The threshold between the state of nature and civil society was central to the boundary-setting and keeping of the imperial project, as the possibility that some were everywhere slaves and others were everywhere free became a question for empire and for global property relations. This chapter explores the relationship between property, slavery, morality and the law at the end of the eighteenth century, as we move from Locke to Haiti. As Stephanie Smallwood points out, there is a tendency to treat slavery and freedom as fixed, stable categories ‘when, in fact, the fuzzy boundaries and unclear content of these categories was precisely what fuelled debate about “slavery” and “freedom” in the eighteenth century’ (Smallwood 2004, 289). This more historicised and dynamic approach to the idea of slavery is about trying to understand how ideas about property, slavery, humanity and enlightenment were forged together, and the tensions and frictions between them. As Smallwood argues, this is in part about recognising how the rise of slavery in the Americas was dependent on the nature of freedom in Western Europe, as slavery was built on a foundation of market relations and freedom on ‘understandings of property underwritten and authored by slavery’ (Smallwood 2004, 297). Eighteenth-century conceptions of self-ownership, universal rights and the rise of revolutionary antislavery grew out of the epistemological relationship between global markets and freedom that was informed by ideas of slavery and empire. Smallwood's argument focuses on commodification as a political process and a discursive system that crowded out other systems of representation and became the fullest expression of slavery. In the process, freedom was reduced ‘to the ability to whittle things (and people) down (from all that they might be) to their own-able characteristics’ (Smallwood 2004, 297).

In his speech to the House of Lords on the second reading of the bill for the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, Sir Thomas Plumer spoke in support of the West Indian planters. He stressed the legality of the slave trade, its foundations in the Royal Africa Company in the seventeenth century and John Locke's involvement: ‘What, my Lords! Are we to be told that these men did not understand plain principles of humanity and justice?’ (Plumer 1807, 11).