Legislating difference: Race, law, and the codification of northern provincial society, 1620--1765.

摘要

This dissertation uses the law to reconsider the basis of race relations in the northern colonies of British America from 1620 to 1765. It employs imperial-colonial correspondence, laws, assembly and council journals, and court cases to examine the central role of legal forms in the definition of New World society and its social categories. It argues that the law expressed colonial society's core beliefs and practices, such as freedom, Protestantism, patriarchy, and personal wealth, while also designating who had access to these imperatives and privileges. As the law assumed the power to arbitrate the difficulties of colonial settlement, free and enslaved African Americans, Indians, and multi-racial persons were systematically excluded from key political, religious, economic, and political rights. New laws, which designated free and enslaved people of color as lacking in liberty, prone to anti-Christian behavior, subordinate family members, and akin to moveable property such as farm animals, emerged in the process.; As a result, an exploration into statue law can provide a novel, critical perspective on the nature of racial community in British America. The current trend in scholarship privileges economic, environmental, and demographic factors such as population growth, agricultural development, and capital flow in the formation of racial differences among African, Indian, and European peoples. This project places the dynamics of race relations squarely in the realm of law and politics, arguing that institutional factors of warfare, taxes, and metropolitan incursion were as important to the master-slave relationship as soil quality, climate, and birth rates. Perhaps the most important event to affect the basis of race relations in the northern colonies was the Glorious Revolution. The controversy surrounding the accession of William III to the English throne in 1688 proved a critical turning point in colonial statute law, shaping the way northern colonists viewed their legal priorities and in turn altering the basis of their racial divisions.