{"id":2542,"date":"2025-02-16T09:03:10","date_gmt":"2025-02-16T09:03:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/firstblacks.org\/?p=2542"},"modified":"2025-02-16T09:04:09","modified_gmt":"2025-02-16T09:04:09","slug":"manumission-as-a-tool-of-slavery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/firstblacks.org\/en\/summaries\/manumission-as-a-tool-of-slavery","title":{"rendered":"Manumission as a tool of slavery"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Manumission as a tool of slavery<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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\"\"In modern times in the Western world, “manumission” was the word used to refer to the occasional practice by slave masters or owners granting full freedom to their slaves,\u00a0after which these former slaves and their descendants would live enjoying social and legal liberty.\u00a0Manumisi\u00f3n<\/em>, as it was called in Spanish culture, was thus one of the main\u00a0sources of free Blacks in Western European societies, including the\u00a0Iberian society.<\/p>

During the 1500s,\u00a0and throughout the next several\u00a0centuries of European colonization and enslavement in the Americas, manumission was practiced, both in the Iberian metropolis and\u00a0in the colonies.\u00a0Freedom was granted mostly by relatively medium or small-scale owners of enslaved Blacks,\u00a0who were their personal or\u00a0domestic servants, frequently as a reward for many years of obedient servitude, and often\u00a0when the owners felt close to the end of their own lives.\u00a0(See Manuscript\u00a0No. 047)<\/a>\u00a0A number of historians have considered manumission to be\u00a0an important part of\u00a0the stability and century-long duration of Black enslavement as a social system in the colonial Americas.\u00a0The hope of\u00a0obtaining manumission from their masters is considered to have been a factor in inducing\u00a0a part of the enslaved population to conform to or accept enslaved life\u00a0and not engage in the most open forms of resistance, which would\u00a0preclude them as candidates\u00a0for manumission in the eyes of their owners.<\/p>

La Espa\u00f1ola, the first historical scenario of Black slavery in the Americas, was also the first one on the continent where manumission came into play.\u00a0The concept\u00a0was present in the European\/Iberian colonization process as part of its social-domination tool box as soon as\u00a0the process\u00a0began to incorporate the importing of enslaved Blacks\u00a0as an indispensable part of the settlement process\u00a0in La Espa\u00f1ola\u00a0and other territories of the \u201cNew World.\u201d\u00a0In\u00a01505 Spanish King\u00a0Ferdinand\u00a0ordered the Crown\u2019s colonial governor in Santo Domingo, Nicol\u00e1s de Ovando, to spread the promise of manumission among the very early, and still relatively small, groups of enslaved Blacks in exchange for an undetermined amount of years of forced labor.\u00a0(See Manuscript No. 009)<\/a>\u00a0Most of these early slaves\u00a0were assigned to work in the mining of gold and the construction of walls in La Espa\u00f1ola and the offer of manumission was used in an attempt to elicit\u00a0as much work from them as possible.\u00a0<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Manumission as a tool of slavery In modern times in the Western world, “manumission” was the word used to refer to the occasional practice by slave masters or owners granting full freedom to their slaves,\u00a0after which these former slaves and their descendants would live enjoying social and legal liberty.\u00a0Manumisi\u00f3n, as it was called in Spanish […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2542","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-summaries"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nManumission as a tool of slavery - First Blacks in The Americas<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/firstblacks.org\/en\/summaries\/manumission-as-a-tool-of-slavery\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Manumission as a tool of slavery - 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