A Proletarian Crowd (Una Multitud Proletaria): Race, Philanthropy, and Sovereignty in the Repatriation of New Granadan Slaves from Peru, 1850s

This study focuses on the history of republican slavery and abolition in New Granada (contemporary Colombia) and Peru in the decades of 1840 and 1850. While these South American republics had embarked on projects of gradual abolition since independence (1810s-1820s), pro-slavery advocates in both countries established alliances to legalize the slave trade in the Pacific (from Panamá, Chocó, and Buenaventura to the port of Paita) between 1845 and 1847. Enslaved families from the southwestern region of New Granada, including nominally free children who were born after the free womb laws, were sold and shipped to Peruvian slave traders and slave owners. My interest in exploring this story through archival materials comprising notarial records, diplomatic sources, and newspapers, is to reconstruct the New Granada government’s efforts to repatriate the enslaved and free children who had been exported. The 1851 final abolition and emancipation law included an article granting freedom to the victims of that republican slave trade who had been re-enslaved in Peru, promising their return to New Granada, and offering compensation to their Peruvian owners. This little-known case reveals important aspects of how slavery and its abolition were central to diplomacy among the South American republics and how discourses about the enslaved and freed people of African descent oscillated between ideas of philanthropy, civilization, sovereignty, and citizenship. The paper contributes to the panel by situating these two countries of Pacific South America within the context of the historiographical debate about the Second Slavery. It establishes a dialogue with the cases of Cuba, Brazil, and the United States explaining why and how republican slavery in South America speaks to the hemispheric and Atlantic transformations of the nineteenth century, namely state formation, international law, and labor regimes.