Rebuilding life after slavery. Manumission, emancipation, and family networks in European empires, 1750–1900

Abstract

Wherever and whenever systems of slavery existed, enslaved people struggled to attain freedom. Spanning various imperial contexts from 1750 to 1920, this special issue convenes a team of scholars to investigate the aftermath of emancipation. What did freedom from slavery entail in deeply unequal colonial societies? This issue explores diverse experiences, from maroon communities in the Caribbean wilderness to the forced resettlement of freed slaves in European colonies in Africa, and the legal emancipation of slaves in segregated colonial port cities in Asia. Enslaved people encountered ‘freedom’ with its attendant threats and opportunities in myriad ways. Building on the rich historiographical tradition of slavery studies, this special issue aims to broaden the scope of historical research from the slave trade and the lives of enslaved individuals to their post-emancipation existence. However, even recent literature often treats freedom after abolition and manumission as distinct phenomena, representing different legal paths to freedom—one associated with the early modern period and the other with the nineteenth century. This special issue re-evaluates this presupposition by foregrounding the post-emancipation life events of formerly enslaved individuals. It questions whether and how these different transitions from slave status to freedom can and should be structurally compared in slavery studies. By tapping into previously unexplored sources, re-examining older datasets with fresh perspectives, and employing record linkage to uncover forgotten slave histories, the authors seek to assess the living conditions of formerly enslaved people and their direct descendants after emancipation. In doing so, we aim to explore how past experiences of enslavement influenced future life choices and opportunities, thereby questioning the so-called afterlives of slavery.

KEYWORDS:

• Slavery
• manumission
• RDA
• abolition
• 18th century
• 19th century

1. Introduction

George Pettis was only a twelve-year boy when he was separated from his family, just before the American Civil War broke out. Over twenty years later, he was still looking for his relatives Sam, Armstead, Rhoda, and Eliza. They all had a different surname from George, because when they were emancipated they took on the name of their enslaver, while George had been ‘taken away’ by a Mrs. Maria Pettis. After looking for them for over a generation, in June 1888 he paid for an advertisement in the Southwestern Christian Advocate to try and find them.¹ George’s persistence in trying to find ‘his people’ is a poignant reminder that while legal freedom in theory closed off a life in slavery, it did not mean free from the effects of slavery on the lives of emancipated people.

Working across imperial spaces between 1750 and 1920, this special issue brings together a team of scholars to examine what happened when enslaved people achieved their emancipation. What did freedom from slavery look like in colonial societies that were profoundly unequal? From maroon communities in the wilderness of the Caribbean to the forced resettlement of freed slaves among European colonies in Africa and the legal emancipation of slaves in segregated colonial port cities in Asia, enslaved people encountered ‘freedom’ and the accompanying threats and opportunities in different ways. Throughout this special issue the reader is invited to uncover similarities and differences in the life experience of emancipated slaves across different European empires, aiming to push the boundaries of slavery studies by integrating a source-based approach with family history.

The contributions to this special issue consciously reach across the temporal watershed of the legal abolition of slavery. By deliberately going beyond the abolitionist waves of the nineteenth century as self-evident cut-off points, the articles address more directly how enslaved people rebuilt their lives after slavery, rather than how formal emancipation was directed from above. This approach acknowledges two different historical phenomena, that a focus on legal abolition elides. First, that pathways to emancipation existed in societies before legal abolition in the nineteenth century, and second, that legal freedom did not always deliver on the promise. Freedom was something that people continued to negotiate, particularly in colonial societies. By drawing these into comparison, this special issue draws out some of the shared concerns of enslaved people: finding family, securing economic independence, and settling in a home they chose for themselves.

Building on the rich historiographical tradition of slavery studies from the past decades, this special issue wishes to extend the boundaries of historical slavery research from the slave trade and the lives of enslaved people to their lives after slavery. By tapping into hitherto untouched sources, revisiting older datasets from this new angle or linking different records to uncover previously obscured slave pasts, the authors try to examine the living conditions of formerly enslaved people and their direct descendants after they obtained their freedom. In doing so, we explicitly aim to investigate ways in which past experiences of enslavement influenced future life choices and possibilities and explore the afterlives of slavery in a variety of contexts.

2. Past enslavement, future lives

On a theoretical level, this issue aims to bring the source-based and historiographical insights from Transatlantic slavery studies into conversation with literature on (pre-)colonial forms of bondage and chattel slavery in the Indian Ocean World. This kind of inter-area dialogue is prefigured by historiographical developments in Atlantic Studies. Historians of the Caribbean and the Americas have taken up detailed readings of African societies to enrich our understanding of African Diasporas, while Africanists have looked to the vibrant literature on experiences of enslavement in the British, Spanish, and Portuguese empires to analyse the realities of slavery in Africa. What new insights can this refreshed literature on Africans in the Atlantic bring to bear on the study of the Indian Ocean world? How can the sophisticated readings of the multi-lingual and highly stratified societies of the Indian Ocean enhance our understanding of the complexities of post-slavery life in Africa and the Caribbean?

Certainly, the literature on the Indian Ocean World in the last two decades has seriously questioned dominant perceptions of static and segregated colonial urban societies. Localised studies on cities like Cape Town, Cochin, and Jakarta have added to our understanding of everyday lives of enslaved and their physical and social mobility in urban spaces, going beyond pre-supposed ‘hard’ boundaries of race, ethnicity, and religion (Geelen et al., 2020; Schrikker & Wickramasinghe, 2020; Worden, 2012). For the purpose of this special issue the question arises to what extent pre-existing social ties facilitated or perhaps complicated the complex transition from enslavement to freedom. If and how did manumission and abolition processes rely on these pre-existing ties, and what happened with these relationships afterwards once freedom was acquired? This question on the importance of underlying social networks becomes all the more crucial if we draw in the knowledge that both manumission and emancipation were hardly linear processes towards freedom, but often changed for other regimes of dependencies, such as apprenticeships, indentured labour systems, or more subtle forms of forced migration.

3. Manumission and abolition

On 27 November 1834, just three days before the de jure abolition of slavery in the Cape Colony, someone paid to manumit an enslaved woman named Malatie.² We know nothing of the person, recorded as A. Christian, who paid the sum and what his/her relationship with Malatie was. Perhaps together, they convinced the slaveowner to accept the sum to manumit her. Through this purchase Malatie avoided the four years of apprenticeship which were to follow for around 36,000 enslaved people emancipated a couple of days later. What kinds of obligations she may have owed to Christian out of a financial debt or one of the gratitude, went unrecorded, but the connection to that person radically altered the course of her life after slavery. But sometimes colonial archives do allow researchers to shed light on such forgotten networks. About a decade and a half ago, the discovery of an eighteenth-century bundle of letters in the Western Cape Archive in South Africa revealed the multilayered networks of kinship, credit, support, and exchange between enslaved, manumitted, and free correspondents both in the Cape Colony and across the Indian Ocean. This fortuitous find offers a glimpse into the connectedness of their lives, and the bonds they created and maintained through their lives in slavery and in rebuilding their lives following manumission (Newton-King, 2012). Since then, historiography on the experience of enslaved has been showcasing the underestimated importance of social networks and the larger social embeddedness of slave communities, both with other enslaved individuals as well as society at large (Fatah-Black, 2020; Geelen et al., 2020). The contributions to this issue further explore the contours of such connections and embeddedness, and what it meant for rebuilding lives after slavery.

While the nineteenth century is considered the age of abolition and centralised legislative initiatives granting freedom to entire populations of enslaved people, in the centuries before individuals could seize opportunities to achieve (relative) freedom via manumission deeds. With such an interpersonal legal agreement in a highly localised setting, the owner could grant both individuals as well as entire families their freedom while slave trade and ownership remained legally sanctioned (Brana-Shute & Sparks, 2009; Kleiwegt, 2006; Negrón, 2022). In the past decades scholars recognise that manumission was more of a social process than just a transformative legal event or moment in time (Brana-Shute, 2009). Manumission entailed negotiation and formalisation, in some cases legal disputes over formalisation, and once formalised, continued obligations of some kind between former slaveowner and formerly enslaved. Manumission did not sever the master–slave relationship but rather reshaped it. Here scholars’ probing of obligations and forms of dependence – rather than a slave-free dichotomy – have been very important in reshaping how slavery is understood and studied in the Indian Ocean World (Reid & Brewster, 1983; Schrikker & Wickramasinghe, 2020). Some of those enslaved people who achieved manumission – by their own payment, by gift, or via a will among other routes – were bound by conditions of service after their formal manumission, as was the case in, for example, the eighteenth-century Sri Lanka and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Cape Town (Ekama, 2020; Shell, 1994; Wickramasinghe, 2020). Even those who were free of such obligations to labour for former slaveowners or manumitters, were freed into stratified societies, in which they began to build lives as free people. The decisions formerly enslaved people made on where to live, who with, how to spend their time, whether or not to work, in what capacity, for whom, and how to dispose of their possessions, are central to understanding how manumitted and emancipated people rebuilt their lives after slavery. Allen delves into these questions for the free people of colour in Mauritius, through the lens of a single – and singular – life: Marie Rozette, a woman enslaved in India, transported to Mauritius, and later manumitted there (Allen, 2011). Fatah-Black (2020) shows that one way to understand how manumitted people rebuilt lives after slavery is to see who they left their possessions to, and what instructions they left in wills. Through a close-analysis of wills written by manumitted people, Fatah-Black brings into focus community formation among free people of colour. Ross and Martin’s innovative study of lives of emancipated people in the nineteenth-century Cape Town makes the methodological point that ‘[w]hat the enslaved thought … has to be inferred from what they did’ (Ross & Martin, 2021, p. 435). Emancipated people in Cape Town, almost without exception, chose to move out of their previous accommodation, exercising their newly acquired if relative freedom.

Central to all articles in this special issue is the key question on the supposed transitional nature of manumission/abolition from enslavement to freedom, and the role that networks from enslavement into freedom – kinship, friendship, religious, credit – had as the building blocks of new lives. By foregrounding the post- emancipation life events of formerly enslaved, this special issue wishes to bridge historiographies of freedom after manumission and freedom after emancipation. These two different legal paths to freedom are often studied as distinct phenomena, one pertaining to the early modern period and the other to the nineteenth century. But both processes resulted in a change in legal status from enslaved to free(d) person, requiring the involvement of various parties and institutions to formalise a change in status. This special issue questions if and how these different forms of transitioning from slave status to one of the more freedom can and should be structurally compared in slavery studies.

4. Finding one’s family

Rather than adhering to a broad definition of social networks to study life after slavery, this special issue consciously centres around the family as a conceptual and methodological prism. The forced separation of families and kin was after all one of the most traumatic moments in the experience of enslavement, while reestablishing kinship ties, and the ability to forge and enjoy new family relations was a key objective for many manumitted and emancipated people when they ventured into their new lives. Tiya Miles observed that ‘kinship mitigated the worst effects of slavery’ (Miles, 2015, p. 15).

A focus on the family as a concept, in comparative frame across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, also compels us to reject Eurocentric notions of the nuclear family as an ideal or particularly secure unit. Jenny Jemmott’s Ties That Bind (2015) diligently uncovered West African beliefs and practices among recently-freed people in post-slavery Jamaica. Jemmott’s groundbreaking work and focus on the family revealed how people engaged with rebuilding their life-worlds after the trauma of slavery, rebellion, and repression. Of course, extended families, veneration of elders, and collective care for children are not unique to West Africa, nor to post-slavery conditions. But they might be seen as community defences to extreme poverty, lack of security, and a dearth of institutional or state provision of welfare. The ‘family’, however it was locally-defined and delimited, became a measure of protection against devastation.

That enslaved families were vulnerable to separation is clear in George Pettis’ story with which we began. Across time and space, almost without exception, the separation of mothers and children or husbands and wives, was a continual threat, while slave sale remained legal. For many, like Malatie, it became a reality. By the 1820s, changes to regulations governing slavery in the British slave colonies general theoretically offered some measure of protection against the destruction of those families which enslaved people created. In the Cape Colony in particular, this came in the various reforms known as amelioration (1823, 1826). Importantly, the reforms included the creation of the Guardian of Slaves office (later called Protector) which enslaved people used as the mechanism to enforce the new regulations. Historians have rightly highlighted the ambivalence of the office and office holders; nonetheless, the records show that enslaved people took up the right to complain against their masters to improve their conditions, including the protection of their families (Mason, 1991, 2003). Enslaved men and women used the Protector’s Office to lay their complaints, striving to protect the families they had created while enslaved. So too did Recaptured Africans use the Commission of Eastern Inquiry as a platform to protect the families they created as ostensibly emancipated, indentured people at the Cape (Crous, 2024).

Emancipated and manumitted people operated in a world where multiple family relationships impinged on each other. In addition to creating their own families, the change of legal status affected the relationship of the manumitted or emancipated person with the former owner and his/her (extended) family as well. What forms of dependency or loyalty continued well after emancipation? On a more abstract level, family as a unit can be a helpful conceptual tool to reflect on the afterlives of slavery: did the way in which people achieved and experienced the transition from slavery to freedom have profound consequences for their kin, and if so, how were the life choices and opportunities of partners and (grand)children influenced by their shared slave past?

But here historians face a real challenge to trace the same individuals from slavery into freedom, whether via manumission or emancipation. For example, how do we trace the likely freed slave woman recorded as Christina van de Kaap in Cape Town, whom we encounter as a mother and grandmother in an 1870 death notice? With the de jure emancipation in the Cape Colony late 1834 no less than 183 emancipated women were recorded under that same name or close variations. By far the majority of these women were born in the Cape Colony, hardly narrowing down the possible matches.³ As Ekama & Ross (2021, p. 416) have commented elsewhere: ‘It would be ironic, though not unexpected, if one of the results of the emancipation of the enslaved […] was that historians could find out a lot less about them and their descendants.’ The articles in this special issue each deal with this specific methodological hurdle, reflect on the pitfalls and opportunities of colonial archives and each in their own way offer pathways beyond it.

5. Five case-studies

The contributions to this special issue span the Indian and Atlantic Ocean, across the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. Two contributions, rooted in the eighteenth century, address manumission and how manumitted people rebuilt their lives, in Dutch Suriname and Sri Lanka, respectively. Another set of two articles again reach across the Dutch colonial world from Curaçao to archipelagic Southeast Asia in the mid-nineteenth century and focus on questions around registration of enslaved people in the period of Dutch abolitionism to consider the role of family networks in conceptualizing life after slavery. The final contribution draws our attention to post-slavery Angola in West Africa. It considers the complexities of households in a post-slavery society, and forces us to abandon all too simple analytical manumission/emancipation models by moving key questions into an era in which slavery should have been a system from a previous century.

Manumission is the focus of Camilla de Koning’s contribution on eighteenth-century Suriname in the Dutch Caribbean (De Koning, 2023). In her study, she identifies slaveholdings/households in which slave-owners and enslaved people were bound by kinship ties. While family relationships were not recorded as motivations for manumissions, the inclusion of descriptions of slaveowners’ and manumitter’s ties to the manumitted person reveal these familial bonds. De Koning contributes to the debate over close-kin ownership as an emancipatory strategy or exploitative master–slave relationship, and suggests that approaching these situations through the lens of dependency and layered obligations is a path through the dichotomy. De Koning finds that close-kin ownership instances varied considerably in terms of the underlying relationships and outcomes for the enslaved people. Through a close analysis of five close-kin ownership manumissions, she demonstrates the shifting claims of kinship and slavery that shaped life after slavery.

Focusing on the eighteenth-century manumission for a different part of the Dutch empire, Dries Lyna studies land ownership of freed slaves in the eighteenth-century Sri Lanka (Lyna, 2024). In this article, Lyna analyzes the process of manumission and the promise of freedom for enslaved people as it was recorded in their owner’s last will. Nearly half of all the enslaved mentioned in Dutch-language last wills of Sri Lanka were bequeathed something by their former owner, and one out of every 8^th enslaved was promised a (shared) plot of land. The extensive Dutch land registration called thombos mentions several of these manumitted slaves as owners of a plot of land, and Lyna offers some compelling examples of how they acquired that land and how that landownership had a lasting impact on these individuals and their families in their lives after slavery. Several of these manumitted slaves had enough financial leverage to buy their property on the land market, and it seems that the agency of these manumitted slaves and their families to carve out their new lives after slavery was considerably higher than we might have expected.

While manumission was a legal entry into freed status, others pursued this transition by running away from sites of enslavement. Desertion has long been recognized as a common feature of slave societies across time and space, in both the Atlantic World and the Indian Ocean (Bergemann, 2024; Newman, 2022; Pargas, 2021). It is here that slavery studies and labour history have been in productive conversation (Rossum & Kamp, 2016; Rossum, 2022). Alicia Schrikker suggests for the Indonesian archipelago that it was the ability to envision a life beyond bondage that motivated the young men in Manado and Sulu to flee enslavement (Schrikker, 2024). While the Dutch authorities in Manado pursued the recapture of runaways there, they simultaneously offered refuge to runaway enslaved people from nearby Sulu. In a fascinating series of interviews with men who fled from Sulu to Dutch-controlled Manado, Schrikker hears their longings for home. Schrikker highlights the parallels between local/indigenous slavery in Sulu and colonial slavery in Manado, by bringing to light the similarities in regions of origin, enslavement, forced labour, and the aspirations of those who fled.

Coen van Galen and Björn Quanjer ask similar questions about runaways from slavery in the Dutch colony of Curaçao in the quarter of a century before abolition (Van Galen & Quanjer, 2024). Rather than analyzing the large surviving corpuses of runaway slave advertisements in colonial newspapers, their article uses the exceptionally detailed Register of Runaways for Curacao to study runaways from slavery. Focusing on the ‘maroon landscape’ of the colony, van Galen and Quanjer direct the Register to explore who the escapees/runaways were, the places they fled from and to, and their success in these endeavours. Moreover, they showcase that the sea itself was part of that maroon landscape and functioned both as a place of opportunity and limitation for fugitives. Throughout the contribution, the authors unveil the different kinds of networks that were in operation in attempts to escape slavery, the connections of runaways to one another, to other enslaved in various parts of Curacao, to the free population of colour on the island and to other locations in the Caribbean.

Finally, Jelmer Vos’s contribution brings into focus household composition and extension strategies in a coffee-producing region in northern Angola in a period long after the legal abolition of slavery (Vos, 2023). Unsurprisingly then, enslaved people are invisible in the early twentieth-century household records on which he bases his study. Through an analysis of household lists, collected for the purpose of census taking, he challenges the general consensus around the preference for incorporation of women – nieces, female cousins. Unexpectedly, considering this literature, households in São José de Encoge brought in young males to extend their households. He concludes that coffee production did not discriminate on gender lines. Vos’s contribution brings choices of family, labour, and dependence into focus in post-slavery Angola.

6. Concluding remarks

One of the aims of the issue is to further embed the study of post-emancipatory regimes as a fundamental building block of global slavery studies. By attending to the experiences of people post-slavery, it is possible to surmount both a ‘triumphalist’ approach to the study of slavery’s abolition and to interrogate the notion that emancipation delivered little in the way of freedom. By reframing the question as one about how people negotiated freedom for themselves and their loved ones in both slave and post-slavery societies, the articles in this issue address abolition’s shortcomings and highlight emancipation’s possibilities.

Going forward, it is our shared belief that comparative studies on life after slavery will yield new insights within a transimperial framework. In the past decades, nationally inspired historiographies on colonialism and imperialism were gradually complemented by localised studies, which took a spatially integrated approach. Building on the merits of the New Imperial History and the shift away from metropole-periphery conceptualisations of empire towards one that foregrounds networks, nodes, and webs created by people who both moved across boundaries and were forestalled by them, historians now acknowledge the limits of copy/pasting ‘national’ boundaries back onto colonial spaces. A comparative and connected approach aims to avoid creating new historical blind spots or forgotten (legal) grey areas.

Building on these trends in historiography that look at transnational flows of goods and people, the challenge for researchers is to each interrogate our sources to uncover the inter- and intra-imperial mobility of enslaved people, which may have allowed them to escape enslavement or to mitigate post-slavery immiseration. This is no easy task, as the nature of archival collecting, organising, and access mitigates against tracing people across imposed borders. We hope that future research on post-slaveries will take up the challenge of comparative research, building on the contributions of this special issue.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. ‘George Pettis seeking his family,’ Southwestern Christian Advocate (New Orleans, LA), June 28, 1888, Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery, accessed October 7, 2022, https://informationwanted.org/items/show/4453.

2. ‘Return of Manumissions … at Cape Town, commencing with the month of September 1830,’ accessed 1 April 2024, https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3Q9M-C91Q-M3X5-7?i=748&cc=2739063. The original records are preserved in the Western Cape Archive and Records Services, Cape Town, South Africa.

3. Death Notice 5918, filed 7 Feb. 1870, Cape Province, Probate Records of the Master of the High Court, 1834–1989. Last accessed 30 March 2024. https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3Q9M-CSQF-V9JY-V?view=explore&action=view&groupId=TH-909-58068–39757–8 Originals are preserved in the Western Cape Archive and Records Services, Cape Town, South Africa. For Emancipation records see Ekama et al. (2021). ‘When Cape Slavery Ended: Introducing a new slave emancipation dataset’ Explorations in Economic History 81, 101390.