With the end of the Paraguayan War, planters again panicked over impending labor scarcity. In response, prominent businessmen at the Court began to organize a new company to jumpstart a “coolie trade” to Brazil. Without a diplomatic entry-point into China, however, their efforts remained scattershot until they pressured the Brazilian government to pursue a commercial treaty with the Qing Empire. Meanwhile, Brazil’s top tycoon, the barão de Mauá, attempted to set up a model sugar central with Indian coolies from Mauritius in an effort to overcome a colossal bankruptcy. As British colonial subjects, these workers received special attention when they complained of poor treatment, which demonstrated the power of diplomatic representation to curtail planters’ disregard for contractual conditions and for workers in general. Both “experiments” were put to the test in the court of public opinion, where Sinophobia masked competing business interests. Whereas the Agricultural Congress of 1878 examined the potential of coolie labor to effect a labor “transition” with lukewarm enthusiasm at best, newspapers engaged in a battle of words with strong racist and eugenic undertones that, at base, had more to do with competition for readership and government contracts than the issue of Chinese colonization itself.

Chapter 4 examines the legal, economic, and political life of the Free Womb law in the Colombian Pacific and the making of new racialized labor structures. For the first time, enslaved women were granted limited legal rights of maternity and motherhood over their children—at least those born after the promulgation of the 1821 law, which was at times malleably interpreted by lowland masters to defend their claims over Free Womb children. By carefully examining notes of sale, mining inventories, dowries, and wills, this chapter charts the formation in the northern Pacific lowlands of a parallel market for Free Womb children, which instantiated a new and at-times confusing regime of property rights. Reversals of the 1821 law are the subject of the chapter’s last section, which looks at extension of Free Womb bondage, partly inspired by the British Caribbean apprenticeship model established under the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, in the aftermath of Colombia’s first civil war (1839–1842).

Chapter 3 departs from the Colombian Pacific and ventures to the eastern Andean highland town of Cúcuta, where white slaveholding delegates from across Gran Colombia (and one from Mexico) established the policy of gradual emancipation. After surveying historical precedents for and factors leading up to the 1821 gradual emancipation law’s adoption, including Antioquia’s gradual abolition law of 1814 and the Haitian Revolution, the chapter turns to the contentious debate over the Free Womb law and the question of slaveholders’ compensation. Delegates principally wrestled over the age at which Free Womb children’s bondage would be terminated and over the parameters of their salability, grounding arguments in Enlightenment thought and colonial racial accounting ideas of the development life cycles of enslaved people. Here I also examine the debates and conditions for the trafficking of Free Womb children, a phenomenon I refer to as the Free Womb trade that adopted specific legal parameters regarding puberty and geography. The chapter ends by exploring the combative and regionalized public spheres of abolition and antiabolition that developed across Gran Colombia in the 1820s.