"Now Designed to the Worst": English Captive Labor and Perceptions of Slavery in the Interregnum

Undergraduate Honors Thesis

Citations

Citeable URL: https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/undergraduate_honors_theses/r207tq82t

Abstract

In 1659 Parliament heard a petition alleging that 72 Englishmen arrested for participating in the Salisbury Rising had been enslaved in Barbados. These allegations were made and heard in the context of increased amounts of captive labor flooding into the Caribbean, some of it state sanctioned, and popular rhetorical use of ‘slavery’ to mean political oppression during the English Civil War. The petition was both shocking to the English nation, and made its claims using language the English would have already been very familiar with. By examining the development of norms of captivity for enslaved people on Barbados, analyzing the 1659 petition, and tracing the further development of norms of captivity after the Interregnum, this thesis will demonstrate how the instability of the Interregnum contributed to an unstable definition of ‘slavery’ in England in the seventeenth century.

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