ABSTRACT
Despite the year-long celebrations surrounding the bicentennial of the abolition of the slave trade in Britain in 2008, the terms ‘slavery’, ‘Britain’, and ‘New England’ still seem at odds with modern conceptions of the enslavement of people of African descent. New Englanders, for the most part, are unaware of how common slavery was in their region, and often congratulate themselves for largely avoiding that historical travesty. In Britain, the fact that abolition occurred before it did in America also makes slavery appear somehow more benign as it is temporally, as well as geographically, distant. In both places there is still a belief that slavery was something that occurred elsewhere – in the American South or in the Caribbean – and that through the tenacity of good white people the heinous practice was finally abolished. While there is some truth to this, it is also true that laws that eventually allowed for abolition in both places rested on similar legal systems, and that slaves themselves often took advantage of those juridical structures to successfully sue for their freedom, in ways that were unavailable to them either in the American South or the West Indies.
