1 - Imperial Reform, Privatization, and Enslavement

Summary

Focusing on the relation and conflict between imperial, colonial, and local levels, Chapter 1 lays out the historical context that gave rise to the collective freedom suit. It first traces the process of making law and policy according to the imperial state’s reform imperatives here directed at the privatization and revival of an extractive metal industry based on the once rich copper mines of El Cobre near Santiago de Cuba. Crucial to the production of artillery in the Crown’s arms industry, copper was at the time a strategic resource for the imperial state. But for the beneficiaries of the privatized mining estate, the most valuable resource were the former royal slaves who had long lived in quasi freedom as an unconventional pueblo in the mining jurisdiction. A growing demand for slaves in the colony led to the re-enslavement, removal, and sale of hundreds of cobreros, or natives of El Cobre, thereby upending former local customary practices. A denied offer for a collective self-purchase, or coartación, and land eventually led to a wrongful enslavement action in Madrid. The chapter shows the major impact of imperial Bourbon reforms and of global factors in this so-called hinterland region of empire.