During the wars for independence in Spanish South America (1808-1826), thousands of slaves enlisted under the promise of personal freedom and, in some cases, freedom for other family members. Blacks were recruited by opposing sides in these conflicts and their loyalties rested with whomever they believed would emerge victorious. The prospect of freedom was worth risking one's life for, and wars against Spain presented unprecedented opportunities to attain it.Much hedging over the slavery issue continued, however, even after the patriots came to power. The prospect of abolition threatened existing political, economic, and social structures, and the new leaders would not encroach upon what were still considered the property rights of powerful slave owners. The patriots attacked the institution of slavery in their rhetoric, yet maintained the status quo in the new nations. It was not until a generation later that slavery would be declared illegal in all of Spain's former mainland colonies.Through extensive archival research, Blanchard assembles an accessible, comprehensive, and broadly based study to investigate this issue from the perspectives of Royalists, patriots, and slaves. He examines the wartime political, ideological, and social dynamics that led to slave recruitment, and the subsequent repercussions in the immediate postindependence era. Under the Flags of Freedom sheds new light on the vital contribution of slaves to the wars for Latin American independence, which, up until now, has been largely ignored in the histories and collective memories of these nations.

Freedom's Captives offers a compelling, narrative-driven history of the gradual abolition of slavery in the majority-black Colombian Pacific.

This Oxford Handbook comprehensively examines the field of Latin American history.

This comparative study examines the emancipation process in the British Caribbean, particularly Jamaica, during the 1830s and in the United States, particularly South Carolina, during the 1860s. Analyzing the intellectual and ideological foundations of postslavery Anglo-America, Demetrius Eudell explores how former slaves, former slaveholders, and their societies' central governments understood and discussed slavery, emancipation, and the transition between the two. Eudell investigates the public policies--which addressed issues of labor control, access to land, and the general social behaviors of former slaves--used to execute emancipation. In both regions, government-appointed officials (special magistrates in Jamaica and agents of the Freedmen's Bureau in South Carolina) were crucial in implementing these policies. While many former slaves were fighting for the right to be paid for their labor and to own land, many officials came to view their role as part of a new civilizing mission whose goal was to eradicate the psychic damage supposedly caused by slavery. Eudell concludes by examining the 1865 Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica and the retreat from Reconstruction in South Carolina, part of the larger movement of Redemption that occurred in 1877. Both of these occurrences represented the incomplete victory of emancipation, Eudell argues, and should provoke scholarly questions regarding the persistent thesis of U.S. exceptionalism.

How slave emancipation transformed capitalism in the United States and Brazil In the nineteenth century, the United States and Brazil were the largest slave societies in the Western world. The former enslaved approximately four million people, the latter nearly two million. Slavery was integral to the production of agricultural commodities for the global market, and governing elites feared the system’s demise would ruin their countries. Yet, when slavery ended in the United States and Brazil, in 1865 and 1888 respectively, what resulted was immediate and continuous economic progress. In American Mirror, Roberto Saba investigates how American and Brazilian reformers worked together to ensure that slave emancipation would advance the interests of capital. Saba explores the methods through which antislavery reformers fostered capitalist development in a transnational context. From the 1850s to the 1880s, this coalition of Americans and Brazilians—which included diplomats, engineers, entrepreneurs, journalists, merchants, missionaries, planters, politicians, scientists, and students, among others—consolidated wage labor as the dominant production system in their countries. These reformers were not romantic humanitarians, but cosmopolitan modernizers who worked together to promote labor-saving machinery, new transportation technology, scientific management, and technical education. They successfully used such innovations to improve production and increase trade. Challenging commonly held ideas about slavery and its demise in the Western Hemisphere, American Mirror illustrates the crucial role of slave emancipation in the making of capitalism.