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From Slaves to Subjects: Forging Freedom in the Canadian Legal SystemUnknown Date (has links)
This thesis clarifies recent debates on the problems of territorialized freedom in
the Atlantic world by examining several extradition cases involving runaway slaves in
Canada, where southern slaveholders attempted to retrieve their lost property by
relabeling fugitive slaves as fugitive criminals. In order to combat these efforts and
receive the full protections of British subjecthood, self-emancipated people realized that
they needed to prove themselves worthy of this status. To achieve this, black refugees
formulated their own language of subjecthood predicated upon economic productivity,
social respectability, and political loyalty. By actively working to incorporate themselves
into the British Empire, Afro-Canadians redefined subjecthood from a status largely seen
as a passively received birthright to a deliberate choice. Therefore, this thesis
demonstrates that ways in which formerly enslaved people laid out their own terms for imperial inclusion and defined the contours of black social and legal belonging in a
partially free Atlantic world. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2017. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection
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