Free Soil in the Atlantic World

<p>Free Soil in the Atlantic World examines the principle that slaves who crossed particular territorial frontiers- from European medieval cities to the Atlantic nation states of the nineteenth century- achieved their freedom. Based upon legislation and judicial cases each essay considers the legal origins of Free Soil and the context in which it was invoked: medieval England Toulouse and medieval France early modern France and the Mediterranean the Netherlands eighteenth-century Portugal nineteenth-century Angola nineteenth-century Spain and Cuba and the Brazilian-Paraguay borderlands. On the one hand Free Soil policies were deployed by weaker polities to attract worker-settlers; however by the eighteenth century Free Soil was increasingly invoked by European imperial centres to distinguish colonial regimes based in slavery from the privileges and liberties associated with the metropole.</p><p></p><p>This book was originally published as a special issue of <i>Slavery and Abolition.</i></p>