Slavery and Freedom in Black Thought in the Early Spanish Atlantic examines how enslaved and free Africans in the Iberian empire created “thick spheres of communication” between key port towns of the Carrera de Indias that generated a constant flow of people, objects, and ideas across the Atlantic. While scholars of the Iberian empire have established the significant mobility of Indigenous, mestizo, and Afro-descendant populations, Ireton traces the ways in which enslaved and free Black people used the multiple maritime circuits and imperial structures of the Carrera de Indias to discuss, debate, and share ideas and strategies about resisting enslavement and charting paths to freedom. Ireton documents the existence of these communicative networks through “relays off word of mouth, epistolary networks, and legal powers” (4). Ireton deftly mines the administrative sources of the House of Trade and the Council of the Indies as well as multiple ecclesiastical, judicial, and notarial archives in New Spain and Cartagena (methodologically dubbed “kaleidoscopic archives of excess,” 13) to trace the emergence of these communicative networks. In so doing, Ireton establishes an intellectual world in which Black people’s struggles for freedom defined the contours of political belonging and religious and racial inclusion in the early modern Iberian empire.

The book is organized into six chapters and a coda that explores distinct aspects of slavery and freedom. Throughout the Iberian empire, enslaved petitioners petitioned for their freedom in courts and in royal councils by alleging an original condition that rendered their enslavement illegal such as indigenous ancestry, advanced ransom or agreed-upon self-purchase payments, religious conversion to the Catholic faith, or service to the Crown. In making these legal claims, enslaved petitioners also articulated ideas of freedom and belonging. They deployed strategies of bottom-up petitioning, forum shopped between jurisdictions, built networks of witnesses, and recruited administrative and ecclesiastical allies. Ireton argues that “Black people’s intellectual work around political belonging had profound implications for the history of ideas about race, Blackness, exclusion, and inclusion in the Spanish Atlantic world” (10).

In chapter one, Ireton shows how Black people contributed to a juridical culture of paperwork by generating a legal dossier that documented their freedom. One wonders whether it was the imminent mobility of travelers that demanded the generation of paperwork and documentation, or whether this constant corroboration of identity was an enduring feature of early modern life in Andalucía. In chapter two, Ireton uses the epistolary networks of the “cartas de llamada” to show how spouses communicated with each other across time and space. The primary protagonist of this chapter, Felipa de la Cruz, implored her husband to keep his promise to free her and their children through his remittances in her correspondence. Using unique methods of historiographical reconstruction drawing from art history and cityscape mapping, Ireton creates a personal cartography of Black sevillanos and situates Felipa de la Cruz as part of a cosmopolitan maritime milieu, even though she never left Seville for the Americas.

In chapter three, Ireton geolocates the dense communicative networks of Margarita de Sossa: an exceptional diasporic subject who circulated among households in Porto, Lisbon, Seville, and Puebla (New Spain). Ireton traces these networks through the archival fragments Sossa generated: a divorce petition, an Inquisitorial record, and multiple notarial transactions that recorded Sossa’s economic activity between San Juan de Ulúa and the Camino Real (119–121). Chapter four takes readers between Seville and New Spain through a remarkable study of Black cofrades who resisted their exile from New Spain as punishment for their putative role in the 1612 conspiracy (153). The chapter builds on the prolific scholarship of the 1612 events and highlights the petitioners’ actions to the Council of the Indies within the ambit of Black intellectual political thought (152). Ireton also shows the inflections of indigenous advocacy and petitioning in Castille in the trajectories of the Afro-Mexican cofrades.

Chapter five explores the legal arguments undertaken by Black litigants to resist their enslavement within the frame of Catholicism and debates about just war. Ireton shows how imperial subjects such as Francisco Martín and Pedro de Carmona shaped extant anti-slavery discourse long before an abolitionist sensibility emerged in the Atlantic world. As she writes, “petitions for freedom from illegitimate enslavement reveal a fragmentary discourse and legal debates between the Crown and enslaved subjects in the long sixteenth century on the question of the legitimacy and enslavement of Black people, the limits on how to define a legitimate or illegitimate enslavement, and the protections afforded to a legal status of liberty in Castilian law” (227). Chapter six shows how free Black women accumulated significant capital through commercial enterprises in the port towns on the Panamanian Isthmus. Ireton uses the notarial documentary trail created by Ana Gomez, a Black Andalucian woman who amassed considerable wealth after relocating to Tierra Firme, where she died (230). Finally, the coda retraces the soundscapes and cityscapes of the historical subjects detailed in the book and situates the archival context in which they emerged.

Slavery and Freedom in Black Thought marshals a wealth of archival evidence and moves the field of early modern Afro-Iberian studies into new terrains. Ireton’s argument rests heavily on Black mobility and communicative networks of her subjects. What happened to Black people who never moved? How did they participate in these communicative networks? What were their worldmaking projects? The book also challenges our ideas of temporality and accustoms readers to the nautical rhythms of change over time. Slavery and Freedom in Black Thought is a significant and magisterial work that greatly contributes to our understanding of Black intellectual history and associated freedom projects.