Blood Fictions, Maternal Inheritance, and the Legacies of Colonial Slavery

This article examines early modern European and colonial American understandings of racial and slave status as hereditary conditions rooted in blood. Focusing primarily on the Chesapeake and Caribbean colonies, I argue that notions of inheritable blood shaped the development of legal innovations and social practices linking African maternal ancestry to permanent commodification and marginalization. Across the Anglo-Atlantic world, unregulated sexual behaviors disrupted racial legal regimes increasingly undergirded by fictions of blood, leading to legal prohibitions against, and ongoing sociocultural concerns surrounding, interethnic mixture.