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Concluding Thoughts: Boundary Crossings: Slavery and Freedom, Legality and Illegality, Past and Present

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2016

Alejandro De La Fuente  and
Ariela Gross
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Extract

This symposium issue is first and foremost about crossing boundaries. The people readers have met in these pages—enslavers and enslaved, traders and purchasers, abolitionists and insurrectionaries—were mobile, and their mobility had consequences. The slave traders who changed flags as they moved across international waters are only the most visible exemplars of this phenomenon. Crossing geographic borders often meant crossing boundaries of race and status as well. All of these articles in one form or another address the question of what it means to cross lines: between “slave” and “free,” “legal” and “illegal,” “past” and “present.”

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Forum
Information
Law and History Review , Volume 35 , Issue 1 , February 2017 , pp. 119 - 130
Copyright
Copyright © the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 2016 

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Footnotes

The authors thank Rebecca Scott for helpful comments, and thank the participants in the conference A Crime Against Humanity: Slavery and International Law, Past and Present, at Stanford University, May 15–16, 2015, for questions, comments and discussion.

References

1. Archivo Nacional de Cuba (hereafter ANC), Protocolos Notariales de la Habana, Escribania Fornari, 1694, fol. 257.

2. Contract of Tiocou with Director of Hospital, July 15, 1737, Records of the Superior Court of Louisiana, reprinted in Louisiana Historical Quarterly 4 (1921): 366–68.

3. The 1826 report is quoted by Marrero, Levi, Cuba: Economía y Sociedad 13 (Madrid: Editorial Playor, 1986), 166Google Scholar.

4. Mamigonian, Beatriz G., “Conflicts Over The Meanings of Freedom: The Liberated Africans' Struggle for Emancipation in Brazil, 1840s–1860s,” in Paths to Freedom: Manumission in the Atlantic World, ed. Brana-Shute, Rosemary and Sparks, Randy J. (University of South Carolina Press, Columbia, SC, 2009 Google Scholar).

5. de La Fuente, Alejandro, Havana and The Atlantic in The Sixteenth Century (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC, 2011), 180Google Scholar (translating February 8, 1556 ordinance). See also 1 Municipio de la Habana, Actas Capitulares del Ayuntamiento de la Habana, 1566–1574 (1937), 110 (regarding the February 8, 1556 ordinance).

6. The Ordenanzas are reproduced in Marrero, Levi, Cuba: Economía y Sociedad 2 (Editorial San Juan, Rio Piedras, PR, 1984): 429–44Google Scholar.

7. ANC, Protocolos Notariales de la Habana, Escribania Regueira, 1590, fol. 74.

8. On the frequent use of the Partidas in Cuba, see Fuente, Alejandro de la, “Slaves and the Creation of Legal Rights in Cuba: Coartación and Papel,” Hispanic American Historical Review 87 (2007): 659–92Google Scholar.

9. See Scott, Rebecca and Hébrard, Jean M., Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in The Age of Emancipation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012)Google Scholar; Scott, Rebecca J., “Paper Thin: Freedom and Re-enslavement in The Diaspora of the Haitian Revolution,” Law and History Review 29:4 (2011): 1061–87Google Scholar.

10. Real Academia Española, Diccionario de la Lengua Castellana (Madrid: Imprenta de Francisco del Hierro, 1726–1739)Google Scholar.

11. See Archives, Louisiana Legal, A Republication of the Project of the Civil Code of Louisiana of 1825, 1 (New Orleans: T. J. Moran's Sons, 1937)Google Scholar, in the section “Of the prescription of ten years,” and the discussion in Rebecca Scott's contribution to this issue.

12. De La Fuente, Alejandro, “Slaves and The Creation of Legal Rights in Cuba: Coartaçion and Papel ,” Hispanic American Historical Review 87 (2007): 659, 670–73Google Scholar.

13. Wong, Edlie L., Neither Fugitive Nor Free: Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits, and The Legal Culture of Travel (New York: NYU Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

14. Beatriz Mamigonian, “Buried in Silence”? Illegally Enslaved Africans in the Debate on Brazilian Slavery in the Nineteenth Century, delivered at the American Historical Association Annual Meeting, New York City, January 2–5, 2009.

15. Transatlantic Slave Trade Database http://www.slavevoyages.org/voyage/search

16. Barbosa, Leonardo, “Behind The Definition of Contemporary Slavery in Brazil; Cristiano Paixão and Leonardo Barbosa, Perspectives on Human Dignity (On Judicial Rulings Regarding Contemporary Slavery in Brazil),” Quaderni Fiorentini 44 (2015): 1167–84Google Scholar.

17. Bales, Kevin, Disposable People (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1999), 28Google Scholar.

18. Oshinsky, David M., Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and The Ordeal of Jim Crow (Simon and Schuster, New York City, 1997)Google Scholar; and Blackmon, Douglas A., Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (Knopf Doubleday Publishing, New York City, 2009)Google Scholar.

19. Oshinsky, Worse Than Slavery; and Blackmon, Slavery By Another Name.

20. See Sugrue, Thomas J., Not Even Past: Barack Obama and The Burden of Race (Princeton: Princeton University Press, New York City, 2010)Google Scholar.

21. See Martinez, Jenny S., The Slave Trade and The Origins of International Human Rights Law (Oxford University Press, New York City, 2012)Google Scholar; and Surwillo, Lisa, Monsters By Trade: Slave Traders in Modern Spanish Literature and Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, New York City, 2014)Google Scholar.