The James Somerset case has been the object of inquiry for scholars investigating the history of slavery, the African presence in Britain, labour conditions in the British Empire and slavery in the American colonies. This chapter argues that the issue of race was in fact fundamental to Somerset's case. England in the eighteenth century and London in particular was racially diverse. Eighteenth-century Britain's visual culture yields a rich record of black presence in England, especially the portraits of wealthy, absentee landlords surrounded by their families, servants and slaves. For many legal scholars in later cases, discussions of the status of slaves in England revolved around whether they considered villeinage a precedent for chattel slavery. Through the repudiation of the analogy between villeinage and chattel slavery, law became the means of separating English from non-English and colonial from metropolitan. The freedom and inheritance of genuine natural born subjects' constituted whiteness as a metropolitan attribute while slavery and blackness were colonial.