Slavery, Race, and the Contours of Belonging in the Atlantic World

Abstract

Slavery, Race, and the Contours of Belonging in the Atlantic World Jessica M. Parr (bio) Edward B. Rugemer, Slave Law and the Politics Resistance in the Early Atlantic World. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018. 400 pp. Maps, notes, and index. $39.95. Brooke N. Newman, A Dark Inheritance: Blood, Race, and Sex in Colonial Jamaica. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. xii + 340 pp. Figures, notes, and index. $40.00. Ruma Chopra, Almost Home: Maroons between Slavery and Freedom in Jamaica, Nova Scotia, and Sierra Leone. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. 336 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00 Elena A. Schneider, The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade, and Slavery in the Atlantic World. Chapel Hill: The Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina University Press, 2018. 335 pp. Maps, figures, and index. $39.95. When direct English engagement in the transatlantic slave trade opened up in 1689, it ushered in an age where the English became the largest traffickers of Africans. The dissolution of the Royal African Company’s charter was the result of arguments made by merchants that the Company’s monopoly on English trade was a violation of their rights as Englishmen, under the Constitution of 1688.1 English sensibilities about “rights” and “liberties” stood in contestation to “slavery,” and in many cases, the lack of positive and/or negative law concerning the legality of chattel slavery meant that the shapers of empire were left to define the parameters of enslavement. Early English debates about law and slavery frequently entailed addressing potential loopholes over whom could be enslaved and under what circumstances. For instance, was it permissible to hold slaves in Great Britain, or only in its dominions? Was it legal to enslave Africans who had been baptized, or would planters who allowed missionaries onto their plantation be forced to manumit those who converted to Christianity? And what of the children born to enslaved [End Page 211] women? Were there justifications in law and philosophy that made slavery an inheritable condition, and were the children born of enslaved Black women and white enslavers condemned to slavery themselves?2 In an effort to address these legal ambiguities, English economic interests and law frequently went hand-in-hand in shaping imperial policy around the Atlantic slave trade.3 The transatlantic slave trade was a multi-empire system, but even within the British Empire, the legal geography was complex, uneven, and inconstant. Edward Rugemer’s ambitious new work, Slave Law and the Politics of Resistance in the Early Atlantic World, traces the development of slave law in the British Atlantic, with a particular focus on mechanisms of resistance to slavery. Rugemer follows the development of slave law from English’s first “slave society” in Barbados through Jamaica, slavery’s entrenchment in the Carolinas, the complexities of abolitionist politics in Great Britain and the United States, and the “retrenchment” of enslavers in the nineteenth century.4 He illustrates the ways in which economic interests, law, and resistance are interlinked. For instance, in his discussion colonial administrators worked not only to clarify details like the ways that the sale of slaves as property could be used to satisfy planter debts, but administrators’ ability to align their general drive to protect property rights with the laws that were designed to control property (i.e. their slaves). His analysis is corroborated by works like Andrew Fede’s study of the law governing planters’ homicides against slaves. Fede draws the connections between jurisprudence that framed justified killings as, at times a necessary function of protecting their property (including their other slaves).5 British law, as both Rugemer and Fede demonstrate, was different than that in the Portuguese, French, or Spanish empires because the structure of English law meant that colonial policymakers and judges were able to fold aspects of English positive law and common law into “local conditions.”6 Collectively, these works illustrate the different ways that law shifted to make enslaving Africans more economically efficient.7 Birthright citizenship is another contour of slavery and the law that has begun receiving attention recently. Martha Jones’s pathbreaking book, Birthright Citizens (2018) provides an exemplary analysis of...