Shannan’s Reviews > The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us > Status Update

The bleak irony was that it was only through this eventual abolition act that slaves came to be defined, in British law, as the ‘inalienable property of their masters’. Up to this moment the English common law had neither expressly condoned nor forbidden slavery. But when the argument had turned towards compensation, the law had to state explicitly: slaves were the property of their owners