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, 1660–1783 by Lee B. Wilson Justin Roberts 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. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. 288 pages. Cloth, ebook. The preamble to the first comprehensive English slave code—passed in Barbados in 1661—justified the creation of this set of laws by arguing that in all of the "Lawes of England" there was "noe tract to guide us where to walke, nor any rule sett us, how to governe such Slaves."1 This would suggest, as some colonial American historians have surmised, that slavery constituted a radical departure from English legal traditions. Lee B. Wilson's Bonds of Empire offers a counterpoint. By looking at a more comprehensive set of legal practices undergirding slavery in the British Atlantic, Wilson is able to stress the continuity of English legal systems in the development of colonial slave law. She argues that colonial slave law was not "a legal aberration" (3) or "beyond the pale of English imperial legal history" (5); rather, it "was a natural extension" of the English "legal system" (10). Bonds of Empire is nominally about slave law in South Carolina, but it is really much broader and more ambitious because Wilson extends her analysis to the Caribbean colonies—particularly Jamaica—and to the maritime world. Her book follows a loose chronological trajectory from the late seventeenth century through the end of the eighteenth century. The chapters trace that arc while remaining thematically organized around the concepts embedded in private law sources such as the conditional bonds used to transfer enslaved property, the records of the Vice-Admiralty Courts, and the records of the Board of Police, which governed Charleston during the American Revolution. Wilson relies on her legal training to shed light on how these records, which most scholars have overlooked, illuminate practices related to slavery. By focusing on such sources, Wilson offers a deeper appreciation of the ways in which English law buttressed the colonists' "commercial need to treat slaves as things" (261). Bonds of Empire clearly demonstrates that the prescriptive slave codes that have drawn so much attention from slavery historians were only a narrow subset of a far more expansive body of slave law. "Bloody and punitive," the slave codes addressed the slaves as potential criminal actors in need of social control, and they focused on "stripping enslaved people of the rights" (10) of freeborn English people. The "viscerally shocking" nature of these [End Page 491] slave codes has led some historians to emphasize that their creation signals "colonial legal deviance" (39). Wilson, by contrast, turns most of her attention to "the 'private' law of slavery—embodied in quotidian transactions and routine litigation" (39). These are sources that generally depict slaves as little more than commodities. Wilson maintains that by conceptualizing slaves as chattel and making them analogous "to ships, cows, or horses" (13), enslavers were able to draw directly from traditional English legal practices and "slot slaves into extant legal procedures and forms" (17), especially instruments of English property transfer such as "preprinted bills of sale, mortgages, trusts, and conditional bonds" (13). By relying on conventional English legal practices, she argues, colonial enslavers normalized the institution of slavery, insulating it from "moral critiques" (5). This continuity in "improvisational" (10) English legal practices and traditions made colonial British slavery resilient in the face of moral criticism and adaptable to change. Ultimately, Wilson argues that the status of the enslaved as property encouraged the "replication" of long-standing English legal practices in private law, which simultaneously bolstered the institution of slavery and "contributed directly to the dehumanization of enslaved people" (21). By privileging legal sources more concerned with enslaved people as alienable property than as potential criminal actors in need of social control, Wilson reinforces the idea that this chattel principle—the idea that a person could be bought and sold—was at the essence of Anglo-American slavery. She argues that "historians have long understood that transforming people...