We complete the day's series of posts on book prizes awarded at the recently concluded annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History with the Peter Gonville Stein Book Award, which went to Adriana Chira, Patchwork Freedoms: Law, Slavery, and Race Beyond Cuba’s Plantations (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Here is the citation:
Adriana Chira’s Patchwork Freedoms is a compelling account of the ways in which the free and semi-free black residents of eastern Cuba used law and custom to eke out their freedom over the course of the nineteenth century. Chira demonstrates how “day in and day out, enslaved people chipped away at enslavers’ authority locally, by negotiating the terms of their manumission and land access. They pulled one another out of plantation slavery gradually, yet consistently.” The committee was especially impressed by how Patchwork Freedoms integrates legal and social history by seamlessly weaving together legal and nonlegal sources to tell a story that is complex, nuanced, and locally grounded.
Adriana Chira
--Dan Ernst
