Slavery In England Research Articles

Contesting Slave Masculinity in the American South

Contesting Slave Masculinity in the American South

Not "Beyond the line": Reconsidering Law and Power and the Origins of Slavery in England's Empire in the Americas

This paper challenges Dunn's framing of the early Caribbean and the emergence of slavery as "beyond the line" of English laws or justice or even social norms. It situates his claims within a longer and more elaborate historiography that portrays slavery as emerging within colonies themselves and via the actions of independent colonists. Then it challenges the assumptions of that framing by investigating the extent of English involvement in their empire, via imperial officials and policies including war and treaties and legal strategizing. Exploring the connections between different colonies amid the early legal and political uncertainty during the first decades of English settlement in the Americas illuminates how and why imperial support for slavery was crucial to its development.

“Laws that make them slaves there, make them slaves here:” The Status of Slavery in England and its influence on the colony of Nova Scotia

Nova Scotia was the only colony in the transatlantic world to possess no statute laws or slave codes; thus, Nova Scotia did not have legal authorization to enforce slavery. The absence of statute law in Nova Scotia engendered significant legal ambiguities on the general status of slavery in the colony. Following 1783, Nova Scotia’s legislative and judicial institutions were greatly destabilized by Loyalist migration, and the colony searched across the transatlantic world for legal answers. England, similarly to Nova Scotia, did not possess any statute laws to enforce slavery; the metropole and the colony of Nova Scotia thus shared a similar ambiguity towards the status and regulation of slavery. Therefore, evidence suggests that judicial rulings made in Nova Scotia regarding the status of slavery were directly influenced by common law established in England. Specifically, Somerset v Stewart and subsequent cases in England legitimized and influenced Chief Justice Blowers and Strange to impose a judicial war of attrition against slavery in Nova Scotia. Although Nova Scotia’s legal system had become effective in eradicating slavery, the system did not always provide permanent freedom, and in many cases freed black men and women risked kidnapping and re-enslavement. Ultimately, slavery in the Canadian colonies is a topic that has been erased from the historiographical narrative and has been ignored by generations of historians. Nonetheless, it signifies that more work is required to establish stronger connections between the metropole and Canadian colonies, but also, the intercolonial and transatlantic influences on slavery.

Property in People and the Complexities of Capitalism (SHEAR)

My years of research on the emergence of slavery in the British Empire not only supports the argument that all markets are regulated, but shows that the character of that regulation can lead to an extraordinary form of capitalism, a form that strikes at the heart of the idea of free markets. This paper explores the dilemma of slavery in the seventeenth century British Empire focusing on questions of its legality and the implications of that legality for finance. Without the ability to maintain that a person could be property, attempted claims at ownership or sale were often legally dubious, difficult to maintain and impossible to finance. England’s Royal African Company—run by the king’s own brother, James, Duke of York, went bankrupt as a consequence in 1667. The paper shows how England’s high court stepped in to legitimate the legal process of treating people as property, and explains its impact on finance and trade in enslaved people across the empire. It then connects those court decisions to the military force necessary to uphold them, and argues that there is no such thing as a “free market” in forced labor, and that all markets have to be regulated and the rules of exchange enforced. While slavery is perhaps the most crucial example of how such regulation works, this case study from the era of its emergence illuminates how modern assumptions about free markets seriously underestimate the ways in which different regulation combined with the instruments of political power can create radically different kinds of society. Of course slavery was part of capitalism—and an important part—in nineteenth century America. But slavery did not define capitalism. Nor was slavery only capitalism; as an examination of its origins reveals, it was in many ways part of an older ideal of hierarchical society that contemporaries called feudalism and that had very particular legal expression. In this paper I explore the origins of slavery in England’s 17th century empire to argue that “property in people” was a concept that to flourish needed a very particular legal basis, one that built on feudal law but then took a dramatic turn towards fictionalizing people as property. Once such a basis was created, it created almost a new form of money and credit. Without such a legal definition, slavery was profoundly unstable.

A Comprehensive Analysis of English Case Law on Colonial Slavery in England

A Comprehensive Analysis of English Case Law on Colonial Slavery in England

Lord Mansfield: Justice in the Age of Reason by Norman S. Poser (review)

Lord Mansfield: Justice in the Age of Reason. By Norman S. Poser.

Slaves and Englishmen: Human Bondage in the Early Modern Atlantic World. By Michael Guasco (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) 315 pp. $45.00 cloth and e-book

Guasco’s study reframes the history of English slaveholding by placing it in the context of human bondage in the early modern English world. Bondage and slavery were, he argues, familiar as ideas and experiences to Englishmen of the period: The early development of slavery does not represent a radical shift but an adaptation of existing models and experiences.Guasco builds his argument across six chapters. The first chapter maintains that the English were familiar with slavery through the Bible and Protestant theology, through the history and laws of Rome as taught in England’s grammar schools and universities, and through narratives of English history that identified conquerors—Danes or Normans—as enslaving the English. Furthermore, serfdom continued to limit the freedom of a significant number of English men and women during the sixteenth century, and penal slavery was a governmental experiment during the mid-Tudor period.The second chapter explores English encounters with slavery around the world, particularly in the Mediterranean: The English (however disingenuously) prided themselves on their freedom, but enslavement, particularly of war captives, was familiar. In the third chapter, Guasco turns to the ways in which English privateers attempted to use alliances with Africans against the Spaniards in the Americas. The Africans, however, did not see the English as natural allies; they used them strategically to gain freedom from Spain. The fourth chapter examines the experience of, and narratives about, the “thousands” of English sailors enslaved in the early modern Mediterranean. Guasco suggests that far more of them died than returned; those who managed to return were often treated as apostates, having converted to Islam rather than embrace martyrdom.The final two chapters look at how slavery was transplanted into English America, from the earliest days onward. Guasco emphasizes the multiple models of slavery available to colonists, its practice in the Spanish colonies, debates about the enslavement of Indians, and the ways in which early colonies adapted bondage to control behavior. When the early colonists began to acquire African slaves, they treated them as slaves before they had legal structures to do so, and only gradually moved away from Spanish models of slavery, with their high levels of manumission. The book thus demonstrates both that English men and women were familiar with slavery and that the ultimate structure of plantation slavery was not a foregone conclusion.Guasco also examines slavery and freedom in the English imagination. The English had a concept of slavery regardless of any actual practice. He points to the hypocrisy behind the English view of its brand of freedom as uniquely humane. Guasco has read widely, and produced a rich account of the English cultural experience of slavery during the sixteenth and early seventeenth century. However, there are blind spots in his coverage. His search for forms of bondage and slavery is not always true to their wider context, particularly their intersection with other historical developments in English society. What is more important, the attempts to enforce villeinage during the sixteenth century or the broad resistance to them from all levels of English society? How were ideas about slavery connected to ideas about gender and sexuality? More importantly, given the political resonance of the concept of slavery in England, what was the political use of such language? Since this book is primarily a cultural history, with an episodic structure, change over time on the English side is not always visible in it, but few historians of England would move as seamlessly as Guasco from the 1540s to the 1640s. Guasco is not, in general, reflective about his methods, or his sources. A bibliography would have helped.Such caveats, however, do not detract from the significance of Guasco’s work. Slaves and Englishmen provides a persuasive account of bondage in English experience that will challenge historians of both colonial America and early modern Britain.

Creating a Common Law of Slavery for England and its Empire

Most scholars who have written about the law of slavery in England have focused on Somerset’s case of 1772, which had an intellectual impact and that challenged slavery not only in England itself but across the British Empire. While we recognize that Somerset represented some change in practice, historians have searched for consistency in earlier rulings, following a general tendency to see the Common Law as unchanging and the winning argument in the Somerset case itself. As a consequence, the current consensus is that the Common Law was somewhat confused, but that some coerced servitude was legal in England before 1772, and certainly in its empire, where English law on slavery did not reach. England was committed to a free society, but slavery was an anomaly that was tolerated because it was far away and across the ocean. Occasionally the historiography goes back as far as the seventeenth or even sixteenth century, to cite obscure cases, or even to the medieval period, when a kind of slavery was clearly legal. Seeing the slave law for the British Empire from the perspective of the famous Somerset case of 1772 has obscured the vibrant debate within the English judicial system over the legality of slavery in England and its empire over more than a century. Not only was the Common Law on slavery changing profoundly during the seventeenth century; it was an instrument of policy. When Charles II failed to pass an imperial slave code via Parliament, he turned to the courts. His judges—really his in that they held their seats “during his pleasure”--presided over a series of rulings that made slavery legal in England itself, as well as its empire.

A Study on the Abolition of Slavery in England

A Study on the Abolition of Slavery in England

The Horrible Gift of Freedom: Atlantic Slavery and the Representation of Emancipation by Marcus Wood (review)

Reviewed by: The Horrible Gift of Freedom: Atlantic Slavery and the Representation of Emancipation by Marcus Wood Roderick A. McDonald The Horrible Gift of Freedom: Atlantic Slavery and the Representation of Emancipation. By Marcus Wood. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. 2010. Marcus Wood follows up Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780–1865 2000, his close, critical reading of the pictorial images that accompanied slavery's apogee in the British Atlantic world, with a provocative yet persuasive analysis of how propagandistic “fantasies of white-controlled emancipation” (237) have dominated the remembrance of the slave trade and slavery since their demise. In the rhetoric and iconography commemorating the sequence of “freedom” moments, Wood chronicles the transmogrification of enslaving nations and their peoples into omnipotent possessors of liberty who philanthropically bestow its gift upon benighted, powerless and grateful bondspeople. This triumphalist narrative of benevolent power at a stroke erases both the culpability of the enslavers and the agency of the enslaved. Wood examines a remarkable array of arts and artifacts that, from the late eighteenth century to the present, have cast emancipation events and their commemoration in celebratory, self-congratulating terms. This iconography reserves [End Page 148] center-stage for the architects of these symbolic moments and their erstwhile enslaving nations, now transformed into bastions of liberty, with the recipients of their largesse at best bit players passively awaiting deliverance, but often entirely excluded from the action. In his subtle reading of arts and crafts, texts and treatises, anniversary celebrations, philately, film and imagery, Wood reveals a consistent set of “narrative falsehoods” (354) that operate as much to assuage white consciences as deflect their responsibility for the horror of chattel bondage and its baneful and enduring legacies. In image after image, for example, it is the allegorical representations of freedom, white and feminized, who are displaying the emblematic liberty caps, rather than the enslaved whose possession of this iconic garb would have symbolically empowered them to challenge their bondage. Instead, the ubiquitous depictions of near-naked black men and women, kneeling, supplicant, entreating and still shackled, best known in the Abolition Seal “Am I Not A Man And A Brother?” would secure the place and role of bondspeople in the machinery of mythmaking. With equal parts acerbity and insight, Wood interrogates various manifestations of these wishful thoughts and conceits as he moves through two centuries of objects and representation (the well-known plan of the slave ship Brookes and numerous commemorative postage stamps, for example, are painstakingly scrutinized), and he culminates by deriding the smugly sanctimonious excesses of the so-called “Wilberfest” of 2007 that marked the bicentennial of Britain's Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, before laying bare the pretensions and agendas of the risible movie, Amazing Grace, released the following year. Elsewhere Wood laments how the “tall tales” (94) spun by imperialist historians from Trevelyan to Schama have lent credence and authority to the fictions of freedom. Wood's polemical tone best suits the scathing and uncompromising critique that dominates his text, but he offers astute and balanced suggestions for correcting emancipation's falsehoods and delusions that reference and promote scholarship on the agency of the enslaved. He probably should have retained consistent nomenclature by not referring to Harriet Tubman as Harriet (224)—one of the few black women he discusses, she is alone among Wood's dramatis personae identified by first name (save for his adherence to the odd convention of using Toussaint to reference the Haitian leader). And Wood does err in identifying Haiti's “famous motto [as] ‘Liberty or Death’” (238) when discussing revolutionary empowerment, although the correct idiom, “Unity is Strength,” makes his case equally well. The Horrible Gift of Freedom offers an invaluable corrective to over two hundred years of pernicious mythmaking while indicating that much work remains in eradicating the malefaction it has wrought. Roderick A. McDonald Rider University Copyright © 2013 Mid-America American Studies Association

The Anti-Slavery Project: From the Slave Trade to Human Trafficking (review)

Reviewed by: The Anti-Slavery Project: From the Slave Trade to Human Trafficking Matthew Lippman (bio) Joel Quirk, The Anti-Slavery Project: From the Slave Trade to Human Trafficking (University of Pennsylvania Press 2011), 332 pages, ISBN 978-0-8122-4333-8. Joel Quirk, Deputy Director of the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation, has written an ambitious new book, The Anti-Slavery Project. Quirk’s text argues that there is a much-overlooked continuity between the historical movement against slavery and the struggle against contemporary forms of human exploitation, such as indentured and bonded labor and human trafficking. Quirk adopts a “big picture approach” that encapsulates several hundred years of history. The volume is divided into two distinct sections. The first portion of the volume focuses on the eighteenth and nineteenth century struggle to abolish chattel slavery. The second section of the text discusses contemporary forms of human exploitation. The specialist reader on completing the book will find themselves asking for a more detailed explication, while the generalist may find that they are overwhelmed. Quirk first focuses on the question of how slavery, which was once a natural [End Page 911] feature of human society, came to be regarded as an unconscionable crime against humanity. He does not recount the well-documented history of trans-Atlantic slavery and instead focuses on the United Kingdom and continental Europe, which he views as the crucial influences on the abolition of global slavery. Quirk argues that the eradication of slavery in England primarily resulted from an acceptance that slavery was a “bounded category,” which was a unique form of suffering and maltreatment which was not an inevitable feature of society. He argues that the British people and politicians came to accept that slavery was at odds with English moral exceptionalism and superiority and that the abolition of slavery had very little to do with the embrace of human equality. The belief that slavery was an affront to civilized values spread to other European countries, which followed England in embracing abolitionism. Anti-slavery became the touchstone of legitimacy for any European regime. According to Quirk, these colonial powers, despite the depredations visited upon their colonial territories, were responsible for promoting abolitionism in their foreign possessions. Slavery by the early twentieth century, although legally prohibited across the globe, had morphed into other forms of exploitation. This development resulted from a conjunction of forces. Agriculturists and industrialists continued to demand inexpensive labor in order to maximize profit and former slaves continued to find themselves limited by the disabilities of money, education, caste, and race and had few alternatives. The League of Nations 1926 Slavery Convention was restricted to chattel slavery. The treaty defined slavery as “the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised.”1 Signatory states were bound to “prevent and suppress the slave trade,” and to “bring about progressively and as soon as possible, the complete abolition of slavery in all of its forms.”2 In the 1930s the League appointed a series of Expert Committees dominated by European powers with a mandate to document and to investigate the continued existence of chattel slavery. These reports generally focused on the remnants of slavery in Africa and relied on information from governments, most of whom claimed that slavery had been eradicated or only existed in small sectors of the country. The expert committees continued to define slavery as “powers attaching to the right of ownership” perpetuating the continued distinction between chattel slavery and other forms of human exploitation such as debt bondage and serfdom. A new stage in the evolution of the anti-slavery movement was introduced by the 1956 Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery.3 This document was intended to supplement the Slavery Convention. Article One of the Convention obligates states parties to take “all practicable and necessary legislative and other measures” [End Page 912] to abolish and abandon four practices: debt bondage, serfdom, servile marriage, and the transfer and exploitation of child labor.4 The Convention categorizes individuals victimized by these practices as...

'Twelve Judges in Scarlet' The Seventeenth-Century Contest over a Common Law of Slavery for England and its Empire

Most scholars who have written about the law of slavery in England have focused on Somerset’s case of 1772, which had an intellectual impact not only in England itself but across the British Empire. While we recognize that Somerset represented some change in practice, historians have searched for consistency in earlier rulings, following a general tendency to see the Common Law as unchanging and the winning argument in the Somerset case itself. As a consequence, the current consensus is that the Common Law was somewhat confused, but that a kind of slavery was basically legal in England before 1772, and certainly in its empire, where English law on slavery did not reach. England was committed to a free society, but slavery was an anomaly that was tolerated because it was far away and across the ocean. Occasionally the historiography goes back as far as the seventeenth or even sixteenth century, to cite obscure cases, or even to the medieval period, when a kind of slavery was clearly legal. Seeing the slave law for the British empire from the perspective of the famous Somerset case of 1772 has obscured the vibrant debate within the English judicial system over the legality of slavery in England and its empire over more than a century. Not only was the Common Law on slavery changing profoundly during the seventeenth century; it was an instrument of policy. When Charles II failed to pass an imperial slave code via Parliament, he turned to the courts. His judges—really his in that they held their seats “during his pleasure”--presided over a series of rulings that made slavery legal in England itself --as well as its empire. These judges held that people could be property and that their status was hereditary, whether as chattels or villeins. These rulings brought the phalanx of English property law to bear upon slavery. Otherwise slavery law would followed feudal law, which had restrictions on ownership, master/servant law, which had a variety of protections for servants, or been nothing more than piracy, a situation enforced by the sword and brute force, but not law. These cases provided the structure of regulation of markets that made slavery--as it existed in eighteenth and nineteenth century America–possible.

Before Somerset: Debating Slavery and Absolutism in England and its Early Empire

Seeing everything from the perspective of Somerset (1772) has obscured the vibrant debate within the English judicial system over the legality of slavery in England and its empire over more than a century. Not only was the Common Law on slavery changing profoundly during the seventeenth century; it was an instrument of policy. When Charles II failed to pass an imperial slave code via Parliament, he turned to the courts. This controversy over slavery in the Common Law was intimately connected to the broader arguments over the divine right of Kings. The Glorious Revolution, which dethroned a King who believed in his own divine right to rule and who overturned Parliamentary laws–also overturned the rulings that James II and his brother Charles II had laboriously overseen. These rulings had made slavery legal in England itself (as well as its empire) by holding that people could be property and that their status was hereditary, whether as chattels or villeins. These rulings brought the phalanx of English property law to bear upon slavery. Otherwise slavery would have allowed either a limited feudal ownership, or been nothing more than piracy, a situation enforced by the sword and brute force, but not law. These cases provided the structure of regulation of markets that made slavery--as it existed in eighteenth and nineteenth century America–possible. While by the early nineteenth century the institution of chattel slavery had largely lost sight of its ideological connection to absolutism, that is where it was born in the seventeenth century.

Caribbean Exchanges: Slavery and the Transformation of English Society, 1640-1700. By Susan Dwyer Amussen. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. xiv, 302 pp. Cloth, $59.95, ISBN 978-0-8078-3165-6. Paper, $22.50, ISBN 978-0-8078-5854-7.)

In this fine book, Susan Dwyer Amussen adds to the familiar picture of the economic impact of plantation slavery in England's West Indian colonies by exploring the social, cultural, and political impact of that slave system. While entering into the wide variety of debates that are the staple of slavery and Atlantic historiography, this English historian emphasizes “the English character of this story” (p. 11). As such, Caribbean Exchanges possesses the considerable strengths of that imperial approach, as well as some weaknesses. While attending to important differences between Barbados and Jamaica, Amussen demonstrates the conflicting goals that actuated the rising planter class on both islands. The planters yearned for the paternalist hierarchy of English society while building an exploitative society centered on sugar profits. Because of that tension, “the harsh treatment of servants and the entire institution of slavery made the English uncomfortable,” if not enough to change their behavior (p. 67). Because slavery was so foreign to seventeenth-century Englishmen, they only awkwardly and slowly rationalized the slave societies on these islands. Their discomfort became evident in a phenomenon familiar to Americanists: the planters were squeamish about using words such as “slavery” even in slave codes.

Reviews: Reading the Past, Packing and Unpacking Culture: Changing Models of British Studies, Practising New Historicism, Dust, History by Numbers: An Introduction to Quantitative Approaches, Hamlet in Purgatory, Literary Circles and Cultural Communities in Renaissance England, Putting History to the Question: Power, Politics and Society in English Renaissance Drama, et al., Anna of Denmark, Queen of England, the Royal Image:

Reviews: Reading the Past, Packing and Unpacking Culture: Changing Models of British Studies, Practising New Historicism, Dust, History by Numbers: An Introduction to Quantitative Approaches, Hamlet in Purgatory, Literary Circles and Cultural Communities in Renaissance England, Putting History to the Question: Power, Politics and Society in English Renaissance Drama, et al., Anna of Denmark, Queen of England, the Royal Image:

Sarah Parsons. Review of "Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America 1780-1865" by Marcus Wood.

Sarah Parsons. Review of "Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America 1780-1865" by Marcus Wood.

Blind Memory: Visual Representation of Slavery in England and America, and: American Slaves in Victorian England: Abolitionist Politics in Popular Literature and Culture (review)

Both these books aim to interrogate overly facile suppositions about the meaning of slavery and Abolition in transatlantic culture. For Marcus Wood, there has been too little attention paid to the iconography accompanying the rhetoric. It has been taken for granted as mere visual accompaniment to the searing anti-slavery texts. After Wood's labors, particularly in foregrounding the manifold and contradictory meanings of the illustrations to the slave narratives, it will never be taken for granted again. His magisterial study moves seamlessly from fine art, through book illustration to propaganda prints, showing the power of such images as the 1789 Description of a Slave Ship, which acted as "a semiotic shock tactic" to a variety of audiences (27). His discussion of visual texts such as J. M. W. Turner's oft-misread Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On (1840) are multifaceted and innovative, showing how painting can perform "an act of artistic salvage" (63). Sometimes the critique of the reception of such works is rather po-faced. No more so than in its indictment of Mark Twain's reaction to Turner's "nauseous" colors. Twain's railing at the vulgarity of the painting is used by Wood to hint at the Southerner's inability to come to terms with the painting's subject matter. Coming at the very time (1875) when Twain was contemplating early drafts of his controversial (and I would contend defiantly anti-slavery) masterpiece The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), such criticism is rather partial. The po-faced nature of the text is illustrated as well by Wood's discussion of John Stedman's Narrative of a Five Year's Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796). Here Wood quotes at length a torture scene that Blake illustrates where a rebel is broken on the rack and dismembered. The elaborate joking by the dying victim is not, as Wood contends, "simply incredible" (234); it could also be said to mock a system that deals in human flesh and suggests a counter-hegemonic discourse that sometimes bursts through Stedman's conservative text.

Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780-1865

Throughout this important volume, the author underscores two vital themes: one, that visual presentation of slavery in England and America has been utterly dishonest to its subject, and the other a meditation on whether the ruptures of the slave experience - middle passage, bondage, and torture -- can be adequately represented and remembered.

American Slaves in Victorian England: Abolitionist Politics in Popular Literature and Culture by Audrey Fisch, and: Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780-1865 by Marcus Wood (review)

American Slaves in Victorian England: Abolitionist Politics in Popular Literature and Culture by Audrey Fisch, and: Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780-1865 by Marcus Wood (review)

The Somerset Case and the Abolition of Slavery in England

omerset v. Stewart, decided by Lord Chief Justice Mansfield four years before the American Declaration of Independence, was long S interpreted as outlawing slavery in England.’ Not only did Somerset have a profound impact in Britain where, many believe, it led to the subsequent abolition of the slave trade (1807) and the eventual emancipation of all slaves in the British colonies (1834), but it also ‘became part of a newly developing American common law [and] . . . was widely discussed in America both before and after the revolution’.2 The American courts, following the revolution, adopted the great bulk of English common law and most interpreted Somerset to stand for the proposition that, in the absence of specific legislation or constitutional provisions authorizing it, slavery was contrary to natural law, ‘odious’ and thus prohibited under common law tradition. Consequently, northern courts, particularly, interpreted the 1772 English decision as outlawing slavery in the absence of any specific legislative mandate to the contrary. If, as some now suggest, Somerset did not abolish slavery, then American courts erroneously incorporated it into common law following the revolution. If the common law at the time of the American revolution sanctioned slavery, then the courts in Massachusetts and other northern states should have held that slavery was permitted in their states unless specifically outlawed by state