Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category
Anarchism, Austrian Economics, Conservatism, Definition, free market, Ideology, international law, legal polycentrism, Libertarianism, Literary Criticism, literary theory, Marxism, Neoconservativism, pluralism, Pragmatism, Transnational Law
In Arts & Letters, Austrian Economics, Conservatism, Humane Economy, Jurisprudence, Law, Law-and-Literature, Liberalism, Libertarianism, Literary Theory & Criticism, Politics, Pragmatism, Transnational Law on August 3, 2011 at 11:18 am
A few months ago, the Libertarian Alliance, a London-based think tank, published my paper on transnational law. Below is an excerpt from that paper. The piece is available for download through SSRN by clicking here, or on the website of the Libertarian Alliance by clicking here.
In 1957, reviewing Philip Jessup’s Transnational Law, James N. Hyde wrote that “[t]ransnational law is not likely to become a term of art for a new body of law.”25 Mr. Hyde was wrong. There has been a proliferation of relatively new law journals bearing “transnational law” in their titles: Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems: A Journal of the University of Iowa College of Law, Ashburn Institute Transnational Law Journal, Journal of Transnational Law & Policy, Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law, Transnational Law Review, and Columbia Journal of Transnational Law. There are LLM programs in transnational law (such as the one I am in), and there are even institutes and think-tanks devoted to the study and development of transnational law. Transnational law has in fact become the term of art for a new body of law, and here we will consider the nature and meaning of this term as well as the corpus of law it has created. It is perhaps not coincidental that the emergence of transnational law coincided with transnational poetics26 and other transnational trends in literary criticism because the legal and literary fields always seem responsive to one another.
One of the earliest references, if not the earliest reference, to the concept of transnationalism comes from the pragmatist philosopher and student of John Dewey: Randolph Bourne. Bourne’s use of the term “transnational” recalls William James’s notion of religious pluralism as non-absolute and non-monist.27 Bourne appears to have revised and extended James’s pragmatism to fit the political instead of the religious or philosophical context, although James himself came close to addressing the former context in “A Pluralistic Universe.” Bourne’s essay “Trans-National America” regarded transnationalism as a cousin of cultural pluralism, the notion that differences in belief across cultures and communities may not be equally valid but can be at least equally practical. Against essentialism, monism, and absolutism, Bourne posits a consequentialist system of polycentrism that regards multiplicity as positive and collectivism as dangerous. Society can and should be multiple and heterogeneous, not single and homogeneous, for a one-size-fits-all polis can only materialize through the stamping out of minority views and through the erasing of distinct, regional cultures. Put another way, Bourne transforms James’s varieties of religious experience28 into varieties of political experience.
Kenneth Burke, a literary critic, sometime student of pragmatism, and Marxist converted into a non-“ism” altogether, argued later in his life that ideology and fanaticism – by which he meant “the effort to impose one doctrine of motives abruptly upon a world composed of many different motivational situations”29 – were destructive missions incompatible with pluralism or democracy. Burke, who remained naively critical of the free market, nevertheless refused ideologies as simplifying what cannot be simplified: human behavior. What Burke did not realize is that free market theories, especially those of the Austrian variety, are not deterministic: they refuse to pigeonhole people or to reduce them to economic calculations; they treat humans as unpredictable and spontaneous and celebrate the sheer variety of human behavior. My point in referencing Burke is not to systematically demolish his economic preferences but to suggest that his wide-ranging theories have positive implications for our understanding of transnationalism. One could argue that Bourne and Burke were the earliest expositors of transnationalist theories tied to the practical world and that Jessup and others merely repackaged Bourne and Burke’s dicta. Regardless of whether Jessup either read or credited Bourne and Burke, the theories emanating from these two literary critics would have been in circulation at Jessup’s moment in history. Jessup, widely read as he was, probably would have encountered Bourne and Burke’s transnationalism directly or indirectly. Read the rest of this entry »
A Plea for Positivism, Bradley C. S. Watson, Claremont Review of Books, Conservatism, Constitution, Constitutional Illusions and Anchoring Truths: The Touchstone of the Natural Law, Edwin Meese, Fred Hutchison, Hadley Arkes, III, jurisprudence, law, Michael M. Uhlmann, Murray Rothbard, Natural Law, Natural Law Man, positive law, Robert P George, The Language of Law and the Foundations of American Constitutionalism
In American History, Arts & Letters, Conservatism, History, Humanities, Jurisprudence, Law, Legal Education & Pedagogy, News and Current Events, Politics on July 14, 2011 at 5:30 pm
Three days ago, the Claremont Review of Books posted two interesting reviews on jurisprudence. The first, “Natural Law Man,” is a reprint of a piece that appeared in the Winter/Spring 2010-11 issue. Here, Michael M. Uhlmann praises Hadley Arkes’s Constitutional Illusions and Anchoring Truths: The Touchstone of the Natural Law. In the second review, “A Plea for Positivism,” Bradley C. S. Watson comments on Gary L. McDowell’s The Language of Law and the Foundations of American Constitutionalism. (Click here to read McDowell’s discussion of the book with Edwin Meese, III.) Both reviews situate their subjects alongside conservative theory. Both books are worth reading.
The prevailing tendency among some uncritical commentators is to binarize natural law theory and positive law theory as polar opposites. That’s understandable if the terms “natural law” and “positive law” are reduced to cliché. But cliché, although helpful to students first getting introduced to concepts, doesn’t do justice to the complexities and challenges of natural law or positive law jurisprudence. In any event, it is curious that both natural law theorists and positive law theorists claim to have influenced, and to have been influenced by, conservatism. That fact alone suggests that natural law theory and positive law theory are complicated. Here are some readings that will complicate the complicated: Murray Rothbard’s excerpts “Introduction to Natural Law” and “Natural Law versus Positive Law,” F. Russell Hittinger’s short pieces “Natural Law” and “The Rule of Law and Law of Nature,” Robert P. George’s “Witherspoon Lecture,” and Fred Hutchison’s overview “Natural Law and Conservatism.”
Aristotle, Auburn University, Bioethics, Brookings Institution, Children, Cloning, Composition, English Departments, Eric Cohen, Ethics and Public Policy Center, Forensic Discourse, Health & Medicine, Hoover Institution, James Madison Program in American Ideals & Institutions, law, Malpractice, Organ Transplants, Pedagogy, Physician Assisted Suicide, Princeton University, Problems and Possibilities of Modern Genetics, Robert P George, Surrogacy, Teaching, The Constitution, The New Atlantis, Writing
In Advocacy, Arts & Letters, Bioethics, Communication, Creative Writing, Creativity, Humanities, Jurisprudence, Law, Law-and-Literature, Legal Education & Pedagogy, News and Current Events, Pedagogy, Politics, Rhetoric, Rhetoric & Communication, Teaching, Writing on July 6, 2011 at 8:33 pm
Last fall, I was assigned to teach a course called “Health & Medicine.” Because I know little about health or medicine, I was concerned. The subject of the course was writing, so I decided to craft a syllabus to facilitate classroom discussion and textual argument. Here is the course description as stated on my syllabus:
Forensic discourse is one of three forms of classical rhetoric as defined by Aristotle. It focuses on the relationship between language and law. This semester we will explore forensic discourse in the context of health and medicine and consider the relationship of law to such issues as physician assisted suicide, surrogacy, cloning, informed consent, malpractice, and organ transplants. Readings on ethics and philosophy will inform the way you think about these issues.
Your grade will not depend on how much you learn about law, but on how you use language to argue about and with law. Because the facts of any case are rarely clear-cut, you will need to understand both sides of every argument. Your writing assignments will require you to argue on behalf of both plaintiffs and defendants (or prosecutors and defendants) and to rebut the arguments of opposing counsel. You will develop different tactics for persuading your audience (judges, attorneys, etc.), and you will become skilled in the art of influence.
During the semester, your class will interview one attorney, one judge, and one justice sitting on the Supreme Court of Alabama.
My students came from mostly nursing and pre-medical backgrounds. A few were science majors of some kind, and at least two were engineering majors.
The students were also at varying stages in their academic progress: some were freshmen, some were sophomores, two were juniors, and at least one was a senior. Throughout the semester, I was impressed by students’ ability to extract important issues from dense legal readings and articulate complicated reasoning in nuanced and intelligent ways.
I thought about this “Health & Medicine” class this week when I came across this article published by the Brookings Institution. The title of the article is “The Problems and Possibilities of Modern Genetics: A Paradigm for Social, Ethical, and Political Analysis.” The authors are Eric Cohen and Robert P. George. Cohen is editor of The New Atlantis and an adjunct fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University, the director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals & Institutions, and a fellow at the Hoover Institution. Read the rest of this entry »
Caribbean, Colony, Early American Literature, Legal Discourse, Nicole N. Aljoe, Project Muse, Rule of Law, slave narratives, Slavery, Slavery and the Law, Testimony, University of North Carolina Press, West Indian Slave Narratives
In Advocacy, American History, Arts & Letters, Civil Procedure, History, Humanities, Jurisprudence, Law, Law-and-Literature, Laws of Slavery, Literary Theory & Criticism, Nineteenth-Century America, Politics, Rhetoric, Slavery, The West Indies on July 5, 2011 at 7:21 pm
Nicole N. Aljoe has published an intriguing article in Volume 46 (issue no. 2) of Early American Literature (2011), which is published by the University of North Carolina Press. The article is titled “‘Going to Law’: Legal Discourse and Testimony in Early West Indian Slave Narratives.” It is available here on Project Muse. The abstract is below:
Despite the fact that the courts had not proven consistently helpful in their quests for freedom, British West Indian slaves frequently consulted them in order to invoke the rule of law and pursue their rights. Several Caribbean historians have documented the ways in which slaves in the West Indies participated in formal legal arenas almost from the initial days of colonization and claimed the courts as one of their own forums for resolving disputes and asserting those few rights written into the various parliamentary acts intended to ameliorate the conditions of the enslaved and passed in England and its Caribbean colonies from 1788 onward. Indeed, slaves in the West Indies participated in the courts systems as plaintiffs as well as defendants more frequently than previously thought. And although the courts were certainly used by those in power to oppress slaves, women, children, and the poor, as well as to “legitimate [the] blatantly repressive regime” of slavery, they nevertheless provided a forum for those who did not write the laws in question to use the courts to ensure the legal protection of their “natural rights” (Lazarus-Black, “John Grant’s” 154). Thus, in another of the seemingly endless paradoxes inherent to the British imperial slave system, slaves—objects of property, yet human subjects—could, in certain situations, use the courts in the West Indies and in England on their own behalf, as legal agents to affirm their status as legal subjects deserving of the law’s unbiased protection, and judgment.
Antislavery, Consequentialist, contextualist, David F. Ericson, deontological, Disunionism, Frederick Douglass, George Fitzhugh, James H. Hammond, Liberalism, Lincoln, Lydia Maria Child, Nation, New York University Press, North, Proslavery, Secession, Slavery, South, The Debate Over Slavery, Unionism, William Lloyd Garrison
In American History, Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, Communication, History, Humanities, Laws of Slavery, Liberalism, Nineteenth-Century America, Politics, Rhetoric, Rhetoric & Communication, Slavery on June 7, 2011 at 10:44 am
Ericson, David F. The Debate Over Slavery: Antislavery and Proslavery Liberalism in Antebellum America. New York: New York University Press, 2000.
“The slavery issue in the antebellum United States was defined centrally by the failure of a people to bear witness to its own liberal principles” (90).
Chapter One
Rhetoric matters, and this book is about the anti- and pro- slavery rhetoric during the antebellum period. Ericson argues that rhetoric separated a nation that was not so “divided against itself” as people assume. Both anti- and pro-slavery rhetoric appealed to “liberalism,” according to Ericson, and thus the overall discourse at that time, in this country, under those circumstances, smacked of “liberty” and “equality”: concepts rooted in the mores of Christianity, Republicanism, and discursive pluralism. Today we might lump these concepts into classical liberalism or neo-liberalism, but Ericson suggests that we should not lump concepts the way “consensus scholars” do; rather, he suggests that we accept that liberalism, in all its manifestations, is a complex and multifarious tradition inherited and adapted in many ways and for many purposes. He endorses the approach of “multiple-traditions” scholars that reveals how advocates on both sides of the slavery debate attempted to conform their arguments to the tradition of liberalism.
Chapter Two
Ericson spells out liberalism and distinguishes it from “non-liberal” thought: “I define liberal ideas as a general set of ideas that appeal to personal freedom, equal worth, government by consent, and private ownership of property as core human values. Conversely, nonliberal ideas appeal to some notion of natural inequality based on race, gender, ethnicity, religion, or birthright that denies those liberal values to significant numbers of human beings” (14). The proslavery liberal logic went as follows: “The institution was a just institution because slavery was the status in which African Americans could enjoy the most practical liberty in light of their present circumstances, which rendered them incapable of prospering as free men alongside European Americans” (14-15). The antislavery liberal logic went as follows: “The Southern institution of racial slavery was an unjust institution because it effectively denied that African Americans were men with a birthright to freedom equal to that of European Americans” (14). The antislavery non-liberal logic went as follows: “The Southern institution of racial slavery was an unjust institution because it effectively denied African Americans the opportunity to work, worship, and learn at the feet of a superior white/Anglo-Saxon/Protestant race” (15). The proslavery non-liberal logic went as follows: “The institution was a just institution because African Americans constituted an inferior race consigned by nature or God to be the slaves of a superior white/Anglo-Saxon/Protestant race” (15). Read the rest of this entry »
Catharine Clinton and Michele Gillespie, David Brion Davis, Edmund S. Morgan, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Eugene Genovese, Fogel and Engerman, Historiography, Interracial Sex, Ira Berlin, James Hugo Johnston, Laws of Slavery, Loving v. Virginia, Miscegenation Laws, Orlando Patterson, Paul Finkelman, Peter Kolchin, Slavery, Stanley Elkins, Virginia, Winthrop Jordan
In American History, Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, Communication, Economics, History, Law, Laws of Slavery, Legal Education & Pedagogy, Nineteenth-Century America, Politics, Slavery, The Literary Table, Thomas Jefferson, Western Civilization on May 17, 2011 at 8:28 am
The following post appeared at The Literary Table.
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Miscegenation laws, also known as anti-miscegenation laws, increasingly have attracted the attention of scholars of slavery over the last half-century. Scholarship on slavery first achieved eminence with the publication of such texts as Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery (1944), Frank Tannenbaum’s Slave and Citizen (1946), Kenneth Stampp’s The Peculiar Institution (1956), Stanley Elkins’s Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (1959), and Leon F. Litwack’s North of Slavery (1961). When Winthrop D. Jordan published his landmark study White Over Black in 1968, miscegenation statutes during the era of American slavery were just beginning to fall within historians’ critical purview. The Loving v. Virginia case, initiated in 1959 and resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1967, no doubt played an important role in activating scholarship on this issue, especially in light of the Civil Rights movement that called attention to various areas of understudied black history.
In Loving, the Supreme Court struck down Virginia’s miscegenation statutes forbidding marriage between whites and non-whites and ruled that the racial classifications of the statutes restricted the freedom to marry and therefore violated the Equal Protection Clause and Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In the wake of Loving, scholarship on miscegenation laws gained traction, although miscegenation laws during the era of American slavery have yet to receive extensive critical treatment. Several articles and essays have considered miscegenation laws and interracial sex during the era of American slavery, but only a few book-length analyses are devoted to these issues, and of these analyses, most deal with interracial sex and miscegenation laws in the nineteenth-century antebellum period, or from the period of Reconstruction up through the twentieth-century. This historiographical essay explores interracial sex and miscegenation laws in the corpus of historical writing about slavery. It does so by contextualizing interracial sex and miscegenation laws within broader trends in the study of slavery. Placing various historical texts in conversation with one another, this essay speculates about how and why, over time, historians treated interracial sex and miscegenation laws differently and with varying degrees of detail. By no means exhaustive, this essay merely seeks to point out one area of slavery studies that stands for notice, interrogation, and reconsideration. The colonies did not always have miscegenation laws; indeed, miscegenation laws did not spring up in America until the late seventeenth-century, and they remained in effect in various times and regions until just forty-four years ago. The longevity and severity of these laws make them worthy our continued attention, for to understand miscegenation laws is to understand more fully the logic and formal expression of racism. Read the rest of this entry »
Austrian Economics and Literature, Conservatism, David Mamet, Edmond, James Seaton, Kenneth Branagh, Literature and the Economics of Liberty, Mises Institute, Paul Cantor, Stephen Cox, The Weekly Standard, Theater, Theatre, Troy Camplin
In Arts & Letters, Austrian Economics, Conservatism, Economics, Humane Economy, Literary Theory & Criticism, Politics, Rhetoric, Theatre on May 17, 2011 at 8:06 am
The following post appeared at Austrian Economics and Literature.
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Although I do not read The Weekly Standard unless James Seaton has contributed an article or review (read Seaton’s review of Paul Cantor and Stephen Cox’s Literature & The Economics of Liberty at this link), I was pleased and intrigued by this recent article by Andrew Ferguson that addresses the political conversion of America’s most famous living playright, David Mamet. Ferguson opens the piece with this:
Three decades ago David Mamet became known among the culture-consuming public for writing plays with lots of dirty words. “You’re f—ing f—ed” was a typically Mamet-like line, appearing without the prim dashes back in a day when playwrights were still struggling to get anything stronger than a damn on stage. Mamet’s profanity even became a popular joke: So there’s this panhandler who approaches a distinguished looking gentleman and asks for money. The man replies pompously: “ ‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be’ —William Shakespeare.” The beggar looks at him. “ ‘F— you’ —David Mamet.”
Some critics said his plays were pointlessly brutal. As a consequence he became famous and wealthy. It didn’t hurt when it dawned on people that many of his plays, for all the profanity and brutality, were works of great power and beauty, and often very funny to boot. When people began to say, as they increasingly did by the middle 1980s, that the author of Speed-the-Plow and American Buffalo and Lakeboat had earned a place in the top rank of the century’s dramatists, no one thought that was a joke. He took to writing for the movies (The Verdict, The Untouchables, Wag the Dog), won a Pulitzer Prize for one of his masterpieces (Glengarry Glen Ross), and moved to Holly-wood, where he became a respected and active player in the showbiz hustle.
Ferguson goes on to describe a speech at Stanford in which Mamet expressed his disenchantment with higher education:
Higher ed, he said, was an elaborate scheme to deprive young people of their freedom of thought. He compared four years of college to a lab experiment in which a rat is trained to pull a lever for a pellet of food. A student recites some bit of received and unexamined wisdom—“Thomas Jefferson: slave owner, adulterer, pull the lever”—and is rewarded with his pellet: a grade, a degree, and ultimately a lifelong membership in a tribe of people educated to see the world in the same way.
“If we identify every interaction as having a victim and an oppressor, and we get a pellet when we find the victims, we’re training ourselves not to see cause and effect,” he said. Wasn’t there, he went on, a “much more interesting . . . view of the world in which not everything can be reduced to victim and oppressor?”
This led to a full-throated defense of capitalism, a blast at high taxes and the redistribution of wealth, a denunciation of affirmative action, prolonged hymns to the greatness and wonder of the United States, and accusations of hypocrisy toward students and faculty who reviled business and capital even as they fed off the capital that the hard work and ingenuity of businessmen had made possible. The implicit conclusion was that the students in the audience should stop being lab rats and drop out at once, and the faculty should be ashamed of themselves for participating in a swindle—a “shuck,” as Mamet called it. Read the rest of this entry »
Abuse, Chattel, Civil Law, Contract Law, Criminal Law, Emancipation, Evidence, Hireling Contracts, Homicide, Jurisdiction, Laws of Slavery, Liability, Manumission, Mortgaging, Outsider, Police, Property, Race, Rape, Sales, Sex, Slavery, Southern Slavery and the Law, Succession, Testimony, Thomas D. Morris, Trials, University of North Carolina Press, Violence
In American History, Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, History, Jurisprudence, Law, Laws of Slavery, Legal Education & Pedagogy, Nineteenth-Century America, Politics, Slavery, Western Civilization on April 20, 2011 at 4:23 pm
Introduction
The introduction serves as a brief historiographical essay that situates Morris’s text alongside other prominent texts and authors in the field. Morris uses the introduction to familiarize readers with, among other things, the differences between common law and courts of equity, the differences between civil and criminal law, and other relevant information such as the fact that statutes in England and America are mostly products of the nineteenth century. Morris believes that slavery reinforced English racism in that the English were predisposed to view Africans as inferior and so used the law to categorize racial difference and justify slave property. Morris suggests that experts can skip most of his introduction probably because the introduction is, as I have suggested, a piece about historiography rather than a history in itself.
PART ONE
Sources: Racial and Legal
Chapter One: The Function of Race in Southern Slave Law
Popular science maintained that blacks were inferior, and this understanding was reflected in law. Indians were not enslaved as often or in the same numbers as blacks. The presumptions and definitions of “slave” had to do with blackness; therefore, the legal status of mulattoes was often in flux. Law had to define people by race and then determine their free or slave status afterwards. Several Southern states adopted laws allowing free blacks to sell themselves as slaves.
Chapter Two: The Sources of Southern Slave Law
Some Southern slave law derived from Roman law; some derived from English common law. The origins of Southern slave law are traceable to at least Virginia. The degree to which Virginia followed or revised the common law is debatable. In early Virginia, many blacks were treated as indentured servants, not slaves. Not until the mid-seventeenth century did blacks become routinely associated with slavery. There is little evidence to suggest that Virginians had a sophisticated understanding of ancient Roman or other European legal traditions. A child’s status as free or slave followed the mother under the judicial principle of partus sequitur ventrem. The traditional common law rule was that the child’s status followed the father. Some appellate courts tried to link their opinions to the precedents of civil law or the Roman law on slavery. Some judges analogized slavery to English villenage. The roots of slavery in Hebraic tradition and Biblical literature had an enormous influence among nineteenth-century Southern whites. Read the rest of this entry »
Alain de Benoist, Alexandre Lefebvre, Clyde Wilson, Counterpunch, Critical Theory, Hart, jurisprudence, law, Literary Criticism, Paul Gottfried, Paul Piconne, Russell A. Berman, Telos, Wittgenstein
In Arts & Letters, Communication, Jurisprudence, Law-and-Literature, Literary Theory & Criticism, News and Current Events, Politics, Rhetoric, Rhetoric & Communication, Writing on April 13, 2011 at 10:32 pm
One of my favorite journals, Telos, has published an essay that might interest readers of this site. The essay, by Alexandre Lefebvre, is titled “Law and the Ordinary: Hart, Wittgenstein, Jurisprudence.” Here is the abstract:
This essay argues that H. L. A. Hart’s concept of jurisprudence in the first chapter of The Concept of Law is strongly influenced by the relationship that Wittgenstein establishes between ordinary and metaphysical language. The article is divided into three sections. The first section shows how jurisprudence emerges as a denial of ordinary language in its pursuit of a definition of law. The second section traces Hart’s use of ordinary language to identify idleness or emptiness in jurisprudence. The third section presents Hart’s conception of his work as therapeutic in its attempt to lead jurisprudence back to the everyday.
Telos is one of the few literary-theoretical journals that regularly challenges the critical and political orthodoxy that pits itself, ironically, as the unorthodox, progressive, or transgressive.
Indeed, Telos seriously considers repressed, unpopular, and unapproved thoughts and theories. It complicates “conservative” and “liberal” as meaningful categories of discourse.
Having published such controversial authors as Paul Gottfried, Clyde Wilson, Alain de Benoist and others who situate themselves on the right-wing of the political spectrum, Telos is committed to contemplation and speculation, to profound and difficult ideas and not fashionable or typical recitations of mainstream opinions.
The journal has a long history of interrogating and revising critical theory and critiquing culture and society, and it continues to publish notable scholarship in traditions both left and right, although the signifiers left and right are not useful starting points from which to analyze anything that appears in this journal.
Paul Piconne was the founder and long-term editor of Telos. Piconne died in 2004. Today the editor is Russell A. Berman. The only publication as daring and interesting as Telos is Counterpunch, a political newsletter and not an academic journal. I urge readers of this site to read both Telos and Counterpunch as often and as closely as possible.
American History, court cases, domestic slave trade, Harvard University Press, New Orleans, paternalism, Slave Market, slave narratives, slave traders, Slavery, Soul by Soul, Southern History, Walter Johnson
In American History, Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, History, Nineteenth-Century America, Politics, Rhetoric, Slavery on April 9, 2011 at 4:01 pm
Introduction
The focus of this book is on nineteenth-century New Orleans and the slave market that emerged then and there. More than other workings of slavery, slave markets reduced humans to commodities with prices. In particular, this book is interested in the story of slave showrooms, which held up to 100 slaves and where appraisals, accountings, back-room dealings, and other activities took place. The book attributes the slave trade to mercantilism whereby colonial imports serviced and stocked metropolitan centers and generated profits secured for both state-sponsored companies and the monopoly-granting state itself. Companies with well-connected leaders and government ties could gain state privileges and favors and receive special monopoly licenses to dominate trade, first in goods such as tobacco, indigo, rice, cotton, coffee, and so on, and later in human beings. The ban of the international slave trade in 1808 did not lead to the reduction or softening of slavery, but rather to new shapes and manifestations of slavery, especially as slave populations moved increasingly from the upper to the lower South. The ban led, more importantly for the purposes of this book, to the domestic slave trade. The domestic slave trade intensified during the rise of the cotton kingdom. The price of slaves changed with the price of cotton until the 1850s. Read the rest of this entry »
The Literary Lawyer: A Forum for the Legal and Literary Communities 