The Slave Trade and the Origins of International Human Rights Law
Jenny S. Martinez- OUP, 2014
- Forces us to fundamentally rethink the origins of human rights activism
- Filled with fascinating stories of captured slave ship crews brought to trial across the Atlantic world in the nineteenth century
- Shows how the prosecution of the international slave trade was crucial to the development of modern international law
There is a broad consensus among scholars that the idea of human rights
was a product of the Enlightenment but that a self-conscious and
broad-based human rights movement focused on international law only
began after World War II. In this narrative, the nineteenth century's
absence is conspicuous—few have considered that era seriously, much less
written books on it. But as Jenny Martinez shows in this novel
interpretation of the roots of human rights law, the foundation of the
movement that we know today was a product of one of the nineteenth
century's central moral causes: the movement to ban the international
slave trade. Originating in England in the late eighteenth century,
abolitionism achieved remarkable success over the course of the
nineteenth century. Martinez focuses in particular on the international
admiralty courts, which tried the crews of captured slave ships. The
courts, which were based in the Caribbean, West Africa, Cape Town, and
Brazil, helped free at least 80,000 Africans from captured slavers
between 1807 and 1871. Here then, buried in the dusty archives of
admiralty courts, ships' logs, and the British foreign office, are the
foundations of contemporary human rights law: international courts
targeting states and non-state transnational actors while working on
behalf the world's most persecuted peoples—captured West Africans bound
for the slave plantations of the Americas. Fueled by a powerful thesis
and novel evidence, Martinez's work will reshape the fields of human
rights history and international human rights law.
