Transimperial mobilities, slavery, and becoming Catholic in eighteenth-century Cartagena de Indias

Abstract

ABSTRACT Complementing the literature on inter-Caribbean Spanish religious “sanctuary” policy and maritime marronage, this article illuminates how enslaved people shared and acted on religious knowledge across oceans and imperial boundaries, long before the “Age of Revolutions.” Curaçao-born Nicholas Baptista, initially with a Dutch enslaver, and Juan de Rada, born in the Portuguese East Indies and captured by an Englishman, found themselves before the tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition of Cartagena de Indias in the late 1710s. Both men took radically different strategies to becoming Catholic and, in doing so, to materially transform their lives. Transimperial mobilities, through labour in the slave trade, were central to enslaved people’s circulation and production of religious knowledge in the early modern world. Analysis of enslaved people’s testimonies in place, formed by geography, mobility, and labour, deepens our understanding of black knowledge production and its quotidian mobilities across the Early-Modern world.