@article{729673,
      recid = {729673},
      author = {Martinez, Jenny S.},
      title = {The slave trade and the origins of international human  rights law [electronic resource] /},
      publisher = {Oxford University Press,},
      address = {Oxford ;},
      pages = {1 online resource (254 p.)},
      year = {2012},
      abstract = {"There is a broad consensus among scholars that the idea  of human rights was a product of the Enlightenment and that  a self-conscious and broad-based human rights movement  focused on international law only began after World War II.  In this narrative, the nineteenth century's absence is  conspicuous--few have considered that era seriously, much  less written books on it. But as Jenny Martinez shows in  this novel interpretation of the roots of human rights law,  the foundation of the movement that we know today was a  product of one of the nineteenth century's central moral  causes: the movement to ban the international slave trade.  Originating in England in the late eighteenth century,  abolitionism achieved remarkable success over the course of  the nineteenth century. Martinez focuses in particular on  the international admiralty courts, which tried the crews  of captured slave ships. The courts, which were based in  the Caribbean, West Africa, Cape Town, and Brazil, helped  free at least 80,000 Africans from captured slavers between  1807 and 1871. Here then, buried in the dusty archives of  admiralty courts, ships' logs, and the British foreign  office, are the foundations of contemporary human rights  law: international courts targeting states and non-state  transnational actors while working on behalf the world's  most persecuted peoples--captured West Africans bound for  the slave plantations of the Americas. Fueled by a powerful  thesis and novel evidence, Martinez's work will reshape the  fields of human rights history and international human  rights law"--},
      url = {http://library.usi.edu/record/729673},
}