To Have and to Hold (onto): Domestic Slaveholding in Colonial Lima

This paper examines cases in which formerly enslaved women sued for their liberty on the basis of carework in exchange for freedom. The cases allow us to chart a negotiated exchange of care and inherited reward in the instance of childless families in a slaveholding society. Customary norms delegated the care and responsibility for ailing parents to elder daughters or the wives of elder sons. In practice however, in slaveholding societies, it was enslaved women who bore the responsibility for the actual carework. The cases studied here addressed litigation regarding deferred promises of freedom, illustrating how litigants drew upon numerous witnesses to vouch for their devoted labor and carework. In so doing, the witnesses and the claimant revealed community approval of an equitable exchange of freedom for carework.

This paper revisits the scholarship on domestic slavery in two respects. First: it will interrogate the notion of the domestic slave as other or stranger. In the historical debate over slavery, scholars insist on the slave’s alterity, or natal alienation as ex ante to her enslavement. This dichotomy breaks down within the domestic context—and indeed may be of limited utility in the global history of bondage. Second, it will challenge the idea that domestic slavery was necessarily unproductive vis-à-vis plantation (or “genuine” slavery). Borrowing from anthropology, labor and gender studies, and feminist geography, the paper uses these cases to envision the household as a productive space comprised of webs of obligation, formal and customary property arrangements.