'Property in humans': unfree labor in the early French Atlantic

This Masters thesis uses the legal classification of slaves as a specific form of private property in the French Code Noir of 1685 as an analytical lens to examine the multiple intersections of race, gender, conceptions of property, and struggles over authority between the French metropole and its Caribbean colonies between c. 1660 and c. 1770. Through this examination, this thesis shows how these hierarchies of power shaped slavery through a complex process which included racialist conceptions but did not emerge or form solely from them. Instead, early modern French ideas of property, tensions between colonial slave owners and the metropole, the gendered hierarchy which shaped early modern French society, and racialist notions which developed alongside the rise of plantation slavery, all intersected in multiple ways that shaped French slavery into one form of unfree labor in the French Atlantic during a period when race itself was a flexible concept.