The epilogue critically assesses how successful the ruling elites were in their republican project of turning peasants, laborers, and day laborers into modern citizens through consumption and economic integration. This critique proceeds by emphasizing the tensions between plebeian and elite attitudes toward consumption and citizenship by the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. It also invites global historians and historians of Latin America to ask new questions about capitalism and globalization “in the margins” by studying consumption from below, so as to interrogate the entrenched narratives of underdevelopment and dependency that still permeate our historical interpretations about Latin America today.

This chapter traces how formerly enslaved Black men and women partook in a legal culture of freedom papers in the sixteenth-century Spanish empire. After enduring lifetimes of enslavement and precarious and lengthy routes to obtain their precious liberty, formerly enslaved Black people often took careful measures to document and protect their hard-won freedom by engaging in the paper-based bureaucracy that underpinned the central tenets of power and justice in the Spanish empire. This often involved investing in the services of notaries to duplicate freedom papers or requesting that various royal and ecclesiastical authorities issue confirmatory paperwork to document their freedom. Their participation in this legal culture of freedom papers reveals how people from the lowest socioeconomic echelons of colonial society measured and valued paperwork – even if they could not read or write – and invested resources to produce and safeguard an array of legal documents to protect their status.

This study explores a shared Black Atlantic world where the meanings of slavery and freedom were fiercely contested and claimed. Weaving together thousands of archival fragments, the book recreates the worlds and dilemmas of extraordinary individuals and communities in the long sixteenth century, while mapping the development of early modern Black thought about slavery and freedom. From a free Black mother’s embarkation license to cross the Atlantic Ocean to an enslaved Sevillian woman’s epistles to her freed husband in New Spain, an enslaved man’s negotiations with prospective buyers on the auction block in Mexico City, and a Black man’s petition to reclaim his liberty after his illegitimate enslavement, these actions were those of everyday and extraordinary individuals who were important intellectual actors in the early modern Atlantic world. They reckoned in their daily lives with laws and theological discourses that legitimized the enslavement of Black people 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, sometimes generating spheres of communication that stretched across the early modern Atlantic world. Their intellectual labor reimagined the epistemic worlds of the early modern Atlantic. This introduction provides an outline of the book’s main argument, methodology, and the six chapters and the coda that follow.

Chapter 4 studies the political, cultural, and economic impact of foreign machetes and other agricultural tools. It shows how popular men and women’s expert knowledge about these goods was not transferred from above or received from abroad but inherited and acquired in practice. Peasants and muleteers used machetes to clear the land, grow their crops, and travel the country; artisans, bogas, and smallholders, to defend their honor, their lives, and their property. As this chapter shows, over the course of the nineteenth century, foreign tools, especially the machete, reshaped these popular actors’ collective identities and underscored their contribution to the nation’s material improvement and progress – not only as part of the country’s labor force but as consumers themselves. Although these Plebeian consumers might have had limited choices due to their limited purchasing power, this did not preclude them from appropriating foreign tools, expressing dissatisfaction with certain agricultural implements, and seeking ways to access the ones they liked and preferred. Most important, machetes allowed them to shape and reiterate their citizenship on the ground. As such, Colombia’s popular consumers became not only critical agents in the global market but active and productive citizens of the new republic.

Based on the recorded experiences of foreign merchants and local shopkeepers, literature, and visual sources, Chapter 3 delves into how the tastes and preferences of Colombia’s Plebeian consumers influenced the production of textiles abroad. It shows how their demands for specific colors, designs, and shapes were communicated through a chain of intermediaries to manufacturers in the United States and England, who risked having their merchandise returned and losing customers if they failed to comply. The chapter emphasizes that terms of trade were never solely determined by US or European interests; the preferences of everyday Colombian men and women actively shaped the republic’s marketplace.

Ephemeral conversations between enslaved people about the laws of slavery and freedom constituted an exchange of precious knowledge and legal know-how that shaped Black life and thought in the early Atlantic world. This chapter explores enslaved people's petitions to the crown for freedom on the basis that their enslavement was illegitimate to write a history of ideas among enslaved Black people about the illegitimacy of certain types of enslavements in the Spanish empire. These petitions are indicative of a rich landscape of ideas about freedom and slavery among free and enslaved Black people in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and their engagement with Castilian rules of law of slavery and freedom. They argued that they were legally free and that their freedom had been stolen from them. Pedro de Carmona, for example, protested in his petition in 1547 about the “great injury and disturbances (agravios y turbación) that have been done to my liberty.” The chapter traces how enslaved Black litigants accrued this know-how through their discussions with other enslaved and free Black people during their desperate pursuits to reclaim the freedom that had been stolen from them.