🏅 Winner: Ana Vergara Sierra
“The Escribano of Babel: Power, Exile, and Enslavement in the Venezuelan Llanos during the War of Independence (1806–1833)”
📖 Read here: bit.ly/3PJSokH

@pwgatrell.bsky.social @delphinediaz.bsky.social @btwhite.bsky.social

4/4 By their emphasis on sweeping executive power, various actors regarded alien acts as an appropriate legal tool to respond to, to avert or subvert what they regarded as challenges or legal complexities of the age of emancipation.

3/4 The alien acts turned into flexible tools of colonial governance. The paper examines how alien legislation was used in two crucial arenas of imperial reconfiguration in the British Caribbean in the 1820s-30s: the push for political equality by free people of color and slave trade abolition.

2/4 In reaction to revolutionary upheaval around 1800, the British parliament and colonial legislatures in the Americas passed their first statutory provisions to govern migration and aliens as such. As this article argues, these “alien acts” were much more than about border and migration controls.

4/4 The consequences of their actions were far-reaching and often uncontrollable, as they carved out a legal grey zone that created, in practice, a quasi-free soil sanctuary in the heart of Britain’s planation complex.

3/4 It shows how the fugitives entered in intense, and contentious, encounters with low-ranking officials on the ground. They used legal ambiguities and loopholes in British slave trade abolition, thereby resetting, reinterpreting, and broadening the meaning and scope of freedom granted under it.

2/4 Based on research across Europe and the Caribbean, the article explores how the British Caribbean turned into an unlikely refuge for intercolonial maroons from slavery in the 1820s and 1830s as hundreds of enslaved men and women fled from French, Danish, and Dutch Caribbean colonies.

Could be read alongside Jan C. Jansen, "American Indians for Saint-Domingue?: Exile, Violence, and Imperial Geopolitics after the French and Haitian Revolutions", French Historical Studies 45, no. 1 (2022): 49-86.
#OpenAccess: doi.org/10.1215/0016...

The article examines visions of a French imperial revival at the moment of the Haitian Revolution and French retreat from Louisiana, targeting Spanish Caribbean colonies. Crucial for these plans was the scattered diaspora of Saint-Domingue refugees. Also available at hal.science/hal-04970600.