Bonds of Empire: The English Origins of Slave Law in South Carolina and British Plantation America, 1660–1783 by Lee B. Wilson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Bonds of Empire: The English Origins of Slave Law in South Carolina and British Plantation America, 1660–1783by Lee B. Wilson Matthew Mason Bonds of Empire: The English Origins of Slave Law in South Carolina and British Plantation America, 1660–1783. By Lee B. Wilson. Cambridge Historical Studies in American Law and Society. ( New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. xiv, 274. $59.99, ISBN 978-1-108-49525-7.) This erudite volume adds to the scholarly understanding of American slaveholders' deep engagements with the most modern features of the Atlantic [End Page 541]world, as well as of the multiple mechanisms they wielded in pursuit of mastery over their human property. In it, Lee B. Wilson offers deeply documented insights, preeminently on legal history and the history of slavery. At the core of Wilson's argument is the contention that South Carolina's colonial-era slaveholders, far from being "beyond the pale of English imperial legal history," constructed the legal machinery that controlled and dehumanized enslaved Africans directly from English law (p. 5). To demonstrate this point she analyzes sources that include but range far beyond statute law, illustrating how white South Carolinians—much like their counterparts in early modern England—employed a wide variety of "routine 'private' practices and civil litigation" to make "slavery work on a daily basis" (p. 11). In the process, legally savvy white Carolinians found the best mechanisms within the intricacies of the British empire's legal patchwork to create a legal culture that "worked quietly and invidiously to commodify enslaved people" both within and beyond Carolina's borders (p. 11). This analysis makes this volume a real contribution to the literature, revealing that the British Atlantic was "a world in which 'law' was an action rather than an object" and in which "litigants transformed legal procedure into a site of innovation" (p. 9). Its contribution goes beyond geographically widening our lens on that world, for it shows that such innovation could be used to oppress as much as to liberate. Among the invidious consequences of these multiple methods of categorizing African slaves as chattel property, Wilson asserts, was the broad psychological acceptance among these white people of the notion that Black people were subhuman. Readers of this journal familiar with long-running historiographical debates about the degree of guilt American slaveholders felt will closely note her running claim that it was close to zero. It was more than an ideological consequence of the chattel principle; it was also a function of how mainstream their laws were within the British Atlantic. The many scholars who have posited "that slaves were a novel form of property and that adapting colonial laws to suit slave societies was a fraught process are incorrect," she proclaims (p. 38). Instead, her research "reveals how seamless this process was as a practical and theoretical matter" (p. 38). But her own discussion nods to some of the evidence those historians have used to show metropolitan resistance to the emerging slave laws of the seventeenth-century colonies. One way to thread the needle between her thesis and that of those she aims to refute is to observe how much of her evidence of the "seamless" chattelization of Africans is from the eighteenth century, by which time it appears that chattel slavery was on firmer legal ground throughout the British empire than in the seventeenth century. Wilson's is a downright Dickensian tale of the fearsome power of the pen and legal papers to blight the lives of their victims, deployed here in Charleston or in maritime courts as much as in London. But in this sphere she also seems to overstate her argument. In the book's least restrained moments, we read that "knowledge of English law was the sine qua non of mastery over slaves" (p. 2). Less dogmatically and thus more persuasively, Wilson at other times characterizes the use of these legal tools as "an essential part of the 'technology of colonization'" that perpetuated slavery and the slave trade (p. 88). Setting aside the moments of overreach, with Bonds of Empire: The English Origins of Slave [End Page 542] Law in South Carolina and British Plantation America...