ePub Fanatical Schemes: Proslavery Rhetoric and the Tragedy of Consensus by Patricia Roberts-Miller in History

Description

In this book; Alan Watson argues that the slave laws of North and South America--the written codes defining the relationship of masters to slaves--reflect not so much the culture and society of the various colonies but the legal traditions of England; Europe; and ancient Rome.A pathbreaking study concerned as much with the nature of comparative law as the specific subject of the law of slavery; Slave Law in the Americas posits an essential distance in the Western legal tradition between the tenets of law and the values of the society they govern. Laws; Watson shows; often are made not by governments or rulers but by jurists as in ancient Rome; law professors as in medieval and continental Europe; and judges as in common law England. Bodies of law; often created without reference to particular social and political ideals; are also often transferred whole cloth from one society to another. Tracing the effects of the reception of Roman law throughout Europe (excluding England) and the Americas; Watson reveals the enormous impact of this legal tradition on subsequent lawmakers operating under utterly dissimilar social and political conditions in the New World.Slave law in the colonies; Watson demonstrates; had much to do with the mother country's relations to Roman law. Spain; Portugal; France; and the United Dutch Provinces; all within the Roman legal tradition; imposed on their colonies slave laws that were private and nonracist in character; laws that interfered little in master-slave relations and provided for the relative ease of manumission and the grant of citizenship to freed slaves. England; however; did not ascribe to Roman law and colonists created rather than received slave law. Public and racist; slave law in the English colonies uniquely reflected local concerns; involving every citizen in the protection and perpetuation of slavery; strictly regulating education; manumission; and citizenship status."Comparative legal history;" Watson writes; "is in its infancy." Presenting the laws of slavery in ancient Rome and in the slaveholding colonies of America; Watson demonstrates how comparative law can elucidate the relationship of law; legal rules; and institutions to the society in which they operate. Investigating not the dynamics of slavery but of slave law; he reveals the working of a legal culture and its peculiar history.