Maria R. Montalvo, "Enslaved Archives: Slavery, Law, and the Production of the Past" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024)

Sep 9, 2025

Maria R. Montalvo, an Assistant Professor of History at Emory University and author of 'Enslaved Archives', discusses how legal records from antebellum America shaped the narratives of enslaved individuals. She reveals the challenges historians face in reconstructing these lives due to biased and fragmentary documentation. Through analysis of over 18,000 court records and five key lawsuits in Louisiana, Montalvo uncovers how enslavers manipulated legal scripts to exploit and commodify enslaved people, intertwining law, history, and personal stories.

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ANECDOTE

How The Project Began

Maria R. Montalvo discovered her project after seeing a screenshot of a Louisiana warranty lawsuit about an enslaved person sold as insane.
That image pulled her into court records and became the foundation for Enslaved Archives.

ADVICE

Build Your Own Archive Index

When archives lack subject indexes, create your own comprehensive database by reading every file.
Indexing subjects, dates, and reel numbers revealed patterns and enabled targeted research.

INSIGHT

Cataloging Reveals Hidden Priorities

Reading entire court dockets reveals what people sued over and exposes social priorities beyond famous cases.
Systematic cataloging transforms a messy archive into a landscape for large-n qualitative analysis.

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Explores the relationship between the production of enslaved property and the production of the past in the antebellum United States.

It is extraordinarily difficult for historians to reconstruct the lives of individual enslaved people. Records--where they exist--are often fragmentary, biased, or untrue. In Enslaved Archives: Slavery, Law, and the Production of the Past (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024), Maria R. Montalvo investigates the legal records, including contracts and court records, that American antebellum enslavers produced and preserved to illuminate enslavers' capitalistic motivations for shaping the histories of enslaved people. The documentary archive was not simply a by-product of the business of slavery, but also a necessary tool that enslavers used to exploit the people they enslaved.

Building on Montalvo's analysis of more than 18,000 sets of court records, Enslaved Archives is a close study of what we can and cannot learn about enslaved individuals from the written record. By examining five lawsuits in Louisiana, Montalvo deconstructs enslavers' cases--the legal arguments and rhetorical strategies they used to produce information and shape perceptions of enslaved people. Commodifying enslaved people was not simply a matter of effectively exploiting their labor. Enslavers also needed to control information about those people. Enslavers' narratives--carefully manipulated, prone to omissions, and sometimes false--often survive as the only account of an enslaved individual's life.

In working to historicize the people at the center of enslavers' manipulations, Montalvo outlines the possibilities and limits of the archive, providing a glimpse of the historical and contemporary consequences of commodification. Enslaved Archives makes a significant intervention in the history of enslaved people, legal history, and the history of slavery and capitalism by adding a qualitative dimension to the analysis of how enslavers created and maintained power.

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