Value, Self-Worth, and the Market in the Black Spanish Caribbean in the Age of Slavery

FAIN: RZ-292847-24

University of Wisconsin, Madison (Madison, WI 53715-1218)
Pablo Gomez (Project Director: November 2022 to present)

Preparation of a co-authored book on Black negotiation of bodily value in the Spanish Caribbean and its economic and political implications (1680 to 1790). (36 months)

We are applying for an NEH Collaborative Research Fellowship in the “manuscript preparation” category. Our book approaches enslaved and free people of African descent as economic agents who subtly shaped Caribbean markets in the age of enslavement with lasting political consequences. We argue that Black historical actors contested economic and moral value systems that relegated their bodies to low status by intervening in processes of appraisal within slave and free labor markets. They did so through economic negotiations to purchase their freedom and through judicial actions to retrieve their freedom payments after owners’ theft and to protect themselves against violence and excessive labor demands relative to their ability. Some of the roots of the calls for racially inclusive national citizenship in the Spanish Caribbean go back to Black economic and judicial activity and the understandings of the Black body that emerged thereof.