The Neapolitan Enlightenment and the Conceptual Challenges of Antislavery Legislation in Colombia

This article studies the connected history of the Neapolitan Enlightenment, Spanish American colonial culture, and republican antislavery. Rather than adopting novel abolitionist paradigms wholesale, Colombia's antislavery legislators resorted to old ideas and convictions. Antislavery legal formulations did not diverge from Spanish culture, adapting long-existing Mediterranean notions instead. Legislators turned to the figure of the Christian captive as the spiritual equivalent of the African slave, making legible, and possible, republican manumission as an act of pious redemption. Under pressure from slave claimants, Colombian antislavery legislators passed a gradual manumission law in 1814, selectively applying Gaetano Filangieri's celebrated Science of legislation.