# Novel Constitutions and the Making of Race - Portail Universitaire du droit

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> Description : novel constitutions and the making of race, a literary and legal history of slavery in the anglophone atlantic, 1688–1818, présentation de l’éditeur ...

## Parution

*A Literary and Legal History of Slavery in the Anglophone Atlantic, 1688–1818*

- **ISBN** : 978-0-197-91786-2
- **Éditeur** : Oxford University Press

## Résumé

Présentation de l’éditeur
Novel Constitutions argues that Anglo-American racial slavery emerged from a seventeenth-century English constitutional crisis exported into the western Atlantic through Stuart imperial expansion. In this crisis, divine-right absolutism collided with the English people’s ancient constitutional claims to life, liberty, and property. As the Stuart monarchy pursued policies that elevated royal prerogative over the common law, imperial governance developed new procedures that severed kinship, alienated labor, and converted human persons of African descent into perpetual chattels—simultaneously transforming some English subjects into colonial slavocrats. These practices of asserting absolute power over other human beings constitute the original sin of American slavery: a profane attempt to assume godlike dominion over human beings. This study names these transatlantic legal improvisations “novel constitutions,” practices that infused absolutism into the very constitutional idioms meant to restrain it. Reading literature alongside statutes, slave codes, charters, and landmark legal decisions, the book traces the rise of racial, chattel slavery as a constitutional process through which race itself was produced in its modern form, binding hereditary rights and constitutional protections to human complexion. By reconceiving slavery and anti-slavery as competing constitutional projects in the anglophone Atlantic world, Novel Constitutions reframes the American founding as both an outcome of imperial slavocracy and a still-unfinished anti-slavery ambition.
Sarah Marsh, Associate Professor of English, Seton Hill University
Sommaire
Introduction: Constitutions Ancient and Novel
1 Imoinda’s Rebellion: Sovereignty, Slavery, and the Ancient Constitution in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko
2 “My Reign, or My Captivity”: The Ancient Constitution in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe
3 Olaudah Equiano Petitions the Queen: Christian Constitutionalism in The Interesting Narrative
4 “Disguised Directions for Escape”: Benjamin Banneker’s Celestial Maps and the Science of Emancipation
5 “One Wish for Air and Liberty”: The Returns of Novel Constitutionalism and the Anti-Slavery Argument in Mansfield Park
6 “I Was Not Even of the Same Nature as Man”: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the Novel Ends of the Ancient Constitution


## Métadonnées

- **Catégorie** : Parutions
- **Publié** : 2026-10-10

## Tags

Droit constitutionnel, Droit et littérature, Droit public, Droits de l'homme, Histoire du droit, Histoire du droit, Histoire politique

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