Modern international criminal law typically traces its origins to the twentieth-century Nuremberg and Tokyo trials, excluding the slave trade and abolition. Yet, as this book shows, the slave trade and abolition resound in international criminal law in multiple ways. Its central focus lies in a close examination of the often-controversial litigation, in the first part of the nineteenth century, arising from British efforts to capture slave ships, much of it before Mixed Commissions. With archival-based research into this litigation, it explores the legal construction of so-called ‘recaptives’ (slaves found on board captured slave ships). The book argues that, notwithstanding its promise of freedom, the law actually constructed recaptives restrictively. In particular, it focused on questions of intervention rather than recaptives’ rights. At the same time it shows how a critical reading of the archive reveals that recaptives contributed to litigation in important, but hitherto largely unrecognized, ways. The book is, however, not simply a contribution to the history of international law. Efforts to deliver justice through international criminal law continue to face considerable challenges and raise testing questions about the construction – and alternative construction – of victims. By inscribing the recaptive in international criminal legal history, the book offers an original contribution to these contentious issues and a reflection on critical international criminal legal history writing and its accompanying methodological and political choices.

There is a broad consensus among scholars that the idea of human rights was a product of the Enlightenment but that a self-conscious and broad-based human rights movement focused on international law only began after World War II. In this book, the nineteenth century's absence is conspicuous - few have considered that era seriously, much less written books on it. But as this author shows, the foundation of the movement that we know today was a product of one of the nineteenth century's central moral causes: the movement to ban the international slave trade.

Slavery in International Law sets out the law related to slavery and lesser servitudes, including forced labour and debt bondage; thus developing an overall understanding of the term human ‘exploitation’, which is at the heart of the definition of trafficking.

The language of international criminal law has considerable traction in global politics, and much of its legitimacy is embedded in apparently 'axiomatic' historical truths. This innovative edited collection brings together some of the world's leading international lawyers with a very clear mandate in mind: to re-evaluate ('retry') the dominant historiographical tradition in the field of international criminal law. Carefully curated, and with contributions by leading scholars, The New Histories of International Criminal Law pursues three research objectives: to bring to the fore the structure and function of contemporary histories of international criminal law, to take issue with the consequences of these histories, and to call for their demystification. The essays discern several registers on which the received historiographical tradition must be retried: tropology; inclusions/exclusions; gender; race; representations of the victim and the perpetrator; history and memory; ideology and master narratives; international criminal law and hegemonic theories; and more. This book intervenes critically in the fields of international criminal law and international legal history by bringing in new voices and fresh approaches. Taken as a whole, it provides a rich account of the dilemmas, conundrums, and possibilities entailed in writing histories of international criminal law beyond, against, or in the shadow of the master narrative.

The Law and Slavery delivers Professor Jean Allain's foundations which have led to the renaissance of the legal understanding of slavery which has transformed the landscape related to human exploitation during the early 21st Century.

This book provides a critical introduction to the core elements of international criminal law. It does so by provoking thought on what international criminal law is, or could be, by contrasting the practice of widely recognised state-based actors and institutions such as the International Criminal Court with practices associated with non-state actors in particular citizens' tribunals. International criminal law is now established as an essential legal and institutional response to atrocity. However, it faces a series of political and practical challenges. It is vital to consider its limits and potential, as well as the ways and extent to which those limitations might be addressed. Many actors with very different visions of its nature and parameters play a role in shaping the meaning of international criminal law whether that be in official or unofficial spaces. This book explores the principles and institutions of international criminal law alongside the alternative visions of it put forward by citizens' tribunals. In so doing it encourages reflection on that law's multiple meanings and usages in order to provoke consideration of what it means, and might mean, to deploy international criminal law today.

This wide-ranging book presents the first comprehensive and comparative account of the slave trade within the nations and colonial systems of the Americas. While most scholarly attention to slavery in the Americas has concentrated on international transatlantic trade, the essays in this volume focus on the slave trades within Brazil, the West Indies, and the Southern states of the United States after the closing of the Atlantic slave trade. The contributors cast new light upon questions that have framed the study of slavery in the Americas for decades. The book investigates such topics as the illegal slave trade in Cuba, the Creole slave revolt in the U.S., and the debate between pro- and antislavery factions over the interstate slave trade in the South. Together, the authors offer fresh and provocative insights into the interrelations of capitalism, sovereignty, and slavery.

Although much has been written about Scottish involvement in slavery, the contribution of Scots to the abolition of black slavery has not yet been sufficiently recognised. This book starts with a Virginian slave seeking his freedom in Scotland in 1756 and ends with the abolition of the apprenticeship scheme in the West Indian colonies in 1838. Contemporary documents and periodicals reveal a groundswell of revulsion to what was described as "e;the horrible traffik in humans"e;. Petitions to Parliament came from remote islands in Shetland as well as from large public meetings in cities. In a land steeped in religion, ministers and church leaders took the lead in giving theological support to the cause of abolition. The contributions of five London Scots who were pivotal to the campaign throughout Britain are set against opposition to abolition from many Scots with commercial interests in the slave trade and the sugar plantations. Missionaries and miners, trades guilds and lawyers all played their parts in challenging slavery. Many of their struggles and frustrations are detailed for the first time in an assessment of the unique contribution made by Scotland and the Scots to the destruction of an institution whose effects are still with us today.

The various manifestations of coerced labour between the opening up of the Atlantic world and the formal creation of Haiti.