The basic premise of this small study is that American slave laws have more in common with the legal traditions of their various colonial metropolises than with the emerging social and cultural realities of the immediate colonies. Alan Watson is not naive enough to suggest that formal legal codes and the practice of law were separate and unrelated activities. Nevertheless, the attempt to explore the comparative dimension of the origins and applications of slave laws throughout the Americas suffers from an excessive simplifying, congealing, and homogenizing of the dynamic conditions of society and culture. When Watson writes, for example, that in the Spanish colonies the lawmaking power remained in Spain but in the English colonies the basic laws were those made by the colonists themselves, he collapses the time span as well as the geographical spread of English colonial lawmaking and obscures the conditions of the British West Indies. Indeed, the English Antilles get short shrift in this discussion, although they formed the core of the English experience with slavery in the Americas. The same could he said of the French, Dutch, and Spanish cases. Commonly promulgated laws were not implemented identically in Louisiana and Saint-Domingue, or in Curaçao and Surinam, or in Cuba and Puerto Rico.

The attempt to trace linear relationship in lawmaking or to explain the inordinate influence of the Roman law tradition over American influences severely distorts the local circumstances and the material conditions of society, custom, and law, especially as they developed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The significance of manumission as an index of variations in the conditions of slavery is questionable. Indeed, by giving more weight to the changing influences of time, place, and local circumstances, the slave laws can reveal much more about the society than the author is willing to admit. Whatever value this hook might have for legal scholars, historians will find its analysis and conclusions far less satisfactory than Elsa Goveia’s The West Indian Slave Laws of the 18th Century (1970).