Barbados enacts a comprehensive slave code

The ship returned from the Caribbean carrying enslaved Africans and is often identified as an early New England voyage in the Atlantic trade. Its cargo linked New England commerce to Caribbean...

The legal code permitted enslavement of captives taken in just wars and people sold into bondage by others. Its language shows colonial lawmakers creating legal openings for enslavement while claiming...

Eleven Black residents petitioned for freedom for themselves and their families, citing decades of service and asking for land. The Dutch authorities granted conditional freedom while keeping their...

The assembly passed a law that purported to limit service to ten years or age twenty-four. The law was weakly enforced and the colony continued slave trading and slaveholding. The gap between...

The English conquest brought Jamaica into an expanding plantation empire. Enslaved Africans and Indigenous people were forced into labor under changing imperial rulers, while Spanish-speaking and...

The statute made children’s legal status follow that of their mother, securing hereditary slavery for children born to enslaved women. It converted sexual violence and family separation into an...

The law declared that baptism did not alter an enslaved person’s condition. It blocked an older route by which Christian conversion might challenge bondage and subordinated religious claims to...

Charles II chartered the Royal African Company, giving it a privileged role in English trade with West Africa. The company transported captive Africans and traded commodities, while royal and elite...

The ordinance regulated slavery and racial hierarchy in French colonies, including the Caribbean. It mandated Catholicism and set rules governing enslaved people while affirming slaveholders’...

Four Germantown Quakers submitted a petition questioning the morality of buying and selling people. Written amid Quaker participation in slaveholding, the protest challenged the practice through...