Review of Camillia Cowling's "Conceiving Freedom." (2013)

Camillia Cowling, Conceiving Freedom: Women of Color, Gender, and the Abolition of Slavery in Havana and Rio de Janeiro (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), pgs. 342.

See here.

Christiano Junior, Studio Portrait: Seated Woman and Standing Boy Street Vendors with Vegetable Baskets, Brazil, 1864, albumen silver print, The MET, New York City, NY. Here.

Atlantic World history is replete with comparative analysis between empires, cities, and provinces in the Atlantic Basin. Notable titles include Frank Tannebaum’s Slave and Citizen (1946), Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Revolutions (1962), and R.R. Palmer’s The Age of Democratic Revolution (1969 & 1970). However, until recently, the comparative approach had fallen out of favor with many scholars. Camillia Cowling, a professor of Latin American History at the University of Warwick (Coventry, UK) uses a comparative lens for her book Conceiving Freedom (2023) to examine enslaved women’s efforts to use the law to obtain freedom for themselves and their families in Havana, Cuba and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This book primarily focuses on the late Antebellum period, though the bulk of her evidence comes from the 1870s and 1880s. This book provides fascinating detail into the lives of enslaved women in these two cities and how these women were at the forefront of emancipation efforts as both Cuba and Brazil moved towards gradual emancipation.

Cowling’s narrative is driven by the process of “zooming in” and “zooming out” and looking at slavery and emancipation through a gendered lens (i.e., focusing efforts on seeing how gender relates to these two historical processes). Throughout Conceiving Freedom: Women of Color, Gender, and the Abolition of Slavery in Havana and Rio de Janeiro Cowling’s narrative hones in on the stories of individual women, which she connects to broader shifts in the Spanish Empire, Brazil, and the Atlantic World at large. She argues that enslaved women increasingly used the law to obtain freedom, by which process they not only defined more clearly the meaning of freedom for themselves and their posterity, but also helped shape the legal processes at all levels of Spanish and Brazilian society. Their petitions and lawsuits, written with the assistance of scribes (most enslaved women in these societies were illiterate), helped push officials to not only act on the legal frameworks already in place, but also to apply the swirl of Atlantic world culture at the end of the nineteenth century to slave law. Importantly, Cowling notes that scholars should view these legal documents not as the direct voice of the enslaved, but rather as “translations” by white officials, scribes, and friends. Though likely not entirely accurate (similar to any translation effort), Cowling notes that much can be learned about the Black women fighting for their and their families’ freedom in the legal spaces of these two cities.

Divided into three sections, with eight chapters, Cowling carefully draws on countless legal cases in both Havana and Rio to provide solid documentation for her arguments. Cowling’s writing is careful and detailed, with the world of the past crafted in a way that the reader understands the complexities of these two powerful slaving cities and the numerous layers of society that occupied them. Unlike some who seek to create broad, all consuming narratives about the Atlantic world, Cowling generally is judicious in articulating broad ideas, instead focusing on both parallels and distinctions between these two societies. For example, Cowling notes that in Havana, the urban/rural divide between freedom and slavery was much starker than in Brazil. Also the legal systems had different nuances that created unique situations for the women petitioning. Still, both systems allowed for increased levels of official activism, which in turn expanded manumitted populations and redefined legal interpretations. Cowling is at her best when focused on the narrow and “micro” levels of history.

One of the best arguments that Cowling makes centers on how with the passage of “Free Womb” laws in both Brazil and Cuba (in part because of pressure from the United States and Great Britain) there was an uptick in Black women seeking legal redress for their masters’ violations of Spanish and Brazilian custom. This argument is fascinating, particularly in that it does not seek to remove these women out of the time and space in which they lived (some seem to cast all enslaved women in the same mold without regard to culture, religion, region, or lived experiences). Case after case she illustrates how enslaved women petitioned and frequently succeeded in achieving some degree of freedom through the process of the law. In turn, through networks of “gossip” and also through familial networks, more petitions expanded the reach of freedom into previously stable slave societies. Because of the pressure of transatlantic abolition and the creation of new laws favoring emancipation and manumission, women of color, particularly those in urban environments, were able to achieve victory in freedom suits.

Key to this success was an Atlantic world shift in how motherhood was presented and framed. Enslaved women seized upon their identity as mothers and guardians of virtue to petition for their rights to their children and to their own freedom. Because of seismic global shifts of the Victorian era, these arguments proved rather successful, even in the face of better funded masters. These victories were most apparent in the “gendered geographies” of both Rio and Havana. By gendered geography, Cowling means that within both cities, enslaved women dominated urban settings while male workers were utilized far more extensively in the rural areas surrounding both cities. This in turn influenced the process of manumission as women not only were able to achieve greater degrees of freedom, but were also closer to more proactive antislavery officials who sided with the enslaved more frequently than their rural counterparts. These areas will likely be fruitful fields for future scholars to investigate further beyond the boundaries of Rio and Havana.

Finally, one of Cowling’s strengths is her willingness to let the sources, rather than modern sensibilities drive her arguments. Rather than impose a “heroic” narrative on the efforts of these women, she takes the women’s stories on their own terms. Cowling’s willingness to engage with the murkiness of history allows for stories of women who were enslaved becoming slaveholders themselves all the more poignant. She also is able to weave in the work of elite abolitionists alongside the efforts of the enslaved to achieve their own freedom. What results is a narrative that is masterfully done and feels closer to the reality of human existence than those by scholars who create monolithic narratives.

While Conceiving Freedom excels in numerous areas (more than I can mention in this brief review), Cowling does have several shortcomings that impact the overall narrative. One of the larger issues is the lack of deep historical context. Often, she passes over long spans of history that could have greatly enriched her narratives. For example, she discusses the role of the arrival of numerous enslaved people in the aftermath of the end of Atlantic slave-trading by Great Britain and the United States. However, she fails to demonstrate how these arrivals were integrated or not integrated by the survivors already in Cuba and Brazil. She often references African culture as a driver within Brazilian and Cuban society, but it would have been good to have had greater engagement with the idea of creole cultures already established that were generations departed from Africa. She also fails to deeply address some of the longer narratives that influenced elite actors, such as the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions, the transatlantic abolition movement, among other things. Another area that was surprisingly not included was religion. The lack of discussion on the role of the Catholic church, one of the dominant powers in Latin American through the end of the nineteenth century, is surprising. Catholic theology and legal jurisprudence were key in creating the frameworks of manumission and influencing all levels of society in Latin America. Her neglect of this topic surely leaves much undone in her narrative.

This book was a bit dense, but it provides an essential narrative of the role of enslaved women in parts of the Iberian Atlantic world. While not the best at engaging with broader Atlantic world patterns and the “common winds” influencing world events, Cowling has crafted a fantastic narrative that illustrates how both elites and the “lower sorts” worked with and alongside each other to carve out paths and spaces of freedom in two of the last strongholds of Atlantic world slavery in the nineteenth century.

Robert Swanson

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