Owning Bodies, Owning Lands

Abstract

Abstract This article presents a broad and comparative examination of property formation in the French and English plantation colonies of the Caribbean and the southern North American mainland. It considers the connections between claims to exclusive control over human beings and claims to portions of the earth's surface. In the two early modern empires, planters pushed consistently and successfully to remove social, legal, and ecological constraints that limited their full control over their human and terrestrial property. Moreover, they insisted on legally fusing fields and workers, assimilating slaves to the category of real estate for purposes of inheritance and legal liability for debt. By the mid-eighteenth century, the French and British colonies had developed precociously modern capitalist property forms. In the Age of Revolutions, ideologues from plantation colonies, such as Thomas Jefferson and Michel-René Hilliard d'Auberteuil, emerged as radical advocates of absolute private property rights.