#  History Workshop, Work-In-Progress Seminar: John Harpham, “From Freedom to Slavery in Early-Modern Political Thought” 

 



####  calendar\_today Date and Time 

 **April 28, 2025** 

 01:30PM - 02:30PM EDT 

####  pin\_drop Location 

 **Robbins Library, Emerson 211**  



 

 



 

*Abstract*: In early-modern Europe, two traditions of slavery survived from the culture of the classical world. The first one of these traditions was drawn from the *Politics* of Aristotle, which held that some persons were fitted by nature to be ruled as slaves no matter their status in fact. The second was derived from the legal treatises of the Roman Empire, which maintained that all persons were free by nature but that some persons might be made slaves as a result of accident or misfortune.

In early-modern English culture, as the influence of Aristotle declined, the theory of natural slavery was most often rejected. But the Roman account of slavery was received and was refashioned in works of drama and history and literature and above all in texts on the common law and the classic early theories of natural rights.

In recent decades, historians who have aimed to describe the context of ideas from which slavery in America first drew support have rooted their accounts in the development of racial prejudice toward the native peoples of Africa. In turn, scholars of racial attitudes have suggested that these might be relied upon in order to explain the origins of American slavery. Nevertheless in the early-modern era, when slavery in the English Atlantic world began, the modern concept of race had not yet been developed and the most important idea of slavery in England was a fundamentally Roman one that was premised upon the natural freedom of all humankind. These facts point toward a different account of the intellectual origins of American slavery, one in which a certain conception of slavery was understood to arise from a certain conception of freedom.



 

 



 

 

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