Novel Constitutions and the Making of Race

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Novel Constitutions argues that Anglo-American racial slavery emerged from a seventeenth-century English constitutional crisis exported into the western Atlantic through Stuart imperial expansion. In this crisis, divine-right absolutism collided with the English people’s ancient constitutional claims to life, liberty, and property. As the Stuart monarchy pursued policies that elevated royal prerogative over the common law, imperial governance developed new procedures that severed kinship, alienated labor, and converted human persons of African descent into perpetual chattels—simultaneously transforming some English subjects into colonial slavocrats. These practices of asserting absolute power over other human beings constitute the original sin of American slavery: a profane attempt to assume godlike dominion over human beings. This study names these transatlantic legal improvisations “novel constitutions,” practices that infused absolutism into the very constitutional idioms meant to restrain it. Reading literature alongside statutes, slave codes, charters, and landmark legal decisions, the book traces the rise of racial, chattel slavery as a constitutional process through which race itself was produced in its modern form, binding hereditary rights and constitutional protections to human complexion. By reconceiving slavery and anti-slavery as competing constitutional projects in the anglophone Atlantic world, Novel Constitutions reframes the American founding as both an outcome of imperial slavocracy and a still-unfinished anti-slavery ambition.</jats:p>