Unfathomable: Love and Anger in Late-Colonial Yucatan and Belize

A slave burns down her master's house, with him inside. A teenage girl greases the key to the front door so as to let her lover in at night. A man writes love letters to his wife, apologizing for beating her.  These and other details provide the fine-grained human ingredients of legal cases found in the archives in Spain and Britain, Mexico and Belize.  Such disputes are more often viewed in terms of race and gender, two of the best-tested categories for analyzing colonial societies.  In this paper, I explore how human emotion—specifically love and anger, more specifically romantic love and its complex relationship with anger—can act as analytical tools to help us better understand how people interacted, made decisions, and contributed to the development of colonial societies.  My subjects are Spanish colonists, British settlers, African slaves, and mixed-race peoples in the comparative context of Yucatan and Belize in the late-18th and early-19th centuries.