“A Black Man from India”: Between Slavery and Freedom in the Early Modern Iberian World

FAIN: FT-264929-19

Norah Linda Andrews Gharala
University Of Houston (Lakewood, NJ 08701-2697)

A book-length study about the complexities of slavery, freedom, and identity in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic worlds through the life of slave Antonio Ximenes. 

This project tells the story of Antonio Ximenes, a young man enslaved in Asia who fought for his freedom in the courts of Mexico City. His life was a microcosm of colonial relationships and a kind of urban servitude that differed markedly from later plantation societies in the Americas. Ximenes lived at a pivotal time for seventeenth-century European empires seeking the wealth of trade in Asia. Before he was thirty, Ximenes had traveled in captivity across the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, visiting the cosmopolitan ports of the Philippines, Peru, and Mexico. Calling himself “a black man from India,” Ximenes claimed that his master had granted him freedom in exchange for his bravery and years of service. The records Ximenes and his associates left help us understand the changing and multifaceted meanings of slavery and freedom, race, gender, and self in the global early modern world.