scholarly journals Anti-Slavery Movements in British North America and the Transnational life of “Obedient Servant” Samuel Ringgold Ward

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenny Reilly
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
North America ◽  
British Empire ◽  
White People ◽  
British North America ◽  
The Many

This paper argues that the writings of abolitionist Samuel Ringgold Ward and other anti-slavery groups were indicative of a larger trend of African Americans becoming influenced by Moral Colonialism. This colonialism was based on the belief that British colonizers were civilizing and therefore saving non-white populations, through measures such as appointing “protectors” to prevent non-white people from being taken into slavery and other forms of exploitation. In these writings, there are many descriptions given to the British Empire, describing it as a “glorious nation” and other similar labels, which argued that the British Empire was the most progressive power.  Samuel Ringgold Ward lived a mobile life in America, Canada, Switzerland, Britain, and Jamaica, so this paper will use a transnational approach, showing the connections British North America had to other colonies in the British Empire, while also demonstrating the many influences on the views of Ward and other African Americans.

The Strategic Constitution in Action: Canada's Afghan War as a Case Study

2012 ◽  
Vol 13 (5) ◽  
pp. 419-448
Author(s):  
Irvin Studin
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Constitutional Law ◽  
Foreign Affairs ◽  
British North America ◽  
The World ◽  
Legal Document

What does the Canadian Constitution have to say (or not say) about Canada's recent war in Afghanistan? The question seems intellectually natural, but has seldom been asked – not least because in Canada, the fields of constitutional law and foreign affairs, in both scholarship and praxis, are often near-perfect strangers. The seldom examined second recital of the preamble to the Constitution Act, 1867 (once the British North America Act,1867, and hereafter the ‘1867 Act'), reads that the “Union would conduce to the Welfare of the Provinces and promote the Interests of the British Empire.” The only provision of the 1867 Act that explicitly references foreign affairs is section 132, although it speaks to the implementation by Canada (legislative and executive branches) ofimperialor British Empire treaty obligations. One can therefore propose with reasonable certainty that both the character and paucity of explicit language onstrategyin the text of the founding legal document of the modern Canadian state betray a fundamental reality: that Canada,constitutionally speaking, was never intended or expected to be a power player of any note in the world, but, rather, was constituted as a strategic appendage orauxiliary kingdomof the British Empire— its instruments and interests subsumed to the strategic designs and direction of Westminster.

Philip Savile Grey Reid

2020 ◽  
pp. 81-96
Author(s):  
Kirsten A. Greer
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
North America ◽  
British Empire ◽  
West Indies ◽  
Military Culture ◽  
Military Officers ◽  
The West ◽  
British North America ◽  
British Military ◽  
America South

Chapter 5 investigates how, back “home” in Britain, British military officers’ production of ornithological knowledge in the British Mediterranean helped reformulate notions of nation and “British birds.” It focuses on Captain Philip Savile Grey Reid (1845–1915), Royal Engineers, as a homeward-bound officer to Aldershot, Hampshire, to understand how ideas and practices of ornithology circulated back to Britain. Designated as “home of the British Army,” Aldershot was an integral site in the transimperial network of military garrisons across the British Empire, connecting England to the Mediterranean, India, British North America, South Africa, and the West Indies. The home station became an important posting for the reunion of family, friendship, military, and ornithological networks in England; its location in Hampshire allowed imperial military officers to ramble in the English countryside, fostering temperate cultures of nature through proper conduct in the collecting and documenting of British birds. Central to this chapter is an understanding of transimperial processes in the shaping of British military culture and the designation of national birds.

Nonmarital Intimacies

2020 ◽  
pp. 211-254
Author(s):  
Christine Walker
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Intimate Relationships ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Sexual Culture ◽  
British North America ◽  
Illegitimacy Rate ◽  
Comprehensive Survey ◽  
Social Censure ◽  
Freed People

Chapter Five surveys the varied intimate and nonmarital relationships formed between free and freed people. A comprehensive survey of more than two thousand baptism records demonstrates that Jamaica had the highest illegitimacy rate in the British Empire. One in four of the children baptized on the island was born out of wedlock. This chapter explores the confluence of factors that led to the development of a sexual culture in Jamaica that afforded unmarried women more autonomy in their intimate lives. In contrast with other colonies in British North America, Jamaica adopted a remarkably lenient approach toward female sexuality. Women also commanded more authority and wealth, largely owing to their participation in slavery. In the absence of social censure and legal repercussions, a large number of free couples established families outside of marriage. Doing so protected women’s material assets and legal autonomy, which would otherwise be comprised by coverture—a set of laws that ceded a wife’s property to her husband. Instead, colonists used baptism rather than marriage to recognize, legitimize, and even legalize intimate relationships with free and enslaved partners.

The Court of Common Pleas of East Florida 1763-1783

2017 ◽  
Vol 85 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 540-576
Author(s):  
M.C. Mirow
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
British Empire ◽  
District Court ◽  
Court Records ◽  
New Information ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
National Archives ◽  
The Many ◽  
Court Of Chancery ◽  
Revolutionary Period

Legal historians have surmised that court records of the British province of East Florida (1763-1783) have been either lost or destroyed. This assumption was based on the poor conditions for survival of documents in Florida and statements made in the secondary literature on the province. Nonetheless, a significant number of documents related to the courts of British East Florida exist in the National Archives (Kew). These materials reveal an active legal culture using English law in a wide range of courts including (1) the Court of Common Pleas; (2) the Court of Chancery; (3) the Court of General Sessions of the Peace, Oyer et Terminer, Assize and General Gaol Delivery; (4) Special Courts of Oyer et Terminer; (5) the Court of Vice-Admiralty; (6) the Court of Ordinary; (7) the General Court; and (8) a District Court.
This article studies a portion of the documents related to the Court of Common Pleas to describe the nature of the court’s practice in civil litigation. It closely examines three cases for which sufficient extant pleadings permit the reconstruction of the general contours of recovery for breach of a sales contract through an action of trespass on the case, for contract enforcement through an action of covenant, and for recovery of a sum certain through an action of debt. The small window provided by these cases into the activities of this court reveals a heretofore unknown world of English common law in North America during and after the American Declaration of Independence. This new information supplements and challenges our established understanding of colonial law in North America in the revolutionary period and the use of law in the British Empire. This study illustrates the many opportunities these sources offer to legal historians of the period.


Andrew Leith Adams

2020 ◽  
pp. 41-62
Author(s):  
Kirsten A. Greer
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
New Brunswick ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Mental State ◽  
Military Career ◽  
British North America ◽  
Northern India ◽  
British Military ◽  
Medical Career ◽  
The Military

Set in Malta, chapter 3 follows the military medical career of Andrew Leith Adams, military surgeon with the Twenty-Second Regiment of Foot, whose military and scientific networks and travels to northern India, Malta, Egypt, and New Brunswick, British North America, helped him to conceive ideas of tropicality, semitropicality, and the temperate. To Adams, temperate martial masculinity was both a physical and mental state and a climatic zone important in the maintenance of a British military career across the British Empire. His ornithological investigations also allowed him to contemplate the zoological connectivity between Europe and North Africa.

scholarly journals The Many Meanings of Judicial Independence: Examples from British North America

2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jim Phillips
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Local Control ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Judicial Independence ◽  
British North America ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
Constitutional Principle ◽  
British North American ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Many

This article argues that there will not be an ‘end of turns’, but that the turn to contextual legal history in the 1960s remains the most potent, enduring turn the discipline has undergone. The varying meaning of judicial independence in nineteenth-century British North America illustrates this. It represented and was influenced by grand constitutional principle, the struggle for colonial autonomy, local control over public finances, and judicial fear of popular involvement in the removal process. Contextualism and complexity is examined here through the lens of judicial independence in three British North American colonies – the colonists worked within the essential paradigm of the inherited British Constitution.

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