Aleschia Hyde (Northwestern University, Pritzker School of Law) has posted American Feudalism: Black Subjecthood in Antebellum America on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This Article argues that American slavery functioned not merely as a racial caste system or contradiction within liberal democracy, but as a parallel system of governance resembling feudal subjecthood. Through slavery, the United States preserved republican citizenship for white Americans while subjecting Black people to localized, hierarchical, and coercive authority exercised by enslavers, overseers, patrols, and state institutions. Drawing on constitutional history, antebellum jurisprudence, political theory, and feudal historiography, the Article develops a theory of “American Feudalism” to explain how fragmented sovereignty, land-based power, private domination, and racialized dependency structured Black exclusion from democratic citizenship.
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