Slavery and International Law

Abstract

The history of slavery and international law remains largely unwritten. Aside from Henry Richardson III's magisterial monograph, The Origins of African-American Interests in International Law, and a handful of shorter pieces (many of them recent), few accounts of “slavery [as] a global legal institution” have emerged from within the discipline, in stark and telling contrast to international law's ongoing reckoning with colonialism. What have been produced in increasing abundance—both inside and outside the discipline—are histories of anti-slavery and international law, stories of “valiant battles waged by enlightened and humane Europeans and Americans—usually white men—to liberate the slaves.” The silencing of slavery in accounts of international law's past, and its afterlives in the present, is overdetermined. It has something to do with the prevailing history-making practices of international lawyers and historians; their choices of events, subjects, and structures, which, as Toni Morrison insisted and Richardson illustrated, remain choices. As Michel-Rolph Trouillot has shown, it has a lot to do with the kind of stories that “the West” and its international lawyers, want (and need) to tell (and hear) about themselves. Like slavery itself, these silences have everything to do with race, and the whiteness of the international legal academy. This essay will consider what a history of slavery and international law might look like (or at least what it must take account of) and what the ongoing “impossibility of its telling” reveals about race, racism, and international law.