"Inheritable Blood": Of Slavery and Freedom, Aristocracy and Empire in Early Virginia and the British Atlantic

FAIN: FT-56362-08

Holly Brewer
North Carolina State University (Raleigh, NC 27695-0001)

"Inheritable Blood" will use a series of interleaved narratives that focus on the key legal reformers from both sides of the political spectrum and both sides of the Atlantic to gain insight into the ideological and cultural origins of slavery that develop in counterpoint to (and sometimes in compromise with) British ideas about liberty and equality in the years before and after the Glorious Revolution. I argue that the ideological origins of slavery in Britain's empire are interwoven with the larger struggles over political power during the seventeenth century. Although a rich cultural history of crucial questions of ideology, power, and slavery, my book will be at the same time readable and exciting--a dramatic rendering of charges of treason, rebellions, and petty struggles for power.