This brief overview seeks to provide some context on British slavery legislation and what made the British laws unique in the Atlantic World. Like the website itself, this Introduction pays particular attention to the history of slavery legislation in the British Caribbean.
In the world of Atlantic slavery, enslaved individuals, from birth and nourishment to marriage, leisure, punishment, rest, and death were regulated in theory by a vast, indeed massive, array of laws. The English first settled in the Americas in Virginia in 1607. In the following four decades, they established permanent settlement throughout the Caribbean archipelago and various mainland territories as well as across North America. Whereas the French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and Danish empires, had a central imperial slavery code — laws passed in the metropole that governed slavery in the entire empire — the British, by contrast, had no imperial slavery law. Rather, British slave legislation was fully decentralised and formed piecemeal in local legislatures. This meant that each British colony, from North America to Trinidad and Tobago, had its own slavery code, which was codified and amended numerous times throughout the more than two centuries of Atlantic slavery. The body of British slave law is, therefore, vast and reflects both wider currents in the Atlantic World as well as local matters specific to each colony. The decentralised nature of British slavery legislation amounted in an enormous body of English slavery codes.
During the period of Atlantic slavery, each North American and Caribbean territory was at once a world unto itself, and a place in constant historical conversation with the outside world. When the English began to colonize parts of North America and the Caribbean in the early seventeenth century, African slavery had been a central feature of the Iberian Atlantic for more than a generation. As such, the English did not have to invent African slavery from scratch. However, in England during this same period, no extant law defined the status of enslaved people, and neither was there a custom of using Roman law for legal development. Colonists could not, therefore, easily take Roman slavery law and apply it to the colonies. This accounted for one of the fundamental differences between the Portuguese and Spanish colonies, on the one hand, and the English on the other. In the 1661 Barbados slave law, the first comprehensive slave code of the Anglo-Atlantic world, lawmakers admitted that “in all the body of [English] lawe [there is] noe tract to guide us where to walk nor any rule sett as how to governe such slaves.” In acknowledging that they had no English laws from which to draw inspiration, Barbados lawmakers created a legal category of African enslaveability that had no precedent in metropolitan law. This permitted lawmakers great laxity in formulating laws that served the emergent needs of recognising Africans’ humanity while seeking to reduce its legal significance in order to exploit it more effectively. Lawmakers argued that African bondspeople were unfit for English law and therefore had to be tried by a system of slave courts tailor-made for the management and punishment of Black people. These courts consisted of two magistrates—almost always major slaveowners—and three freeholders; there was no jury and no opportunity for appeal for the enslaved. Evidence given by enslaved people was not permitted for or against free persons; individual courts determined whether or not enslaved persons could be witnesses for or against enslaved individuals. Because the enslaved could not be fined, the new system of slavery law mandated that they be physically punished.
The Caribbean was the earliest site of European settlement in the Americas and is, therefore, a key locale in which to explore the circulation of legal knowledge that was fundamental to the establishment of Atlantic slavery. The first comprehensive slave code of the Anglo-Atlantic World was issued in Barbados in 1661, and its influence can be seen in the founding laws of Carolina, Jamaica, St. Christopher, Georgia, St Lucia, St. Vincent, and Antigua. Slavery legislation was borrowed from colony to colony but over time came to reflect the specific needs of each individual colony. English lawmakers tried to dehumanize Africans by defining them as chattel, but enslaved Africans were a special kind of property: human property. Human property possessed volition, after all – they could steal goods, run away, and plot and rebel against their owners. In this way, the laws that governed slavery illustrate both the damaging effects of slavery’s violence as well as enslaved people’s refusal to accept the terms of their bondage. Many of the laws in this archive were written as a direct response to enslaved people's acts of resistance, from the quotidian small acts of resistance to the exceptional acts of armed rebellion.
During the last decades of the eighteenth century, with the legal end of the slave trade in sight, both pro- and anti-slavery advocates and British Parliament supported a plan for the amelioration, or improvement, of slavery through legislative reform. Historians have identified two main phases of amelioration. The first phase (1780s-1807) was characterized by legal changes initiated by colonial governments to increase the overall health of the enslaved and encourage enslaved women to give birth. Foreseeing that the slave trade might very well end, stopping the importation of enslaved people, enslavers focused their efforts on reproducing the enslaved population through birth. In their effort to exploit the reproductive abilities of bondswomen, planters set in motion a number of measures to increase the overall health of women still in their childbearing years. The abolition of the slave trade in 1807 marked a new phase in the history of amelioration. British Parliament increasingly pressured the self-governing colonies such as Barbados and Jamaica to implement further ameliorative reforms in an effort to ‘modernize’ and safeguard slavery from abolition. In May 1823, under abolitionist pressure, the Tory government formally adopted a policy of using amelioration to effect a legally-regulated abolition of slave status. This second phase of amelioration (1823-34) continued with previous reforms and involved revising the slave codes which regulated slave labor, granting the enslaved basic legal rights (including the right to own property), and introducing them to Christian instruction. All of these measures were meant to restore the precipitous population decline following the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. The laws that were mandated during the amelioration period illustrate the strong connection between enslaved rebellions in the Caribbean and abolitionist politics in the metropole.
There is an incredible amount of scholarly work on slavery laws in the Anglophone Atlantic World. Please see the Further Reading page for suggested readings.