Drawing on thirty freedom suits from nineteenth-century eastern Cuba, this article explores how some slaves redefined slaveholders' oral promises of manumissions by grace from philanthropic acts into contracts providing a deferred wage payout. Manumissions by grace tended to reward affective labor (loyalty, affection) and to be granted to domestic slaves. Across Cuba, as in other slave societies of Spanish America, through self-purchase, slaves made sustained efforts to monetize the labor that they did by virtue of their ascribed status. The monetization of affective work stands out amongst such efforts. Freedom litigants involved in conflicts over manumissions by grace emphasized the market logics in domestic slavery, revealing that slavery was a fundamentally economic institution even in such instances where it appeared to be intertwined with kinship and domesticity. Through this move, they challenged the assumption that slaves toiled loyally for masters out of a natural commitment to an unchanging master-slave hierarchy. By the 1880s, through court litigation and extra-judicial violence, slave litigants and insurgents would turn oral promises of manumission by grace into a blueprint for general emancipation. Through their legal actions, enslaved people, especially women, revealed the significance and transactional nature of care work, a notion familiar to us today.

At the turn of the 19th century, across most regions of Latin America, free people of color outnumbered the enslaved. Even in the Western Hemisphere's last societies to abolish slavery, Cuba and Brazil, the only exceptions to this pattern, the size of the free population of color in some regions increased throughout the 1800s. This demographic sector emerged and expanded primarily through manumission. This article examines recent scholarly attention to freedom litigation which has shown manumission's deep entanglements in custom, unwritten negotiations between enslavers and enslaved. Customary arrangements for manumission took a variety of local forms that courts often recognized even when they misaligned with written law. Custom's privileged status within the Iberian‐Atlantic legal regime and a fragmented local elite that could not control it placed some power in the hands of enslaved people in some areas of Latin America. Moreover, through its orality and embedding in local social relations, custom also offered a low entry point into the justice system for subaltern sectors. In Latin America, the Age of Emancipation was not just a time of conflict over liberalism's potential to free enslaved people. It was also an age of conflict over custom's liberatory capacity, and as such, an age of popular legalism.

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This essay reviews the following works:Beyond Babel: Translations of Blackness in Colonial Peru and New Granada. By Larissa Brewer-García. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. xvi + 304. $99.99 hardcover. ISBN: 9781108493000.Arqueología del mestizaje: Colonialismo y racialización. By Laura Catelli. Temuco: Ediciones Universidad de la Frontera, CLACSO, 2020. Pp. 296. ISBN: 9789562363853.Key to the New World: A History of Early Colonial Cuba. By Luis Martínez-Fernández. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2018. Pp. 220 + 236. $24.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781683401278.The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Colonial Latin America and the Caribbean (1492–1898). Edited by Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel and Santa Arias. London: Routledge, 2021. Pp. 460. $250.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9781138092952.On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. By Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. Pp xii + 304. $27.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780822371090.Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico. By Daniel Nemser. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017. Pp. viii + 232. $29.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781477312605.The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade, and Slavery in the Atlantic World. By Elena A. Schneider. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Pp. 360. $39.95 hardcover. ISBN: 9781469645353.Blood and Boundaries: The Limits of Religious and Racial Exclusion in Early Modern Latin America. By Stuart B. Schwartz. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2020. Pp. xviii + 256. $35.00 paperback. ISBN: 9781684580200.

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