“Those in Their Possession”: Race, Slavery, and Queen Elizabeth’s “Edicts of Expulsion”

Abstract

At the turn of the seventeenth century, Queen Elizabeth’s Privy Council issued three documents that authorized the removal of “negars and blackamoores” from England. These documents have become a frequent point of reference in studies of race in early modern English literature, with most critics reading them as edicts of expulsion. Turning to histories of the Iberian slave trade and the Tudor government, Emily Weissbourd argues that these documents in fact implicate the Privy Council in a nascent slave trade in black Africans. This suggests that a discourse that linked blackness with slavery already circulated in the late sixteenth century in England.