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

Abstract

In this fascinating book, Lee B. Wilson argues (against popular and scholarly perception alike) for the existence of an English common law of slavery. Or, perhaps more accurately, that the English common law proved malleable enough to incorporate slavery. The common assumption that slave law had to be imported from foreign jurisdictions, Wilson argues, is flatly wrong. To prove her case, Wilson analyzes the South Carolinian legal system from the colonial era to the early republic. Instead of focusing on the proscriptive slave codes borrowed from Barbados and elsewhere, she examines property law, commercial transactions, vice-admiralty courts, equity jurisdiction, and the law of police. She consistently finds that English law provided a more-than-adequate framework for the incorporation of slavery. Property law was adapted in the colonial context quite readily. The Royal African Company treated enslaved people as goods and merchandise, and early laws in New York and South Carolina followed suit. There was some legal wrangling over whether to treat enslaved people as real or moveable property in the eighteenth century. In South Carolina, lack of legislative guidance led plantation owners and merchants to adopt the chattel principle by custom.