IAS Book Launch: Slavery and Freedom in Black Thought in the Early Spanish Atlantic

ABOUT THE BOOK
Weaving together thousands of archival fragments, this study explores a shared Black Atlantic world where the meanings of slavery and freedom were fiercely contested and claimed. It recreates the worlds of extraordinary individuals and communities in the long sixteenth century, whilst mapping the development of early modern Black thought about slavery and freedom. From a free Black mother's embarkation license to cross the Atlantic Ocean, to an enslaved Sevillian woman's epistles to her freed husband in New Spain, to an enslaved man's negotiations with prospective buyers on the auction block in Mexico City, to a Black man's petition to reclaim his liberty after his illegitimate enslavement, Chloe L. Ireton explores how Africans and their descendants reckoned with laws and theological discourses that legitimized the enslavement of Black people and the varied meanings of freedom across legal jurisdictions. Their intellectual labor reimagined the epistemic worlds of slavery and freedom in the early modern Atlantic.

Slavery and Freedom in Black Thought in the Early Spanish Atlantic (Cambridge University Press, 2025) is available in paperback, hardback, and as ebook.

Read the first page of Chloe L. Ireton's book on the IAS online review Think Pieces here.

ABOUT THE EVENT
Join us for a roundtable discussion with author Chloe L. Ireton and

- Matthew J. Smith (Chair), Professor of History and Director of the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery at UCL, and author of Liberty, Fraternity, Exile: Haiti and Jamaica After Emancipation (2014), and Red and Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict and Political Change, 1934-1957 (2009).
- Toby Green (Kings College London), author of The Heretic of Cacheu (Allen Lane, 2025), The Covid Consensus (Hurst, 2023), A Fistful of Shells (Allen Lane/Chicago University Press, 2019), and The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2012).
- Julie Hardwick (University of Texas-Austin), author of Sex in an Old Regime City: Young Workers and Intimacy in France, 1660-1789 (2020), The Practice of Patriarchy: Gender and the Politics of Household Authority in Early Modern France (1998) and Family Business: Litigation and the Political Economy of Daily Life in Early Modern France (2009).  
- Miles Ogborn (Queen Mary University London), author of Spaces of Modernity: London’s Geographies 1680-1780 (1998), Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company (2007), Global Lives; Britain and the World, 1550-1800 (2008), and The Freedom of Speech: Talk and Slavery in the Anglo-Caribbean World (2019).
- Danielle Terrazas Williams (University of Leeds), author of The Capital of Free Women; Race, Legitimacy, and Liberty in Colonial Mexico (2022).

Copies of the book will be on sale during the event at a Cambridge University Press table.

This event is supported by UCL Department of History, UCL Centre for Legacies of British Slavery, and UCL Centre for Transnational and Global History.

As part of the lead-up to this IAS Book Launch of Slavery and Freedom in Black Thought in the Early Spanish Atlantic, Chloe L. Ireton will lead a session of the [Black Europe] Reading Group titled Black Lives and Thought in Early Modern Europe: Exploring Research Methods and Archives on May 7th 2025. This informal session will explore the research methods and archival work behind Ireton's book, focusing on how the meanings of slavery and freedom were claimed and contested in the early Spanish Atlantic. Our discussions will centre around historical documents printed in the book’s CODA. Everyone is welcome to join the discussion; no prior reading is required. Please register via Eventbrite to confirm your attendance. Tea and coffee provided! ”