(Self-)purchase, obligation and the financial lives of enslaved and manumitted people in nineteenth-century Cape Town

This paper uses manumission as a lens through which to explore the financial lives of enslaved people in nineteenth-century Cape Town. Between 1825 and 1834, more than one thousand two hundred people were manumitted in the city, about a third of whom achieved that through (self-)purchase. Records of paid manumission marked the end point of what, in some cases at least, was a protracted dispute over the costs of freedom. Pairing quantitative analysis of the paid manumissions with close reading of disputed manumission cases, this paper centres enslaved people as financial actors. In so doing this paper contributes a new perspective to the growing literature on the financial side of slavery and emancipation.