Focusing on the afterlife of the Freedom Edict of April 7, 1800, the chapter moves the story into the nineteenth century, a period of imperial crisis that saw the emergence of liberal trends in the empire as well as new stakeholders in the historical context of the island and, more generally, of the Spanish Atlantic world. Chapter 9 focuses on the problems that the emancipated cobreros faced in actualizing a corporate community model along the lines of colonial Indian law. It further compares El Cobre’s predicament in the new period with that of two other recognized Indian pueblos of El Caney and Jiguani, a situation that resonated elsewhere in the Spanish Atlantic in the postcolonial Latin American republics. Questions about native rights, race, and citizenship, about civil and political rights, about corporate and individual land rights emerged in this new political context, especially with the globalization of El Cobre. This globalization was linked to the arrival of French refugees and the development of a British mining industry in the region. These emerging trends led to the erasure of major aspects of the Freedom Edict of 1800 by the early 1840s.

Chapter 8 focuses on the imperial state level to examine the legal and political logic informing the final adjudication of the case in 1799, a decision that constituted a shift in the decisions the Council of the Indies and colonial tribunals had been taking in the 1780s. The chapter examines the political reasons related to mining utility and security that informed the shift and the juridical basis imperial jurists used to ground the case’s outcome. Ultimately, the Bourbon Crown ruled in favor of the cobreros but attached caveats related to Indian law to their collective freedom. The chapter ventures into the immediate aftermath of the Freedom Edict of 1800 to examine the challenges that emerged in the colony regarding the actualization of the decreed emancipation. It also interrogates the possibility of compensation or reparations to the cobreros for their wrongful enslavement.

Chapter 5 turns to the law in action and the politics of litigation involving adjudication and interpretations of the law. The chapter opens with an examination of the Council of the Indies’ initial judgment in September 1784 on the plaintiffs’ case. Based on a narrow reading of slave law and on pro-slavery policies, the ruling rejected the plaintiffs’ controversial claim to collective freedom and to the criteria of freedom presented by the plaintiffs’ brief but allowed hearings to determine ambiguous cases and stipulated the criteria to be utilized by colonial courts in those cases. The ruling gave way to a cascade of hearings and legal actions in lower-level colonial courts and to a conflict of interpretation over the imperial ruling. Ordinary enslaved and fugitive cobreros dispersed throughout the island became direct participants in the judicial arena at this point as they directly engaged in the politics of litigation for freedom in colonial courts. The chapter shows the way imperial and colonial authorities centralized and controlled judicial outcomes but also the room for maneuvering available in some cases.

This chapter presents a novel electoral strategy by which landowners have successfully influenced policymaking in democratic Brazil: a multiparty congressional caucus known as the Bancada Ruralista. It shows how agrarian elites finance the campaigns, encourage other producers to support, and subsidize the work of like-minded legislators independently of their partisan affiliation, as well as how legislators of agrarian origin collaborate across partisan lines. The chapter argues that Brazil’s Agrarian Caucus is the product of agrarian elites’ collective efforts to build a channel of electoral representation to protect their interests under democracy in a context of high political fragmentation. The threat of radical land reform during the democratic transition prompted landowners to engage in electoral politics. However, high political fragmentation among the agrarian elite rendered party-building unfeasible. The chapter discusses the advantages of an electoral, candidate-centered, multipartisan strategy over other strategies available to economic elites in democracies such as lobbying or party-building, and illustrates these advantages through the analysis of the Forest Code reform of 2012.

This chapter first describes the dependent variable – agrarian elites’ strategies of political influence – and its three categories (nonelectoral, party-building, and candidate-centered) in terms of their reliability and costs. Then, it introduces a new theory to explain the variation in agrarian elites’ strategies of political influence under democracy. It highlights the role of two independent variables – perception of an existential threat and intragroup fragmentation – to explain when and how agrarian elites will organize in the electoral arena. It argues that agrarian elites will enter the electoral arena only when they perceive an existential threat. In turn, landowners’ level of intragroup fragmentation conditions the way they organize their electoral representation. Where landed elites are cohesive, they will engage in party-building. In contrast, highly fragmented elites will prefer a nonpartisan, candidate-centered strategy of representation, supporting individual like-minded politicians across partisan lines. Lastly, the chapter assesses three main alternative explanations, previous history of electoral organization, electoral rules, and the relevance of congress as a policymaking arena.

This chapter presents a case of nonelectoral strategies of political influence by agrarian elites in Argentina and the limitations of such strategies. Until 2008, Argentine landowners influenced politics through lobbying and, when this failed, through protests. The chapter presents evidence of how Argentine agrarian elites did not invest in electoral representation prior to 2008 because they did not experience an existential threat. It also shows how landowners decided to enter the electoral arena with the rise of an existential threat in the form of confiscatory taxes in 2008. Given Argentine agrarian elites fragmentation, they deployed a candidate-centered strategy, sponsoring the candidacies of a dozen agricultural producers for Congress under diverse party affiliations. However, institutional features and ideological differences among producers’ associations blunted the effectiveness of the strategy and led to its abandonment. Later on, with the consolidation of Propuesta Republicana (PRO) as a viable electoral alternative and the continuity of hostile polices, part of the Argentine agrarian elite has engaged in party-building. However, economic cleavages within Argentine agricultural producers continue to undermine the kind of sector-wide party-building effort that we saw in Chile during the democratic transition.

Chapter 7 deals with the violence unfolding at the local level and with the cobreros’ extrajudicial forms of mobilization in tandem with legal actions. Here the story of legal action merges with one of extrajudicial actions such as fugitivity and more violent action and shows how judicial and extrajudicial actions were entangled with each other. Cosme’s letters from Madrid also provided legitimacy to the cobreros’ extrajudicial actions by directly informing the community that the king’s edicts favored their freedom. Factoring into the escalating threat of violence and political conflict on the ground was the broader Atlantic context of revolution in Saint Domingue and war with the British during the 1790s. Imperial designs in this period seem to conflict with colonial ones in a triangulation of conflict that included the cobreros’ actions.