[Editor’s Note: Review originally published in Traces: The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History 12, no. 1 (2024): 242.]

By N. H. Gill

In 1629, Catalina Angola and Domingo Angola, two African-born captives enslaved near what is today the northern Colombian city of Cartagena, learned that Catalina’s enslaver was moving her to the city. Fearing their separation, the couple petitioned their parish priest for marriage, hoping the Catholic Church’s respect for the sacrament of matrimony would help them resist the move. Catlina’s enslaver, however, quickly uncovered the stratagem and did everything he could to prevent their union. While unable to intervene legally, he beat Catalina violently and shipped her downriver to separate the two. By the end of the next year, however, it was the enslaver who found himself excommunicated, publicly shamed, and forced to pay hefty fees and fines for his actions. In a society generally viewed as hostile to enslaved Africans, why did Catalina and Domingo win, and what does this tell us about slavery as an institution in the early colonial period?

Ricardo Raúl Salazar Rey sets out to answer these questions in Mastering the Law: Slavery and Freedom in the Legal Ecology of the Spanish Empire, showing how enslaved Africans in the seventeenth century used royal and religious courts to resist their captivity. Based on legal and ecclesiastical records from archival collections in Spain, Colombia, and Mexico, Salazar argues that colonial courts in places like Cartagena served as real, albeit inequitable, checks on enslavers’ power over captives, and made enslaved people “stakeholders in the establishment and consolidation of the Spanish empire” (p. 46).

The book begins by examining how enslaved Africans and their descendants exploited their status as faithful Christians and loyal subjects to protest the terms of their captivity. Building on the case of Catalina and Domingo Angola, Salazar argues that their appeals to Spanish institutions not only worked, but they also strengthened the legitimacy of European rule by integrating captives into the institutions of colonial society. His first chapter also shows how freed people of color used the language of the colonial caste system to assert and maintain their freedom in the face of increasing efforts by Spanish enslavers to racialize their captivity, foreshadowing the more rigid system of chattel slavery that would emerge in the nineteenth century, but also marking a difference.

In Chapter two, Salazar probes the long history of the Spanish reconquest of Iberia to show how centuries of forced cohabitation between Christians, Muslims, and Jews created a legal tradition in which the law had to be “leavened by the understanding that pragmatic toleration and effective governance were essential to sustaining the gains of conquest” (p. 48). In Cartagena, Salazar wrote, this was done through the installation of a branch of the Holy Office of the Inquisition in 1610. While more often remembered for persecuting religious heretics, Salazar contrasts two witch trials in Cartagena, one in 1565 and the other in 1641, to show how the Church developed standardized procedures for adjudicating religious crimes like witchcraft that gave it “popular legitimacy” and contributed to the overall stability of the Spanish state (p. 65). In the first case, before the arrival of the Inquisition, fear of witches led authorities to torture and execute multiple captives. In contrast, the second case involving an enslaved woman who was similarly accused of witchcraft in 1641 was quickly dismissed by Inquisition officials as hysteria. The difference between the two, Salazar writes, was the intervention of the court and their expertise in matters of heresy, which allowed them to protect the accused woman and keep the violence from spreading. By taking the rights of enslaved people as Christians and Crown subjects seriously, Salazar argues, the Inquisition served as an effective tool to “curtail the power of regional elites” (p. 71).

In chapter three, Salazar narrows his focus from the codification of Spanish slave codes to their practical implementation in Cartagena. An important way this happened was through coartación, a system of self-paid manumission, which Salazar argues became an important incentive for enslaved people to integrate peacefully into Spanish colonial society. Yet, while recognized under Spanish law, the terms of coartación were not always respected by enslavers, often leading enslaved people to engage with the courts to demand their rights. Most often, this came in the form of witness statements. But because the courts took captives’ testimonies seriously, sometimes weighing it more strongly than Spanish elites’, Salazar argues that these cases served as a real check on slaveowners’ abuse and ensured that avenues for freedom, such as coartación, remained open despite its unpopularity with the slaveholding elite.

The final chapter explores how royal justice was imposed in Cartagena, often in more measured doses than the legal code would suggest. For otherwise exemplary subjects, for example, castrations were commuted to whippings, sentences annulled, and hard labor reduced to lashes as officials sought to maintain social order. This relative moderation reinforced the legitimacy of the law and gave enslaved people limited opportunities to influence the terms of their captivity, the author claims, a legacy that contrasts with the better-known period of “racialized slavery” that emerged in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (p. 125).

Salazar’s overall argument, expressed in the title, is that mastering the law and participating in royal and religious courts were critical ways in which enslaved people pushed back against the boundaries of their captivity. The Crown, in turn, used the provision of secular and ecclesiastic justice as a tool to maintain political and social stability. Grounded in extensive archival research and a detailed review of ancient and medieval Iberian law, the book convincingly argues that by taking enslaved peoples’ rights as Christians and royal subjects seriously, both captives and the courts in places like colonial Cartagena helped define the limits of slavery as an institution in the long seventeenth century.