Defining abolitionism broadly, this panel explores an international terrain of contestation against slavery in the mid-nineteenth century. Spanning Brazil, Colombia, Peru, Cuba, and the United States, it considers the historiographical implications of fully engaging the shared context of abolition that connected the Americas. We seek to expand the ways in which scholars conceptualize abolitionism by moving beyond traditional geographies and accounts of interstate politics to include understudied facets of the contested process of ending slavery. For example, we examine the history of international kidnappings of free people into slavery between the Caribbean and the United States, efforts to reopen the slave trade between the Pacific South American republics, and the struggles of black activists, both enslaved and free, to create networks of geopolitical alliances in pursuit of meaningful black freedom. By focusing especially on grassroots diplomacy, the everyday practice of non-state actors challenging slavery and building interstate relations from below, we suggest that abolitionism was shaped by both formal political processes and grassroots social movements in the Americas.

This panel brings together five scholars of Latin America and the United States. M. Scott Heerman examines criminal proceedings against ship captains in admiralty courts to follow people kidnapped from Jamaica and sold into slavery in the U.S. over the 1850s. His paper focuses on international abductions across imperial borders to offer insights on the intersection of emancipation and the making of international law. Marcela Echeverri reconstructs the history of republican slavery and abolition in New Granada (present-day Colombia) and Peru in the mid-nineteenth century. Her presentation explores New Granada’s efforts, after the 1851 final abolition law, to repatriate the enslaved and free children who had been exported to Peru in the 1840s. Isadora Mota examines how Africans and their descendants fashioned their own critique of slavery in Brazil by thinking comparatively about the uneven spread of abolition across the Atlantic world. Presenting her new book Freedom’s Horizon, Mota shows that through flight, marronage, rebellion, and literacy practices, enslaved and freedpeoples developed a geopolitical imagination in dialogue with the British and French antislavery, the U.S. Civil War, and the Triple Alliance War in South America. Finally, Iacy Maia explores the transnational political and intellectual networks that black activists in Cuba, Brazil, and the United States built to advance the struggle for freedom between 1865 and 1886.

We are fortunate to have Oscar de la Torre, Associate Professor of Africana Studies at UNC Charlotte, as chair and commentator on the panel. De la Torre is the author of The People of the River (UNC Press, 2018), a social and environmental history of black communities in Amazonia that won the 2019 Outstanding First Book Award of ASWAD, the 2020 Best Book on Amazonian Studies Prize from LASA’s Amazonia Section, and an Honorary Mention from the Brazilian Studies Association. We expect that scholars of race, politics, slavery, and emancipation in the United States, Latin America and the Caribbean, the Atlantic World, and the African diaspora will be interested in this panel.