Early rights theory arose in the slave-trading states and defended slavery.

Evidence

It was no accident that the beginnings of modern rights theories are to be found in Portugal and the Netherlands, the main centers of the slave trade at that time. Thus according to the Portuguese theologian Molina, liberty as property could be traded. Man was pictured as a free being, capable of making his own economic and moral decisions, and of being bound by their consequences. Paradoxically, this picture of the individual as sovereign could be made to yield a defense of slavery and of absolutism. Similarly, Grotius’s famous desire for peace was articulated through his rights theory: in the state of nature, man possessed active rights and the moral capacity to enter freely into contracts with others regarding his property. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 634

Categorization

• QUESTION: Test the claim that Molina’s and Grotius’s rights theory directly served slave-trading interests—is the geographic coincidence or the causal link what matters?
• SEED: Essay angle: the Enlightenment’s sovereign-individual was forged in the slave economy, not against it—the paradox of liberty-as-property as the founding gesture of modern rights.