Acknowledgments
More often than not, books are born out of a sense of community and intellectual generosity. This work is not an exception to this rule, and a brief word of appreciation to the people who supported me during its conception is more than warranted. First of all, I would like to thank Damian Pargas. As a mentor, Damian has always been very generous with advice, and extremely enthusiastic and knowledgeable in his backing. Marlou Schrover kindly read the entire draft manuscript with care and has steadily supported this project; I warmly thank her for that. I was also fortunate to benefit from the unwavering energy and expertise of Catia Antunes.
The intellectual debt I owe to James D. Nichols, Sean M. Kelley, and Alice L. Baumgartner will be evident to specialists in the field. They have my gratitude for their guidance at different stages of this endeavor. I am also thankful to Bertrand van Ruymbeke, Jared Hardesty, David Doddington, Pepijn Brandon, Karwan Fatah-Black, Matthias von Rossum, Deborah Toner, Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie, Bradley Folsom, Elodie Peyrol-Kleiber, Lawrence Aje, Claudine Raynaud, Anne-Claire Faucquez, and Adam Fairclough for their constructive criticism on different parts of this project. Ronald A. Johnson and Ousmane K. Power-Greene have been very pleasant colleagues to work with. I would like to thank the editors and anonymous peer reviewers who commented on early drafts for their valuable feedback. The participants of the N.W. Posthumus training conferences helped me a lot during the take-off stage of this book. My gratitude likewise goes to colleagues I met at the different conferences in which I presented my research over the last seven years. This book would not be the same without the guidance of Debbie de Wit and Jennifer Obdam from Brill, Alex Jordan’s excellent proofreading work, as well as Gaëlle Sutton’s cartographic skills. The kind support of my new colleagues in Essen since 2021, Jan C. Jansen, Megan Maruschke, Jannik Keindorf, Sabine Hanke, Anja Neuhaus, Lena Filzen, Yves Schmitz and Sophie Rose has helped me cross the finish line.
I would like to express my most sincere appreciation to the staff of all the archives and libraries which I visited since 2015. Special thanks must go to the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, the Benson Library at Austin, Texas as well as the staff of the Archivo General del Estado de Coahuila. I am thankful for the very responsive personnel of the Archivo Histórico de la Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores and for the friendly staff of the Archivo General de la Nación. My gratitude to Dean Smith, from the Bancroft Library at Berkeley, and Arnoldo Bermea, from the Archivo Municipal de Monclova for their consideration. Lastly, I was delighted to be able to spend the fall of 2019 at the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies, a place full of warmth and conviviality in the middle of Zeeland.
I have been fortunate enough to count on the support of wonderful people in The Netherlands and elsewhere, who made the road to completing this book far more enjoyable than if they had not stood by my side. In Leiden, thank you to Oran, Viola, Chris, Edgar, Henri, Thom, Paul, Anne, Teuntje, Larissa, Bram, Elizabeth, Sander, Marion, and Albertine. To Alix, Susannah, Jacob and Carien as well, many thanks for all the precious moments spent together chatting, bouldering and travelling. Rebecca and Álvaro made me feel very welcome in Mexico City. During a brief non-academic parenthesis in Brussels, I was lucky to meet Elisa, David, Raquel and Jorge, and spend quality time with Marjolein and Wessel. In France, Adrien, Lucille, Thalie, Stefania, Ahmad, Elias, Mira, François and Paul have always made me feel like I had never actually left home. The unfailing support of my family, from a distance, has meant a lot to me, more than they can imagine. My final words are for Girija: I will never thank you enough for your care and companionship, and for supporting me in moments of doubt.
Essen, September 2022
Parts of this book were previously published in adapted form in: “Looking for Freedom in the Borderlands: U.S. Black Refugees from Slavery in Early Independent Mexico”, in Ronald A. Johnson and Ousmane Power-Greene (eds.), In Search of Liberty: African-American Internationalism in the Nineteenth- Century Atlantic World (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2021), 57–86. “Freedom at the fringes? Slave Flight and Empire-Building in the Early Modern Spanish Borderlands of Essequibo-Venezuela and Louisiana-Texas” (with Bram Hoonhout), Slavery & Abolition 40:1 (2019), 61–86. “Abolitionists, Smugglers and Scapegoats: Assistance Networks for Fugitive Slaves in the Texas-Mexico Borderlands (1836–1861)”, Mémoire(s), Identité(s), Marginalité(s) dans le Monde Occidental Contemporain 19 (2018). URL: https://journals.openedition.org/mimmoc/2731.