Fractional Freedoms
Slavery, Intimacy, and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima, 1600–1700

Fractional Freedoms examines paths to liberty forged in the slaveowning household, and legal claims brought by slaves in colonial Lima.

Michelle A. McKinley (Author)

9781316620106, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 26 April 2018

294 pages, 1 b/w illus. 4 maps 16 tables
23 x 15.3 x 2 cm, 0.5 kg

'McKinley's extensive work with church documents complicates the existing scholarship on slaves as legal actors … a primer on the most prominent types of legal disputes involving slaves.' Emily Berquist Soule, Latin American Research Review

Fractional Freedoms explores how thousands of slaves in colonial Peru were able to secure their freedom, keep their families intact, negotiate lower self-purchase prices, and arrange transfers of ownership by filing legal claims. Through extensive archival research, Michelle A. McKinley excavates the experiences of enslaved women whose historical footprint is barely visible in the official record. She complicates the way we think about life under slavery and demonstrates the degree to which slaves were able to exercise their own agency, despite being ensnared by the Atlantic slave trade. Enslaved women are situated as legal actors who had overlapping identities as wives, mothers, mistresses, wet-nurses and day-wage domestics, and these experiences within the urban working environment are shown to condition their identities as slaves. Although the outcomes of their lawsuits varied, Fractional Freedoms demonstrates how enslaved women used channels of affection and intimacy to press for liberty and prevent the generational transmission of enslavement to their children.

Introduction
1. Litigating liberty
2. Conjugal chains
3. Dangerous dependencies
4. Freedom at the font
5. Till death do us part
6. Buyer beware
7. Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Slavery & abolition of slavery [HBTS], Social & cultural history [HBTB], History of the Americas [HBJK]