Colonial laws maintained the social and physical security of English settlements in the New World. This essay compares those laws that attempted to define and regulate servants and labour in seventeenth-century Virginia and Jamaica. The laws reveal differences in the social composition of their early populations and in the relationships each colony had with the imperial government. Earlier laws reflect a greater concern with the economic value of labour. In the last two decades, however, the laws defined new social constructs that would dominate slave laws in the next century. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT];
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Journal Title Details:
39(2) : 196-210
Notes:
Reviews several books on slavery. Silver, Trade and War: Spain and America in the Making of Early Modern Europe, by Stanley J. Stein and Barbara H. Stein; Black Society in Spanish Florida, by Jane Landers; Gobernar Colonias, by Josep M. Fradera.;