focus on metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and ethics. In addition to numerous articles about Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and several other early modern philosophers, she is the author of Leibniz on Causation and Agency and the editor of Powers: A History.
Jorati applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Slavery and Race: Philosophical Debates in the Eighteenth Century, and reported the following:
Page 99 is the first page of chapter two, which focuses on Scottish debates about slavery and race in the eighteenth century. The page introduces readers to David Spens, an enslaved Black man who had been brought to Scotland by his enslaver and who contended in a court case in 1770 that his continued enslavement was illegal. Spens’s main argument was that his conversion to Christianity should have made him free. Here are his words, as recorded in court documents:Learn more about Slavery and Race at the Oxford University Press website.I David Spens formerly called Black Tom late slave to Dr. David Dalrymple of Lindifferen hereby intimate to you the said Dr. Dalrymple that being formerly an heathen slave to you and of consequence then at your disposal but being now instructed in the Christian Religion I have embraced the same . . . and of consequence I am now by the Christian Religion Liberate and set at freedom from my old yoke, bondage, and slavery.The notion that enslaved people gain freedom if they convert to Christianity was controversial during this period, but Spens was not the only one who used it to argue for the right to freedom. Whether the Scottish court agreed with this argument is unclear because Spens’s enslaver died later that year, before a formal judgment was reached, and Spens became free as a result.
In some ways, this page is an accurate reflection of the book overall, which aims to explore the philosophical ideas employed in eighteenth-century debates about slavery. Spens is one of many authors whose arguments I discuss in the book. In other respects, however, the page about Spens is an outlier: the legal argument that freedom is a consequence of converting to Christianity is only of marginal importance to the book. After all, the book centers on the role that race—rather than religion—plays in debates about slavery. In particular, the book traces various versions of, and responses to, the racist proslavery argument that Black people are naturally destined for slavery based on allegedly inferior natural capacities. According to this argument, being Black means being a natural slave, or being naturally suited only for enslavement. This argument was central to eighteenth-century debates about slavery and we can learn a lot about the history or race and racism by scrutinizing the ways in which authors either defended or attacked it. While the book also mentions other proslavery and antislavery arguments, the idea of natural slavery is its focus.
--Marshal Zeringue
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