| Title: | Roots in Stone and Slavery Permanence, Mobility, and Empire in Seventeenth-Century Cartagena de Indias / by Ana María Silva Campo |
| Autor: | University of Michigan
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| Autores: | Silva Campo, Ana
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| Palabras clave: | Cartagena de Indias (Colombia) Historia S.XVII
Vascos en Colombia S. XVII
Araoz de Uriarte, Juan de Biografía
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| Issue Date to EMD: | 26-Mar-2021 |
| Description: | Tesis de University of Michigan.
This dissertation examines the strategies that institutions and individuals employed in order to establish themselves in the slave-trading port city of Cartagena de Indias. In doing so, it uncovers social, religious, economic, geographic, and increasingly racialized transformations that made Cartagena a sustainable and stable component of the Spanish empire during the seventeenth century. In 1610, when church officials arrived in Cartagena with a mandate to establish a new tribunal of the Spanish Inquisition, a fragile political and economic balance already prevailed. The inquisitors needed to carve out space to integrate the new tribunal into the existing system without upsetting local power groups. For this, the inquisitors employed a tactic that they described as “building authority day by day.” To avoid direct confrontation with existing power-holders the inquisitors applied confiscation of property gradually and selectively against people convicted of religious deviance. The first target for confiscation was a prosperous but socially vulnerable community of women of African descent whom inquisitors had declared guilty of “witchcraft.” By offering for sale confiscated real estate, which was located in a zone that was increasingly attractive to prosperous buyers, the Inquisition became integrated into the economic life of Cartagena and laid the foundations for the tribunal’s survival. Selective confiscations allowed inquisitors to secure the ground for later prosecuting members of the elite, especially Portuguese traders in African captives, suspected of practicing Judaism. The local power that the Inquisition had gradually attained allowed inquisitors to achieve some convictions and confiscations. However, the economic dynamics of the city--in which Portuguese traders had exclusive rights to trade in African captives through the asiento contracts--imposed limits to the Inquisition’s tactic. The inquisitors eventually acquitted most of the Portuguese traders and allowed many of them to remain in Cartagena. When the Portuguese asientos ended, Spanish migrants who had opened up space for themselves in Cartagena took control of the economic nodes that the Portuguese had previously dominated. Some Inquisition officials themselves profited from agricultural and commercial activities indispensable to the trade in African captives. Constrained by the physical limitations of a port city surrounded by water, members of the new commercial elite expanded their economic activities into the neighboring island of Getsemaní. Getsemaní was home to free and enslaved people of African descent who lived and worked in artisanal workshops, including noxious industries. Many residents of Cartagena described Getsemaní as an arrabal, or slum. Spanish newcomers seeking to become permanent residents of Getsemaní employed legal strategies to have those industries removed. For local officials, however, the economic benefits of the arrabal prevailed over arguments about the impropriety of unsavory enterprises. The economic survival of Cartagena required that such industries remain at the edges of the city’s physical boundaries. Against the colonial authorities’ interests, this liminal location allowed the communities of African descent that remained in Getsemaní to maintain connections with runaways from enslavement who had settled in the hinterlands. Fugitives themselves were sometimes able to maintain fragile freedoms in Getsemaní, passing unnoticed by people who took them to be “blacks from the forest” rather than “fugitive slaves.” The dynamics that made Cartagena a stable and self-sustaining city shaped the meanings of permanence for individuals of different backgrounds, including merchants who avoided conviction, notaries who drew revenue from forging documents, and fugitives from slavery who settled the forests surrounding Cartagena. |
| URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/10357/59837 |
| Origin repository: | http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/146037 |
| Rights: | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ |
| Appears in Collections: | Tesis, TFG, trabajos académicos, etc. de otros repositorios de universidades no vascas
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