Running, Hiding, and Hoping

This book offers an unprecedented comparative study of five landmark court cases on slavery, tried on both sides of the Atlantic and spanning nearly a century: Somerset, the Zong, the Amistad, the Creole, and Dred Scott.

Dr. Nicholls reviews these cases through an interdisciplinary lens, analysing their historical, socio-economic and political rami cations. He also raises the critical issue revolving around the volatile and often conflicting notions of freedom, property, property rights, the definition of ownership, as well as the basic human right and authority to assert these rights whether or not they are legally recognised.

Finally, this study explores how the application of positive law, explicitly and exclusively devoted to the social control of slaves was also contrary to the declared tenets of natural law and how this tension was largely ignored.

Dr. Colin R. Nicholls, a Barbadian, was a graduate of Seton Hall University and the University of Virginia, USA, and held a Doctorate in African and Caribbean Literatures from the Sorbonne, and a Diploma in Law from the University of Paris. He was a Lecturer in French at the University of Virginia, and in International Development at the University of Paris. He was for twenty-six years an international civil servant at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Paris and ended his diplomatic career in 2011 as UNESCO Representative to Burundi where he served for six and a half years.

Colin Nicholls published several articles on African and Caribbean Literatures, Culture.