“In consequence of considering herself to be free” : freedom and (im)mobility in the trans-imperial Caribbean space of the 19th century

Based on both archival material from the European colonial archives in Aix-en-Provence, Madrid, and London and documents held at the Archivo Nacional de la República de Cuba, this paper analyses court cases related to petitions submitted by enslaved people to foreign diplomacy in Cuba, exploring the entanglement between mobility in trans-imperial Caribbean space and the use of law by enslaved people in the Age of Abolition. Drawing mainly on legal sources, it emphasizes how slavery and freedom remain ambiguous and contested concepts in the shifting boundaries between free and unfree labor. (Im)mobility – understood both as the transition from one legal status to another and as migration – represented a practice to escape coercion and a tool of control, through which new forms of coercion emerged and were regulated.