Bastiaan D. van der Velden - Publications & Research
The French philosopher Rousseau (1712-1778) explains the necessity for the person in power over enslaved people to transform the physical or psychological force of the strongest into a legal relation of dependence: “The strongest are still never sufficiently strong to ensure them continual mastership unless they find means of transforming force into a right and obedience into duty.”
Mennonite pastor Willem de Vos (1738-1823) listed in his 1797 indictment against slavery titled Over den Slaavenstand seven powers attached to the right of ownership of enslaved people during his era. Firstly, an enslaved person could not serve as a witness. Secondly, the owner could treat enslaved individuals as property, selling them without their consent. Thirdly, the enslaved person was subjected to hard labor without any accountability from the owner. Fourthly, punishments like imprisonment, flogging, and various forms of coercion were administered at the owner’s discretion, without state supervision. Fifthly, the prevention of escape was enforced with extreme violence, and escape did not change the rights of the owner. Sixthly, marriages were controlled by the owner. Finally, the status of enslavement of the mother was transferred to the children. Most of the private law institutions listed by De Vos can be found in the Bellagio-Harvard Guidelines.
The first article of the 1926 League of Nations Convention to Suppress the Slave Trade and Slavery, which is still in force, offers a private law-oriented definition: “Slavery is the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised.”
To examine the powers attached to the ownership of individuals with an enslaved status, my research takes the Bellagio–Harvard Guidelines on the Legal Parameters of Slavery as its point of departure. These Guidelines—developed in 2012 by researchers from seventeen universities in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia, together with two NGOs—establish a coherent definition of slavery. They emphasize that wherever a right of ownership exists, it carries with it a fundamental relation of control: “That control is the power attaching to the right of ownership.”
This study asks how far those ownership rights functioned when the “property” in question was a human being, and which legal transactions owners could carry out. The Guidelines offer a clear framework for identifying the legal institutions that enabled such powers and for analyzing how these institutions functioned across different jurisdictions.
Using these parameters, a comparative legal-historical questionnaire was developed to uncover similarities and differences between the legal systems in the territories examined. This comparative approach reveals the legal structures that made slavery possible—structures that converted physical domination into formally recognized rights of the owner.
Ultimately, the analysis shows how legal rules enabled the systematic control of enslaved individuals and embedded them within an economic system built on exploitation. In this early capitalist world, protecting the property rights of owners and capital investors consistently took precedence over safeguarding the personal freedoms of the people whose lives sustained this global system.