This chapter reads Mary Prince’s History within a Black Atlantic context of Black print and activism to connect the abolitionist work of enslaved and free Black people across the Caribbean, North America, and Britain. Mary Prince’s testimony creates abolitionist futures too, linking past and present through transatlantic Black networks of resistance and print. The legacies of abolitionist arguments made by Prince, Belinda Sutton, Olaudah Equiano, Grace Jones, Ottobah Cugoano, and many others are shown to be of vital importance today as we seek pathways out of ongoing racial capitalist violence.

This chapter considers how we might situate Mary Prince in the history of Black British life in the early nineteenth century. It examines how Prince’s narrative fits into a wider tradition of Black British writing, paying special attention to how her story compares to the writings of other Black Britons from the same period and to Prince’s unique insights as the first Black British woman to share her story of starting a new life in London. Considering the narrative’s status as a highly edited and controlled text, created by Prince alongside Thomas Pringle and Susanna Strickland, this chapter also analyzes the ways Prince might have been limited in what she could say about her experiences as a Black British immigrant, especially with respect to her potential connections to other Black Britons. Therefore, the chapter purposely puts pressure on the narrative’s tendency to depict Prince in isolation from other Black people during her time in London, inviting readers to reconsider how we might imagine Prince’s relationship to a wider Black British community.

Between 1660 and 1775 the number of European countries with diplomatic relations with the Ottoman Empire that obtained ahdames of their own grew rapidly, but many of these newcomers did not establish networks of consulates and vice-consulates in the eastern Mediterranean. Instead, they appointed the consuls of other European nations as their vice-consuls. This did not hurt the legal privileges of the merchants from these countries. In the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, some nations asked the Ottoman government to renew their capitulations several times with the single aim of obtaining more privileges. This development culminated in the French capitulations of 1740, which incorporated the clauses of virtually all earlier ahdnames. In the eyes of many Ottomans, the capitulations of 1740 came to symbolise the Europeans’ ceaseless attempts to obtain more and more privileges from the Turks. But the French renewal of their capitulations in 1673 already laid the foundations for the rise of imperialism. It was then that the Ottoman authorities granted Ottoman subjects working for foreigners as interpreters or as warehousemen the same fiscal and legal status as the Westerners. It was also in 1673 that the French had their role as protectors of the Christian Holy Places in Jerusalem, as well as of all Catholic clergymen – not just Western missionaries, but all Catholic clerics – in the Levant codified in their capitulations. It was this French model that the Russians used in 1774 to claim their own protectorate over all Greek Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman realm.

By the middle of the seventeenth century, a category of sovereign princes and polities had succeeded in monopolising jurisdiction over external relations and the internal machinery of government that allows to speak of sovereign state. The Old Regime saw the further emergence, in governmental and diplomatic practice as well as in learned writings of the paradigm of the law of nations as the preserve of sovereigns. As legal practice and literature, it also expanded in scope and mass to new regulatory fields such as the law of the sea, maritime warfare, neutrality or dispute settlement. The great treatises on the law of nations of the middle of the eighteenth century fleshed out the dualist system of law of nature and of nations that formed one of the intellectual backbones to Grotius’ work into an elaborate framework of the governance of international relations inside Christian Europe and for its imperial expansion outside.

In the early modern age, the settlement of disputes between the actors of ‘international’ relations hinged on communication channels and negotiation networks that were meant to limit the recourse to violence. Multireligious Renaissance Europe saw the emergence of the jus gentium – as a distinct, gestating branch of law – and modern diplomacy, perceived as a social and cultural practice used not only by sovereigns, but also by non-sovereign actors – a practice allowing both Europeans and non-Europeans to engage in formal and informal interactions, in state and non-state settings, through the elaboration of common languages, of (verbal and symbolic) communication practices and of shared political and legal cultures. In a belligerent era, which spawned many wars, European diplomacy developed new forms of negotiation that attest to an elaborate ‘art of peace’. By the end of the period, the Thirty Years War ended with the first experience of dispute settlement through multilateral talks involving nearly all European powers in Westphalia (1643-9) and reflecting conflicts that attest to the successive integration of non-European territories in ongoing European dispute. The congress demonstrated both the effectiveness and the limitations of this innovative negotiation model.

This chapter argues that through narrating the specific experiences of enslaved women and their freedom practices, from alternative kinship practices and strategic sexual relationships to knowledge of the slave economy and its reproductive logic, The History of Mary Prince imagines future freedoms while critiquing white inhumanity and the place of enslaved women within slavery’s rape culture. The chapter examines how enslaved women created and held onto kinship; how they used their sexuality to navigate their confinement and challenge ownership over their bodies; how Prince critiques white supremacy and its practices, including rape culture and the inability of white people to have sympathy for the enslaved; and how Prince imagined future freedoms, such as moving back to Antigua as a free woman, and freedom for all enslaved people. Through this analysis the chapter argues that Prince’s narrative challenges the silence of the colonial archive and allows us to see enslaved women beyond the violence they faced.

This chapter analyzes how Prince’s text underscores her disabilities and illnesses resulting from the physical, emotional, and psychological abuse she encountered and the labor she performed in both enslaved and free legal situations across geopolitical locations. Her memoir also moves between past and present tenses, active and passive voices. Through these literary techniques, she emphasizes disability and mobility as hardship as well as means of acquiring agency within the legal and everyday restrictions and demands people in power in the Caribbean and Britain placed on her in daily life. Prince’s intervention in the slave narrative genre as the first-known woman-authored autobiography in the genre widens interpretative terrain about Black enslavement and freedom, as she draws our attention to her physicality, disability, movement, and agency as a woman.

With its supporting materials and explanatory footnotes added to the transcribed narrative, The History of Mary Prince resembles a bundle of legal documents. This was no accident: Thomas Pringle sought to intervene in the public debate about Caribbean slavery by publishing a trustworthy, firsthand account of its horrors. Yet the relationship of The History to legal matters was not only metaphorical, and two legal suits followed its publication, both for libel. The first was brought by Pringle himself in response to an attack in print by James MacQueen, a trenchant defender of British slavery. The second suit was brought by Prince’s former enslaver John Adams Wood, who claimed that Pringle had libeled him in the first place in The History. Prince appeared as a witness in both trials, and her testimony during the second trial provides an additional source of information about her life. With extracts from The History and MacQueen’s article read aloud in both trials, the court thus became a significant site for Prince and the continuing “trials” that she faced during her life.

In the period of the Renaissance, trade became a matter of legislation and policy. Municipal governments and princes aimed to facilitate trade. International trade relations became increasingly supervised by states. This came in tandem with more treaties. From the middle of the fifteenth century onwards, specialized institutions were created and they increased control over foreign merchants. As a result of growing government intervention, the rules relating to trade were found in bylaws, charters and statutes. Besides those there were customs of trade, which were mostly local. New mercantile techniques, becoming widespread in this period, were maritime insurance, bills of exchange and partnerships of merchants. Insolvency became regulated in the sixteenth century. From the 1500s onwards, rights of hospitality for traders and a right of trade were developed in ius gentium writings. However, due to the mostly local customs and legislation, trade across European countries was far from harmonised. Gerald Malynes proposed a universal custom of trade, but he struggled with the combination of ius gentium ideas with the more factual customs of trade. His views nonetheless laid the basis for later categorisations of commercial law as being customary and transnational.

This chapter examines the development of the law governing warfare on land in Renaissance Europe. In this formative period, the law of war became a central feature of international relations and a distinct legal field. Wars of religion, the growth of the Ottoman Empire, dynastic disputes and the European expansion all contributed to an almost permanent state of warfare. Against this background, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, several scholars contributed to the development of the law of war, responding to the political, religious and cultural turmoil of the Iron Century by elaborating different theories of such law. They derived concepts and principles from medieval theology, canon and civil law, as well as from history, literature and philosophy. The chapter relies on both primary and secondary sources drawing on state and military practice as well as scholarly – legal, historical and relevant military literature. It surveys the major principles of the ius in bello on land, the international law governing warfare including booty, siege warfare and the treatment of civilians and prisoners of war. Rather than describing the distinct contributions of several scholars to the early modern jus in bello – which could not do justice to the works of relevant scholars, especially in the light of recent outstanding works in the field – this chapter adopts an analytical approach focusing on key themes of the jus in bello, analysing and critically assessing the contributions of various scholars to the same.