Del i serien British Academy Monographs

African Memories, Foodways, and Freedom in Colonial Colombia's Gold Mines

Nyhet

Gender, Identities, and Intercultural Worlds in Antioquia

Inbunden, Engelska, 2026

AvPaola Vargas Arana

2 159 kr

Kommande

African Memories, Foodways, and Freedom is the first in-depth study of the African population introduced to the gold mines of colonial Antioquia from the early sixteenth century and the revolts and maroon settlements that followed. Reading Antioquia’s documentation alongside West African sources, an archival pairing rarely attempted for this period, the book traces the forced arrival of Upper Guinean, West and West-Central African captives through judicial and Inquisition records, correspondence, slave-trade documentation, travellers’ accounts, and treasury series on registered gold. It situates these processes against the earlier Zenú hydraulic and goldwork civilisation, analysing how Spanish occupation, through coercive rule, reorganised territory, labour, and extraction. Gender is central to the analysis. The book argues that African women’s food labour, under-registered in history, was structural to the economy of colonial Antioquia’s mines. African agrifood practices, reworked through sustained exchange with Indigenous peoples, supported self-sufficient maroon settlements in the mountainous goldfields. By establishing control over strategic terrain and securing food production, these settlements impeded colonial access to key mining zones and intensified existing constraints on water supply, provisioning, transport, and labour. Integrating demographic reconstruction, mining records, and ecological analysis, the book reinterprets gold production decline and the abandonment of Guamocó mining district.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2026-11-13
Mått156 x 234 x undefined mm
FormatInbunden
SpråkEngelska
SerieBritish Academy Monographs
Antal sidor240
FörlagLiverpool University Press
ISBN9781805969259

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Paola Vargas Arana is a historian and anthropologist whose research explores African and African-descendant knowledge in the Atlantic world. She examines the sustainability of food systems and ideas of freedom within slavery and post-slavery societies. Her work foregrounds African women’s agency and their contributions to agrarian production and food economies, challenging the marginalisation of African women in economic history. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research, she analyses how agrarian and culinary knowledge underpinned maroon autonomy. She has held a British Academy Newton International Fellowship at King’s College London and an Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh. She is currently Research Associate in History at the University of Manchester.

Contents List, including prelims and back matter:List of Figures Note on Terminology AcknowledgementsIntroduction**Part I Indigenous Gold Territories and Early Spanish Mining Slavery of Africans ** 1 African Captives in the Early Spanish Gold Rush in the New Kingdom 2 Zenú Hydraulic Engineering, Goldwork, and Territorial Defence 3 African and Indigenous Resistances to Spanish Incursions**Part II Slave Trade, Labour Regime, and Mining Economy ** 4 Antioquia’s Mines After Spanish Occupation 5 African Origins, Slave Trade and Contraband Routes to Antioquia 6 Mining Under Bondage: Ordinances, Labour Organisation, and Gendered Life in the Camps 7 Rise, Decline, and Economic Diversification of the Gold Mines**Part III Marronage, Food Systems, and Women’s Leadership in Maroon Communities ** 8 Foodways and the Formation of Maroon Communities in the Goldfields 9 African Women in Uprising: Building the Architecture of FreedomConclusionGlossary Bibliography Index