Description
From Colonial Cuba to Madrid explores the remarkable legal strategies employed by enslaved and free Africans and their descendants to secure freedom and assert their rights within the Spanish Empire during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Mara Elena Díaz analyzes pivotal court cases that moved between colonial Cuba and metropolitan Spain, demonstrating how marginalized subjects navigated imperial legal systems to challenge slavery and discrimination.
Through meticulous archival research, Díaz reveals how these litigants invoked Spanish law, royal decrees, and concepts of natural rights to contest their enslavement and demand recognition as free persons and subjects of the crown. The book situates these individual struggles within broader contexts of Enlightenment thought, imperial reform, and the revolutionary upheavals transforming the Atlantic world. By centering the agency of Afro-Latin American litigants, this study fundamentally reshapes our understanding of resistance, freedom, and the complexities of law and slavery in the Spanish colonial empire.
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