Oppression Beyond Plantations: How Emancipation Led to Incarceration in Urban Buenos Aires

By Valentín Figueroa and Guadalupe Tuñón

We show that the emancipation of enslaved Black people led to their subsequent incarceration in a context of urban slavery —a context that lacked the economic incentives for incarceration present in plantation economies such as the U.S. South. To establish causality, we study a lottery of certificates of freedom in nineteenth-century Buenos Aires that randomly freed a small group of enslaved persons. Through archival research and digitization of the full count of the handwritten 1810 census, we link lottery winners and sets of eligible nonwinners to police records until 1830. We find that emancipation increased the probability of incarceration, on average, by 11.8 percentage points. Exploring mechanisms, we find no evidence that the e↵ect was driven by rural labor shortages, bur rather by the criminalization of petty offenses..

Peinxwron, NJ: Princeton University,

Liechtenstein Institute on Self-Determination.

2023. 49p.