This chapter begins to explore the impact of slave majorities and limited white migration and settlement to the tropics. This chapter starts with Barbados in the middle of the seventeenth century, showing that the island had held a substantial white majority population and that it was the most densely settled place in England’s overseas empire before a mix of disease and emigration combined with dwindling immigration led to a sharp decline in the white population. The chapter details the increasing black to white ratios at tropical sites across the colonies after the dispersal of white settlers from Barbados. The English tried to mitigate their fears of these emerging racial imbalances by turning to new modes of political arithmetic to socially engineer populations and recruit more European migrants. English colonial architects started to calculate exactly how many white settlers would be necessary to ensure the survival of the English in the tropics and counter the new crisis in political economy. These constructed metrics helped to entrench ideas about racial distinctions.

This chapter examines the twin threats of invasion and insurrection that most English tropical colonies faced because of dwindling white migration and the English reliance on bondage and forced migration to populate and build the tropical empire. It focuses on the period between 1675 and 1720, when a series of large-scale slave insurrection plots began to rock English settlements in the Atlantic. It shows how the very real threats of invasion and insurrection shaped these colonies and how the English navigated these twin threats. Ultimately, English settlers and governors in the Caribbean turned to brutal and draconian policies of slave management to maintain their colonies, while English agents in Asia and Africa were forced to rely on others to help them control the enslaved and defend their factories and settlements. Yet, by the end of the seventeenth century, the English in both the East and West Indies had begun to tentatively explore arming the enslaved, turning to their non-European bondsmen to build, populate, and even help defend the empire. Armed slaves became agents of empire.

When William attempted to hire Nicholas out, he turned to Gadsden to broker the transaction. Not long after, Nicholas refused to hand over his pay to Gadsden’s clerk, and the man called for the city guard to take Nicholas to the workhouse. Nicholas resisted the officers sent to arrest him, expressing the sentiment that he was not afraid to die and eventually striking both men over the head with a spade. A Court of Magistrates and Freeholders tried Nicholas for grievously wounding a white man, a capital offense. Not surprisingly the court found him guilty and sentenced him to hang. However, Nicholas’s attorneys successfully appealed the case and were granted a new trial. In that proceeding, Nicholas was found guilty of a lesser offense and sentenced to a three year term in the workhouse which consisted of routine whippings and solitary confinement – not to mention witnessing the daily degradations at the house of punishment.

Byzantium continued traditions of slaveholding it inherited from the Roman Empire, but these were transformed significantly from the fourth century onward as slavery came to play a diminished role in the generation of economic surplus. Laws governing slaveholding gradually diminished the power of slaveholders and improved the rights of slaves by restricting a master’s right to abuse, prostitute, expose, and murder slaves and their children. Legal norms also eliminated penal servitude, opened the door wider to manumission, and created new structures for freeing enslaved war captives through the agency of the Christian church. Simultaneously, new forms of semi-servility arose with the fourth-century invention of forms of bound tenancy, which largely replaced the need for slaves. Byzantine society commonly used slaves in household and industrial contexts but only sporadically for agriculture, although slave prices remained constant through the eleventh century and even increased beginning in the thirteenth century as Italian traders turned Constantinople and Crete into conduits for slave commerce from the Black Sea. From the fourth century onward, Christian discourse began questioning slavery as contrary to natural and divine law, a tradition that continued throughout Byzantine history without ever leading to a call for abolition.

This study’s introduction presents a new way of understanding the development of slave law in plantation America. Rather than viewing slave law as an aberration or a unique colonial development, I argue that it was a natural outgrowth of an early modern English legal system that was built around procedures, forms, categories, and concepts. English men and women did not think of “law” as a creature of substance, as we do. Rather, they encountered “law” first and foremost as a set of practices and procedures. This owed much to the early development of English common law, which coalesced around a set of formal procedures and rules administered by the King’s central courts in Westminster. Among the most important of these was the writ system, which gave litigants access to remedies in the Court of Common Pleas and the Court of King’s Bench. Because the formulae of most writs had congealed by the thirteenth century, litigants could only seek relief at common law if they could fit a complaint within a preexisting writ form. The resulting reification of form had significant legal and cultural consequences. Most importantly for our purposes, it transformed procedure into a site of innovation. Although we tend to associate procedure with rigidity, early modern litigants, advocates, and judges learned to work within English law’s extant procedural parameters in order to accomplish their particular legal goals. By deploying legal fictions and expanding older categories, they found ways to make new facts fit old forms.

Chapter One emphasizes the relationship between English property law and slavery. I follow colonists as they sought to classify slaves as property, and as they deployed their knowledge of English property law on a daily basis to manage slaves. Fitting slaves into an extant legal system that bifurcated property into real estate or chattels personal was an act with long-term practical consequences. American colonists – including those beyond plantation America – understood that each particular category unlocked different ways of proceeding at law that impacted their ability to buy and sell slaves and to shield them from creditors. Building upon customary practice in the transatlantic slave trade, South Carolina colonists treated enslaved people as chattel property, at first by custom and later via statute. Whereas most plantation colonies settled upon some mixture of chattel and real property when they determined how to classify their slaves, South Carolina colonists ultimately adopted pure chattel slavery in order to facilitate commercial transactions involving enslaved people and to expand their credit with British merchants. Treating slaves as a chattel property was economically beneficial for South Carolinians, but it had far-reaching cultural implications. Through close readings of legal forms, including marriage settlements, trusts, and wills, I also watch small acts of legal transformation, moments in which colonists analogized slaves to things. In these acts of legal transmutation, South Carolina colonists compared enslaved people to livestock and other valuable moveable objects, not because they believed them to be the same as those objects, but because they believed them to be the same at law.

In 1661, the Barbadian Assembly passed the first comprehensive slave code in the English Americas to ‘better manage its profitable but unruly slave society’. The Act was entitled ‘An Act for the better ordering and governing of Negroes’. The Barbadian slave code was the ‘premier slave code in the English colonies’ by early eighteenth century due to its central role in launching slave codes throughout the English slave holding territories such as Jamaica, Antigua and South Carolina. This codified legislation was an innovation of English police law, property law, laws of villeinage, martial law and various vagrancy regulations. This paper delves into pre-colonial English society to identify various laws comparable with colonial slave legislation, examining whether these influenced the various slave codes, to decipher what exactly was adapted, borrowed or transplanted into the colonial slave laws. The Slave Act's preamble stated that the law's purpose was to ‘protect them (the slaves) as we do men's other goods and chattels’. Confirming that African slaves would be legally treated and seen as chattel property. English Property law and villeinage are the epicentres of the origin arguments as both contribute to the slaves as chattel phenomenon. Hence, this presentation also analyses and ascertains slave status definition in colonial West Indian law. Ultimately, transplantation was central to development within colonial legislation, not only legal transplants from England to the colonies but throughout the Atlantic world. What this inter and intra connectivity of laws meant for the region’s development is the essence of this research.