Slavery, Law, and Power Project

The Slavery, Law, and Power (SLP) project focuses on primary sources that expose the debates and struggles over slavery and power in the early modern British Empire and in the new United States. At present many of these sources are buried in archives–in difficult old handwriting–and scattered across institutions, many geographically remote from each other. When some of these materials are accessible via scanned databases, they are often behind a cascade of different paywalls.  Collecting these sources will make it possible for scholars to see how the structures of power connected, or to see how those imperial structures in many ways promoted not only authoritarian governance, but also slavery. Piecing together these struggles over policies and practices requires that many of the original sources be put in conversation.  SLP seeks to enable historians, political theorists and scientists, and scholars in African American, American, and British studies to access materials that reveal how power and law, censorship and propaganda, political theory and religion, all influenced and connected to the development of racial chattel slavery–and its eventual demise–in the British Empire and the United States.

Adapted from the project website