France promulgates the Code Noir

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...

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...

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...

The statute defined enslaved Africans and their descendants as property and restricted movement, testimony, and legal recourse. It entrenched racialized status in colonial law and helped make...

A group of enslaved people set fire to a building and attacked white residents in an organized revolt. Colonial authorities crushed the uprising, executed several participants, and imposed harsher...

The asiento contract granted the South Sea Company a monopoly to supply enslaved Africans to Spanish America for thirty years. The contract treated the forced migration of people as a diplomatic...