Chloe Ireton awarded a British Academy / Leverhulme Small Research Grant

Untraceable ideas? Black thought in the early Iberian Atlantic explores a world of free and enslaved Africans who engaged in intellectual work and shaped discourses about empire, blackness, and slavery.

Hundreds of free black men and women, some of them first generation Africans (former slaves), obtained royal permits to embark on fleets to cross the Atlantic as vassals of the Spanish crown in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Weaving together the world of black vecinos through archival fragments scattered across varied institutions of colonial governance, Untraceable ideas? Black thought in the early Iberian Atlantic explores how free and enslaved black men and women fostered interconnected black spheres through literacy, transoceanic ties, and epistolary networks. They – along with black brotherhoods in port cities – shaped localized meanings of blackness by sponsoring churches, positioning the Catholic Church as historically inclusive of black individuals, and appealing to the crown as black Catholic royal vassals, while also fostering a circulation of knowledge through travel, transoceanic ties, literacy, epistolary networks, and petitions to the crown.

Untraceable ideas? reshapes understandings of royal vassalage, skin color, and Catholicism in the early Iberian empires by tracing the lives of a growing class of free black Iberian vecinos in the Indies and their relationship to the crown as free loyal royal black Old Christian vassals. The project employs cross-disciplinary research methods that wed intellectual and socio-cultural approaches in order to demonstrate that plural, and often overlapping, ideas about blackness, royal vassalage, the illegitimacy of slavery, and African Christianity coexisted in this period. To that end, the monograph traces the fragments, the webs, and the practices – sometimes written, and sometimes in ephemeral conversations, or through witness statements – and the entanglements of people and ideas between different spaces across the Atlantic.

Under the auspices of the British Academy and Leverhulme Trust, Dr. Ireton will conduct research in archives in Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Portugal, Rome, Santo Domingo, and Spain over the next two years.

Recent and upcoming publications:

- “They Are Blacks of the Caste of Black Christians”: Old Christian Black Blood in the Sixteenth- and Early Seventeenth-Century Iberian Atlantic”, in Hispanic American Historical Review (2017). This article explores how hundreds of Castilian free black men and women obtained royal travel licenses to cross the Atlantic in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as black Old Christians. They settled across the Spanish Indies and developed trades as artisans, traders, sailors, healers, and small business owners, often becoming prominent and wealthy vecinos (residents). Exploring these often obscure and long-invisible biographies of individuals, the article revisits key historiographical debates about race, purity of blood, and vassalage in the early Spanish empire.

 - “There is no right to enslave between Christians:” Africans’ Freedom Litigation Suits to Define Just War and Just Slavery in the Early Spanish Empire.” Provisional Acceptance in peer-review journal. This article explores how some enslaved black Africans litigated for their freedom in Spanish royal courts in the sixteenth century on the basis that – as Christians ¬– they had been unjustly enslaved in Africa. With a focus on the port cities of Seville and Cartagena, the article explores how freedom litigation suits illuminate how individuals from starkly different social worlds and intellectual milieus – who inhabited the same urban sites – affected and shaped one another’s intellectual landscapes. The article traces how enslaved Africans’ epistemologies of just slavery shaped broader discourses on the just enslavement of Africans in the Spanish empire.