| dc.description.abstract | This dissertation examines the making of a Spanish imperial legislation by which black fugitives from foreign colonies could receive asylum and freedom in Spanish territories if they converted to Catholicism. Engendered in the reality of the contested Caribbean, Spain’s religious sanctuary policy put enslaved desertion into both the service of the monarchy’s long-standing religious mission to evangelize the non-Catholic peoples of the world and its imperial designs, functioning as a tool for the propagation of the faith as well as a weapon to destabilize plantation development in rival colonies. Set in motion by acts of fugitivity across imperial boundaries, the policy’s evolution illuminates how micro-histories of slave agency and macro-level developments became entwined. Using legal and ecclesiastical records, government and missionary reports, and correspondence collected from archives in Cuba, Spain, England, and Italy, I examine the inception, evolution, establishment, and demise of Spain’s religious sanctuary legislation in the Caribbean from the 1650s to the 1790s. The study of this legislation over a century and a half ultimately reveals that the contested Caribbean was not only a space where Africans and people of African descent acted, but one where their actions were the primary motor driving legal change. Rather than the “backwater” that previous generations of Latin American historians have depicted, the colonial Caribbean thus emerges as an arena of global disputes, and, more importantly, as a generative legal space. | |
