1.3 Methodology and Heuristics
The study is based upon a general historiographical literature study, supplemented by primary source material (legislation, case law, doctrine, and archival material).
General legal historical work, next to work on select aspects of the slavery and slave trade regime, added flesh to the legalist bones of this work.
All these works are covered in the bibliography, though I would point the reader particularly at four works that were of immense use to this work. Jean Allain’s Slavery in International Law: Of Human Exploitation and Trafficking contains an excellent survey of the international law aspects of slavery and the history of the slave trade. Likewise, Alan Watson’s Slave Law in the Americas is pivotal to understand the colonial aspects of European slave law. Seymour Drescher’s Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery is a work of impressive breath and coverage which deals with abolition in general, but also provides a useful point d’entrée for freedom principle research specifically. Finally, Sue Peabody and Keila Grinberg’s Free Soil in the Atlantic World contains must-read essays for initial research into the freedom principle. Besides for these books, secondary literature can most easily be found using Paul Finkelman’s Slavery and Slaving in World History. This book serves as a massive bibliography for anything written related to slavery between 1900 and 1991. Since then, bibliographical supplements have been published annually in the periodical Slavery & Abolition.In the first part (Chapter 2), I use a combination of primary and secondary materials. To assess the means by which slavery was legally justified, I have made use of the authoritative Classics of International Law-series. As the series is focused on the Early Modern Period, the choice of primary material for Classical Antiquity and the Middle Ages was more eclectic.
Given the importance of Aristotle and Roman law in all of the Classics’ remarks of slavery, I have discussed the legitimation of slavery that can be found in Aristotle’s Politics and in the Corpus Iuris Civilis. Next to those, I have looked at the works of some of the most important Medieval thinkers on slavery, primarily on the basis of the references in the dated but still immensely useful R.W. Carlyle and A.J. Carlyle’s A History of Mediaeval Political Theory in the West series. To collect the necessary secondary material, I extensively made use of the online database Oxfordbibliographies, which includes concise literature lists on many relevant topics (e.g. Slavery in Dutch America and the West Indies), written by academics.For England, statutory law for this period can be found in two well-recognised collections, namely The Statutes of the Realm (pre-1713) and The Statutes at Large. The case law that I discuss can mostly be found in the first book of Catterall’s Judicial Cases Concerning American Slavery and the Negro collection. Catterall only mentions cases that came before the superior courts of the common law (King’s Bench and the Court of Common Pleas) and the Court of Chancery, Court of Star Chamber and Admiralty. For all cases in which Granville Sharp, the famous English abolitionist, was involved, Andrew Lyall’s recent book Granville Sharp’s Cases on Slavery is excellent. I have tried to refrain as much as possible from quoting unreported cases that I have not been able to consult myself (both from local and superior courts), only referencing them where I have felt it necessary. Though not primary sources of law, I use some of the pivotal treatises on English law: Glanvill, Bracton, Littleton’s New Tenures, Coke’s Commentary on Littleton, Hale’s History of the Common Law and Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England.
For France, the essential primary sources on this subject (especially royal law and customary law) are found in Sue Peabody and Pierre Boulle’s Le droit des noirs en France au temps de l’ esclavage.
This book also contains parts of the mémoires of lawyers for the few court cases related to slavery where these were published. As all of these published cases are related to proceedings before Parisian courts, I have counterbalanced this with secondary literature on the situation in other areas of France. This has been supplemented by works of seventeenth and eighteenth century French scholars.For the Low Countries, legislation can be found in the Recueil des ordonnances des Pays-Bas for the Southern Netherlands, and the various Groot placaet-boecken for the United Provinces, which contain both the laws of the States General (Staten Generaal) and of the States of Holland related to slavery. There are no published collections of cases related to slavery. Additionally, I have analysed the Generaale index op de registers der resolutien van de Heeren Staaten van Holland en Westvriesland for the period 1524–1790, to see if the issue of slaves coming to the United Provinces was ever discussed by the central authorities of Holland. (As Holland was the province most involved in the Atlantic slave trade, it made more sense to look at these resolutions rather than those of another province.)12 The results from that enquiry were then used to trace archival material for the States General, which can be found in the Dutch National Archives in The Hague.
Finally, before starting, a word on terminology. I have chosen to stay as close to the original sources in writing this work, and this also means that I sometimes employ the language of the (mainly eighteenth century) writers. When it comes to race relations, these writers used other words for the enslaved than we obviously would in the twenty-first century. English writers routinely called black slaves “blackamoor” or “negroe”. Likewise, French writers sometimes went for “nègre” and Dutch writers for “neger”. A variety of other terms were also used, which sometimes but not always also tell us more about the origins of the enslaved (which could come from Africa, but equally from the Americas or the East Indies). In my own analysis, I refer to black, coloured people, slaves or enslaved (the latter two obviously only if we know this personal status). However, when I quote primary material, I will refer to the words used by the contemporary writers, which will be made clear by italicising the word.