Historians of Iberian Empires, of the Caribbean, and of Latin America have paid especially close attention to labor relations in the making of racial and colonial hierarchies. Spanning several centuries, from the early modern period to the early twentieth century, and a vast geography, this roundtable explores popular financial practices, reflecting on the possibility of thinking about subaltern actors as economic agents who tried to manipulate and find fissures within local economies through debt and credit, not only as laborers. Debt cultures formed the background for subaltern conceptions of economic justice, economic sovereignty, and economic futures that we might all too easily miss if we focus only on labor relations or on the economy as a top-down capitalist enterprise. The authors ask: what kinds of social dynamics could we reveal through attention to popular finance and credit relations? When and how did such dynamics challenge colonial and postcolonial racial hierarchies and when did they reinforce them? How did subaltern actors use formal credit institutions, and with what long-term consequences? How did creditors and debtors engage with one another informally, as well as through legal institutions, and what notions of economic justice did they invoke?

All the papers draw on archival sources that have received little-to-no attention in the historiography-- small claims courts, freedom suits, notarial records, and savings banks records. Through their capacious analytical and methodological approaches to debt-- as an economic, social, affective, and cultural relation—they open new avenues of inquiry into the study of the economy, of sovereignty, and of reparations for colonial violence more broadly. The panel will appeal to economic, social, and cultural historians, to historians of capitalism, to historians of gender, to historians of medicine and the body, and to historians of the Atlantic World, of Latin America, and of the Caribbean.

Michelle McKinley explores debt as an “affective technology of domination” through which enslavers who manumitted people within their households continued to exercise power over them long after granting freedom papers in sixteenth-century Andalucia and seventeenth-century Lima (sometimes over generations). Both Gómez and Chira show how enslaved people became adept at deploying legal and economic understandings of corporeality and freedom as property in two different contexts that were shaped by a culture of indebtment during the seventeenth century: Gómez, in the gold mining region of Santa de Antioquia, New Granada, and Chira, in Havana, Cuba. Louise Walker examines legal conflicts between ordinary debtors and creditors in nineteenth-century Mexico City to shed light on how people decided to trust each other enough to draw contracts. Growing litigation in the city suggests social strain as economic life became more impersonal. Joan Flores-Villalobos explores how working-class Black Barbadians, particularly women, retooled a colonial policy in Barbados to inculcate “thrift” in the newly emancipated population toward ends other than dependent patriarchal single-income households—they saved to emigrate. Flores-Villalobos prods us to think about the discourse of reparations to the former British colonies capaciously and consider “alternative routes of economic sovereignty that Afro-Caribbean people have improvised.”