The old world and the intellectual history of American slavery

A series of recent books examining the intellectual history of American slavery points to the continuing influence of European ideas not only on the practice of enslavement and subsequent justifications of it, but also on the post-Civil War historiography of the phenomenon. In The Intellectual Origins of American Slavery, John Harpham points to the importance of Roman law categories and arguments in justifying the initial practice by which certain individuals – not for reasons of their race, but because they had been made captive in war or as punishment for crimes – found themselves enslaved. The presumption of Roman law favoured freedom, but explained why, in certain instances, this could be lost. Keidrick Roy in American Dark Age points to a fascination in the antebellum South with Europe's medieval past, whereby comparisons of the plantation system with feudalism and the paternalism it supposedly engendered served to soften perceptions of the exploitative character of slavery. Scott Spillman in Making Sense of Slavery reviews the intellectual history of American slavery between the mid-eighteenth century and the present, first as a contested presence in American life and then after the Civil War as the subject of historical investigation.