Edgardo Pérez Morales, Unraveling Abolition: Legal Culture and Slave Emancipation in Colombia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Pp. 242. $34.99 paperback (ISBN 9781009514415)

provides a fascinating study considering the overlapping histories of antislavery and political revolution in late colonial New Granada and early national-era Colombia, with specific focus on the districts of Antioquia, Cartagena, and Popayn.He opens our reading toward the end of the chronological scope, in the midst of constitutional negotiations around abolition laws within a newly formed Colombia, giving attention to lawyer and politician Felix Jose de Restrepo.These debates reveal the various gradations of abolitionist positions (almost all falling short of completely abolishing slavery) and the philosophical and moral contradictions therein.Continuing through the book, the reader finds that notions of liberty, the acceptability of slavery, and slavery's relationship to revolutionary ideas that underpinned independence were consistently negotiated by slaves, slaveholders, jurists, and politicians.Rather than finding these debates in the "usual" places of the burgeoning print world or in abolitionist churches, Prez Morales discovers that the discussions resided most often in the court.Starting in the first two chapters, Prez Morales ties together the local Comunero Revolution and the wider contexts of the French and Haitian Revolutions, revealing hopes of freedom, both individual and collective, among slaves of New Granada.As elite fears of enslaved uprisings increased, the enslaved "legal imagination" treated strategic legal appeal as more fruitful for manumission than armed action.There is significant attention given to the stereotypes that evoked the most fear from Colombian administrators and slave owners alike.Those with any ties to France, and the radical ideas it was producing, were to be closely watched.Slaves who had been labeled prone to uprising and intent on violent resistance were also feared.But the legal record, including litigation inspecting possible rebellion, reveals slaves expected abolition to arrive by decree not by bloodshed.One example shows the people