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

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Sep 9, 2025

Maria R. Montalvo, an assistant professor of history at Emory University, dives into her groundbreaking book, 'Enslaved Archives.' She examines the intricate relationship between legal records and the historical narratives of enslaved individuals in antebellum America. Montalvo discusses how enslavers manipulated documentation to control information and shape perceptions. Her analysis of over 18,000 court records reveals the ethical challenges of historical representation and highlights the importance of archival research in uncovering the true stories of those affected by slavery.

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ANECDOTE

How The Project Began

Maria R. Montalvo discovered her project after an advisor sent a screenshot of a redhibition lawsuit about an enslaved person deemed insane.
That single example pulled her from medical history into studying New Orleans court records and warranty disputes.

INSIGHT

Question Who Produced The Record

Courtroom narratives often reflect enslavers' interests, not enslaved people's voices, and can mislead historians if uncritically used.
Asking how records were produced reveals whose stories survive and why the archive privileges certain voices.

ADVICE

Make Your Own Archive Index

When archives lack subject indexes, prepare to inspect every file yourself and build your own database if necessary.
Persisting through manual indexing revealed patterns and enabled whole new research questions about New Orleans slavery.

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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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