Slavery and international law: The jurisprudence of Henry Richardson Anghie Antony* Professor of Law at the University of Utah and at the National University of Singapore. He is a Member of the Third World Approaches to International Law Network of Scholars *Email id: u0027950@utah.edu
Online Published on 28 February, 2024. Abstract The article will review on Slavery and International Law in the eyes of Henry Richardson whose book “The Origins of African-American Interests in International Law” both as a contribution to the history of the Atlantic slave trade and as contribution to critical race theory. Henry Richardson has read innumerable historical monographs, works of legal and sociological theory, international law and critical race theory. Armed with this store of knowledge, he is able to recount a detailed narrative of African-American claims to, interests in and appeals to international law over approximately two centuries spanning, with occasional peeks both forward and backward in time, from the landing of the first African slaves at Jamestown in 1619 to the 1815 Treaty of Ghent. The work partakes of some of the narrative and methodological strategies of the critical race theory tradition, including the fictive reconstruction of historical events, with new African-American voices added to the mix. The silencing of slavery in accounts of international law’s past, and its afterlives in the present, is overdetermined. It has something to do with the prevailing history-making practices of international lawyers and historians; their choices of events, subjects, and structures. But Henry Richardson is equally at ease with the approach to international law of the New Haven School, and he is thus able to write with great authority of how African-American history can be understood to have comprised a tradition of appeals to international law or international legal norms as a source of remediation for the injustices that African-heritage people suffered in the Americas. Top Keywords International law, Slavery, Jurisprudence, Racism, Race. Top |