Manumission

Along the western rim of the Atlantic basin, slavery’s growth was primarily in response to economic imperatives. The sugar industry, in particular, drove much of the flow of the transatlantic slave trade from the late 16th century to the second half of the 19th century. However, slavery proved to be a plastic institution, adapting to a variety of contexts and crop types throughout the Americas. As a consequence of this variation, the frequency and the rationale for master-sanctioned manumission (the voluntary freeing of slaves) differed among the array of economic, as well as cultural and legal, contexts. Taken at face value, manumission deeds show that masters granted freedom to individuals for cash payment; “loyal,” valorous, or “good service” shown by a slave; religious and ideological reasons; or the “love and affection” proclaimed by the manumitter. Historians of free populations of color in the Atlantic world have been drawn to manumission studies, but those scholars interested in the conditions and the standard of living of slaves have made the most use of manumission records. For the latter, analysis of the manumission deeds and the process of manumission yields rich insight into the relationship between masters and their slaves across time and space; both the textual content of individual manumission records and the aggregate statistical patterns in groups of records can offer some indication of the intensity in which slaves were controlled. Furthermore, manumission deeds provide one perspective into the strategies that slaves pursued in order to better their lives within a brutal labor regime. The manumission process, as well as the legal code regulating the freeing of slaves, not only details the attitudes of the master class toward slaves and the slave economy but also provides evidence of slave agency. Manumission, it should be kept in mind, is a very narrow topic within the slavery historiography, but paradoxically it is a subfield that touches on many broader themes that are much more developed in the literature, including slave resistance, urban slavery, the independent economy of slaves, and so forth. This article, therefore, cites scholarship that is closely connected to manumission; readers should be advised that many classic general works on slavery and freedom are excluded.