Abstract

The long-term legacies of slavery in Latin America cannot be fully explained without understanding how the process of emancipation unfolded. Where slavery had been more prevalent, emancipation was an uneven process rather than a single event. I examine new data from manuscript population listings to offer the first quantitative analysis of slave emancipation in Uruguay, where by 1836 less than a third of people of African descent were free. Though traditional historiography has lauded the ‘free birth law’, only 5% of Black people in the sample had drawn any direct benefit from it. Freedom rather came through their own efforts in an institutional context which was at best indifferent to their destiny. Reflecting racial status hierarchies, people born in Africa and those of darker complexion were more likely to remain enslaved also after independence. Crucially, I find that Africans as well as their descendants were more likely to be free in the least fertile smallholder areas, suggesting an embedding of de jure racial inequality onto de facto resource allocation before the formal abolition of slavery in 1852.