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Forum: Holly Brewer's “Creating a Common Law of Slavery for England and its New World Empire”—Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 October 2022

Gautham Rao*
Affiliation:
American University

Extract

Historians have long since agreed that slavery was central to the social, economic, and political life of the English-speaking North American colonies, and then early United States. Yet the origins of North American slavery have remained far less clear. Holly Brewer's article, “Creating a Common Law of Slavery for England and its New World Empire,” which appeared in a recent issue of Law and History Review, attempted to clarify one key question within this puzzle. Did judges and legislatures in the colonies create their own institution of slavery? Or did they borrow from English precedent? For Brewer, the answer is clear: seventeenth and eighteenth century English judges, merchants, and others, in tandem with “crown policy,” built the institution of slavery that would be “a foundation for a common law of slavery in all English colonies and for the slave trade.” Slavery, in other words, was legal in England before the Somerset decision. It would thus be legal in the British Empire.1

Type
Forum: Holly Brewer's “Creating a Common Law of Slavery for England and Its Empire”
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Society for Legal History

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References

1 Brewer, Holly, “Creating a Common Law of Slavery for England and its New World Empire,” Law and History Review 39 (2022): 768Google Scholar.

2 Rabin, Dana, “Slavery, Law, and Race in England and its New World Empire,” Law and History Review 40 (2022): xx-xxCrossRefGoogle Scholar.