Bound Journeys, Freedom Places: Slavery, Movement, Place, and Gender in Nineteenth-Century Cuba

UCL Americas Caribbean Seminar Series

Join Dr Camillia Cowing to discuss how a new slave society was forged in Cuba’s nineteenth century through a bitter, transformational set of struggles over human movement and place among enslavers, colonial officials, and enslaved men and women. Unfree workers built much of the new transport infrastructure – especially roads and railways - that supported sugar’s take-off, connecting burgeoning plantations to fast-expanding port cities; yet they also travelled on, and forged new communities and geographic knowledge around, the worlds of the new infrastructures, across Cuba’s extensive hinterland spaces as well as through the better-known coastal world. 

Meanwhile, in everyday spaces of enslavement, legal and administrative tussles played out over the “infrastructures of paper” - including, for example, travel passes and receipts for captured persons - with which the colonial regime purported to administer enslaved movement. At the same time, largely outside of authorities’ or enslavers’ purview or immediate concern, enslaved men and women moved around in a range of complex, quotidian ways - to sustain family ties, for religious and economic purposes, and, often, in pursuit of the elusive right to simply stay put. 

The experience and reach of men’s and women’s mobilities were shaped at every turn by colonial slavery’s gendered bodily violence and specific constraints on their working lives and circulations. Collectively, however, enslaved movements and place-making built contestatory geographies that were fundamental to the struggle with enslavement itself.