ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the way that international slave trade repression law framed its subjects. It shows how slave trade repression law commodified slaves and recaptives directly by placing an economic value on them through awards of compensation and indirectly by enabling conditions by which recaptives generated wealth for others. The chapter presents an analysis of how the commodification of recaptives and the property relations running through international slave trade repression law impacted on the legal construction of recaptives. It provides some broader historical context to contemporary debates about the construction and representation of victims in international criminal law. Prize, the basis for international slave trade repression law, as Benton and Ford have shown, was concerned with questions about property rights. Legal emancipation was not simply about the grant of freedom. There were different degrees of freedom: freedom with or without full emancipation and its grant was linked to the broader economies of abolition.
