Chapter 2 examines abolitionist texts that engaged the conventions of the theatrical genre of farce to denounce the illegal slave trade. By analyzing how captives and abolitionists mocked the generalized awareness of pretense that helped slavery flourish under prohibitions, it foregrounds the role that farce played in processes of racialization. Henry Shirley, a kidnapped man who requested help from British authorities, pointed out that a large range of people were complicit in the illegal slave trade, thereby making the rule of law look like a farce. The chapter concludes by tracing how captives turned the logic of pretense to their advantage, using forged documents or new names in the cities of Havana and Santiago. Enslaved people, it shows, could sometimes partake in the benefits of pretense by assuming new names and passing as free.

For over four decades, the District of Columbia, the seat of national government and a major slave-trading depot, stood as a key symbol and site of the US government’s support of slavery. This chapter focuses on abolitionist depictions of the slave trade in the District and the moral liability thrust on northern citizens because of its many kinds of publicness. Abolitionists repeatedly circulated the image of chained slaves driven past the US Capitol. Reprised by sightseers and abolitionists, the iconic image conjured not only democratic complicity but also democratic shame. William Wells Brown searingly critiqued the District slave trade in Original Panoramic Views of the Life of an American Slave (1849), the focus of the chapter’s final section.

This chapter discusses the labor institutions in the consolidation of the Russian Empire: not only serfdom, but also slavery, war captivity and military conscription. It is shown that in contrast to the Western Empire, coercion was more pronounced in the Russian core than in the colonies. Analogies and differences between the colonies in the steppes and the occupation of Poland and Ukraine are detailed. Political, economic and legal reasons for the different outcomes are given.

In this chapter, we discuss Jewish, Christian, and Muslim attempts to reduce the scope of slavery that fall short of abolition. For example, religious groups at various times have restricted slavery by making it more difficult to turn a free person into a slave, and by making it more difficult to sell slaves, and by placing limits on who could hold a slave of a certain category. In this chapter we also evaluate the influence of Christianity on the waning of slavery in medieval Europe, and examine the Catholic response to enslavement in the New World.

Between 1774 and 1787, greater condemnation of the slave trade occurred from mainly Christian individuals and groups, notably Quakers, than was the case before the American War of Independence. The humanitarian arguments made, however, did not translate into coordinated campaigning against continuance of the slave trade. Both Continental Congresses banned slave importations as part of a wider package of non-importation measures on British goods, but neither had any authority to impose enforcement measures. Jefferson’s attempt to insert a clause into the Declaration of Independence to prohibit slave importations backfired as he penned words stretching far beyond the required remit of such a clause and was forced to withdraw his statement. The Confederation Congress under the Articles of Confederation lacked the political authority to deal with slave imports. Yet positive activity occurred at state level. Delaware and Vermont banned the slave trade in their state constitutions of 1776 and 1777 respectively. The Bill of Rights included in the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 proscribed slave imports. The New Hampshire state constitution of 1783 also banned slave imports. In 1778 Virginia passed a statute to end slave importations to the state. The Pennsylvania gradual abolition of slavery law in 1780 incorporated a bill in the same state from the previous year that banned slave imports. Abolitionist views spread widely as a result of efforts by Anthony Benezet and other Quakers, but there was no national campaign against the slave trade. South Carolina was the state where the most acrimonious arguments occurred over the slave trade. The state legislature reopened Charleston to slave importations in 1783 and over the next four years thousands of Africans were imported. Divisions underscored the reality that proscribing the entire slave trade to the United States could only happen under the aegis of national political authority and that was absent in 1787.

Colonial restrictions on the slave trade main took the form of slave import duties. Nine of the thirteen British North American colonies legislated in favour of such duties at one time or another before the War of Independence. Colonies passed such legislation to restrict slave imports when saltwater Africans were not required economically, when there were fears of slave revolts, in order to boost white immigration, manufacturing and trade and when military costs had to be met. South Carolina made particular use of high slave import duties to stop Africans being imported in the wake of the Stono rebellion of 1739, thereby supporting public safety against protesting slaves. The British parliament reserved the overall political and constitutional right to decide on the merits of slave trade restriction and its decisions were binding. The colonies did not combine to form an anti-slave trade stance before the meetings of the First Continental Congress in 1774, and even then the Guinea traffic formed just one element in the North American boycott of British goods in the tense couple of years leading up to the War of American Independence. Moral concerns about the slave trade were fairly muted in North America’s colonies before the War of Independence. The Quakers were at the forefront of anti-slave trade commentary but even they took decades to persuade their own membership to relinquish slave importation and slaveholding. New England clergymen joined by the 1770s in their condemnation of the slave trade. But there was no consensus in the North American colonies that consistent pressure should be exerted to proscribe the transatlantic slave trade. The trade was banned by most colonies in the non-importation protests of 1776–8, 1769–70 and 1774–6, but there were no detailed discussions about the subject at the two Continental Congresses after the Coercive Acts had been implemented in 1774.

The subject of the slave trade was acrimonious and divisive at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. It had never before been discussed at such length by virtually all of the states and many divergent views were expressed. Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution signalled that the federal government through Congress would have the right to interpose in regulating the slave trade for the whole of the United States in the future but this could not occur for twenty-one years until 1808. This was guaranteed by Article 5. A compromise had been hammered out between the northern and southern states whereby strong reservations expressed by South Carolina and Georgia over interference with the slave trade were accommodated in order to secure the American union. Constitutional arrangements over the slave trade left plenty of areas of debate on the subject during the ratification conventions of 1787–8. Some commentators were disappointed at the compromise struck there and the effective tying of hands of the federal government on this issue for twenty-one years. Others exercised their patience and were willing to wait until 1808, comforting themselves that action would then be taken promptly. Many northern states expressed their opposition to the slave trade on moral grounds in their ratifying conventions while South Carolina and Georgia avoided public debate about the humanitarian desire to get rid of slave importations. The sheer amount of commentary on the subject indicated that prohibition of the slave trade was a lively topic of political debate that would continue for some years to come.

European colonial ventures in the Americas depended on Native American trading routes and economic practices, even as they transformed them. Europeans initially sought to extract valuable resources, but this endeavor always intersected with the day-to-day business of men and women alternately competing and cooperating to sustain their communities. European traders and settlers thus fit into networks crossing imperial and cultural boundaries that were simultaneously economic, familial, and political. Trading networks soon connected the violence of Indigenous land dispossession for the purposes of food cultivation and the export of staples such as sugar, tobacco, and rice with the violence of the Atlantic slave trade, which transported tens of thousands of captives each year from Africa to the Americas by the end of the seventeenth century. Over time, colonial settlers increasingly struggled against imperial governments for control over land, trade, and profits, with revolutionary political consequences in the eighteenth century.

The end of the American Revolution energised concerns about the political, economic, and moral state of an empire that had become inextricable from the plantation economy and the transatlantic trafficking of enslaved Africans. Intent on forging an empire without slave-trading, some Cambridge students and fellows took a leading role in attacking the slave economy, enslavers, and the consumption and production of goods tied to the plantation economy. Other past and present Cambridge fellows, however, were emboldened by defeat in the Revolution to support enslavers, arguing that enslavement was the principal foundation of Britain’s rapidly growing economy and should remain entrenched in the British Caribbean. The problem of the slave trade was particularly evident in Britons’ engagement with West Africa, where antislavery activists, colonisers, and explorers had to negotiate and collaborate with local slave-traders and imperial companies to achieve their aims. These conflicts reveal the challenges and limitations of idealism when confronted with the realities of Britain’s slave empire.

Conventional histories of the revolutionary period tend to largely omit Indian policy and the Gulf Coast region, but both are foundational to the formation of the early republic. The thirteen colonies had been flanked by Indigenous power, which prevented an unfettered American expansionism. The failure of Indian policy under the Articles of Confederation and the question of the “Indian problem” that arose, therefore, framed federalist debates and shaped the development of the federal government. Congress subsequently embraced a militant nationalist politics concerned with Indian affairs. Securing control over the Indian trade and taking possession of the lands then claimed by Spain allowed the United States to expand across the continent. The Louisiana Purchase (1803) doubled the size of the nascent nation, and the seizure of Indigenous lands and the removal of Indigenous peoples from the former Spanish borderlands enabled the rise of the Antebellum South.

This chapter tells the story of Kwadwo Egyir (also known as Cudjo Caboceer), an African trader and employee of the British Company of Merchants Trading to Africa, in the town of Cape Coast in the modern Republic of Ghana. Egyir amassed wealth and power by working with the British Company, and he eventually used it to usurp power from the ruler of Cape Coast. Like the Patriots in North America, he found ways to benefit from a system of violence, slavery and overseas trade that was made possible to a great extent by Britain’s forced removal of Africans from their homeland and the forced labor of Africans in the Americas. His life serves as an example of how British influence in West Africa and North America were similar, in spite of many differences.

In a familiar pattern, federal judges ultimately embraced their role as the architects of American sovereignty on the water. As the Monroe administration redoubled its prosecutions of South American privateers, Congress left it to judges to define the legitimate boundaries of maritime violence. The Supreme Court responded by casting doubt on the claims to sovereignty advanced by revolutionary polities, and declaring that privateers were merely pirates, and therefore subject to punishment by all – including the United States. This judicial assertion of legal authority to police the waters of the revolutionary Atlantic was transformative. It helped secure approval of a treaty with Spain that paved the way for decades of territorial expansion in North America, and it presaged increasingly expansive American claims to hemispherical preeminence. Even when federal judges denied their own power to discipline a different category of “pirates” – those who engaged in the slave trade – they did so to uphold sovereign rights that Americans had been asserting since independence. If a nineteenth century American empire was ultimately realized on land, some of its first stirrings were at sea.

The chapter presents a dialogue between Sellers and Grey, exploring how "absent jurisprudence" from past international tribunals shapes contemporary international criminal law. Through a discussion of cases from Tokyo and Nuremberg to the ICC, Sellers demonstrates how opportunities for gendered analysis of crimes like enslavement were missed, creating enduring gaps in legal understanding. The conversation focuses on the overlooked cases of "comfort women" at the Tokyo Tribunal, women’s detention at the Ravensbrück camp during World War II, and the evolution of enslavement jurisprudence from the ICTY’s Kunarac case to recent ICC proceedings. Sellers argues that had early tribunals conducted deeper intersectional analyses of gender, race, and class in enslavement cases, contemporary courts would be better equipped to address similar crimes. The chapter suggests the Rome Statute’s bifurcation of "sexual slavery" from "enslavement" obscures how enslavement inherently involves control over victims’ sexuality and reproduction. The conversation reveals how jurisprudential gaps continue to constrain judges’ ability to fully recognize and address gendered dimensions of international crimes.

Chapter 2 is situated in the context of Portugal’s internal conflicts with its colonies. In 1787, a group of so-called Brahmin priests who attributed racism to their lack of clerical promotions planned a revolt against Portuguese authority in Goa. In the Kingdom of Kongo, a rebellion in 1788 by the smaller Kingdom of Musulu spread into Portuguese slave-trading territories in Angola, initiating a war between Portugal and Musulu. Finally, a conspiracy in 1789 to end Portuguese rule in Minas Gerais, Brazil included slaveholders with outstanding debts who were in jeopardy of losing their property, including the people they enslaved. Two things stand out from placing these events together. First, we see more acutely how slavery and the slave trade not only supported the entirety of the Portuguese empire but also constituted its very framework. Second, and relatedly, the 1798 conspiracy in Bahia may have been more explicitly about race and slavery than these other three episodes. But it is, in fact, race and slavery that tied them together, a claim which orients the reader towards thinking about the Tailors’ conspiracy as part of an empire-wide phenomenon in the remaining chapters.