By investigating the place of enslaved Africans and their descendants in the cities of the Atlantic world, this article explores many of the themes of this Special Issue across empires, with an emphasis on the Americas in the late eighteenth century, the eve of abolition. The article finds that, in nearly every manual occupation, slaves were integrated with free laborers and, not infrequently, slaves who had reached the level of journeyman or master directed the work of free apprentices. The limited number of slave insurrections in cities may be explained by the fact that they often worked semi-independently, earning money to supplement the livelihood provided by the master, or sometimes almost entirely on their own. To them, city life offered advantages that would have been inconceivable for their rural counterparts, especially the scope of autonomy they enjoyed and the possibilities to secure manumission.

‘I was a few years back a slave on your property of Houton Tower, and as a Brown woman was fancied by a Mr Tumming unto who Mr Thomas James sold me.’ Thus begins Mary Williamson's letter, which for decades sat unexamined in an attic in Scotland until a history student became interested in her family's papers, and showed it to Diana Paton. In this article, Paton uses the letter to reflect on the history and historiography of ‘Brown’ women like Mary Williamson in Jamaica and other Atlantic slave societies. Mary Williamson's letter offers a rare perspective on the sexual encounters between white men and brown women that were pervasive in Atlantic slave societies. Yet its primary focus is on the greater importance of ties of place and family – particularly of relations between sisters – in a context in which the ‘severity’ of slavery was increasing. Mary Williamson's letter is a single and thus-far not formally archived trace in a broader archive of Atlantic slavery dominated by material left by slaveholders and government officials. Paton asks what the possibilities and limits of such a document may be for generating knowledge about the lives and experiences of those who were born into slavery.

In her book Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World, Katharine Gerbner offers a rich history of Protestant planters’ efforts to tether Christian identity to free status and European descent in the American colonies, and missionaries’ answering attempts to reconcile African and indigenous conversion with enslavement. Gerbner's concept of Protestant Supremacy names the sociopolitical function and economic utility of “religious belonging,” specifically how Christian institutional, discursive, and ritual spaces demarcated boundaries between the enslaved and their enslavers, prefiguring race in the process. In this history of Atlantic slavery, religion is not subsidiary to the punitive, legal, sexual, and economic systems that enabled the enslavement of African and indigenous peoples in the Americas. Rather, Gerbner argues that Protestant Christianity provided a metastructure for the race-based caste systems that emerged in Barbados and other British colonies in the Americas. Through an intense and extensive interrogation of correspondence, missionary accounts, and institutional records from across the Atlantic, she traces how Protestant emissaries established “Christian” as a “protoracial” term and hastened the legal and discursive codification of lineage-based American caste systems in the process. The linkage of Christian identity and nascent whiteness not only exposes the Protestant architecture of American racial logics, but also sparks nuanced questions about how African, indigenous, and creole people oriented themselves toward Protestantism in early America. In this way, Gerbner definitively situates religion at the center of ongoing conversations about racial formation in the Americas, while opening up avenues for fresh speculation and imaginative intellectual trajectories in studies of American religion and Atlantic slavery.

This essay considers how the cultural authority of the constitutional Founding became legal authority in antebellum America. Examining a series of cases implicating the constitutional politics of slavery, it illustrates how legal professionals grasped the public power of constitutional origin stories. To produce meanings and legitimate rulings, lawyers and judges wrote and reproduced narratives about slavery at the Founding, converting ascriptions of original constitutional visions in formal constitutional law. This power derived from the ongoing popular construction of the Founding as a venerated and authoritative moment containing unwritten intentions, understandings, and promises binding upon subsequent generations. The essay argues that these developments belong to the deep history of originalism. By approaching originalism as a form of constitutional politics integrating public memory culture and legal reasoning, the essay locates the central public and juridical dynamics of originalism emerging in struggles over the constitutional identity of slavery.

In 1822, the Russian czar resolved a dispute over compensation for slaves fleeing to British lines during the War of 1812. American observers have long asserted that this canonical decision favored the United States. But new debate has recently arisen among historians. Uncovering evidence from diplomatic archives, this Article concludes that the czar did indeed side with the United States. Moreover, the case demonstrates how nineteenth-century American statesmen pressed international law into service in support of slavery.

This article analyses domestic law cases brought by former slaves during the decade following the Civil War. It argues that ending slavery was a long and complex process that included not only granting rights to freedpeople, but also subtracting the incapacities previously imposed by bondage and applying certain rights retroactively. Reconstruction-era judges, throughout the era and across the South, overlooked the realities of slavery as a lived institution. Instead, they reimagined slavery as a collection of legal disabilities that could simply be subtracted and summarily resolved. This is how they would carry out abolition. The notion that slavery had to be undone stands in contrast to prevailing scholarship that emphasizes the acquisition and exercise of rights as demonstrative of consummate freedom. Instead, this article shows that even when positive law and judicial rulings were used to deconstruct the peculiar institution, slavery, as a legal construct, could not be fully demolished. Judges and freedpeople alike were left to face troubling legacies for which there was no remedy. No performance of legal acrobatics could alter, undo, or fully resolve the myriad ways slavery continued to affect many former slaves and influence the direction of their free lives. Abolition would remain incomplete.

The analysis proposed here defends the necessity to operate a shift in the terms that seem to dominate, at present, the thinking on new forms of slavery or servitude, in order to fully integrate gender relations as production and exploitation social relationships. In this regard, based on two field studies performed with domestic and agricultural workers subjected to the Canadian immigration programs, we must try to see how the work relations amalgamated under the concepts of “modern slavery” and “unfree labour” give rise not only to a working class that is excluded from the canonical wage-earning class, but also and simultaneously to a racialized, intrinsically sexual workforce: “non-nationals” who are also male workers and female workers whose bodies are put to work, exploited and branded differently.

On March 8, 1679, Polonia de Ribas entered her last will and testament into record at the offices of Alonso de Neira Claver, the royal notary public of Xalapa. The will included information about Polonia's family, possessions, debts to be collected, and how she wanted her estate distributed after her passing. She was well acquainted with the appropriate processes and venues to ensure that such matters were officially acknowledged. In the second half of the seventeenth century, Polonia demonstrated her legal acumen by documenting half a dozen transactions with the notary public in Xalapa.

The general, but false, perception of migrant smuggling through Indonesia, a large, archipelagic country, is that smugglers operate entirely on their own. In fact, the more complex smuggling operations rely on broad networks of foreign organizers as well as local intermediaries and ground staff. In 2011, the Indonesian legislature introduced a severe minimum sentence for any involvement in migrant smuggling with the expectation that the judiciary would apply the sentence in all future cases. However, some judges proceeded to hand down sentences below the statutory minimum, arguing that the punishment is not commensurate to the relatively minor roles played by locals. This article examines how judges at all levels of the judiciary did so in ten related cases. In conclusion, it argues that statutory sentences are not mandatory in Indonesia and that, by applying below-minimum sentences, judges not only maintain judicial independence; they also effectively exercise a judicial review function.

English common law reports are dense with ideas. Yet they remain mostly untapped by intellectual historians. This article reveals how intellectual history can engage with law and jurisprudence by following the notion that “infidels” (specifically non-Christian individuals) deserved to receive exceptional treatment within England and across the globe. The starting point is Sir Edward Coke: he suggested that infidels could be conquered and constitutionally nullified, that they could be traded with only at the discretion of the monarch, and he confirmed their incapacity to enjoy full access to the common law. This article uncovers how each of these assertions influenced the development of the imperial constitution in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when it came to war, trade and slavery. Identifying each of the major moves away from Coke's prejudices, this article argues that sometimes common lawyers responded to political change, but at other times anticipated it.