This section collects source material relating to slavery and the law in Britain and the British Empire in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is very much under construction, and very far from being comprehensive; it’s the start of a research project,\u00a0 into slavery in and around Britain, not a finished product.<\/p>\n
It is currently organized into 2 parts:<\/p>\n
I had considered adding the texts of selected Caribbean and Colonial American laws, but given that they are outside my areas of expertise, are entirely the product of the slavers themselves, and\u00a0 most certainly require context, I have put this aside. There is in any case the excellent Laws of Enslavement and Freedom in the Anglo-Atlantic World<\/a> collecting such material.<\/p>\n There will also be a section of related, miscellaneous material, and a bibliography of works on slavery and the law, as time allows.<\/p>\n None of this material should be taken at face value. Much of it is the product of the enslavers, who were often at pains to present themselves as morally upstanding benefactors, yet were in fact simply brutal. The early legal judgements, most especially those of Lord Justice Holt at the start of the eighteenth century, disallowing the possibility of slavery on British soil, did not prevent that slavery happening there, to the measure of probably thousands of Black people in Great Britain,* nor did they apply to the transatlantic slave trade.\u00a0 And of course, nearly all these texts are instruments of racist dehumanizing.<\/p>\n * I base this number on the excellent Runaway Slaves<\/a> website. Apparently, the next update to it, which has been pending for some years,\u00a0 will bring the number of runaways up to nearly 2,000. (Source for this information was now deleted twitter poost.)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This section collects source material relating to slavery and the law in Britain and the British Empire in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is very much under construction, and very far from being comprehensive; it’s the start of a research project,\u00a0 into slavery in and around Britain, not a finished product. It is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":9,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-339","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/statutes.org.uk\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/339","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/statutes.org.uk\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/statutes.org.uk\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/statutes.org.uk\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/statutes.org.uk\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=339"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/statutes.org.uk\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/339\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/statutes.org.uk\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n\t