As If She Were My Own: Love, Law, and Women in the Slave Society of Eighteenth-Century Lima, Peru

The stability and reproduction of Spanish American slavery relied, both in law and in life, on the creation of quasi-familial bonds between adult owners and enslaved children. The notion that master authority derived from naturalized patriarchal authority was codified in Spanish medieval laws that governed the American colonies. In the lived experience of African slavery in the New World, however, the rhetorics and practices of master authority as familial power was particularly pronounced among female owners of female slaves. Many female masters claimed deep emotional bonds with their female slaves, said they treated slave children as their own, and overall were more likely to manumit their female slaves based on good service. This paper examines court cases pitting slaves against masters and takes seriously the language of love female masters in colonial Lima, Peru expressed for their slaves. It pushes past common dismissals of discourses of master emotion as inauthentic or instrumental and considers how love provided slave-owning women legal authority.  It also explores the legal challenge these emotional bonds of bondage faced in the 18^th century, when Bourbon royal reformers and local judges began to more aggressively regulate adult authority over children, and when slaves (and their parents) more frequently sought freedom in secular royal courts.