This course explores histories of slavery and the law throughout the Caribbean and North America from European conquest in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to the abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century. We will read primary sources, including slave laws, trial transcripts, treatises, and first-person narratives. Topics include: indigenous forced labour regimes; slave laws; crime and punishment; manumission; the legal position of free persons of African descent; abolition and the meaning of freedom; the transatlantic slave trade and international law; and the origins of human rights.