Bonds of Empire: The English Origins of Slave Law in South Carolina and British Plantation America, 1660–1783 by Lee B. Wilson (review)

Abstract

The preamble to the first comprehensive English slave code—passed in Barbados in 1661—justified the creation of this set of laws by arguing that in all of the “Lawes of England” there was “noe tract to guide us where to walke, nor any rule sett us, how to governe such Slaves.”1 This would suggest, as some colonial American historians have surmised, that slavery constituted a radical departure from English legal traditions. Lee B. Wilson’s Bonds of Empire offers a counterpoint. By looking at a more comprehensive set of legal practices undergirding slavery in the British Atlantic, Wilson is able to stress the continuity of English legal systems in the development of colonial slave law. She argues that colonial slave law was not “a legal aberration” (3) or “beyond the pale of English imperial legal history” (5); rather, it “was a natural extension” of the English “legal system” (10). Bonds of Empire is nominally about slave law in South Carolina, but it is really much broader and more ambitious because Wilson extends her analysis to the Caribbean colonies—particularly Jamaica—and to the maritime world. Her book follows a loose chronological trajectory from the late seventeenth century through the end of the eighteenth century. The chapters trace that arc while remaining thematically organized around the concepts embedded in private law sources such as the conditional bonds used to transfer enslaved property, the records of the Vice-Admiralty Courts, and the records of the Board of Police, which governed Charleston during the American Revolution. Wilson relies on her legal training to shed light on how these records, which most scholars have overlooked, illuminate practices related to slavery. By focusing on such sources, Wilson offers a deeper appreciation of the ways in which English law buttressed the colonists’ “commercial need to treat slaves as things” (261). Bonds of Empire clearly demonstrates that the prescriptive slave codes that have drawn so much attention from slavery historians were only a narrow subset of a far more expansive body of slave law. “Bloody and punitive,” the slave codes addressed the slaves as potential criminal actors in need of social control, and they focused on “stripping enslaved people of the rights” (10) of freeborn English people. The “viscerally shocking” nature of these