Browse Items (1079 total)

King John of England granted the Magna Carta ("the great charter") on 15 June 1215. Leading nobles had demanded confirmation of their liberties and had threatened war if their demands were not met. The King agreed not to confiscate his subjects’…

In 1628, the position of Charles I of England had gone from bad to worse. Rash enterprises, lavish and illegal expenditure, and broken promises of better government had almost ruptured relations between the monarch and his subjects. The King offered…

This depiction of a sugar plantation in Saint Domingue emphasizes the grinding mill and refining vats. An overseer with a gun supervises the slave labor. By 1789 Saint Domingue excelled at sugar production, outpacing other French colonies and the…

This print depicts and labels the essential components of a plantation producing indigo, a blue dye used for coloring cloth. Slaves are shown here working at different parts of the production process. In 1789, over 3,000 plantations in Saint Domingue…

As shown here, numerous activities of plantation life were carried out by slaves. This scene includes women and children, who formed a relatively small part of the enslaved population.

The Code noir initially took shape in Louis XIV’s edict of 1685. Although subsequent decrees modified a few of the code’s provisions, this first document established the main lines for the policing of slavery right up to 1789. The very first article…

In response to policies that threatened to restore Catholicism in England, Parliament deposed King James II and called William of Orange from the Dutch Republic and his wife Mary, who was James’s Protestant daughter, to replace him. William and Mary…