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Recent scholarship has examined Alexis de Tocqueville's underexplored assertion that American racial stratification functioned as an extension of European feudalism. However, Tocqueville was not alone in his insights. At least a half-dozen nineteenth-century African American writers and thinkers, including Frederick Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Maria Stewart, Harriet Jacobs, Sojourner Truth, and especially Hosea Easton, have also described America's racial hierarchy as a continuation of antecedent European feudal social structures. Not only do their perspectives on what I call racial feudalism in America lend credence to Tocqueville's hypothesis that the afterlife of medieval social frameworks continued to persist in the post-Enlightenment United States, but also black Americans establish a distinctive body of knowledge that must be read alongside Tocqueville to render a more complete understanding of antebellum US social hierarchy.

Abstract: At the very time when the feudal system of land tenure was being abolished in France, and elsewhere in Europe, it was enjoying an unexpected revival in Scotland as a means of controlling urban development. Land which was sold under the feudal system could be subjected to permanent conditions, known as "real burdens", which regulated its future use; and in this way planning control was achieved by a mechanism of private law. Real burdens could (and can) also be used in a non-feudal context, in which case they resemble praedial servitudes. But, unlike servitudes, real burdens can impose affirmative obligations, such as an obligation to construct and maintain a building. Today Scotland is one of the last jurisdictions in the world to have an operational feudal system. That will shortly change. Legislation passed in 2000 abolishes the feudal system with effect from 28 November 2004. At the same time the law of real burdens is reformed and codified. The continued existence, and importance, of real burdens was the greatest obstacle to feudal abolition. For if feudal lords ("superiors") were to disappear, who was to enforce the burdens? The legislation tackles the difficulty with various improvisations, in some cases reallocating enforcement rights to neighbours (including former superiors), and in others allowing the burdens to lapse altogether. Affirmative burdens will be a permanent legacy of the feudal era, but in other respects its continuing influence on land law is likely to be slight.