CSLS Speaker Series: “Puer Sequitur Parentis and Coniugis Sequitur Coniugis?: British Laws of Slave Descent on the Eighteenth-Century Gold Coast”

Featuring Stephanie Jones-Rogers, Associate Professor and Chancellor’s Professor of History, UC Berkeley

Abstract: In 1703, forty years after Virginia’s legislators passed an act (Act XII) which made the free or enslaved status of children born to “Englishmen” and “negro” women in the colony contingent upon the free or enslaved status of their mothers, the Governor of Cape Coast Castle, who was in the employ of England’s Royal African Company, and indigenous leaders from the town of Cape Coast (in modern-day Ghana), implemented an entirely new policy governing slave descent. Under this new policy, any children born to enslaved people who the Royal African Company owned, be they male or female, were born enslaved. Additionally, any free person, man or woman, who married an enslaved person owned by the Royal African Company would be enslaved to the Company from that point forward. My paper examines this policy and its implications in the broader context of British laws governing slave and free status in places shaped by English settlement.  

Reception: Lunch 12:15-12:45p.m. in the Kadish Library 
Program: 12:45-2:00p.m. in the Philip Selznick Seminar Room

Click here to register for the livestream via Zoom.    

Cosponsored with  the Center for Race and Gender