Enslaved women, men, and children used many strategies to attain legal and extralegal freedom within the imperial contexts of the 18th and 19th century Atlantic World. For enslaved Africans and African-descent people living under colonial rule, the pathways to freedom were both peculiar and common, often involving encounters with local and royal courts, traversing interregional and trans-imperial distances, and forging personal and strategic networks across colonial spaces. This panel convenes early-career historians whose scholarship explores slave and post-emancipation societies in Mexico, Brazil, Angola, Lagos, and Sierra Leone. Thus, the panelists consider this session as an opportunity to convene scholars investigating similar questions across several locations, empires, and time periods.

The essays in this panel employ innovative quantitative and qualitative approaches to explore the interconnected histories of enslavement, slave trading, and emancipation under colonial rule. Panelists draw on largely untapped and understudied historical sources, such as census data, courtroom testimonials, passport records, and notarial documents, found in local and national archives on both sides of the Atlantic basin, extending from Lagos to Bahia, and from Oaxaca City to Freetown. These papers also collectively reflect on the archival opportunities and limitations of narrating freedom struggles during the era of the slave trade, drawing into the conversation archival encounters across the British and Iberian empires.

The presentations on Mexico, Brazil, and Angola analyze freedom suits, criminal cases, and slave sales to better understand demands for freedom under Spanish and Portuguese colonial rule. These case studies enhance our understanding of how enslaved people relied on prior notions of freedom or used ill-treatment to justify their paths to legal and extralegal freedom. Building on this foundation, another paper cross-references legal and passport records to reveal that enslaved people undermined the laws of the British empire to attain their freedom in Lagos and Brazil. The fourth presentation examines fugitive slave reports in British Sierra Leone, offering new perspectives on forced labor, social networks, and the overland and maritime movement of enslaved and formerly enslaved people in colonial West Africa. Collectively, these papers reflect on and revise enduring historical debates that form the core of Atlantic scholarship, such as the connection between patterns of consumption and systems of slavery, African strategies of resistance against enslavement, and the role of Africans and their descendants in shaping local, imperial, and global processes of emancipation. Through its case studies of locations and colonies across the 18th and 19th century Atlantic World, this panel seeks to recast knowledge about the meanings and experiences of freedom for African descent people living within and on the fringes of Iberian and British empires.