Creating a Common Law of Slavery for England and its Empire

BeyondSomerset?: Slavery and the Temporality of Law

“…have not understood that Butts was ever precedent"that the argument might be pushed further. 16 For what was this "feudalism," really? As Brewer remarks toward the end of the article, slavery's "feudalism" was "a bastard innovation associated with absolutism and with a particularly powerful form of capitalist ownership," a past invented and located in an "ancient" temporality whose purpose was to legitimate a contemporary governing regime of absolutist capitalism.…”