Author: Alan Watson Publisher: University of Georgia Press ISBN: 9780820311791 Category : Law Languages : en Pages : 212
Book Description
In this book, Alan Watson argues that the slave laws of North and South America--the written codes defining the relationship of masters to slaves--reflect not so much the culture and society of the various colonies but the legal traditions of England, Europe, and ancient Rome. A pathbreaking study concerned as much with the nature of comparative law as the specific subject of the law of slavery, Slave Law in the Americas posits an essential distance in the Western legal tradition between the tenets of law and the values of the society they govern. Laws, Watson shows, often are made not by governments or rulers but by jurists as in ancient Rome, law professors as in medieval and continental Europe, and judges as in common law England. Bodies of law, often created without reference to particular social and political ideals, are also often transferred whole cloth from one society to another. Tracing the effects of the reception of Roman law throughout Europe (excluding England) and the Americas, Watson reveals the enormous impact of this legal tradition on subsequent lawmakers operating under utterly dissimilar social and political conditions in the New World. Slave law in the colonies, Watson demonstrates, had much to do with the mother country's relations to Roman law. Spain, Portugal, France, and the United Dutch Provinces, all within the Roman legal tradition, imposed on their colonies slave laws that were private and nonracist in character, laws that interfered little in master-slave relations and provided for the relative ease of manumission and the grant of citizenship to freed slaves. England, however, did not ascribe to Roman law and colonists created rather than received slave law. Public and racist, slave law in the English colonies uniquely reflected local concerns, involving every citizen in the protection and perpetuation of slavery, strictly regulating education, manumission, and citizenship status. "Comparative legal history," Watson writes, "is in its infancy." Presenting the laws of slavery in ancient Rome and in the slaveholding colonies of America, Watson demonstrates how comparative law can elucidate the relationship of law, legal rules, and institutions to the society in which they operate. Investigating not the dynamics of slavery but of slave law, he reveals the working of a legal culture and its peculiar history.
Author: Thomas D. Morris Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press ISBN: 0807864307 Category : Law Languages : en Pages : 588
Book Description
This volume is the first comprehensive history of the evolving relationship between American slavery and the law from colonial times to the Civil War. As Thomas Morris clearly shows, racial slavery came to the English colonies as an institution without strict legal definitions or guidelines. Specifically, he demonstrates that there was no coherent body of law that dealt solely with slaves. Instead, more general legal rules concerning inheritance, mortgages, and transfers of property coexisted with laws pertaining only to slaves. According to Morris, southern lawmakers and judges struggled to reconcile a social order based on slavery with existing English common law (or, in Louisiana, with continental civil law.) Because much was left to local interpretation, laws varied between and even within states. In addition, legal doctrine often differed from local practice. And, as Morris reveals, in the decades leading up to the Civil War, tensions mounted between the legal culture of racial slavery and the competing demands of capitalism and evangelical Christianity.
Author: Jean Allain Publisher: OUP Oxford ISBN: 0191645354 Category : Law Languages : en Pages : 416
Book Description
"Slavery is the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised." So reads the legal definition of slavery agreed by the League of Nations in 1926. Further enshrined in law during international negotiations in 1956 and 1998, this definition has been interpreted in different ways by the international courts in the intervening years. What can be considered slavery? Should forced labour be considered slavery? Debt-bondage? Child soldiering? Or forced marriage? This book explores the limits of how slavery is understood in law. It shows how the definition of slavery in law and the contemporary understanding of slavery has continually evolved and continues to be contentious. It traces the evolution of concepts of slavery, from Roman law through the Middle Ages, the 18th and 19th centuries, up to the modern day manifestations, including manifestations of forced labour and trafficking in persons, and considers how the 1926 definition can distinguish slavery from lesser servitudes. Together the contributors have put together a set of guidelines intended to clarify the law where slavery is concerned. The Bellagio-Harvard Guidelines on the Legal Parameters of Slavery, reproduced here for the first time, takes their shared understanding of both the past and present to project a consistent interpretation of the legal definition of slavery for the future.
Author: Paul Finkelman Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield ISBN: 9780742521193 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 488
Book Description
In this book, prominent historians of slavery and legal scholars analyze the intricate relationship between slavery, race, and the law from the earliest Black Codes in colonial America to the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law and the Dred Scott decision prior to the Civil War. Slavery & the Law's wide-ranging essays focus on comparative slave law, auctioneering practices, rules of evidence, and property rights, as well as issues of criminality, punishment, and constitutional law.
Author: Paul Finkelman Publisher: The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd. ISBN: 188636348X Category : Electronic books Languages : en Pages : 360
Book Description
Winner, Joseph A. Andrews Award from the American Association of Law Libraries, 1986. Provides a detailed discussion and analysis of the pamphlet materials on the law of slavery published in the United States and Great Britain.
Author: Edward B. Rugemer Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674982991 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 401
Book Description
Winner of the Jerry H. Bentley Book Prize, World History Association The success of the English colony of Barbados in the seventeenth century, with its lucrative sugar plantations and enslaved African labor, spawned the slave societies of Jamaica in the western Caribbean and South Carolina on the American mainland. These became the most prosperous slave economies in the Anglo-American Atlantic, despite the rise of enlightened ideas of liberty and human dignity. Slave Law and the Politics of Resistance in the Early Atlantic World reveals the political dynamic between slave resistance and slaveholders’ power that marked the evolution of these societies. Edward Rugemer shows how this struggle led to the abolition of slavery through a law of British Parliament in one case and through violent civil war in the other. In both Jamaica and South Carolina, a draconian system of laws and enforcement allowed slave masters to maintain control over the people they enslaved, despite resistance and recurrent slave revolts. Brutal punishments, patrols, imprisonment, and state-sponsored slave catchers formed an almost impenetrable net of power. Yet slave resistance persisted, aided and abetted by rising abolitionist sentiment and activity in the Anglo-American world. In South Carolina, slaveholders exploited newly formed levers of federal power to deflect calls for abolition and to expand slavery in the young republic. In Jamaica, by contrast, whites fought a losing political battle against Caribbean rebels and British abolitionists who acted through Parliament. Rugemer’s comparative history spanning two hundred years of slave law and political resistance illuminates the evolution and ultimate collapse of slave societies in the Atlantic World.
Author: Douglas A. Blackmon Publisher: Icon Books ISBN: 1848314132 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 429
Book Description
A Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the mistreatment of black Americans. In this 'precise and eloquent work' - as described in its Pulitzer Prize citation - Douglas A. Blackmon brings to light one of the most shameful chapters in American history - an 'Age of Neoslavery' that thrived in the aftermath of the Civil War through the dawn of World War II. Using a vast record of original documents and personal narratives, Blackmon unearths the lost stories of slaves and their descendants who journeyed into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation and then back into the shadow of involuntary servitude thereafter. By turns moving, sobering and shocking, this unprecedented account reveals these stories, the companies that profited the most from neoslavery, and the insidious legacy of racism that reverberates today.
Author: Michelle A. McKinley Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 9781316620106 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Fractional Freedoms explores how thousands of slaves in colonial Peru were able to secure their freedom, keep their families intact, negotiate lower self-purchase prices, and arrange transfers of ownership by filing legal claims. Through extensive archival research, Michelle A. McKinley excavates the experiences of enslaved women whose historical footprint is barely visible in the official record. She complicates the way we think about life under slavery and demonstrates the degree to which slaves were able to exercise their own agency, despite being ensnared by the Atlantic slave trade. Enslaved women are situated as legal actors who had overlapping identities as wives, mothers, mistresses, wet-nurses and day-wage domestics, and these experiences within the urban working environment are shown to condition their identities as slaves. Although the outcomes of their lawsuits varied, Fractional Freedoms demonstrates how enslaved women used channels of affection and intimacy to press for liberty and prevent the generational transmission of enslavement to their children.
Author: Mark Tushnet Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 0691198152 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 273
Book Description
In an examination of Southern slave law between 1810 and 1860, Mark Tushnet reveals a structured dichotomy between slave labor systems and bourgeois systems of production. Whereas the former rest on the total dominion of the master over the slave and necessitate a concern for the slave's humanity, the latter rest of the purchase by the capitalist of a worker's labor power only and are concerned primarily with economic interest. Focusing on a wide range of issues that include contract and accident law as well as criminal law and the law of manumission, he shows how Southern slave law had to respond to the competing pressures of humanity and interest. Beginning with a critical evaluation of slave law, the author develops the conceptual framework for his own perspective on the legal system, drawing on the works of Marx and Weber. He then examines four appellate court cases decided in three different states, from civil-law Louisiana to commonlaw North Carolina, at widely separated times, from 1818 to 1858. Professor Tushnet finds that the cases display a continuing but never wholly successful attempt at distinguish between law and sentiment as modes of regulating social interactions involving slaves. Also, the cases show that the primary method of accommodating law and sentiment was an attempt to use rigid categories to confine the law of slavery to what was thought its proper sphere. Mark Tushnet is Professor of Law at the University of Wisconsin. Originally published in 1981. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Author: Alan Watson
Author: Thomas D. Morris
Author: Jean Allain
Author: Thomas Read Rootes Cobb
Author: Paul Finkelman
Author: Paul Finkelman
Author: Edward B. Rugemer
Author: Douglas A. Blackmon
Author: Michelle A. McKinley
Author: Mark Tushnet