Imagining liberty: legal geographies of enslaved and free Black people in late sixteenth-century Sevilla

This talk is based on a chapter in my forthcoming book, Slavery and Freedom in Black Thought in the Early Spanish Atlantic (Cambridge University Press, 2024). This talk explores a history of ideas and hopes about freedom in the early Spanish Atlantic through the lives and affairs of enslaved and liberated Black people who lived in a central parish of late-sixteenth-century Sevilla. The talk traces varied conversations and fractured memories about paths to liberation from slavery among free, enslaved, and liberated Black populations in Sevilla and the existence of mutual aid practices that sometimes spanned vast distances across the Atlantic world. Such Atlantic ties and fractured community memories of liberations from slavery inevitably impacted enslaved Black Sevilla-dwellers' ideas and hopes about liberty. The talk explores how some enslaved Black women, who remained trapped in captivity for most (if not all) of their lives, sometimes became members of an emerging lettered Black public sphere in late sixteenth-century Sevilla and shaped the meanings of freedom and slavery through their daily practices and interactions with Spanish imperial institutions.

Speaker

Chloe Ireton is a Lecturer in the History of Iberia and the Iberian World 1500-1800 at University College London and is a British Academy Wolfson Fellow (2023–2026) working on a project titled Freedom in Black Thought in the Early Modern Atlantic 1450-1750. Ireton's first monograph, Slavery & Freedom in Black Thought in the Early Modern Spanish Atlantic explores a shared Black Atlantic world where the meanings of slavery and freedom were fiercely contested and claimed. Ireton is currently working on a second project tentatively titled Infrastructures of Black Political Knowledge in the Early Modern Atlantic, an intellectual history of Black political thought in the early modern era rooted in a social history archive and a spatial approach to histories of ideas and networks of political know-how, and is also writing a trade book titled Plotting for Freedom. Ireton's research has also been published in the Hispanic American Historical Review, The European History Quarterly, Renaissance Quarterly, and Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, while her article “Black Africans’ Freedom Litigation Suits to Define Just War and Just Slavery in the Early Spanish Empire,” which appeared in the Renaissance Quarterly in 2020, and was awarded the Renaissance Society of America William Nelson Prize for best article published in Renaissance Quarterly.

All welcome- this seminar is free to attend, but booking is required.