Enslaved Archives: Slavery, Law, and the Production of the Past

Maria R. Montalvo is Assistant Professor in the Department of History.

In Enslaved Archives, Maria R. Montalvo investigates the legal records, including contracts and court records, that American antebellum enslavers produced and preserved to illuminate enslavers' capitalistic motivations for shaping the histories of enslaved people. The documentary archive was not simply a by-product of the business of slavery, but also a necessary tool that enslavers used to exploit the people they enslaved.

In working to historicize the people at the center of enslavers' manipulations, Montalvo outlines the possibilities and limits of the archive, providing a glimpse of the historical and contemporary consequences of commodification. Enslaved Archives makes a significant intervention in the history of enslaved people, legal history, and the history of slavery and capitalism by adding a qualitative dimension to the analysis of how enslavers created and maintained power.

“Enslaved Archives offers a profound 'history within a history' of slavery, centering enslaved people as architects of their own pasts. Here, the enslaved hold fast to the parts of their lives that enslavers tried to wrench from them before and after sale. Fashioning a past that retained vital elements of their former lives, enslaved people quietly resisted attempts to commodify their bodies and souls. A welcome, necessary addition to the study of the American slave trade.” Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, author of They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South

“Montalvo's excavation of city court records offers an important contribution to the understanding of slavery in the Crescent City. By examining warranty disputes and freedom suits, Enslaved Archives explores the control of information and the creation of an antebellum legal archive, offering a salient understanding of slavery and power in New Orleans.” Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Rutgers University