Understanding ‘chinese customs’: Sinchew rulings in the straits settlements, 1830s-1870s

British and American migrants to the American Midwest transplanted legal norms from two different British colonial projects in North America into the tertiary colonial space of the Midwest. The development of chattel slavery law in colonial Virginia grew to emphasize and codify race as a legal category, just as it worked to establish slave owning as a requisite for republican citizenship. White contract labourers in the fur trade of Michigan Territory were often recent immigrants from British Canada or Europe. Black contract labourers in Illinois Territory signed their labour contracts with their white masters in southern Illinois Territory, across from St Louis. The majority of the contracts in the region created master-servant relationships in the fur trade. The fur trade contracts directly connected American law to a British colonial legal tradition different from that which supported slavery. Both contracts purported to require voluntary agreement from both the master and the servant.