This chapter explores how enslaved people developed legal know-how about Castilian laws of slavery and freedom, and shared and exchanged such information with others. In particular, the chapter focuses on the history of enslaved Black people’s determination to raise capital or credit to purchase their liberty from their enslavers. The chapter explores how enslaved Black men and women often plotted their paths to liberty through economic decisions by focusing on the lives of enslaved Black people who resided in the towns along the Camino Real in New Spain between Veracruz and Mexico City during a time of economic boom in the late sixteenth century. Notarial records that cataloged the self-purchase and liberation of enslaved people in port towns of the Spanish Atlantic often reveal how enslaved Black people developed social ties and capital among kin, friends, and charitable residents, and consorted with people from varied socioeconomic backgrounds who lived or passed through the places where they resided. These records index a history of conversations about strategies to obtain liberty among enslaved Black people and relationships across different socioeconomic spheres that allowed for some enslaved people to access precious credit to pay for their liberty.

At the turn of the seventeenth century, Felipa de la Cruz penned two letters to her freed husband who had moved from Sevilla to Veracruz in New Spain. These letters reveal extended discussions of Cruz’s commitment to securing liberty for herself and their children, as she reminded her husband not to forget her desire for freedom. Felipa de la Cruz’s letters hold immense historical value as they are among the earliest known letters penned by an enslaved Black woman in the Atlantic world that have survived in a historical archive. Reading the private correspondence between Felipa de la Cruz and her absent husband also reveals the day-to-day lives of enslaved people in an urban environment. The Coda presents these two letters transcribed in Spanish as well as in English translation. The Coda also includes a map of the social ties of a generation of free and liberated Black Sevillians who were Cruz’s contemporaries in the late sixteenth century (approximately 1569–1626). The map and extended key allow readers to trace some of Felipa de la Cruz’s Black neighbors who also had ties with the Spanish Americas, and their respective socioeconomic ties across the city.

The introduction sets the stage for a comprehensive exploration of how plebeian consumption shaped global and local interactions in nineteenth-century Colombia, challenging conventional historical narratives and offering new insights into the dynamics of global capitalism and popular citizenship. It does so by providing insight into the existing historiography and its limitations and by highlighting the need to challenge dominant narratives that perpetuate the perception of Latin America and its consumers as passive participants in global transformations. The introduction also explores the methodological challenges of writing histories of consumption “from below” and the need to adopt an interdisciplinary approach drawing from cultural history and anthropology to analyze popular consumption practices. After a historical exploration of Colombia’s place within the global nineteenth century, the introduction concludes with a brief outline of the book’s chapters.

Chapter 5 turns to elite consumption of foreign luxury goods. This detour from the book’s narrative of Plebeian consumption is necessary in order to question the historiography that has equated “foreign goods” with “luxury goods.” This chapter looks at how nineteenth-century Colombian elites incorporated European luxury consumer goods – clocks, books, umbrellas, clothing, and musical instruments – into practices of social distinction and cultural expression in a reaction against ordinary people’s way of life. In this way, the chapter highlights that, when it came to their own consumption, the category of “foreign commodities” in nineteenth-century Colombia was flexible for the members of the upper classes, with particular political and social ramifications.

Chapter 1 explores how the elites’ economic republican project, based on the modern science of political economy, was closely linked to ordinary people’s desire to consume foreign goods. It explores how for those in power as well as for those seeking recognition as political subjects, ideas and practices of citizenship were inevitably tied to participation as consumers in the marketplace – understood not as a mere container of economic transactions but as a node of complex social processes and a creator of cultural and political activity. By so doing, the chapter reveals that in nineteenth-century Colombia, politics was everywhere, and the marketplace was no exception.

Chapter 6 turns to the consumption of patent medicines and toiletries and their impact on the Colombian market. By following their distribution, it explores the mechanisms and strategies employed by foreign manufacturers to infiltrate the market and gain widespread attention. It also shows how producers of patent medicines were the first to introduce modern advertising techniques to Colombians. As a result of such advertising, popular sectors were gradually incorporated into the world of foreign nostrums and toiletries, embracing the ideas that these commodities promoted and enforced. In spite of this, as the chapter demonstrates, Colombian men and women still transformed and domesticated their uses and their meanings in interesting and often unpredictable ways.

Chapter 2 explores the complex dynamics of Colombia’s post-1850 import trade. It traces how foreign objects – textiles, machetes, toiletries, food, and chinaware, among many other goods – circulated throughout the national geography: the routes they traveled and the places they visited. The chapter also explores the many places in which peasants, bogas, formerly enslaved people, and small landholders came together to give meaning to the multiple and diverse spaces of exchange.

Liberated and free-born people understood that generating paperwork to record commercial transactions could protect and assure their freedom in the Spanish empire. The chapter explores this know-how through the life of Ana Gómez, a free Black woman who accumulated significant capital over the course of her lifetime and who documented her economic ties as a means of practicing and protecting her freedom. Gómez carefully documented her various economic ties across the Atlantic through paperwork, and astutely measured her trust and social capital with associates when determining whether to record a commercial transaction in writing, or whether to rely on verbal agreements, which she usually only allowed for her credit lines to Black neighbors. The chapter studies how Black women in the late sixteenth-century Caribbean practiced freedom through their economic decisions and protected their freedom through their engagement in legal cultures of paperwork to document their extensive economic, commercial, and social ties.

This chapter explores a history of ideas and hopes about freedom in late- sixteenth-century Sevilla through the lives and affairs of enslaved and liberated Black people who lived in a central parish of the city in this period. In particular, the analysis explores ideas about freedom of an enslaved Black woman named Felipa de la Cruz who penned two letters to her absent husband beseeching him to send funds for her liberation from slavery. The chapter explores the varied conversations and fractured memories about paths to liberation from slavery among free, enslaved, and liberated Black populations in Sevilla and the mutual aid practices that sometimes spanned vast distances across the Atlantic world. Assembling diverse archival materials that catalog how hundreds of free and liberated Black men and women crossed the Atlantic Ocean as passengers with royal licenses on ships also reveals spheres of communication between free Black residents of Sevilla with kin and associates in the Spanish Atlantic world, especially through relays of word of mouth and epistolary networks. In other words, enslaved and free Black residents of late sixteenth-century Sevilla were often members of a nascent Black lettered city and participated in informal relays of word of mouth.

This chapter explores how free-born and liberated Black people in the Spanish Americas invested significant resources to defend and expand the meanings of Black freedom and political belonging in the Spanish empire. In particular, when facing repressive policies introduced by local or municipal authorities or disturbances of their freedom enacted by private individuals, free born and liberated people often deftly negotiated various legal jurisdictions and expended social and political capital to carefully craft petitions for royal justice and grace. The chapter traces the development of infrastructures of Black political knowledge, and how people and communities learned about events and political discourses in faraway places and exchanged ideas and news in their daily lives that they later might deploy in their own petitions. With a focus on the cities of Sevilla and Mexico City, the chapter traces a history of infrastructures of Black political knowledge through the activities of Black religious confraternities, and the significance of Black petitioning to speculate about the possible moments of fellowship and exchange between Black petitioners from different cities in the Spanish empire, and the impact of any such exchanges on Black political ideas about freedom in this period.