4.1 Introduction

After having looked at the origins of this freedom principle, we now move to the next century and a half. In contrast with the period before, one thing changed. England, France and the United Provinces increasingly succeeded in breaking the Iberian monopoly in the Americas, and started acquiring colonies of their own. As mentioned before, each of these countries turned to the Atlantic slave trade to fuel their colonial economy. As an outgrowth of this turn to African slave labour, at times African slaves started ending up in England, France and the Low Countries. How did the legal order of these countries react to this black presence?