This project is a comprehensive survey, indexing and analysis of archived lawsuits brought by enslaved men and women in Lima, Peru between 1600-1700. The court documents to be surveyed are manumission cases, appeals for family unification, change of ownership petitions, and self-purchase lawsuits. The objective is twofold: first: to identify legal arguments that were successful for enslaved litigants given their condition of bondage and their negligible social, economic and political power, and second: to identify legal forums which were more favorable to slave claims, and the circumstances of occupation, residence, gender, and caste that enabled slaves to use these forums. The central hypothesis is that slave litigants' claims were often more successful in ecclesiastical courts than they were in secular courts, because they were brought within a religious and legal context that was deeply ambivalent about the status of slaves as humans vis-Ã -vis their status as property.
Much of the debate in comparative slavery studies can be reduced to a central argument about which legal system was more favorable to liberty. Civil law systems created greater opportunities for manumission than the common law tradition of chattel slavery. Slaves in the British Caribbean and the US South hardly used the legal system to pursue their freedom at comparable rates to Latin American slaves. This research will provide empirical data about outcomes of slave litigation that can inform larger theoretical debates about the legal agency of colonial Latin American enslaved litigants, the ambiguity of slaves' legal personality, and the role of courts as protectors or detractors of slaveholders' interests. This data in turn will assist humanist and social science scholars in comparative slavery studies, by assessing the measurable performance of courts in denying or approving slave claims, and will deepen our understanding of the role of courts in times of social change more generally.
The principal goals of this project were to identify legal avenues for enslaved peoples to assert claims to liberty and autonomy in a colonial, slaveholding society marked by extreme inequalities of race, ethnicity, status, and gender. Archival data revealed possibilities of legal action under conditions inimical to agency and autonomy. The project used contemporary theories of legal mobilization and gap studies from law and society scholarship to analyze four types of litigation: 1) manumission litigation and status determination suits, 2) self-purchase disputes, 3) family unity petitions, and 3) transfer of ownership petitions. A review of these lawsuits enabled the PI to test an early and influential thesis in comparative slavery studies articulated by Frank Tannenbaum, that the combination of Iberia's Roman law tradition, together with the influence of the Catholic Church, created a system more favorable to slaves using the courts to fight for their freedom than the common law. Where possible, the PI combed through extant documentation left in the vortex of history that pertained to the litigants either before or after their lawsuits. These documents included administrative and bureaucratic proceedings, surviving notarial documents (wills testaments, letters of freedom), baptismal and marriage petitions, and other domestic relations materials, Law and society scholars have long pointed out that ltigation "sparked" extra-legal processes and out of court negotiations that eventually led to changed circumstances even when the agitating party lost his or her case in court. The primary outcome of this project was the construction of a searchable database of over 15,000 entries of baptism, marriage, family unity, and change of ownership petitions from 1580-1700.
