Slavery and Freedom in Black Thought in the Early Spanish Atlantic

Chloe L. Ireton is Lecturer in the History of Iberia and the Iberian World 1500–1800 in the Department of History at University College London, and a current British Academy Wolfson Fellow. This is her first book.

• Introduction; 1. Proving Freedom: Documenting Alhorría; 2. Imagining Freedom: Black Atlantic Communities in Sevilla; 3. Purchasing Freedom: Economics of Liberty in New Spain; 4. Defining Freedom: Infrastructures of Black Political knowledge between Sevilla & Mexico City; 5. Reclaiming Freedom: The Illegitimacy of Slavery in Black Thought; 6. Practicing Freedom: Documenting Capital; Coda: Felipa de la Cruz's World & Letters.

'This book is an astounding, sweeping, and beautifully written intellectual exploration of the rich, complicated, and worldly lives of people of African descent as they negotiated experiences of enslavement and emancipation in the early modern Iberian Atlantic. It charts an extraordinary intellectual cartography of early modern Black living that upends how scholars think of Black movement and agency at the dawn of and decades into the Atlantic slave trade.' Yesenia Barragan, Rutgers University