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Slave No More: Self-Liberation before Abolitionism in the Americas by Aline Helg (review)

In this ambitious monograph Aline Helg, professor of history at the University of Geneva, offers a comprehensive, nearly exhaustive, overview of slave manumission in the Americas before 1838. Spanning the full breadth of the Americas, Helg looks at the various strategies of emancipation that enslaved people used to escape bondage from the sixteenth through the early nineteenth centuries. An impressive and commanding overview of the historiography of comparative slavery and freedom over the past few decades, Slaves No More encompasses literature in English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese to render a portrait of emancipation before abolition movements took off in large scale. Throughout, Helg foregrounds the strategies enslaved people used to find freedom, often with very little help from abolitionists, at a time when slavery was expanding. Writing a book of this scale and scope is an impressive accomplishment that showcases the importance of writing histories that are unbound by imperial geographies or national chronologies. Over ten chapters Helg traces the four major pathways to emancipation that dominated strategies of resistance over these centuries: flight and maroonage, emancipation by legal process, military service, and revolt and insurrection. Each chapter offers a topical overview of these strategies that touches on nearly every corner of the Americas to draw out broad continuities across imperial boundaries. Her study of maroonage breathes new life into the older notion that at the margins of plantation societies, formerly enslaved people could find spaces of freedom. By tracing the dogged, if not always successful, attempts to run for freedom, Helg shows how “an America of vast frontier regions and hinterlands inhabited by the descendants of fugitive slaves” helped to give birth to societies without chattel bondage (274). She also reveals how fugitive slaves commonly ran across international lines, or sailed to islands claimed by foreign empires. While the history of international flight to places like Puerto Rico is well known, owing to the sanctuary policy the Spanish Empire adopted, the overall scale and pervasive nature of international maroonage is a revelation to this reader, and it comes into focus given Helg’s approach. These kinds of insights extend to the other