Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- ENLIGHTENED LEGAL EDUCATION
- THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE GLASGOW LAW SCHOOL
- ENLIGHTENED CRITIQUE: CRIME, COURTS, AND SLAVERY
- 10 John Millar's Lectures on Scots Criminal Law
- 11 Hamesucken and the Major Premiss in the Libel 1672–1770: Criminal Law in the Age of Enlightenment
- 12 Ethics and the Science of Legislation: Legislators, Philosophers, and Courts in Eighteenth-Century Scotland
- 13 Stoicism, Slavery, and Law: Grotian Jurisprudence and its Reception
- CRITIQUES: LITERATURE AND LEGAL HISTORY
- Index
13 - Stoicism, Slavery, and Law: Grotian Jurisprudence and its Reception
from ENLIGHTENED CRITIQUE: CRIME, COURTS, AND SLAVERY
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 October 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- ENLIGHTENED LEGAL EDUCATION
- THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE GLASGOW LAW SCHOOL
- ENLIGHTENED CRITIQUE: CRIME, COURTS, AND SLAVERY
- 10 John Millar's Lectures on Scots Criminal Law
- 11 Hamesucken and the Major Premiss in the Libel 1672–1770: Criminal Law in the Age of Enlightenment
- 12 Ethics and the Science of Legislation: Legislators, Philosophers, and Courts in Eighteenth-Century Scotland
- 13 Stoicism, Slavery, and Law: Grotian Jurisprudence and its Reception
- CRITIQUES: LITERATURE AND LEGAL HISTORY
- Index
Summary
INTRODUCTION: THE PROBLEM OF SLAVERY
The late Sir Moses Finley, in his well-known work, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology, asserted that:
The one sphere in which the ancients could, and did, provide assistance [i.e. to early modern defenders of slavery] was the practical one of law. Roman law offered unbroken continuity, first through the Germanic codes, then through the revival of Roman law in the later Middle Ages. The basic texts survived in more than sufficient quantity and there were learned commentaries. Hence the Europeans who peopled the New World with imported African slaves had a ready-made legal system at their disposal, which they adopted almost in toto, modifying it slowly to meet certain conditions, for example, in the eventual restriction of manumission to a minimum.
The extent to which the colonisers of the New World did in fact import Roman rules on slavery is an interesting one that will not be dealt with here, other than to remark that it was not really the straightforward adoption Finley implies. Finley in fact comments that “the defenders of slavery” had difficulty in finding acceptable evidence or argument from the ancient world with which to support the institution:
Aristotle offered no more than learned embroidery to the main argument, which rested on Scripture. To justify the enslavement of God's creatures, the support of God was needed, not of history or of pagan philosophy, which knew neither sin nor baptism.
Finley is much concerned to explore the attitude of thinkers of the Enlightenment (whom he sees as varied and somewhat ambiguous) and nineteenth-century and more modern historians to the phenomenon of ancient slavery. The one important group of writers whom he ignores are the secular natural lawyers of the seventeenth century, whose works strongly influenced the philosophes whose attitudes he finds so intriguing. In this paper, I shall argue that the advocates of slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries could find in their works an apology for slavery and arguments in its favour that legitimated it in the New World and elsewhere.
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- Enlightenment, Legal Education, and CritiqueSelected Essays on the History of Scots Law, Volume 2, pp. 364 - 398Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2015