Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• BREWER, HOLLY

Titel

Slavery, Sovereignty, and “Inheritable Blood”: Reconsidering John Locke and the Origins of American Slavery

Ist Teil von

• The American historical review, 2017-10, Vol.122 (4), p.1038-1078

Ort / Verlag

Oxford University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2017

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Oxford Journals 2020 Humanities

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Historians of slavery in America—most notably Edmund Morgan—had their ideas shaped by the struggles of the Cold War, and debates over the connections between political and economic liberalism. As we have paid more attention to slavery, we have made increasingly strenuous efforts to rationalize slavery, democracy, and capitalism, efforts that have also occurred in other academic fields, ranging from philosophy to political theory to sociology and literature. Many of these efforts, for right or wrong, have focused on John Locke, a crucial figure of the Enlightenment and the beginnings of modern democratic ideals. In this article I contextualize Locke’s ideas and actions with regard to slavery in the empire to argue that we need to begin with different assumptions and questions. Those policies did not emerge from Locke, but instead from those he argued against: the Stuart kings. To understand the origins of slavery, we need to pay more attention to how various laws and policies enabled it across the empire, to who was behind those policies, to who profited the most from those policies via customs on imported staple crops, and to how those policies were initially rationalized. Slavery was created in legal pieces—pieces written, approved, and rationalized in hierarchical political contexts by Charles II and his brother James II. They had origins in older feudal law, with new innovations to make them more capitalist—but the larger rationale was in principles of absolutism and the divine rights of kings. There are powerful connections between monarchy, oligarchy, lordship, and slavery; all emphasize hereditary status. It took force to implement and get access and control enslaved labor and collect taxes; the power of empire was critical to each part of slavery’s development. When Locke had real power in the 1690s on the Board of Trade, he helped to reform Virginia laws and government, objecting especially to royal land grants that had rewarded those who bought “negro servants.”