UC Santa Barbara

In the early sixteenth century, the Spanish Kingdom of Valencia was home to a growing black population. Most of these black Valencians could trace their presence on the Iberian Peninsula to Europe’s involvement in the West African slave trade, and were either enslaved or freed West Africans or their descendants. But the documentation recording their lives and experiences poses quantitative and qualitative difficulties. On the one hand, a majority of the documentation recording black and Afro-Valencians’ lives and experiences were produced by Valencia’s Bailiff General, a royal official charged with regulating Valencia’s slave trade. To this end, the Bailiff General was primarily concerned with justifying black captives’ enslavement in trials known as captive confessions, in which he also levied taxes on captives’ enslavers. On the other hand, other sources that record a wider spectrum of black Valencians’ lives—such as civil and criminal court records, notarial contracts, and census records—are numerically sparse and often provide only fragmentary glimpses into black Valencians’ lives. In this dissertation, I work with these sources and their limitations to examine two distinct but related aspects of the early modern history of Valencia’s black diaspora. In the first half of the dissertation, I examine records produced by the Bailiff General to show that the official was under multiple logistical strains in the early sixteenth-century. I argue that these strains encouraged to the Bailiff General to streamline presentations of West African captives through strategies that amounted to processes of race-making. Namely, I show that officials made strategic claims about West Africans’ linguistic abilities and places of origin to facilitate their work of interrogating captives and justifying their captivity. In the second half of the dissertation, I shift focus away from the Bailiff General and instead foreground the experiences of free and enslaved black and Afro-Valencians. Namely, I examine how Afro-Iberians talked about and presented themselves in relation their West African origins, the various sites of black life throughout Iberia, and the contours of black quotidian life in the city of Valencia. In pursuing these topics, I argue that black Valencians’ testimonies—even when fragmented or opaque—shed light on heretofore unacknowledged realities and experiences. Taking stock of and foregrounding these realities undermines institutional narratives about early modern European black life and enriches and humanizes early modern European black history.