Slavery and a Free Land

Abstract

Historians of slavery have long been curious about the relationship between slavery and freedom.¹ Many historians, and large numbers of modern students, have been particularly intrigued (and puzzled) by the mentality of people in past time who were able to justify the slavery of others while extolling their own rights of liberties and freedom. What, to the modern Western eye, might seem inconsistent — a contradiction in attitudes and behaviour — was not of course necessarily equally obvious to people in the past. In the British case, black slavery thrived for more than two centuries in the West Indian settlements and did so, for much of its history, with relatively few objections (of any kind). Yet the years when the British slave empire emerged and prospered were also the years when political life in Britain was characterised by a long-protracted, vocal and insistent struggle for a wide range of political and social rights. By the time the major Caribbean islands had been transformed into black slave societies producing tropical staples for the benefit of the metropolis, that same metropolis had witnessed — among other changes — the triumph of parliamentary over monarchical power, and the passing of the Habeas Corpus Act in 1679. However limited those political and social rights might now seem — however hemmed in by the restraints of property, and access to them limited by poverty — contemporaries took great pride in them; the liberties of the British were viewed as the achievements of (and justification for) the years of revolution and turmoil.