2.4 Conclusion: Slavery as a Sempiternal Institution
This part tried to answer two questions, one theoretical and one practical in nature.
On the theoretical sphere, we have assessed how legal thinking on slavery evolved between 1500 and 1800, having done so by discussing the views of the Classics of International Law.
Starting from Spain’s Francisco de Victoria and up until Emmerich De Vattel’s work, we noted a great amount of continuity in the legality of slavery as an institution. Neither of these scholars doubted the legality of slavery as an institution, let alone denounce it. When it came to the issue of the African slave trade, Spanish as well as other Classics were conspicuously silent, whilst each and any of them, at the least, believed in just war as a legitimate means of enslavement. Some others, such as Grotius, also mentioned other means such as voluntary enslavement. This only applied to “the other”, as all thinkers fell in line when it came to enslavement of prisoners in Christian wars, which clearly went a step too far.In practise, each of the European colonising powers had colonies built on slave labour between the sixteenth-early nineteenth centuries. Given that, besides for Spain and Portugal, there was no metropolitan slave law, the European colonisers had to create this. The English, with their decentralised colonial structure, left the issue of regulation to the colonial assemblies themselves. The relationship between these laws and English law was very complex. Things were clearer for the French colonies. The French King had a more centralised control over them, and whilst the Coutumes de Paris had force of law in the colonies, legislation on slaves was made with the Code Noir. Meanwhile, the Dutch did not govern their colonies directly, and left this to the West India Company. Barring metropolitan laws, the Dutch had recourse to Roman slave law, supplemented by local statutes.
With these remarks in mind, we can shift our attention back to Europe. The reason why each of the colonial interlopers devised a set of slave laws for their colonies in the first place, was due to the fact that slaves had disappeared from metropolitan soil by 1200, and their national laws did not include any provisions on slavery. This begs the question as to how the domestic legal orders would react when slaves, coming from colonies where slavery was enacted by positive laws, arrived in a metropolis which did not have such provisions. How did England, France and the Low Countries solve this conflicts of law issue between colony and metropolis?