Abstracts
Panel 2: Legality and Monarchical Legitimacy (Day 1)
Chair: Marcela Echeverri (Yale)
Hendrik Kraay, University of Calgary (Canada), “Cabanos, Black Kings, and the Guarda Negra: Popular Royalism in Nineteenth-Century Brazil”
When faced with the challenges of the Age of Revolution, the majority of Brazil’s elitesembraced a limited constitutional monarchy in 1822-24. In the next decades, they quashed all challenges to this model. Thus, unlike in republican Spanish or English America, “popular royalism” was not construed as a problem by elites. As elsewhere in the Americas, scholarship has focused on the challenges to the Brazilian model that took the form of slave revolts, social movements among the free poor, and federalist and republican revolts that capitalized on discontent among the free poor and drew support from certain sectors of the elite. In this context, popular royalism might be seen as simply support for the regime; indeed, in its civic rituals, the Brazilian empire sought to foster the image of such support through ensuring a significant popular presence at the annual celebrations of independence, the constitution, and the emperor’s birthday. (more)
Sergio Serulnikov, Universidad de San Andrés-Conicet (Argentina), “What Invoking the King’s Name Meant (and What it Did Not): Popular Royalism in Late Colonial Charcas”
The paper addresses popular expressions of royalism among Indians and urban groups in late colonial Charcas. It explores the ideological underpinnings of collective actions, symbolic representations, and political practices that invoked the King´s image. It draws from various historical events such as the Katarista indigenous rebellions, protests and riots against the Spanish army in the city of La Plata (present-day Sucre) in the 1780s, and the Charcas uprising of May 25, 1809. The central argument is that in Spanish America the king was an empty signifier. As it lacked all the material and symbolic attributes associated to government officials and bodies, it could be deployed to convey compliance to the existing political order as well as to subvert in radical ways the relations of power on which that order was predicted. Therefore, the profound implications of monarchical legitimacy cannot be inferred exclusively from formal statements, programs, and declarations of principles but from the political nature of the collective practices and their inscription into the public sphere.
Randy Sparks, Tulane University (USA), “‘Britons Never Shall Be Slaves’: Consular Manumissions in the Atlantic World, 1830 – 1860”
Once the British abolished slavery in their empire in 1832, the geography that separated slavery from freedom changed dramatically. That abolition came at a time when the British were engaged in a long-running battle against the African slave trade and when that illegal trade was booming to Cuba and Brazil. As a result, many British subjects recently freed from bondage in the Caribbean and many people with claims to British protection in West Africa were caught up in the illegal slave trade. Beginning in the 1830s, they began to appeal to British consuls in West Africa, Cuba, Brazil, and the United States for their freedom claiming to be British subjects. The complaints often resulted in British to free them from their illegal bondage. Their cases – tried in the courts, negotiated through diplomatic channels, and sometimes fought militarily –were often successful. These “micro-diplomatic” cases of consular manumissions turned on questions of citizenship or subjecthood, on whether or not these individuals belonged to a particular state or nation – the idea of individual rights in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was deeply imbedded in the rights of citizens rather than in some universal human right, though the fight against the slave trade was beginning to change that perception. In this paper, I use the tools of microhistory to analyze these cases and their meaning in the larger context of the debate over slavery and the rights of individuals. In some cases, Africans and African Americans who may not actually have been British subjects claimed that status to gain their freedom. What is at work in these cases is a far-reaching innovation tied to the movements to abolish the slave trade and slavery itself, the idea that all members of a society were entitled to personal freedom and that the sovereign power was obliged to protect it. These cases are reminders, if any is needed, that Africans and enslaved African Americans understood local, national and even international legalities that could break the shackles of slavery and knew how to negotiate them. Around the Atlantic world, enslaved Africans and African Americans looked for ways to escape bondage, and in many cases, that meant an appeal to British protection. This paper is based on a number of these cases found in the records of the British consuls around the Atlantic world and on a collection of the accompanying court cases when those are available.