Michelle A. McKinley. Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy, and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima, 1600–1700.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy, and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima, 1600–1700, by Michelle McKinley, is a must-read book. Focusing on the seventeenth-century urban environment of Lima, one of two viceregal capitals of the Spanish Empire with a large enslaved and free African and African-descent population, McKinley meticulously, incisively, and insightfully considers the historical context within which the legal mobilization of slaves occurred. Women are at the center of her deeply researched sociolegal portrayal of the gendered and intimate nature of experiences of enslavement: what it meant to be treated as both person and property, how distinct forms of labor conditioned experiences of bondage, and how women pursued legal options in secular and ecclesiastical courts to protect themselves from ill-intentioned masters and to save children and future generations from continued bondage. Experiences of freedom, as the book’s title suggests, were fractional: encompassing neither absolute nor complete autonomy from masters, yet enabling relationships with kith and kin to develop and be sustained. Questioning historian Frank Tannenbaum’s thesis that moving from a slave to a citizen in colonial Spanish America was a frequent and positive experience, McKinley shows that manumission in Lima was often incomplete and contingent on the continual and long-term extraction of labor from indebted parties. Through an analysis of freedom suits, parish records, wills, census data, and slave-trade records, the author enters into dialogue with medieval European, colonial Latin American, and U.S. studies on slavery, agency, and the law. She argues convincingly that slaves who questioned their conditional freedom could become enmeshed in protracted legal battles that only deepened relations of paternalistic dependency. For many of those freed in early infancy, re-enslavement was a lived reality.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".