An Understudied Diaspora: The Mid-19th-Century Intra-American Slave Trade Between Colombia and Peru

This paper shifts the focus of the end of slavery from the Atlantic to the Pacific, offering a new perspective on the intra-American slave trade across the South American Pacific. It raises questions about the configuration of diasporic communities and their claims to citizenship during abolition in mid-nineteenth century republican Colombia and Peru. The study reveals that the gradual abolition laws in New Granada (Colombia) and Peru both clashed and aligned with legal frameworks aimed at promoting economic development under successive liberal and conservative governments. The 1821 constitutions of New Granada and Peru enacted free womb laws and laws of free soil to end slavery. However, the ongoing trade in slaves and their free children undermined these laws, extending mechanisms of enslavement between the two republics. Despite this, New Granadan abolition laws included a critical clause ensuring that families of enslaved individuals could not be separated. This clause had significant implications: It preserved family units among Afro-descendants during the republican slave trade; their survival within this adverse context shaped the Pacific South American diaspora; and, in some cases, it allowed these families to successfully defend their collective rights and return to New Granada, supported by the New Granadan government in the 1850s.