Historians have paid more attention to the inner life of households than to their legal and political significance in early European overseas empires. This article analyses the legal role of households in the seventeenth century Caribbean, with an emphasis on Jamaica and Suriname. It argues that households were key to organising maritime violence and composing regional order. Imperial agents in the Caribbean—soldiers, sojourners, servants, and officials—drew selectively from European political and legal discourses about dominium to define households as essential to the constitution of colonial communities and governance. In imperial and colonial legal imagination, households were necessary for the constitution of political communities and their presence fortified arguments for interpolitical violence, especially maritime raiding. Affirming the rights of household heads to hold and command captives, imperial policies to foment household formation and regulate conflicts within households underpinned a regional regime of raiding, captive taking, and enslavement. The regional regime centred on legalities of violence. Demand for coerced labour in early plantation households fuelled a 
circum-Caribbean economy of captive taking and plunder, while settlers invoked the defence of households to authorise privateering and local warfare. As the primary legal framework for absorbing and commanding coerced labour, households became the object of inter-imperial competition and a vehicle for constructing enslavement as an institution. Contests over the rights of settlers to relocate to competing colonies at times pitted expansive understandings of the dominium of household heads—the exercise of private power over household subordinates—against the public authorities they nominally sustained. Such conflicts worked to reinforce the centrality of households to the expansion of plantation slavery. The politics of households made them an unstable underpinning for colonial governance and a site of resistance to the emerging plantocracy. Officials in Jamaica struggled to manage the volatile relation between raiding and planter household formation. In Suriname, Indigenous and African captives struggled to escape and subvert forms of slavery and coercion imposed under cover of household dominium. Examining the significance of households in colonial thought illuminates important and often overlooked continuities in the legal politics of nascent Caribbean colonies and the rise of a regional slave regime. Viewed from the colonial household, legal change across the Caribbean did not follow discrete stages of conquest, privateering, and plantation slavery. Instead, it evolved in relation to shifting accommodations between public and private claims to authority and legitimate violence. Authorising warfare and converting captives into property, households formed a legal fulcrum for balancing interdependent networks of raiding, slaving, and planting in emergent slave societies. This constellation of private rights and public authority, organised around captive taking ventures and slave-holding households, spanned the seventeenth-century Caribbean and produced an inter-imperial legal regime in which the rights of slave owners came to occupy the very centre of visions of regional order.

中文翻译：

---

家庭的海洋：加勒比帝国之间的秩序暴力和流动性


历史学家更关注家庭的内心生活，而不是它们在早期欧洲海外帝国中的法律和政治意义。本文分析了 17 世纪加勒比地区家庭的法律作用，重点介绍了牙买加和苏里南。它认为，家庭是组织海上暴力和构建区域秩序的关键。加勒比地区的帝国代理人——士兵、旅居者、仆人和官员——有选择地从欧洲关于自治领的政治和法律话语中汲取灵感，将家庭定义为对殖民社区和治理构成至关重要的。在帝国和殖民地的法律想象中，家庭是政治共同体构成所必需的，他们的存在加强了政治间暴力，尤其是海上劫掠的论点。帝国政策肯定了户主扣押和指挥俘虏的权利，煽动家庭组建和规范家庭内部冲突的政策支撑了劫掠、俘虏和奴役的区域制度。地区政权以暴力的合法性为中心。早期种植园家庭对强迫劳动的需求助长了环加勒比海的俘虏和掠夺经济，而定居者则援引家庭的防御来授权私掠和地方战争。作为吸收和支配强迫劳动的主要法律框架，家庭成为帝国内部竞争的对象和构建奴役制度的工具。 关于定居者搬迁到相互竞争的殖民地的权利的争论有时会使对户主统治（对家庭下属行使私人权力）的广泛理解与他们名义上维持的公共权威相冲突。这种冲突加强了家庭对种植园奴隶制扩张的中心地位。家庭政治使它们成为殖民治理的不稳定基础和抵抗新兴植物统治的场所。牙买加的官员们努力管理突袭和种植园主家庭组建之间的不稳定关系。在苏里南，土著和非洲俘虏努力逃离和颠覆在家庭统治的掩护下强加的奴隶制和胁迫形式。研究家庭在殖民思想中的重要性，可以阐明新生的加勒比殖民地的法律政治和地区奴隶政权的崛起中重要但经常被忽视的连续性。从殖民地家庭的角度来看，整个加勒比地区的法律变革并没有遵循征服、私掠和种植园奴隶制的离散阶段。相反，它是随着公共和私人对权威的要求和合法暴力之间的转变而演变的。家庭授权战争并将俘虏转化为财产，形成了一个法律支点，用于平衡新兴奴隶社会中相互依存的劫掠、奴役和种植网络。这个围绕俘虏企业和奴隶持有家庭组织的私人权利和公共权力的集合跨越了 17 世纪的加勒比地区，并产生了一个帝国间的法律制度，其中奴隶主的权利占据了地区秩序愿景的中心。