Australia and New Zealand Legal History Annual Conference: Receiving Laws/Giving Laws

Description

'Colonial Practices: Mediating Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Scotland' This paper examined how Scots law managed the presence in Scotland of enslaved men and women of African and Indian origin. It did so through adopting assumptions about the position of African and Indian people acquired through enthusiastic Scottish participation in the first British Empire. Scots law did not explicitly endorse slavery, though it probably came closer to doing so than English law; but it obtained enough ambiguity that allowed colonial legal practices to translocate to Scotland, and thereby create a working regime supportive of holding Africans and Indians as enslaved, with mechanisms for sale, transmission by inheritance, and emancipation. Colonial assumptions became embedded in Scottish legal practice, through a set of social and racial assumptions endorsed in particular by a legal profession greatly implicate in in slave-owning on Scotland and particularly in the Caribbean. This translocation of colonial practices allowed Scots law, drawing on an ambiguous doctrinal background, to mediate between the tensions created by the presence of enslaved individuals in a country and jurisdiction that did not explicitly endorse slavery and in which the inhabitants considered themselves as a free people. The tensions were finally resolved by Scotland's "free soil" case, Knight v. Wedderburn (1778), which used anthropological and historical evidence to challenge a natural-law based argument in favour of slavery, and which led to a general forgetting of the support slavery once received.

Period	Dec 2012
Event type	Conference
Location	Sydney, AustraliaShow on map