Abstract

In the historiography of slave-owning societies, manumission has been a contentious topic. Based on the assumption that manumission rates and the level of cruelty in a slave-owning society were closely related, historians have used research on manumission to rank slave societies based on a scale from “mild” to “harsh.” More recent research on manumission has eschewed this problematic approach, instead probing gradations of freedom. This article aims to contribute to our understanding of manumission and slavery by questioning how the formal, legal process of manumission altered the lived experience of individuals. Examining legal sources that shed light on the complexities of manumission in eighteenth-century Colombo, it considers the social strategies employed to achieve and defend free status. The records show that manumission did not sever the master-slave relationship: obligations and relations of debt continued to bind the formerly enslaved to former slave-owning families. Studying court records involving individuals responding to the possibilities and limitations of manumission, this study shows that freed status was precarious and, like bondage, was not an unalterable state.

中文翻译：

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Free可危的自由：18世纪科伦坡的叛乱

摘要

在奴隶主所有社会的史学中，放弃所有权一直是一个有争议的话题。在假定奴隶制社会的受教育程度与残酷程度密切相关的假设下，历史学家利用对奴役的研究，根据“轻度”到“严酷”的等级对奴隶制进行了排名。较新的关于手制的研究避开了这种有问题的方法，而是探究自由的等级。本文旨在通过质疑正式的合法法律程序如何改变个人的生活经验，来增进我们对奴役制和奴役制的理解。它审查了揭示18世纪科伦坡演习的复杂性的法律资料，并考虑了为实现和捍卫自由地位而采用的社会策略。记录显示，交割并未切断主奴关系：义务和债务关系继续将原先被奴役的家庭与原奴隶拥有的家庭联系在一起。研究涉及对可实行性的可能性和局限性作出回应的个人的法院记录，这项研究表明，释放状态是不稳定的，并且像束缚一样，不是不可改变的状态。