The History of Mary Prince was the first account of the life of a Black woman to be published in the United Kingdom. Part of the avalanche of print culture that accompanied the transatlantic abolitionist movement, it has in recent years become an increasingly central text within pedagogy and research on Black history and literature, thanks to its vivid testimonies of Prince’s thoughts and feelings about her gendered experience of Caribbean slavery. Embracing and celebrating a growing international scholarly and general interest in African diasporic voices, texts, histories, and literary traditions, this Companion weds contributions from Romanticists, Caribbeanists, and Americanists to showcase the diversity of disciplinary encounters that Prince’s narrative invites, as well as its rich and troubled contexts. The first published collection on a single slave narrative or author, the volume is not only an authoritative, highly focused resource for students but also a model for future research.

The Old Regime period in which war proved the norm and peace the exception witnessed the development of the modern law of nations. Questions of international law assumed a new urgency as did the status of diplomatic agents. By this time the existence of permanent embassies could still be deplored but no longer questioned, and diplomatic immunity could not be disputed, reinforced as it was by a body of precedent and tradition. This period witnessed first the expansion and later the contraction of diplomatic privilege. European aristocratic society reinforced diplomatic privilege, for the status of the ambassador was inextricably intertwined with that of the ruler. The explosive expansion of diplomats and their staff led many theorists, such as Grotius and Vattel, to analyse the evolving conventions, such as the importance of the civil immunity of the ambassador and the liability of the embassy staff. Practice tended to reinforce privileges identified as personal, that is, attached to the ambassador himself. Of these the exemption from criminal liability was perhaps the most important. Among territorially defined privileges, the right of asylum and the notorious right of quarter were first expanded and later either limited or eliminated.

The History of Mary Prince is a geographically layered narrative: The text transcribes Prince’s experiences of enslavement in the Caribbean from her birth in 1788 in Brackish Pond, Bermuda, to her harrowing labor on the salt industries on Grand Turk to her efforts to purchase her freedom in Antigua in the 1820s to her journey to London in 1828, where she continued her campaign for emancipation. Yet this chapter turns to The History to meditate on the methods we use for recovering Black geographies that may remain oblique in colonial archives. It argues that contemporary Black poets offer insights into Prince’s movements that may only exist as palimpsests within The History by speculating on her knowledge of Caribbean resistance movements, such as the Haitian Revolution and the Sunday Market Revolt in Antigua. By assembling this diachronic reading method, the chapter resists the impulse to achieve conclusive answers about Prince’s geographical relations but instead unfolds alternative possibilities for locating her in Black spaces.

In Renaissance Europe, war and the use of force were regular phenomena and likewise subject of common rules. The theory of ‘just war’, dating back to ancient times, was further developed by legal scholars, and all belligerents claimed to have a just cause, often explained in printed pamphlets. International law consisted of theory and practice, and thus, they should be considered in a mutual context. The focus was still on the question of who had a right to wage war, i.e. on the jus ad bellum, and barely on regulations of warfare or on a containment of war. International law in Renaissance Europe rooted in its very society, in its rules and values. Legal debates and war justifications consolidated the Christian European community, which even in war times did not break apart, even if it was contradictory to the principle of sovereignty and the idea that a sovereign owes no justification to anyone. Moreover, scholars and belligerents argued with natural law and insisted in the universality of international law, although it was in fact basically European. Thus, in Renaissance Europe well-established traditions existed for how to handle war, but they were more and more challenged by the idea of sovereignty, as well as by the European expansion and by global interaction.

This chapter describes territorial conflicts among lords, parishes, cities and towns, and how they contributed to emerging notions of the territoriality of states. It surveys debates regarding both the expansion to new territories and the conservation of existing territories and considers how these debates operated both in Europe and in European overseas colonies. It analyses the writing of jurists as well as a plethora of practices that contemporaries pursued, which despite their obvious local reiterations, were mostly pan-European. Among other things, it covers the question of just war, taking possession of not yet occupied land, discovery, prescription, conservation of the status quo and the role of both conflicts and agreements, including agreements with indigenous peoples, natural law, the law of nations and of relations between territory and jurisdiction. To explain developments during the Renaissance, it observes a much longer time span that began in the Middle Ages and allowed for both slow and revolutionary transformations. It shows that developments in Europe were important, but as vital in both encouraging and empowering change was colonialism, which affected many peoples and territories across the world but also modified Europe in ways we have not yet completely understood.

This chapter considers The History of Mary Prince as an environmental history and demonstrates how Mary Prince theorized environmental justice from the perspective of an African descended woman who labored in the trenches of ecological imperialism and envisioned liberation. In studying Prince’s text, we can better understand how the interwoven systems of slavery and colonialism altered the natural world and also how imperialism, as a formalized ideological structure administered in the colonies as well as in the metropole, always left its imprint on the environment. The chapter argues that Prince demands a geography of freedom that is outside of the colonial-defined borders of the Caribbean islands, calling for an end to both slavery and ecological imperialism. In making this argument, it examines a series of vivid moments in Prince’s environmental history to catalogue Prince’s anti-imperialist geography. Further, this chapter also considers Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite’s theoretical neologism, tidalectics, as an entryway to comprehending Prince’s conceptualization of the marine landscapes of the islands she traversed.

In the highly stratified servile societies of the Caribbean, numerous codes made it difficult for enslaved persons to distinguish themselves as generators of personal income. Yet an unmistakable feature of Caribbean slavery was the countless number of enslaved persons who succeeded in making money for their own benefit. Several historians have interrogated this history through their examination of the provision ground–Sunday market complex and the hiring and self-hiring of enslaved laborers. Despite the solidity of their scholarship, gaps exist in the historiography, not least of which is the general anonymity of these servile small-scale business people. This chapter, relying heavily on the 1831 publication of The History of Mary Prince, along with other contemporary sources as well as secondary publications, aims at narrowing the gap by focusing on the personal economic pursuits of Mary Prince, a relatively well-known enslaved female from the Caribbean who lived the last years of her life in London.

This chapter is a survey of the legal languages used to govern territory, sovereignty and the right of a ruler within a polity. Debates were heavily dominated by feudal and private law-concepts. Sovereigns maintained the diversity of privileges in the territories ruled in the setting of a composite monarchy. Claims and titles could or could not entail consequences for sovereignty. Reservations and exceptions to full internal sovereignty were not uncommon. Succession quarrels (often causes of war), could be solved by treaty, often in conflict with domestic constitutional rules and principles. Mixed polities (Poland-Lithuania, Holy Roman Empire) offered a broad range of argumentative topoi to either confirm or combat overlordship. Internal German questions could quickly escalate to the field of the law of nations through the game of alliances and guarantees. Although republican forms of monarchy and republican oligarchies were on the decline in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, their legal agency was not contested. In extra-European dominions of European sovereigns, the chain of reasoning was significantly lighter, as feudal arguments rarely came into play. Conversely, the agency of subaltern actors in establishing boundaries, or the treatment of native Americans as either allies or subjects provide original avenues of research.

This chapter examines Thomas Pringle’s and Susanna Strickland’s literary relationship and their contributions to anti-slavery print culture in the years surrounding their work on The History of Mary Prince. Each brought a different set of interests and strengths to the production of The History. Pringle was an established voice in abolitionist writing, having published anti-slavery poems and essays in venues ranging from the Oriental Herald to the Penny Magazine. Strickland had not previously written about slavery, but she was practiced in writing for the fashionable and ornamental publications that targeted one of the anti-slavery movement’s primary audiences, middle-class white women. In the years immediately surrounding the publication of Prince’s History, Pringle and Strickland brought anti-slavery discourse into ornamental and ostensibly apolitical forms of print culture such as literary annuals; conversely, by foregrounding the first-person testimony of enslaved people, they brought novelistic discourse into overtly political and polemical publications such as the Anti-Slavery Reporter.

The chapter gives an overview of dispute settlement during the Old Regime. Contrary to older assessments of the historiography, dispute settlement retained its importance in this era, both in qualitative and in quantitative terms. This was true for the field of theoretical literatures, which, from the last decades of the seventeenth century, dealt intensively with the subject. Normally, a clear distinction was made between an elected arbiter, who definitively decided a dispute, and a mediator, who only made peace proposals. Diplomatic practice, which made intensive use of the instruments of dispute settlement until the last decades of the eighteenth century, was much more flexible. The transitions between arbitration and mediation were fluid; the boundaries of confession and rank were also frequently crossed. In Old Regime Europe, mediation was also used for the first time in peace negotiations between Christian and Islamic powers. New forms of mediation emerged as well. One was the armed mediation, in which a power intervened in a conflict uninvited and set a peace ultimatum; this could easily lead to war. This indicates that dispute settlement did not automatically contribute to an increase in peace; the relationship of dispute settlement to war and peace remained rather ambivalent in Old Regime Europe.