Coercion and Enslavement in Motion: An Introduction

Abstract

Captivity and mobility are central conditions for understanding the historical experience of enslaved people in and between Africa, Europe, and the Americas from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Mobility played a crucial role in creating and entrenching slavery, the establishment of labour regimes, and the circulation of enslaved people’s knowledge. While the study of slavery and captivity has a longer history, mobility is increasingly a growth area in slavery studies and one examined across, between, and within oceans, continents, and regions. We collectively examine the relationship between slavery and mobility in the South Atlantic and its wider web of connections through four centuries. In doing so, we trace the changing laws, processes, and technologies that enslavers utilized to move captives and, in doing so, made the age of slavery. Just as enslavers used mobility to articulate their power and disrupt the making of place, captives of diverse ethnicities circulated knowledge and enacted freedoms as they moved between and created cultural worlds. This special issue emerged from the conference, ‘Captive Mobilities: Slavery, Freedom, and Knowledge Production in Latin America and Beyond,’ organized by us and held at the University of Bristol in September 2022, with the support of the Leverhulme Trust and the Society of Latin American Studies. While we came together as a group of historians who work principally on slavery and knowledge production in Latin America, Africa, and the South Atlantic, the focus on the mobilities of enslaved individuals follows the global, transoceanic, transcultural geographies and flows of slavery. Forced movement within Africa, to Europe, across the Atlantic, and around the Americas produced the condition of enslavement. The geographical breadth of the volume reflects the trajectories of enslaved individuals of African and indigenous descent that we study. We follow the mobilities of captives, around world and within regions, who frequently traversed traditional boundaries of continents, empire, and language. The individuals featured descended from and moved through territories now known as Angola, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea-Conakry,