Massachusetts Body of Liberties recognizes enslavement in limited cases

The New Laws sought to curb abuses against Indigenous peoples and restrict hereditary encomiendas, while also addressing Indigenous enslavement. Colonial elites resisted and enforcement was uneven....

The Crown granted Reynel a contract to supply enslaved Africans to Spanish America. The asiento system made trafficking a regulated imperial monopoly, with African captives treated as taxable cargo...

A privateer delivered captive Africans to Point Comfort in August 1619, where colonists exchanged food for them. This often-cited arrival is not the beginning of African presence in the Americas,...

The charter authorized a Dutch company to wage war, trade, and govern in Atlantic territories. Its later activities included conquest, plantation production, and trafficking in enslaved Africans,...

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...

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...

Barbados enacted a law for the “better ordering and governing” of enslaved Africans. It made racialized hereditary slavery a state-enforced institution, restricted movement and testimony, 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...