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SUMMARY:Free souls\, poor soils: the nature of slave emancipation in postc
 olonial Uruguay - Emiliano Travieso (University of Madrid)
DTSTART:20251204T171500Z
DTEND:20251204T184500Z
UID:TALK237508@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:116791
DESCRIPTION:The long-term legacies of slavery in Latin America cannot be f
 ully explained without understanding how the process of emancipation unfol
 ded. Where slavery had been more prevalent\, emancipation was an uneven pr
 ocess rather than a single event. I examine new data from manuscript popul
 ation listings to offer the first quantitative analysis of slave emancipat
 ion in Uruguay\, where by 1836 less than a third of people of African desc
 ent were free. Though traditional historiography has lauded the ‘free bi
 rth law’\, only 5% of Black people in the sample had drawn any direct be
 nefit from it. Freedom rather came through their own efforts in an institu
 tional context which was at best indifferent to their destiny. Reflecting 
 racial status hierarchies\, people born in Africa and those of darker comp
 lexion were more likely to remain enslaved also after independence. Crucia
 lly\, I find that Africans as well as their descendants were more likely t
 o be free in the least fertile smallholder areas\, suggesting an embedding
  of de jure racial inequality onto de facto resource allocation before the
  formal abolition of slavery in 1852.\n\n
LOCATION:Lightfoot Room - St John's College
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