" ... Explores the emothional, intellectual, and political roots of Zachary Macaulay, the leading abolitionalist, and his son Thomas's visions of race, nation and empire. The story moves from late eighteenth-century Scotland to the plantations of Jamaica, from the new colony of Sierra Leone to India, from Leeds and Edinburgh to London. The Macaulay family with its intense dynamics and complex relationships provides one thread while the politics of abolition, of reform, of empire and of history writing is another. The contrasting moments of evangelical humanitarianism and liberal imperialism are seen through the writings and careers of father and son."--P [2] of cover.