In the 1980s, Frederick Cooper, Rebecca Scott and Thomas Holt inaugurated a new comparative approach to the study of race and citizenship in the post-emancipation Atlantic World. In Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies (2000), they argued that comparative historians of slavery had missed “everything that fell in between [emancipation] and the present day,” including crucial questions about the new labor and political systems into which freedpeople were supposed to be integrated. Over the past forty years, scholars have developed a deep knowledge of the distinct outcomes of Black struggles to give meaning to their freedom across the Western Hemisphere. Yet, as this field developed, one central insight of Beyond Slavery was lost: that “these histories, though unfolding in different parts of the world, were not separate.” We therefore propose adopting a transnational approach to investigating the historical construction of race and citizenship in the post-emancipation Atlantic World. Our collective work demonstrates that transnational conversations and international collaboration fundamentally shaped the political struggles that unfolded after the abolition of slavery in the Americas.

Marcelo Ferraro begins the panel by exploring the remaking of racialized citizenship regimes in Cuba, Brazil and the United States in the aftermath of two hemispheric crises: the Haitian Revolution and the U.S. Civil War. He argues that in both moments, planters in these nations exchanged knowledge and information about how to exclude Black people from full citizenship and preserve plantation agriculture throughout the Atlantic World. Jonathon Booth reveals how the lessons that the Jamaican planter class drew from the Haitian Revolution shaped their response to British emancipation in the 1830s. He argues that although Jamaican planters were isolated from the new international proslavery order, former slaveowners still managed to retain local control over the boundaries of Black citizenship after slavery and imposed “a new system of restraint” that attempted to bar freedpeople from political participation and maintain sugar production across the island. Samantha Payne investigates the Brazilian reaction to the crisis of slavery inaugurated by the U.S. Civil War. She argues that the Confederate planters who fled to Brazil to escape Radical Reconstruction warned Brazilian elites of the dangers of Black political enfranchisement. In their view, Black suffrage led to a violent race war that imperiled the future of plantation agriculture. As a result, Brazilian elites pioneered a new strategy – literacy tests – designed to disenfranchise Afro-Brazilian freedpeople without fomenting racial divisions. Finally, Laura Correa Ochoa reveals the enduring legacies of emancipation in twentieth-century Colombia by exploring Black and Indigenous political mobilization as part of a single history of struggles over land, race and democracy after slavery. She argues that because of the conditions of extreme inequality that followed the abolition of slavery, Black and Indigenous activists embraced international Marxist ideas to challenge their political exclusion and transform the Colombian state.

Our panel will be of interest to scholars of race and citizenship and we also welcome scholars of slavery, capitalism, and democracy from all corners of the globe.