The Warfare Origins of the Anti-Slave-Trade Legal Regime in the Atlantic World

Online:

London: Institute of Modern Languages Research:

16 November 2021, 4.00pm – 5.30pm:

Speaker: Jake Subryan Richards (LSE).

Chair: Adom Philogene Heron (Goldsmiths).

This paper locates the origins of British anti-slave-trade laws and practices in the crucible of Atlantic warfare. Between 1805 and 1820, the Royal Navy patrolled West African and Caribbean waters and captured enemy slaving ships as prizes of war. British laws reclassified the enslaved captives from these ships as ‘liberated Africans’, and subjected these people to bonded apprenticeship in service of the warfare state. The financial profits from prize warfare motivated naval officers to look beyond the high seas for prospective captures. In the new era of peace from 1815, Britain’s courts declared such captures unlawful unless Atlantic polities agreed treaties to authorize them. Treaty negotiations sparked more conflict. Wartime violence and peacetime confrontation, rather than a shared vision of human rights, drove early anti-slave-trade law – and shaped the lives of tens of thousands of liberated Africans in the nineteenth century.

Further informations HERE