Dr Chloe Ireton

Chloe Ireton is the author of Slavery and Freedom in Black Thought in the Early Spanish Atlantic (Cambridge University Press, 2024) and is currently writing ‘Plotting for Freedom’, a dual biography of an enslaved Black couple and their epic attempts to liberate each other from slavery, set across the early modern Atlantic world spanning West Africa, Spain, and Mexico. She lectures in history at University College London and is a current British Academy Wolfson Fellow (2023-2026).

About the event

In the early modern era, millions of people were enslaved, dispossessed, and forcibly displaced from sites in West Africa and West-Central Africa to European imperial realms where the meanings of slavery and freedom were codified into distinct rules of law. These laws and traditions often differed from legal cultures about slavery in enslaved peoples’ places of origin or the sites where they or their ancestors were first enslaved.

The talk traces how West Africans and West-Central Africans and their descendants reckoned with the violent world of Atlantic slavery that they were forced to inhabit, and how they conceptualized two strands of political and legal thought – freedom and slavery – in the early Spanish empire. In their daily lives, Black Africans and their descendants grappled with laws and theological discourses that legitimized the enslavement of Black people in the early modern Atlantic world and the varied meanings of freedom across legal jurisdictions.

They discussed ideas about slavery and freedom with Black kin, friends, and associates in the sites where they lived and across vast distances, generating thick spheres of communication in the early modern Atlantic world. Discussions about freedom and its varied meanings moved from place to place through diverse exchanges of information, fractured memories, and knowledge between Black communities and kin across the Atlantic Ocean.

Tickets: Imagining Liberty: Slavery and Freedom in Black Thought in the early Spanish Atlantic