Holly Brewer - an impeccable scholar -- had just announced on FaceBook that
"an article that [she] first started working on in the spring of 2010 (also
part of my larger book) [is] finally published! And it's open access (no
paywall). It explores how and why Charles II and his advisors sought to
promote slavery across the empire. After the Royal African Company went
bankrupt in 1671 due to the fact that they could not legally recover
enslaved people as collateral for debts, and after two efforts to pass an
imperial slave code via parliament failed, Charles II turned to the courts.
High court judges--really his in that they held their seats at the king's
pleasure, presided over a series of rulings that held that aliens
(non-Christians) were not merely lower class people (villeins, or feudal
serfs), the law that English courts had formerly been using. They could
legally be considered "goods" and all the legal mechanisms--that we would
now call "torts"--mechanisms that protected the ownership of things a
person owned, could be used to protect the ownership of people.
These English high court decisions applied across the empire, and mentioned
"negroes" as the particular group of people who could be considered things,
but also could apply, because of the logic, generically to any
non-Christians or non-subjects (aliens, to use their term). It was a key
ruling in the development of racial slavery across England's empire.
Through the ideology expressed, and through Charles II's use of the courts
to circumvent parliament, I connect slavery to absolutism. Lots of work
here in manuscript sources. It's not for the faint of heart (at 70 pages),
and it's a difficult topic (emotionally and conceptually), but if these
issues interest you, it does attempt to solve a longstanding puzzle about
the creation of a powerful, and destructive, legal fiction.
Citation is: Brewer, H. (2021). Creating a Common Law of Slavery for
England and its New World Empire. Law and History Review, 39(4), 765-834.
doi:10.1017/S0738248021000407
Pdf is at
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/law-and-history-review/article/creating-a-common-law-of-slavery-for-england-and-its-new-world-empire/8D27552070D9A6CD478BA9912DEFB26B?fbclid=IwAR2bB05qQNLj69nYq4LY5Fmla4aeuu1WkH55ovgWXFeblJs0YpFu7orRtz4#.YjTwYZxsGpE.facebook

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