Virginia establishes hereditary status through the mother

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...

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 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...

Parliament ended the Royal African Company’s exclusive privilege and opened English trafficking to independent merchants. Competition increased the scale of forced transportation, while state policy...