Calendrier du 16 novembre 2022
Economic History Seminar
Du 16/11/2022 de 12:00 à 13:30
Salle R2.01, Campus Jourdan
TRAVESIO Emiliano (Universidad Carlos III )
Freedom in labour: ‘free wombs’ and slave emancipation in postcolonial Uruguay
Slavery casts a long shadow on economic and social inequality in the Americas. To understand its legacy we must consider how it came to an end in the 19th century as well as the extent of slave labour itself in the colonial and early national periods. The ‘freedom of wombs’ enshrined in Uruguay’s independence program (1825) and first constitution (1830) was emblematic of the slavery policy of Latin American creole elites during the so-called ‘lost decades’ after colonial rule. Under these free-womb laws, slaves’ children were declared free at birth, but existing slaves remained enslaved and slavery still legitimate. Slave emancipation in this context has rarely been quantitatively studied because of the source lacunae caused by poor state capacity and decades of political unrest. I rely on a new dataset constructed from manuscript population listings from 1834-36 to describe and analyse how Black people (Africans and their immediate descendants) laboured for freedom in Uruguay. I find that the free-wombs legislation was not universally applied and had a small direct impact, reaching only 8% of free Black people, most of whom became free because they paid for their emancipation or because they were born to free parents. Moreover, numeracy rates were higher for free Afro-Uruguayans than for slaves, even if deep-rooted racial gaps in human capital remained large. Using a probit model to control for the effects of age, place of birth, gender, and other covariates, I argue that Black people living in the countryside and in areas of small-scale farming were more likely to be free. Only a minority of Afro-descended people achieved freedom for themselves and their families in early-independent Uruguay. They did so through their own labour—both in the sense of working and giving birth—in an institutional context which was at best indifferent to their destiny.