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The impact of the Declaration of December 15, 1738 is presented in this chapter. It was discussed that when masters neglected to complete the required formalities, such as registration of their slaves with the nearest clerk of the Admiralty, the slaves would be confiscated au profit du roi and returned as slaves to the colonies. The Parlement of Paris and the Admiralty Court of France refused to confiscate slaves. However, the case of Catherine Morgan, who was brought to Nantes by her master in 1746, shows how the courts of Brittany enforced the Declaration of 1738. The Admiralty Court of France never recognized the validity of either the Edict of October 1716 or the Declaration of December 15, 1738, because they had not been registered by the Parlement of Paris. As a result, they relied on the maxim that any slave who entered the French soil was free.

The Declaration of 1738 stayed unregistered by the Parlement of Paris and the Admiralty Court of France. The Admiralty clerk duly recorded the declarations of slave owners who brought their slaves to Paris. These declarations reveal a small portion of blacks living in Paris, but nonetheless offer information about these individuals. The aim of this chapter is to gauge the size and the sociological makeup of the black population in Paris and the administration's efforts to control them. The case of Louis v. Jean Jacques Le Fevre prompted the officers of the Admiralty of France to prepare an ordinance that required all blacks in Paris to be registered by the Admiralty's clerk. The registration drive was a one-time event, designed to give the Admiralty an report of how many blacks were residents in Paris.

This chapter contains the description of events that elapsed between the Admiralty's ordinance of 1762 and the 1777 Police des Noirs. This period is a crucial period for slavery in France. First, the number of blacks suing for their freedom in the Paris Admiralty Court increased radically. Second, some of the renowned authors adopted the metaphor of slavery to defy the excesses of monarchic government in France. The political context in which the lawsuits and discourse propagated was radicalized from 1770 to 1774 when Louis XV's chancellor Maupeou instituted a series of dramatic judicial reforms. A judicial memoire by Henrion de Pansey on behalf of the slave Roc circulated extensively, linking the injustice of Roc's slavery to the influence of Maupeou on the king.

This chapter discusses the case of Jean Boucaux v. Verdelin. In June of 1738, the Paris Admiralty Court heard its first two petitions for freedom by slaves. It was through these that the 1716 edict's lack of registration was first discussed by the court. One of these cases was brought by Jean Boucaux, a slave from Saint Domingue, against his master Sieur Verdelin. The slave's lawyer Mallet and the procureur du roi Le Clerc du Brillet published briefs that justified the maxim that any slave who sets foot on French soil is free. These lawyers also credited Christianity with the elimination of Roman slavery and its transformation into serfdom. Second, the case called the government's attention to slave owners' abuses of the Edict of 1716, prompting new and stricter legislation in the Declaration of December 15, 1738.

This chapter examines the Vice-Admiralty Court of Sierra Leone, the first court in the British empire with an explicit mandate to release enslaved people from slavery. In practice, the Court and its officers paid little attention to the people the Court called ‘captured Negroes.’ Instead, the Court became the hub of a brisk trade in seized slave ships, which were renovated and resold at auction for the coastal trade. British officers, sailors and soldiers received ‘prize money,’ shares of the auction value of property they captured. Many settlers and European merchants were engaged in trades related to the Court, from victualling and rum-selling to surveying and ship-building. The antislavery businessman Zachary Macaulay had a controlling stake in many colonial businesses. This chapter also examines the role of the Royal African Corps, a regiment of white convicts and former slaves, and their place in the colony.

This chapter discusses the origins of maritime law, the development of the English High Court of Admiralty, and the administration of the international law of prize in North America. It examines the significance of colonial expansion and the historical role of colonial English Vice-Admiralty Courts in handling piracy cases, and the United States Admiralty Courts that operated during the War of 1812.

This chapter examines the nature of the East India Company’s claim to authority over English affairs in Asia. Though often regarded as possessing a monopoly over the English trade to and from Asia, the Company in fact insisted it maintained a jurisdiction by virtue of its charters not just over the trade but also the traffic of any English subject in the East Indies. Evidenced in instruments like Company shipping passes and Admiralty Courts, this position reached its most vibrant expression in the Company’s suit against the interloper Thomas Sandys in the Court of King’s Bench from 1682 to 1684. Company advocates clearly articulated a vision of the Company as both a counsellor to the English state and a public government in its own right in the East, with a responsibility over the safety, prosperity, and souls of English subjects and other European and Asian residents of its settlements abroad. Company opponents in turn expressed their objections to its exclusive rights not simply in anti-monopolist and free trade terms, but as a critique of the Company as a legitimate constitutional form.

In 1759, the Parlement of Paris made a decision that established the status of slaves who sued for their freedom within the jurisdiction of this court and, consequently, the Admiralty Courts within its domain. This was the case of Francisque, which set an important example for the suits that would follow it in the same jurisdiction, as well as across the channel in England's Somerset case. It also provided an opportunity for French thinking on racial difference in the middle of the eighteenth century. The lawyers revealed assumptions about the meaning of the term negre and the foundations of racism in eighteenth-century France due to their attempts to argue that Francisque was not a negre, and thus not subject to the laws of 1716 and 1738.

Most of the Earle family invested in privateers and “marks” (letter of marque ships) in wartime and never more so than in the American War of Independence. This chapter uses the prize records (kept at Kew) to examine this business in detail, focussing mainly on four specialist privateers in which members of the family had shares. These were all successful and their voyages, captures and methods of operation are described, while for two of them it is possible to calculate profit which was much higher than for ships engaged in the slave trade, providing a valuable source of capital to be invested in trading ships in peacetime. Earle & Hodgson in Livorno also invested in privateers based in Livorno and Minorca and they were one of the two most important dealers in prize goods in the Italian port.

This chapter begins with a brief overview of the imperial and maritime contexts of the years when Gentili was engaged at the Court of Admiralty. It then considers Gentili's arguments about the extension of English subjecthood and jurisdiction into ocean space and about the legal identity of the dependent states of the Ottoman empire. A concluding section comments on the importance of Gentili's more mundane arguments about maritime law to his innovative and analytically deeper commentary on empire as a legal problem.