ABSTRACT
Every slave society has had ex-slaves. In societies that enslaved many different ethnic groups, former slaves and their descendants could not be easily identified. In ancient Rome, for example, the descendants of freedmen were eligible to become citizens. But from the 1400s, when Europeans began to enslave large numbers of Africans in the Iberian Peninsula and then in the New World, ex-slaves and their descendants were often visually identifiable. US slave society tended to describe all such people as “free blacks”, although most Caribbean and Latin American cultures developed more specific labels to designate mixtures of European, African and native American ancestry. With the rise of a self-consciously “scientific” racial ideology in the eighteenth century, racial ideologues claimed they could precisely determine a person’s degree of African descent from his or her physical appearance. In practice, however, whether an observer described a free person as “black”, “mulatto”, “quadroon” or “white” depended heavily on clues such as gender, language or social class. In other words, racial labels, including the phrase “free person of colour”, were social constructions, based on the observer’s perceptions and stereotypes. For this reason, their use varied widely from one society to another. 1
