Sub-Saharan Africa was on the threshold of a new and violent era in the second half of the fifteenth century. The ensuing four centuries would see innovative forms of military organisation, novel cultures of militarism underpinning such systems, and new wars, as well as new ways of fighting them. There were often different factors at work in different regions; the presence of external drivers was a key distinction between Atlantic Africa and the rest of the continent, for instance. However, warfare across early modern Africa had much in common, in terms of the aim to control factor endowments, to maximise population, and to construct enduring ideological systems, whether territorially or culturally defined. In some ways – certainly in terms of the underlying trends and broad contours of Africa’s military history – the existence or absence of external intrusion is a distraction, however significant it was in particular places at particular times. The outcome of the processes in motion between c. 1450 and c. 1850 was an expansion in military scale, the professionalisation of soldiery, the adoption of new weaponry, and the militarisation of the polity – whether ‘state-based’ or otherwise. The militarisation of African polities and societies was an ongoing process between the fifteenth and the nineteenth century, a period which in many ways witnessed the laying of the foundations of modern African political systems; this would culminate in a veritable military revolution in the nineteenth century, a transformation in the organisation and culture of violence, without which Europe’s later partition of the continent cannot properly be understood.

In the Doctrine of Right, Kant describes domestic right as “the right to a person akin to the right to a thing.” The Feyerabend lectures lack this framework, but the same set of marriage, parent-child, and master-servant relationships are united under the framework of “domestic societies.” This chapter explores domestic right in Feyerabend, mapping Kant’s careful resistance to conceptualizing these relationships in terms of property right in light of debates about marriage, domestic right, labor, and slavery unfolding in the 1780s. This resistance is informed by a paradox at the heart of Kant’s thinking about domestic right, namely, his claim that marriage and servitude are rightful while sex work and slavery are not. This puzzle arises because Kant follows Achenwall in locating slavery in domestic right, which leads to his innovative framework of domestic right as “the right to a person akin to the right to a thing.” The deep entanglement of Kant’s thinking about sex, and about service and slave labor, should lead us to think about these problems together, and to challenge the silos in Kant scholarship that treat his thinking about gender and sex distinctly from slavery and race.

How did Kant incorporate elements of natural right into his philosophical system after radically transforming the basis for philosophical claims in the Critique of Pure Reason, the Groundwork, and other related texts? I show how Kant praises certain ideas by natural law theorists while rejecting their foundations and many of their applications. Two particular areas reflect this process: Kant’s rejection of slavery and his developing work on war and international institutions for peace. Feyerabend must be understood as a stage in the development of Kant’s overarching unitary theory of right that fuses domestic and international right.

This essay addresses the role of whiteness in slave narratives, a body of writing that featured the voices and experiences of African Americans, arguing that white American culture is fundamental to these narratives. This foundational presence is clear in the narratives’ representation of white slave owners, in the prefaces or other material added to slave narratives by white writers, and in the fact that some narratives were wholly written by white writers, representing the experience of formerly enslaved African Americans. But it is important to understand that white American culture made the slave narratives necessary and that these narratives work to persuade white Americans of moral imperatives for which African Americans needed no persuasion.

Besides discussing previous scholarship on gender and the rhetoric of slavery, the introduction provides a historical overview and historiography of the nineteenth-century international women’s movement, particularly illuminating interpersonal and cultural connections with organised antislavery. The introduction also outlines an understanding of the woman–slave analogy as part of the international women’s movement’s memory culture. It sets up a common-sense conceptual framework that guides the rest of the book, introducing the terms usable past and the (collective) memory work involved in creating it, as well as the umbrella term memories of antislavery, narratives which were circulated transnationally both during the campaign to end slavery and afterwards.

Critics often debate the authenticity of authorial voice in The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave Narrative, Related by Herself. They argue that external influences and pressures either obscure or completely override Prince’s agency as the first-person narrator. However, a close analysis of the text reveals distinct hallmarks of Prince’s personal voice in her autobiography. As many valences of that personal voice are manifested, Prince illuminates across her narrative not only the historical experience of the enslaved but also the power of testimony to change the surrounding culture.

This final chapter investigates what Pepys’s famously frank and comprehensive diary does not say – and how readers have dealt, or failed to deal, with those omissions. The focus is on a selection of the people mentioned in Pepys’s papers whose lives are barely mentioned in official documents or who went otherwise unrecorded: his wife Elizabeth, women and girls in whom he had a sexual interest, and certain of the Black people who worked for him or lived near him. Pepys’s diary and his other surviving records contain valuable information on their lives – information which shows Pepys to have been a sexual predator and an enslaver. For a range of reasons, these are aspects of his life missing from his popular reputation. Getting the most from the diary, and using it to explore the lives of others, requires understanding and countering influential traditions about Pepys and how his diary should be read.

This chapter argues that an adequate assessment of revolutions (and the role of law in revolutions) is often stymied by historical exclusions and theoretical myopia. Historical exclusions centralise certain experiences and present sanitized and one-sided narratives of the revolutionary experiences they centralise, especially with respect to violence, slavery, and colonialism. On the basis of such ideological uses of history, theoretical accounts paper over these social and political realities in order to legitimate particular revolutionary constitutions and to elevate them to the status of a paradigm or ideal type. This paradigm serves as the yardstick by which other experiences are assessed. The main feature of this paradigm is that it postulates a distinction between political and social revolutions. It presents the American Revolution of 1776 as an exemplar for the political revolution that concerns itself with the establishment of government under law. In contrast, the French Revolution of 1789 is presented as an exemplar for the social revolution that also seeks to tackle social injustice. The deficiency of this paradigm construction is not merely methodological, but also substantive and normative. It reduces the plurality of the revolutionary phenomena, it ignores the revolution’s dialectical nature, and it presents a certain type of revolutionary constitutions as ones that legitimate the polity.

This chapter explains what property covers and what interest it serves. Property is the field for legal and social relations for separable resources. And property serves an interest people have in acquiring and using separable resources for survival or flourishing. This chapter relies on work by James Penner and Neil MacCormick to introduce separability. This chapter studies property in body parts, names, identities, and slaves.

The most direct intersection of another right with the right to freedom from torture and other ill-treatment exists in the instance of the right to life. This is most obviously so on the basis that ill-treatment may result in the death of the victim. Where it does so, there will be a violation of both the right to life and the right to freedom from torture and other ill-treatment. The chapter goes on to consider how the right to freedom from torture or other ill-treatment interrelates with the rights to liberty, security, fair trial, and a private life, and the international legal prohibitions on enforced disappearance and slavery.

Examining the transition from slavery to free labor through the lens of the overseer-state, this chapter clarifies the ascent of labor regulation to a key preoccupation of colonial rule, reveals plantation colonies as sites of experimentation in interventionist governance, and illuminates the evolving relationship between colony and metropole (and different colonies to one another). The analytical framework of the overseer-state also demonstrates how the changing character of colonial labor management entangled British and Continental European modes of imperialism, complicating our historical understanding of the role played by liberal ideology in British imperial governance and political discourse. The overseer-state, concretely and conceptually, bridged the histories of the British Empire and the French, Spanish, and Dutch Empires, revealing how the development of labor control mechanisms in Britain’s plantation colonies remained a European enterprise rather than merely a British one.

The Cambridge History of the Papacy is organized to provide readers with a critical–historical survey of the structural development of the papacy as an institution and as an actor in Church history, and in world history. It is hard to imagine a sphere of human activity over the past two millennia that has not been influenced by, and influenced in turn by, papal action – be it in the domains of religious belief and practice; social, cultural, and political thought; art, science, medicine, ethics, diplomacy, and international relations. Four questions – each addressed throughout the three volumes of the present work – have framed that vision across vast chronological and geographical expanses: the pope’s centrality within the Catholic Church, the primacy of papal power as an instrument of governance, the papacy’s cultural influence in society and culture, and the implications of secularity for its place in the lives of believers and non-believers alike. Each question – and the search for answers – converges around the fundamental question of papal authority: its original claims; the ebbs and flows of its effective reach; and the numerous ways in which claims, and expressions of papal authority and supremacy, have been contested within the Catholic tradition, and from without.

The Cambridge History of the Papacy is organized to provide readers with a critical–historical survey of the structural development of the papacy as an institution and as an actor in Church history, and in world history. It is hard to imagine a sphere of human activity over the past two millennia that has not been influenced by, and influenced in turn by, papal action – be it in the domains of religious belief and practice; social, cultural, and political thought; art, science, medicine, ethics, diplomacy, and international relations. Four questions – each addressed throughout the three volumes of the present work – have framed that vision across vast chronological and geographical expanses: the pope’s centrality within the Catholic Church, the primacy of papal power as an instrument of governance, the papacy’s cultural influence in society and culture, and the implications of secularity for its place in the lives of believers and non-believers alike. Each question – and the search for answers – converges around the fundamental question of papal authority: its original claims; the ebbs and flows of its effective reach; and the numerous ways in which claims, and expressions of papal authority and supremacy, have been contested within the Catholic tradition, and from without.

In the late Roman empire, the papacy’s endorsement of marriage as a divine institution was already explicita. From the mid-fifth century, fundamental importance was attached to the signification by marriage of Christ’s union of the Church, a value shaping the social practice of marriage, underpinning the creation in Roman Catholicism of a marriage system unique in the history of literate societies, one which banned both polygamy and divorce. More flexible laws limited marriage within the “forbidden degrees” of relationship. The aim was to foster social cohesion. These rules could be changed, or dispensed with, in individual cases. Marriage was made by consent, and only from the Council of Trent was the presence of a priest required. Christianity in general and papal law in particular slowly transformed the relationship between slavery and marriage.