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Abstract
Contemporary law and legal theory are resigned to the view that the corporation is a mere nexus of contracts, a legal person lacking both body and soul. This essay explores that commitment to the immateriality of the corporation through a discussion of the 18th-century revolt against the Indies Company in Saint-Domingue (Haiti) and British North America. Opponents of the joint-stock monopoly in these Atlantic settings believed, like critics of transnational corporate power today, that the company form represented a merger of wealth and power operating to subvert the liberties of disenfranchised outsiders. Financial crisis served to destabilize the fiscal and political environment that insulated the Indies Company from its critics, who took advantage of these openings by attacking the material embodiments of the corporation in the name of “free trade.” The 18th-century opposition to monopoly privilege suggests that corporate personality was neither dismissed as fiction nor accepted as reality, and that in some circumstances, at least, the corporate body could indeed be held to account for the sins of a person without conscience.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author thanks Frans-Willem Korsten, Yasco Horsman, and Nanne Timmer for inviting him to the wonderful “Legal Bodies” conference in Leiden, the Netherlands, at which an earlier and rather different version of this paper was delivered under the title “The Forever Company.” The author is grateful to the audience members for their comments and questions. Thank you also to Susanna Blumenthal for the opportunity to present a near-final draft of the paper to the University of Minnesota Legal History Workshop; the student and faculty participants in that seminar provided exceptionally helpful feedback. Thanks, lastly, to Paul Cheney for his thoughts on a draft of a related manuscript.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. The theme of government collusion with corporate power also figures, albeit less prominently, in some strands of (conservative) Tea Party rhetoric; Linton Weeks, “Today's Tea Party Isn't Quite Like 1773's,” National Public Radio, September 27, 2010, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130152859//.
2. Gregory A. Mark, “The Personification of the Business Corporation in American Law,” University of Chicago Law Review 54, no. 4 (1987): 1472.
3. Neuroscience has placed the definition of the self itself up for grabs; Lynn Hunt, “The Self and Its History,” American Historical Review 119, no. 5 (2014): 1576–86. doi:10.1093/ahr/119.5.1576.
4. Quoted in John C. Coffee, Jr., “‘No Soul to Damn, No Body to Kick’: An Unscandalized Inquiry into the Problem of Corporate Punishment,” Michigan Law Review 79, no. 3 (1981): 386–459, 386. See also the discussion in John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 33. An alternative formulation attributed to Thurlow reads as follows: “Corporations have neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be condemned; they therefore do as they like”; John Poynder, Literary Extracts from English and Other Works, vol. 1 (London: John Hatchard & Son, 1844), 268.
5. Stephen Bainbridge, “The Immorality of Corporate Reparations,” ProfessorBainbridge.com (January 27, 2004), http://www.professorbainbridge.com/professorbainbridgecom/2004/01/the-immorality-of-corporate-reparations.html//. For a critique of the nexus of contracts approach as too ambiguous to provide an adequate model of the corporation, see Lewis A. Kornkauser, “The Nexus of Contracts Approach to Corporations: A Comment on Easterbrook and Fischel.” Columbia Law Review 89, no. 7 (1989): 1449–460.
6. For a (very partial) sampling of the large and growing legal–theoretical literature on corporate personhood, see Daniel J. H. Greenwood, “Introduction to the Metaphors of Corporate Law,” Seattle Journal for Social Justice 4, no. 1 (2005): 273–303; and Ernst Freund, The Legal Nature of Corporations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1897).
7. The classic discussion is Roland Mousnier, Les institutions de la France sous la monarchie absolue 1598–1789 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2005). For a reexamination of Mousnier's thesis, see Gail Bossenga, “Estates, Orders and Corps,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Ancien Regime, ed. William Doyle (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 141–61.
8. Malick W. Ghachem, “Royal Liberties,” in The Princeton Companion to Atlantic History, ed. Joseph Miller (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 294–98.
9. For the analogy between Early Modern and contemporary transnational trading firms, see Ann N. Carlos and Stephen Nicholas, “‘Giants of an Earlier Capitalism’: The Chartered Trading Companies as Modern Multinationals,” Business History Review 62 (Autumn 1988): 398–419. Smaller but critically important Indies companies were sponsored by Sweden, the Austrian Netherlands (the Ostend Company), and Denmark in the 18th century; Markus A. Denzel, Jan de Vries, and Philip Robinson Rössner, Small Is Beautiful?: Interlopers and Smaller Trading Nations in the Pre-Industrial Period (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2011).
10. Partial exceptions include regulated public utilities and transportation companies.
11. For the development of American and European ideas of antitrust/competition policy, see Herbert Hovenkamp, Enterprise and American Law, 1836–1937 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); and Daniel A. Crane and Herbert Hovenkamp, The Making of Competition Policy: Legal and Economic Sources (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
12. “European Commission Decides Selective Tax Advantages for Fiat in Luxembourg and Starbucks in the Netherlands are Illegal under EU State Aid Rules,” Press Release (October 21, 2015), http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-15-5880_en.pdf//; James Kanter, “E.U. Orders 2 Nations to Recover Taxes from Starbucks and Fiat,” New York Times (October 21, 2015), http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/22/business/international/starbucks-fiat-eu-tax-netherlands-luxembourg.html//; Charles Duhigg and David Kocieniewski, “Apple's Tax Strategy Aims at Low-Tax States and Nations,” New York Times (April 28, 2014), http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/business/apples-tax-strategy-aims-at-low-tax-states-and-nations.html//; Marc Short and Andy Koenig, “Giving Billions to the Rich,” New York Times (November 23, 2015): A21.
13. Franklin Foer, “Amazon Must Be Stopped,” New Republic (October 10, 2014), https://newrepublic.com/article/119769/amazons-monopoly-must-be-broken-radical-plan-tech-giant//. For an argument that companies like Amazon and Comcast are best understood as “platforms” rather than monopolies, see K. Sabeel Rahman, “Curbing the New Corporate Power,” Boston Review (May 4, 2015), http://bostonreview.net/forum/k-sabeel-rahman-curbing-new-corporate-power//.
14. For an evocative discussion of the politics of oceanic commerce in French and British economic thought of the 1760s and 1770s, see Emma Rothschild, “Global Commerce and the Question of Sovereignty in the Eighteenth-Century Provinces,” Modern Intellectual History 1, no. 1 (2004): 3–25.
15. For example, Crane and Hovenkamp, Making of Competition Policy, 2. That Smith himself figured in 19th-century theoretical discussions of laissez-faire economics, including jurisprudential discussions, is undeniable; e.g., Nicola Giocoli, “The Classical Limits to Police Power: Adam Smith and the Economic Foundations of the Slaughterhouse Dissents,” March 5, 2016, available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=2742517. For a creative reinterpretation of Smith's iconic value in the narrative of the rise of “free trade,” see Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). Sankar Muthu shares Rothschild's revisionist reading of the “invisible hand” motif, but remains committed to understanding the international trading companies through the lens of Smith; Sankar Muthu, “Adam Smith's Critique of International Trading Companies Theorizing ‘Globalization’ in the Age of Enlightenment,” Political Theory 36, no. 2 (2008): 185–212. Rothschild emphasizes that the economists of the 1760s and 1770s “explored some of their most profound ideas in the course of highly empirical observations about the events of ordinary economic life” – observations and events with which the history of political economy has traditionally been little concerned; Rothschild, “Global Commerce and the Question of Sovereignty,” 22–23.
16. For the intellectual background, see, inter alia, Muthu, “Adam Smith's Critique,” 190–94 (elaborating Smith's understanding of commercial liberty as a “human right”); and Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 192 (discussing Quesnay's and Mirabeau's understanding of trade as “free by its very nature”).
17. Cf. Philip J. Stern, “Companies: Monopoly, Sovereignty, and the East Indies,” in Mercantilism Reimagined: Political Economy in Early Modern Britain and Its Empire, ed. Philip J. Stern and Carl Wennerlind (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 177–195, 187.
18. For a discussion of the Early Modern tradition that declines to offer a systematic definition of the term “revolt,” see Yves-Marie Bercé, Révoltes et révolutions dans l’Europe moderne (Paris: CNRS, 2013), 7.
19. Antony Black, “Introduction” to Otto von Gierke, Community in Historical Perspective: A Translation of Selections from Das deutsche Genossenschaftsrecht [The German Law of Fellowship], ed. Antony Black, trans. Mary Fischer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), xiv–xv.
20. Gierke, Community in Historical Perspective, 198.
21. Black, “Introduction,” xvii.
22. Gierke, Community in Historical Perspective, 203–04.
23. Cf. John Thomas Noonan, Persons and Masks of the Law: Cardozo, Holmes, Jefferson, and Wythe as Makers of the Masks (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1976), 25 (observing that “the masks of the law are magical ways by which persons are removed from the legal process”).
24. Jed S. Rakoff, “The Financial Crisis: Why Have No High-Level Executives been Prosecuted?,” New York Review of Books (January 9, 2014), http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/jan/09/financial-crisis-why-no-executive-prosecutions/.
25. Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., 573 U.S. __ (2014).
26. Model Penal Code §207.06, quoted in Sanford Kadish and Stephen Schulhofer, Criminal Law and Its Processes: Cases and Materials, 6th ed. (New York: Little Brown, 1995), 706.
27. On this reluctance, see Brandon Garrett, Too Big to Jail: How Prosecutors Compromise with Corporations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).
28. On the Early Modern French monarchy's use of privilege as an engine of economic expansion, see Jeff Horn, Economic Development in Early Modern France: The Privilege of Liberty, 1650–1820 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), esp. 96–131.
29. For the claim of British emulation, see John Mickelthwait and Adrian Wooldridge, The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 20.
30. The merger of the Company of the West with the East India Company and the China Company was accomplished by a May 1719 decree. The regency government added the remaining spheres of commercial influence later in 1719 and 1720.
31. Notwithstanding that the terms of its charter licensed the EIC to conduct trade between the Cape of Good Hope and the Straits of Magellan, the EIC did control one Atlantic territory, the south Atlantic island of St. Helena, for most of the period from 1657 to 1834. (An important commercial establishment in the 18th century, St. Helena is perhaps most famous as the site of Napoleon's banishment from the continent in 1815.) However, as Philip Stern points out, in conceptual and jurisdictional terms the Company's Court of Committees considered St. Helena as located “in India”; Philip Stern, The Company–State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 42. See also Claire Breay and Julian Harrison, Magna Carta: Law, Liberty, and Legacy (London: British Library, 2015), 197 (noting the imprint of Magna Carta on the EIC's 1683 constitution for St. Helena).
32. The exact parallel between the much feared and maligned universal monarchy, on the one hand, and the despotic potential of the universal company, on the other, seems not to have figured prominently in Enlightenment political thought; J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, Vol. 1: The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737–1764 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 109. But see Muthu, “Adam Smith's Critique,” 187–88 (arguing that the critique of commercial overreach was very much at issue in Enlightenment economic thought).
33. Urs Stäheli, Spectacular Speculation: Thrills, The Economy, and Popular Discourse, trans. Eric Savoth (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), ch. 3.
34. “Arrêt du Conseil d’Etat, qui subroge la Compagnie des indes aux droits et prétentions appartenans à la Compagnie de Saint-Domingue” (September 10, 1720), in Médéric Louis Elie Moreau de Saint-Méry, Loix et constitutions des colonies françoises de l’Amérique sous le vent, 3 vols. (Paris and Cap Français, 1784), II: 692–96.
35. John Garrigus, Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), ch. 1.
36. “Arrêt du Conseil d’Etat” (September 10, 1720). Shortly after this monopoly was granted, the company received a monopoly over the slave trade in the Gulf of Guinea to its preexisting monopoly on the Senegambian slave trade north of Sierra Leone; Moreau de Saint-Méry, Loix et constitutions , II: 698–701. As of late September 1720, the entire French slave trade was, in theory at least, in the hands of a single company.
37. “Arrêt du Conseil d’Etat qui fixe l’indemnité créé par la Compagnie des indes à la Compagnie de St. Domingue” (September 12, 1720), Archives nationales d’outre-mer, Aix-en-Provence, France (hereinafter ANOM), F/2A/11, f. 412.
38. “Arrêt du Conseil d’Etat, qui subroge la Compagnie des Indes” (September 10, 1720), in Moreau de Saint-Méry, Loix et constitutions, II: 695.
39. “Ordonnance du roi, concernant la diminution des espèces étrangères, et leur reduction au poids” (August 3, 1722), in ibid., III: 16–17.
40. Robert Lacombe, “Histoire monétaire de Saint-Domingue,” Revue d’histoire des colonies 43, no. 152 (1956): 273–337, 293.
41. Jack Greene and Richard M. Jellison, “The Currency Act of 1764 in Imperial–Colonial Relations, 1764–1776,” William and Mary Quarterly 18, no. 4 (1961): 485–518, 485–86.
42. Benjamin L. Carp, Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010); Ray Raphael and Marie Raphael, The Spirit of ’74: How the American Revolution Began (New York: New Press, 2015). See also the website of the Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum, which is run by Historic Tours of America, http://www.bostonteapartyship.com/.
43. See note 32 above on the EIC's control of the South Atlantic island of St. Helena.
44. On Massachusetts’ life as defined by various self-governing corporations, see Richard Brown, Revolutionary Politics in Massachusetts: The Boston Committee of Correspondence and the Town, 1772–1774 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 175. Also Pauline Maier, “The Revolutionary Origins of the American Corporation,” William and Mary Quarterly 50, no. 1 (1993): 51–84.
45. H. V. Bowen, Revenue and Reform: The Indian Problem in British Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Nick Bunker, An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America (New York: Knopf, 2014). See also Richard B. Sheridan, “The British Credit Crisis of 1772 and The American Colonies,” The Journal of Economic History 20, no. 2 (1960): 161–186.
46. For example, Raphael and Raphael, Spirit of ’74, 11: “Tea was already a symbol of imperial taxation, and now it signified monopoly as well.” This statement points to a longstanding debate in the literature on the Tea Crisis as to whether taxation or monopoly was the “true” object of colonial protest in 1773–74. For the monopoly argument, see John W. Tyler, Smugglers & Patriots: Boston Merchants and the Advent of the American Revolution (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986); and Arthur M. Schlesinger, “The Uprising against the East India Company,” Political Science Quarterly 32, no. 1 (1917): 60–79. For the taxation argument, see the still classic work of Benjamin Labaree, The Boston Tea Party (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1979). I do not attempt to take a stance on this somewhat circular debate, as the focus here is on the issue of corporate privilege itself.
47. The Townshend (Revenue) Act, July 2, 1767, 7 Geo. III, c. 46, in The Statutes at Large, from Magna Charta to the end of the Eleventh Parliament of Great Britain, Anno 1761, Continued, 46 vols., ed. Danby Pickering (Cambridge: John Archdeacon, 1767), XXVII: 505–12.
48. Quoted in Bowen, Revenue and Reform, 123.
49. The Indemnity Act, July 2, 1767, 7 Geo. III, c. 56, in Pickering, Statutes at Large, XXVI: 600–05. See also Bowen, Revenue and Reform, 122–24.
50. Ibid., 127.
51. Ibid., 126–27.
52. “An Act for granting a Drawback,” June 3, 1772, 7 Geo. III, c. 60, in The statutes at large, from the eleventh year of King George the Third, to the thirteenth year of King George the Third, 9 vols. (London: Charles Eyre & William Strahan, 1773), IX: 538–40.
53. “An act for granting certain duties in the British colonies,” 1720, 7 Geo. I stat. 1, c. 21, sect. 9, in The Statutes at Large, of England and of Great-Britain, ed. Thomas Edlyne Tomlins and John Raithby, 20 vols. (London: G. Eyre & A. Strahan, 1811), VIII: 411–17.
54. A fourth provision of the Tea Act raised the level of the deposits required of successful bidders at the EIC's London tea auctions from 40 shillings to £4 per chest of bohea tea; The Tea Act, May 10, 1773, 13 Geo. III, c. 44, in Statutes at large, from the eleventh year, IX: 827–29.
55. Labaree, Boston Tea Party, 67.
56. The Tea Act, May 10, 1773, sect. 6.
57. The most adamant version of this argument is by Labaree: “Opposition to the East India Company's tea plan was based almost entirely on the issue of the tax.” Labaree goes on to acknowledge, however, that “[w]hat made the plan to send duties tea to the colonies particularly ominous was the nature of the arrangement itself”; Labaree, Boston Tea Party, 258.
58. The Townshend (Revenue) Act, July 2, 1767, sects. 7–8.
59. In this context, note that the full text of the May 1773 Tea Act did not appear in an American newspaper until September 1773, several weeks after the first colonial reports of the new law had begun to proliferate; Labaree, Boston Tea Party, 89. Saint-Domingue boasted no newspapers as of 1722.
60. Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern (London: Verso, 2010), 283.
61. For a good general account of the Mississippi Bubble, see James MacDonald, A Free Nation Deep in Debt: The Financial Roots of Democracy (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003), ch. 5. Cf. Philippe Haudrère, La Compagnie française des Indes, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Paris: Les Indes savants, 2005), I: 78, cautioning against overestimating the extent to which FIC shares and Banque Royale notes were diffused beyond a narrow circle of the financially active public.
62. Marcel Delafosse, “Planteurs de Saint-Domingue et négociants rochelais au temps de Law,” Revue d’histoire des colonies 41, no. 142 (1954): 14–18; Lacombe, “Histoire monétaire de Saint-Domingue,” 292–93.
63. Ibid., 293.
64. Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix, Histoire de l’Isle Espagnole ou de St. Domingue, 2 vols. (Paris: Jacques Guerin, 1731), II: 394.
65. Charlevoix, Histoire de l'Isle Espagnole, II: 402–03.
66. The major accounts of the Saint-Domingue revolt of 1722–24 are: Charles Frostin, Les révoltes blanches à Saint-Domingue aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Haïti avant 1789) (Paris: l’École, 1975), 166–265; Joannès Martial Marie Hippolyte Tramond, Les troubles de Saint-Domingue en 1722–1724 (Paris: E. Leroux, 1929); and Georges Pollet, Saint-Domingue et l’autonomie, 1629–1730 (Saint-Amand (Cher): Impr. Clerc, 1934), 224–67. These accounts make greater or lesser use of the narrative composed shortly after the events in question by Charlevoix, Histoire de l’Isle Espagnole, II: 393–468.
67. “Lettre écrite aux commissaires du Conseil de Léogane par Le Sr Lesgut, directeur du comptoir de la Compagnie à Léogane, sur les privilèges accordées à la Compagnie” (November 23, 1722), ANOM, F/3/169, ff. 67r–69v.
68. “Relation de ce qui est arrivé au Cap à l’égard de la Compagnie des indes” (November 20, 1722), ANOM, F/3/169, f. 136. The author of this account was possibly Châtenoye, commander of the port at Cap Français, the colony's major commercial hub in the north.
69. For example, Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, revd. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1992), 232 ff.; and, most recently, Peter Dorsey, Common Bondage: Slavery as Metaphor in Revolutionary America (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2009).
70. Rothschild, Economic Sentiments.
71. Cf. William Pettigrew, Freedom's Debt: The Royal African Company and the Politics of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1672–1752 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2013).
72. William Sewell, “Historical Events as Transformations of Structures: Inventing Revolution at the Bastille,” Theory and Society 25, no. 6 (1996), 843.
73. Ibid., 841–881, 844.
74. “Relation de ce qui s’est passé à St. Domingue” (1723), ANOM, F/3/169, f. 148 left. The exact same phrase appears in Charlevoix, Histoire de l’Isle Espagnole, II: 426. Charlevoix based his narrative primarily on the contemporaneous manuscripts of the Walloon Father Jean-Baptiste Le Pers, a fellow Jesuit who arrived in Saint-Domingue in 1704 and remained through the 1720s. On Le Pers, whom Charlevoix met during his novitiate years in Paris, see J.-Edmond Roy, “Essai sur Charlevoix (première partie)” in Proceedings of the Royal Society of Canada: Délibérations et mémoires de la Société royale du Canada, 3rd ser., vol. 1 (Ottowa: Royal Society of Canada, 1907), 3–95, 55.
75. For the Saint-Domingue case, see [Nicolas-Louis Bourgeois and Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Nougaret], Voyages intéressants dans différentes colonies françaises, espagnoles, anglaises (London: J.-F. Bastien, 1788), 196, claiming that the insurgents who raised the greatest fuss over the Duc de Noailles were among the leading buyers of its slave cargo. For the American variation on this theme, see Mary Beth Norton's work on the “seventh tea ship,” which shipwrecked off the coast of Cape Cod and whose cargo was salvaged and partly sold off amidst great controversy. Mary Beth Norton, “The Seventh Tea Ship,” The William and Mary Quarterly 73, no. 4 (2016): 681–710.
76. Carp, Defiance of the Patriots, ch. 10.
77. Charles Dudley to the Commissioners of Customs at Boston (April 11, 1771), in Documents of the American Revolution, 1770–1783 (Colonial Office Series), ed. K. G. Davies 21 vols. (Shannon: Irish University Press, 1791), III: 78–82; Bunker, Empire on the Edge, 328.
78. Quoted in Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution, 1763–1776 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1918), 266. Schlesinger is here citing an extract of Wharton's letter, dated October 5, 1773, that was published in Francis S. Drake, Tea Leaves, Being a Collection of Letters and Documents Relating to the Shipment of Tea to the American Colonies in the year 1773, by the East India Tea Company (Boston: A.O. Crane, 1884), 273.
79. Inhabitants of Pennsylvania a Very Dangerous Attempt to Render Ineffectual Your Virtuous Exertions, against the Inroads of Oppression and Slavery, Being Now Meditated by the East-India Company, under the Direction of a Corrupt and Designing Ministry (Philadelphia, 1773).
80. A claim borne out by the historical record; Bowen, Revenue and Reform, 123–24.
81. Quoted in Labaree, Boston Tea Party, 89–90. For additional examples of the slavery trope, see ibid., 95; and To the Freeholders and Freemen, in Pennsylvania. It Is Certainly Very Difficult to Fix the Precise Limits to Which Scepticism May Be Extended (Philadelphia, 1773).
82. Moses Brown to Thomas Arnold (August 23, 1774), in the Moses Brown Correspondence, Rhode Island Historical Society, Mss. 313; William D. Johnston, “Slavery in Rhode Island, 1755–1776,” Publications of the Rhode Island Historical Society 2, no. 2 (Providence: Rhode Island Historical Society, 1894), 113ff.; “Documents Relative to the Action of Rhode Island for Resisting the 1773 Tea Act,” in Records of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations in New England, ed. John Russell Bartlett, 10 vols. (Providence: A. Crawford Greene, 1862), VII: 272ff.; “The Continental Association” (October 20, 1774), http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/presentationsandactivities/presentations/timeline/amrev/rebelln/assoc.html//; W. E. B. Du Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870 (New York: Longmans, 1904), 41–44.
83. Quoted in Raphael and Raphael, Spirit of ’74, 4.
84. On the rediscovery of the Tea Party in the 1830s, see Alfred Young, The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution (Boston: Beacon, 2000).
85. Alfred Young, The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution (Boston: Beacon, 1999).
86. Maier, “Revolutionary Origins of the American Corporation.”
87. Cf. Jeremy Adelman, Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).
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Malick W. Ghachem
Malick W. Ghachem is Associate Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2012).