Mixed Race Studies

Examining ‘Latinidad’ in Latin America: Race, ‘Latinidad’ and the Decolonial Option

Critical Race and Whiteness Studies
Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association
Volume 8, Number 2, (2012) Directions and Intersections
11 pages

Eugenia Demuro, Visiting Fellow
School of Language Studies, College of Arts and Social Sciences
Australian National University

This article provides a critical account of the idea of race, conceived of and derived from European colonisers in the New World. The paper argues that race became a crucial category to the colonising projects of the New World, and in particular in the distribution of power during colonialism. The paper further examines how the notion of Latinidad (Latinity), entrenched in the term Latin America, continued to enact a discourse of racial superiority/inferiority even after the battles for Independence had taken place. Employing the critical vocabulary and framework of Decolonial theory, the paper introduces key arguments against Western European universality, and calls for a re-reading of the processes that structure privilege across racial and ethnic lines.

Introduction

Following the conquest and colonisation of the Americas, the concept of race, as a category, became instrumental to social organisation and, significantly, continues to be a powerful stratagem today. This is clearly evident in the idea of Latinidad (Latinity) that underscores the nomenclature ‘Latin America’, which continues to elevate European heritage to the detriment of all other racial or ethnic groups. We can see this, for example, in the fact that whilst an Aymaran Amerindian from Bolivia may not share much with an Afro-Cuban from Santiago, or with a porteño from Buenos Aires, or a Mexican from Tijuana, each is deemed to be Latin American. Given the cultural heterogeneity of the region, it seems imprecise to speak of Latin America as though there were no marked differences between the nations, regions, cultures and peoples of the huge landmass that extends from the south of Río Grande to Tierra del Fuego. It is difficult to employ the term Latin America with any validity for a number of reasons: to reiterate, it is the referent of an incredibly vast and heterogeneous region; additionally, the term emerged as the result of conflicts between imperial nations and was hence applied to the region from outside (see Mignolo 2005); and, most importantly, the very idea of Latinidad functions to define Latin American identity in relation to the European heritages, and erases and marginalises the racial and cultural diversity of people residing in Latin America. For these reasons, the term Latin America and its continued usage must be seen as part of a larger program of coloniality that began with the inception of the Americas as the New World in the 15th century, and that continues today through global, Western capitalism and its accompanying epistemology. In Latin America, the colonial project that began with the arrival of Europeans did not end with the cessation of Spanish and Portuguese colonial rule. In fact, coloniality persists today and is evident in the distribution of wealth and resources across the region and the globe…

…The Emergence of Race

For Europe, the so-called discovery of America opened vast territories to be appropriated, riches to be extracted, and inhabitants to be indoctrinated into European culture and Catholicism. For the indigenous peoples of the New World, the conquest and colonisation meant complete domination, and went hand-in-hand with slavery, serfdom, genocide and the overall destruction of previously existing social formations. It goes without saying that the destruction of culture also meant the destruction of knowledge/s and worldviews that differed from that of the Europeans. The legitimizing discourse of this enterprise, based on the supposed superiority of the European colonisers and the supposed inferiority of the dominated, rested on a newly emergent notion of race.

The classification Indio to refer to the vast numbers of societies and civilisations not only obscured the differences between the groups which inhabited the region, it served as the construction of an identity whose main purpose was to differentiate the indigenous from the colonisers. The term summarised a category that was entirely negative and inferior. The same process was repeated when it came to the people transported as slaves from Africa, although they came from different regions and belonged to different groups—Ashantis, Yorubas, Congos, etc.—in the colonial period they became Negros (Quijano 2000: 551-2). Both Indios and Negros were conceived as inferior identities to their European counterparts, and this inferiority was defined specifically in terms of their race. These identities became configured in asymmetrical relations of power within the new colonial system; they had a corresponding place within the colonial hierarchies, the organisation of labour, and corresponding social roles. Both Indios and Negros existed outside the domain of civilised society, as a repository of labour to be exploited for the advantage of Europeans. Interestingly, race became associated with colour, perhaps as one of the most salient differences of phenotype, and social organisation and privilege can be traced to a gradient of colour: the darker the subject the lesser freedom they exercised and possessed. In this way, the concept of race was instrumental to conquest and colonisation: there is a direct link between the idea of race that emerged at the onset of the conquest of the Americas—and that was later spread around the world—and the division and organisation of labour. From the beginning, the distribution of wealth, power, domination and resources was established in terms of the newly invented categories of identity that the concept of race facilitated—Indio, Negro, Mestizo, Spanish, Portuguese, European. It is difficult to overstate the significance of this emergence of race as a new mode of power, efficiently employed as a means to codify the relationship between the conquerors and the conquered, and to justify the atrocities, and the violence, that the conquest and colonial enterprise entailed…

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The Evolution and Genetics of Latin American Populations

Cambridge University Press
December 2001
528 pages
12 b/w illus. 128 tables
228 x 152 mm
Hardback ISBN: 9780521652759
Paperback ISBN: ISBN:9780521022392
eBook ISBN: 9780511837128

Francisco M. Salzano
Departamento de Genética, Instituto de Biociências
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

Maria C. Bortolini
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

The human genetic make-up of Latin America is a reflection of successive waves of colonization and immigration. There have been few works dealing with the biology of human populations at a continental scale, and while much data is available on the genetics of Latin American populations, most information remains scattered throughout the literature. This volume examines Latin American human populations in relation to their origins, environment, history, demography and genetics, drawing on aspects of nutrition, physiology, and morphology for an integrated and multidisciplinary approach. The result is a fascinating account of a people characterized by a turbulent history, marked heterogeneity, and unique genetic traits.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• 1. Origins
• 2. Environment and history
• 3. Socioeconomic indices, demography, and population structure
• 4. Ecology, nutrition, and physiological adaptation
• 5. Morphology
• 6. Health and disease
• 7. Haemoglobin types and haemoglobinopathies
• 8. Normal genetic variation at the protein, glycoconjugate, and DNA levels
• 9. Gene dynamics
• 10. Synthesis.

Sweet Liberty: The Final Days of Slavery in Martinique (Review)

French History
Volume 27, Issue 1 (2013)
pages 135-137
DOI: 10.1093/fh/crs158

Emily Musil Church, Assistant Professor of History
Lafayette College, Easton, Pennsylvania

Sweet Liberty: The Final Days of Slavery in Martinique. By Rebecca Hartkopf Schloss. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2009. 312 pp. ISBN: 978 0 8122 4172 3.

Rebecca Hartkopf Scholss’ investigation of the end of slavery in the French Caribbean island of Martinique is a welcome addition to the growing scholarship on the history of the Francophone Black Atlantic world. Schloss’ book builds on existing works by exploring the complex dynamics that existed amidst and between the various racial and economic groups in Martinique, as well as between the metropole and colony. The author’s writing style makes a long, complicated colonial history with a complex cast of characters both engaging and accessible. She uses a wide variety of sources—ranging from court proceedings to diaries to demographic statistics—to reconstruct how Martinique, and the French empire more broadly, defined and redefined racial categories and their meanings. Although she uses class and racial categories to describe the social framework, Schloss is careful to reinforce that the categories she describes—such elite Creoles, poor whites, free mixed-race persons, enslaved Africans, and so on—were fluid designations and not united, cohesive groups. The…

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Ben-Ur awarded study grant by Hadassah-Brandeis Institute

In the Loop: News for Staff and Faculty
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
2012-12-13

Associate professor Aviva Ben-Ur of the Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies has been awarded a Senior Grant in History from the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute for her book project “Eurafrican Identity in a Jewish Society: Suriname, 1660-1863.”
 
Ben-Ur’s book project focuses on slave society in the former Dutch colony of Suriname in South America, where Jews of Iberian origin were among the earliest colonists. She examines the ever-shifting boundaries and bridges of Jewish communal belonging in Suriname and focuses on the special role enslaved and free Eurafrican women played in expanding the definition of Jewishness and collapsing the social hierarchies that distinguished whites from non-whites. Ben-Ur argues that from the start of Jewish settlement in the colony in the 1650s, females of African descent were key to both Jewish community building and the transformative adaptation of Jewish culture to a multi-ethnic slave society…

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Referential Ambiguity in the Calculus of Brazilian Racial Identity

Southwestern Journal of Anthropology
Volume 26, Number 1 (Spring, 1970)
pages 1-14

Marvin Harris (1927-2001)

Categorizations elicited from 100 Brazilian informants through the use of a standardized deck of facial drawings suggests that the cognitive domain of racial identity in Brazil is characterized by a high degree of referential ambiguity. The Brazilian calculus of racial identity departs from the model of other cognitive domains in which a finite shared code, complementary distribution, and intersubjectivity are assumed. Structurally adaptive consequences adhere to the maximization of noise and ambiguity as well as to the maximization of shared cognitive order.

THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF RACE RELATIONS in Brazil and the United States has brought to light important differences in culturally controlled systems of “racial” identity. Many observers have pointed out the partial subordination of “racial” to class identity in Brazil exemplified in the tendency for individuals of approximately equal socio-economic rank to be categorized by similar “racial” terms regardless of phenotypic contrasts, and by the adage, “money whitens” (Pierson 1942, 1955; Wagley 1952; Harris 1956; Azevedo 1955). Other aspects of the Brazilian calculus of “racial” identity lead to categorizations that are inconceivable in the cognitive frame of the descent rule which underlies the bifurcation of the United States population into “whites” and “negroes” (now, more politely, “blacks”). Experimental evidence indicates that phenotypically heterogeneous full siblings are identified by heterogeneous “racial” terms. Children of racially heterogeneous Brazilian marriages are not subject to the effects of hypodescent; where the phenotypes are sharply contrastive, full siblings may be assigned to contrastive categories (Harris and Kottak 1963). It has also long been observed that the inventory of terms which defines the Brazilian domain of “racial” types exceeds the number of terms in the analogous domain used by whites in the United States (and probably by blacks as well).

The suggestion has been made that the most distinctive attribute of the Brazilian “racial” calculus is its uncertain, indeterminate, and ambiguous output. Subordination of race to class, absence of descent rule, and terminological efflorescence all contribute to this result (Harris 1964a, 1964b). Several different indications of the absence of a common shared calculus should be noted: ego lacks a single socio-centric racial identity; the repertory of racial terms varies widely from one person to another (holding region and community constant); the referential meaning of a given term varies widely (i.e., the occasions in which one term rather than another will be used); and the abstract meaning of a given term (i.e., its elicited contrasts with respect to other terms) also varies over a broad range even within a single community.

Clarification of the nature of the ambiguity in the Brazilian “racial” calculus awaits the development of cross-culturally valid methods of cognitive analysis. In this essay I report on a preliminary attempt to employ a test instrument to elicit the Brazilian lexicon of “racial” categories and to provide a measure of referential ambiguity and consensus with respect to the elicited terms…

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Racial Identity in Brazil

Luso-Brazilian Review
Volume 1, Number 2 (Winter, 1964)
pages 21-28

Marvin Harris (1927-2001)

According to the 1950 census, the population of Brazil consisted of 61.66% brancos, 26.54% pardos, and 10.6% pretos. In the I.B.G.E.’s 1961 review of these facts, the following caution is registered:

In order to avoid erroneous interpretation, it must be remembered that there is no barrier of racial prejudices in Brazil which divides whites from non-whites as in the United States and that in Rio the label “white” is bestowed with a liberality that would be inconceivable in Washington. One must presume that a study made in conformity with objective criteria would show the proportion of whites to be inferior to that indicated by the census. However, it would be extremely difficult to clearly separate brancos morenos from pardos de matiz claro and pardos de matiz escuro from pretos. (IBGE 1961:169).

The unreliability of Brazilian racial statistics has nothing to do with the alleged absence of “barriers of racial prejudice.” The myth that Brazilians have no racial prejudices has been exposed by numerous studies carried out in both northeastern and southern portions of the country (Bastide and Fernandes 1959; Costa Pinto 1953; Wagley 1951; Harris 1956; Hutchinson 1958, etc.). It has by now been convincingly demonstrated that Negroes throughout Brazil are abstractly regarded as innately inferior in intelligence, honesty and dependability; that negroid features are universally (even by Negroes themselves) believed to be less desirable, less handsome or beautiful than caucasoid features; that in most of their evaluations of the Negro as an abstract type, the whites are inclined to deride and slander; and that prejudiced stereotyped opinions about people of intermediate physical appearance are also common. One may speak in other words of an ideal or abstract racial ranking gradient in Brazil in which the white physical type occupies the favorable extreme, the Negro type the unfavorable extreme, and the mulatto type the various intermediate positions…

Pigmentocracy in the Americas: How is Educational Attainment Related to Skin Color?

Latin American Pubic Opinion Project
AmericasBarometer Insights
Number 73 (2012)
Vanderbilt University
2012-02-20
Number 73 (2012)
9 pages

Edward Telles, Professor of Sociology
Princeton University

Liza Steele
Department of Sociology
Princeton University

Executive Summary: This Insights report addresses the question of whether educational attainment, a key indicator of socioeconomic status, is related to skin color in Latin America and the Caribbean. Based on data from the 2010 AmericasBarometer, our analysis shows that persons with lighter skin color tend to have higher levels of schooling than those with dark skin color throughout the region, with few exceptions. Moreover , these differences are statistically significant in most cases and, as we show in a test of several multiracial countries, the negative relation between skin color and educational attainment occurs independently of class origin and other variables known to affect socioeconomic status. Thus, we find that skin color, a central measure of race, is an important source of social stratification throughout the Americas today.

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Ethnicity and Earnings in a Mixed-Race Labor Market

Economic Development and Cultural Change
Volume 55, Number 4 (July 2007)
pages 709-734

Hugo Ñopo
Inter-Amerian Development Bank

Jaime Saavedra
World Bank

Máximo Torero
International Food Policy Research Institute

This study examines the relationship between earnings and racial differences in a context in which various races have coexisted and mixed during several centuries, as is true in many parts of the postcolonial world and specifically urban Peru. Coarse indicators of racial differences do not suffice in capturing this relationship; therefore, we introduce a score-based procedure of white and indigenous racial intensities that allows us to approximate these mixed racial heritages. We introduce a score-based procedure of white and indigenous racial intensities that allows us to approximate the heterogeneity within the mestizo population. We construct two types of indicators of racial intensities using a score-based procedure: a single-dimensional indicator of degrees of whiteness and a two-dimensional indicator combining degrees of both whiteness and indigenousness. This second indicator allows us to study nonlinearities in earning differences across mixed white and indigenous racial characteristics. Our estimates from a semiparametric model show evidence of a race premium for whiteness on earnings, statistically significant among wage earners but not among the self-employed. These results may be consistent with a story of employer discrimination.

Spaniards, ‘pardos’, and the missing mestizos: identities and racial categories in the early Hispanic Caribbean

New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids
Volume 71, Numbers 1&2 (1997)
pages 5-19

Stuart B. Schwartz, George Burton Adams Professor of History
Yale University

Traces the history of the mestizos, the descendants of Spanish-Indian contacts during the early stages of Caribbean settlement. Author asks whether they constituted a separate ethnicity. He also looks at the question why the position of the mestizos in the Spanish Caribbean seems different from that in other areas in Spanish America.

On arrival in Puerto Rico today, one can not but help noticing the way in which the term criollo has become a descriptive adjective denoting things local or indigenous to the island: café criollo, comida criolla, müsica criolla, pan criollo, etc. The word criollo has become a way of claiming authenticity and a distinctive island identity. In the Americas, the term “criollo” had a complex history, many uses, and considerable regional variation. Used in Brazil (crioulo) and in early Spanish America as a designation for American-born black slaves, the term was often employed generically for anything locally-born. Hence usages such as ganado criollo (native cattle) or even, as in the case of Guatemala, of references to mestizos criollos (Megged 1992:422-24; Garcia Arévalo 1992a). The traditional usage of the term in colonial mainland Spanish America—as a designation a white person of European heritage born in the colony—had begun to take hold in the 1560s (Lavallé 1986, 1993; Lockhart 1994) but it had never fully taken hold in the islands. Father Agustfn Inigo Abbad y Lasierra (1971: 181-84) reported in the 1780s: “They give the name criollo without distinction to all those born on the island regardless of the caste or mixture from which they derive.” Clearly a fusion of categories of social and racial differences was summarized in this term. In it, an identity and a history are claimed (Sider 1994).

In the Hispanic Caribbean with its peculiar early demographic history of elimination of the indigenous population, low levels of European immigration, and the large-scale importation of Africans, the process of classification had a distinctive character and form in which whites, blacks, Indians, and people of mixed origins were grouped and categorized in different ways at different times. This study seeks to explore a small part of this process by examining the mestizos, the descendants of Spanish-Indian contacts during the early stages of Caribbean settlement. Mestizos, there from the outset, seem to fade from sight. What happened to them? Did they constitute a separate ethnicity, and why does their position in the Hispanic Caribbean seem different from that in other areas of Spanish America?…

…The word “mestizo” itself appeared in the Caribbean as early as the 1520s but it was rarely used, a fact surprisingly paralleled in early Peru and Paraguay where less pejorative terms like genizaro or montanés were preferred at first. In a place like Puerto Rico, for example, it is difficult to find any references to mestizos despite the fact that many already existed by the 1530s. The Lando census of 1530 enumerated Spaniards, Indians, and blacks but made no mention of persons of mixed origin. Over a century later, in the 1645 synod of San Juan there was no reference to mestizos, and the presiding Bishop, Damian López de Haro, in describing the island’s population made no mention of them. Still, modern historian Francisco Scarano (1993:199) has argued that by the seventeenth century mestizos “were probably more numerous than the Spaniards themselves.” What may be at stake here is not the definition of “mestizo,” but rather the definition of “Spaniard.” Mestizos, especially those born legitimately and who lived according to accepted colonial norms were being accepted as “Spaniards,” a term that now no longer indicated place of origin alone, but was being expanded to indicate status and a level of acceptance based on cultural attributes and probably to some extent on appearance (Schwartz 1995)…

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The Origins and Authors of the Code Noir

Louisiana Law Review
Volume 56, Number 2 (Winter 1996)
pages 363-407

Vernon Valentine Palmer, Thomas Pickles Professor of Law
Tulane University, New Orleans

I. Introduction

The Code Noir marked France’s historic rendezvous with slavery in the Americas. It was one of the most important codes in the history of French codes. First promulgated by Louis XIV in 1685 for his possessions in the Antilles, then introduced in Louisiana in 1724, this code was, unlike the Custom of Paris, the only comprehensive legislation which applied to the whole population, both black and white. In these colonies where slaves vastly outnumbered Europeans and slave labor was the engine of the economy as well as its greatest capital investment, the Code was a law affecting social, religious and property relationships between all classes.

The Code was also an important sociological portrait, for no legislation better revealed the belief system of European society including its fears, values and moral blind spots. No legislation was more frequently amended and regularly adapted to adjust to France’s evolving experience with slavery. Furthermore, perhaps no aspect of the Code—whether one refers to its motives and aims, compares it to other slave systems, or questions its enforcement—is free of contemporary controversy.

However, no set of issues is more important than the Code’s antecedents and origins. Who were its authors and what sources did they use in drafting the Code? And what difference does it make? Some have claimed that the Code Noir derives from Roman law and that once again we have an example of legislation from the civil law which contrasts with slave legislation in the English colonies. But to what extent is this conclusion justified? Indeed, the claims about Roman sources usually include the argument that slave laws like those of France and Spain were susceptible of being codified because the Roman reservoir of rules was available, whereas English law developed ad hoc experientially, and could not be codified at the outset2 Some even argue that Rome’s legal influence improved the quality of life of slaves in the New World. France and Spain’s laws, they argue, were relatively more “humane” or less dehumanizing than slavery rules developed by English colonies, and Spanish slavery regulation was milder than that of France because of the greater degree to which Spain absorbed Roman law into its law of slavery…

…II. THE INSTRUCTIONS

The first document is the King’s Mémoire to his Intendant, dated April 30, 1681. This Mémoire is a statement of reasons or motifs why a slavery code is desired, and it contains a set of instructions for the preparation of an “ordonnance” in the Antilles. The King entrusted the task to Jean-Baptiste Patoulet and the Comte de Blénac, his two top officials in the Antilles…

…III. The Drafters’ Rough Notes

On December 3, 1681, de Blénac and Patoulet compiled what is essentially a set of notes comparing their views and seeking consensus on specific problems and topics relating to slavery. Two vertical columns divide each page. The right-hand column reads, “Advice of M. de Blénac on several issues in the Isles of America” and the left-hand column carries the heading “Response of Sieur Patoulet.” De Blénac took the initiative in the drafting, organizing his thoughts into nine articles. Article one deals with convening sessions of the Sovereign Councils, article two with matters of taxation, article three with the problem of the diminishing number of Europeans in the islands, article four with criminal and civil trials, procedures and punishments of slaves, article five with questions arising out of racial mixing (status of offspring, marriage, customs in Martinique and Guadeloupe, etc.), article six with the desirability of introducing feudal fiefs in the islands, article seven with establishing an inspectorate to monitor the treatment of slaves on each island, and article eight with police control (passes, runaways, etc.). Article nine contains a miscellany. De Blénac wrote these sections of the memorandum and then sent the papers on to Patoulet for his response or comments. Patoulet completed his “Response” three days later, and returned the entire document to de Blénac who then added a postscript stating that he would appear the following Monday at Patoulet’s office to work further on the drafting.

De Blénac’s procedure in this memorandum was to pose a general problem at the beginning of each paragraph within an article and then to list possible solutions by shorthand annotation. Patoulet’s responses either approved, disapproved, or supplemented these solutions. These agreements and disagreements formed the basis of their subsequent working session.

These notes allow glimpses into the formative stage of the redaction. They also illuminate aspects of the personalities of the authors and the sources at their disposition. The notes first reveal that the authors took quite seriously the obligation to collaborate with the three Sovereign Councils. De Blénac outlined a procedure in article one, whereby the Councils of all the islands were to meet every two months and to remain in continuous session where matters required it. The authors apparently interpreted their instructions as permitting some parts of the slave code to arise out of the deliberations of these assemblies. This was a sensible interpretation. Since the Intendant served as first president of these Councils with responsibility to take the votes, draw up and sign and promulgate the regulations, and since the Governor-General had full rights of audience and was expected to attend, these sessions would have been the most convenient means by which the authors might comply with their duty to seek consensus and collaboration. Yet this shows that they built the Code not merely out of previously established laws and customs, but from on-going legislative activity during the redaction period itself. Thus, to Patoulet and de Blénac “collaboration” did not exclude the passage of new legislation by the local representative institutions which they led. This was the antithesis of an “artificial” process of discovering rules by the light of Roman sources in faraway Paris.

Second, the notes give hints as to the personalities and motives of the codifiers. De Blénac appears the more humanitarian and racially tolerant of the two. He called for inspectors to be placed on each island to monitor the treatment of slaves, and he wanted to outlaw the use of cruel punishments like “la brimballe” and “le hamac.” Patoulet, however, did not find these practices “too rude” to be employed. Patoulet believed in strict separation of the races. He was scandalized by concubinage between Europeans and Africans, whereas de Blénac considered miscegenation a normal, even inevitable, phenomenon in the colonial context.

Though the drafters may have had somewhat differing outlooks, we should guard against the tendency to contuse their motives with our own views. Judging by these notes, some allegedly “protective” rules may have had a completely different motive than to protect slaves. For example, de Blénac and Patoulet reached the conclusion that the law should require owners to provide their slaves with minimum food and clothing allotments, and this rule passed into the Code Noir. They did not originally discuss this measure as a matter of decency or humanity toward slaves (as might be supposed), but as a means of halting the diminishing white population in the islands. The drafters’ notes argued that when slaves were not properly fed, they had a tendency to run away in search of food and steal from the petit blancs, causing these whites to sell their lands and leave the islands. Readers of the Code may search for higher motives behind the rations provision, but the Mémoire provides evidence that cold-eyed efficiency primed every other consideration.

Finally, the drafters’ notes contain important references to the existence of customs and usages about slavery which had already taken root in the Caribbean islands. These practices were a vital part of the dynamic by which indigenous slave law developed. De Blénac tells us, for example, that there was a usage on the isle of Martinique regarding the manumission of mulattoes: the men are freed automatically when they become twenty years old, the women when they reach fifteen years. The father of a mulatto child was obliged to pay a fine to the Church as a penalty, and if he claimed the child for himself from the owner of the mother he had to pay the owner a similar sum. On Guadeloupe and St. Christophe, however, de Blénac outlines the development of other laws and customs. De Blénac takes all of these rules and practices into account in stating his position to Patoulet. As mentioned earlier, the presence of these diverse legal elements and sources shows that the picture of French slave law drawn by Professor Watson is quite misleading. Professor Watson assumed that France would have turned inevitably to Roman sources because there was a legal vacuum existing with respect to local law and custom. This took no account, however, of the speed and diversity with which law and custom incubated on small isolated islands separated by great distances. None of this development could have been visible from Paris, nor would it have depended upon Rome…

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