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El texto se adentra en las formas de manumisión de esclavos que residieron en la ciudad de La Plata, Charcas colonial. Propone su análisis como procesos complejos, develando mecanismos coercitivos desplegados por los amos para perpetuar el control sobre los esclavizados, así como la hábil acción de estos en su lucha por la consecución de la libertad legal. Estudia los efectos de la violencia de la palabra no cumplida, no escrita y no respetada, que arriesgó con sumergir a los coartados, libertos, manumisos en un limbo de servidumbre no-libre por tiempo indefinido. Así también, de la gratitud como valor social de corte paternalista que legitimó relaciones asimétricas de dependencia y pudo condicionar a las personas a vivir en servidumbre.

Neil Smith's writings about capitalism and what we call "nature" were insightful and influential. This paper asks what Smith would make of the "radical turn" today occurring in the world of international geoscience. If we "think with" Smith, how should we view Naomi Klein's recent statement that geoscientists can act as fifth columnists calling the capitalist way of life into question? In the first half of the essay I address these questions. I summarise and apply the insights of Smith's writings to recent developments in international geoscience. Smith wrote about science in most of his published statements about capitalist ecology and I show that he would ultimately have regarded Klein as hopeful, even naïve. I then go on, in the second half of the essay, to "think against" Smith. I suggest his views on science bespeak a wider, unhelpful separation between Left scholarship in the social sciences and humanities and the STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, and medicine). Recalling earlier attempts to radicalise science politically, and highlighting the radical potentials of geoscience today, I make the case for forms of interdisciplinarity that might render geoscience more political. Though this case opens space for perspectives beyond the Marxism Smith did so much to develop, he would-I hope-see it as a legitimate part of the Left's long war against capitalism's rule over society and environment.

This chapter examines unfree labour in three industries in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. It focuses on the forms and consequences of protest which arose amongst workers in these industries in response to the conditions under which they were employed. The Assamese tea industry, Vietnamese rubber plantations and Northern Australian cattle ranching used differing means of production, technology and investment but all relied on colonial governments to enable them to recruit and retain a 'contracted' labour force. The forms of the labour relationship varied but led to protests which often took on a wider meaning in struggles for liberation.