The abolition of the slave trade is normally understood to be the singular achievement of eighteenth-century British liberalism. Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa, and the Atlantic expands both the temporal and the geographic framework in which the history of abolitionism is conceived. Abolitionism was a theater in which a variety of actors—slaves, African rulers, Caribbean planters, working-class radicals, British evangelicals, African political entrepreneurs—played a part. The Atlantic was an echo chamber, in which abolitionist symbols, ideas, and evidence were generated from a variety of vantage points. These essays highlight the range of political and moral projects in which the advocates of abolitionism were engaged, and in so doing it joins together geographies that are normally studied in isolation. Where empires are often understood to involve the government of one people over another, Abolitionism and Imperialism shows that British values were formed, debated, and remade in the space of empire. Africans were not simply objects of British liberals’ benevolence. They played an active role in shaping, and extending, the values that Britain now regards as part of its national character. This book is therefore a contribution to the larger scholarship about the nature of modern empires. Contributors: Christopher Leslie Brown, Seymour Drescher, Jonathon Glassman, Boyd Hilton, Robin Law, Phillip D. Morgan, Derek R. Peterson, John K. Thornton

Few phenomena of modern history have cast so long a shadow as that of black slavery or branded themselves so deeply in the historical consciousness of both Africa and the Western world. Inevitably it has left a trail of controversy, not least among historians, who take violently opposed views of the internal effects of the slave trade upon Africa, who magnify or disparage its role in the Atlantic economy, and who assign widely differing explanations of British moves to secure its abolition. It is symptomatic of the paradox of much of our contemporary intellectual culture that under the influence of historical materialism it should instinctively deny an autonomous role to ideology while remaining itself so ideologically oriented. Yet the central statement of this viewpoint, Eric Williams' celebrated Capitalism and Slavery, undoubtedly threw a salutary douche of cold water over the smug complacency that had hitherto infected the received accounts of British abolition. The argument that British abolition, far from being an act of pure disinterested benevolence, fell into line with the country's economic interests and with the change from commercial to industrial capitalism has never been fully countered. The more exaggerated elements in his thesis have been duly assailed. That the profits of the slave trade should have been sufficiently large and well-directed to power the Industrial Revolution is a hypothesis as far-fetched as that which sees the wealth accumulated from the plunder of Bengal after the battle of Plassey as the main source of investment capital. Yet when purged of such exaggerated claims Williams' argument remains formidable. As D. B. Davis has acknowledged: "It is ... difficult ... to get around the simple fact that no country thought of abolishing the slave trade until its economic value had considerably declined." - Foreword.

"In the nineteenth century, global systems of capitalism and empire knit the North Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds into international networks in contest over the meanings of slavery and freedom. Sojourners, Sultans, and "Slaves" mines multinational archives; profiles transnational human rights campaigns; shows how the discourses of poverty, kinship, and care could be adapted to defend servitude in different parts of the world; and reveals the tenuous boundaries that such discourses shared with Whiggish contractual notions of freedom. An intercontinental cast of empire builders and émigrés, slavers and reformers, a "cotton queen" and courtesans, and fugitive "slaves" and concubines populate the pages, fleshing out on a granular level the interface between the personal, domestic, and international politics of "slavery in the East," and in the age of empire. By extending the transnational framework of U.S. slavery and abolition histories beyond the Atlantic, Gunja SenGupta and Awam Amkpa recover vivid stories and prompt reflections on the comparative workings of subaltern agency"--

At the turn of the nineteenth century, writers arguing for the abolition of the slave trade and the emancipation of those in bondage used the language of sentiment and the political ideals of the Enlightenment to make their case. This collection investigates the rhetorical features and political complexities of the culture of sentimentality as it grappled with the material realities of transatlantic slavery. Are the politics of sentimental representation progressive or conservative? What dynamics are in play at the site of suffering? What is the relationship of the spectator to the spectacle of the body in pain? The contributors take up these and related questions in essays that examine poetry, plays, petitions, treatises and life-writing that engaged with contemporary debates about abolition.

Though blacks were not often seen on the streets of seventeenth-century London, they were already capturing the British imagination. For two hundred years, as Britain shipped over three million Africans to the New World, popular images of blacks as slaves and servants proliferated in London art, both highbrow and low. Catherine Molineux assembles a surprising array of sources in her exploration of this emerging black presence, from shop signs, tea trays, trading cards, board games, playing cards, and song ballads to more familiar objects such as William Hogarth's graphic satires. By idealizing black servitude and obscuring the brutalities of slavery, these images of black people became symbols of empire to a general populace that had little contact with the realities of slave life in the distant Americas and Caribbean. The earliest images advertised the opulence of the British Empire by depicting black slaves and servants as minor, exotic characters who gazed adoringly at their masters. Later images showed Britons and Africans in friendly gatherings, smoking tobacco together, for example. By 1807, when Britain abolished the slave trade and thousands of people of African descent were living in London as free men and women, depictions of black laborers in local coffee houses, taverns, or kitchens took center stage. Molineux's well-crafted account provides rich evidence for the role that human traffic played in the popular consciousness and culture of Britain during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and deepens our understanding of how Britons imagined their burgeoning empire.

In the two decades before World War One, Great Britain witnessed the largest revival of anti-slavery protest since the legendary age of emancipation in the mid-nineteenth century. Rather than campaigning against the trans-Atlantic slave trade, these latter-day abolitionists focused on the so-called 'new slaveries' of European imperialism in Africa, condemning coercive systems of labor taxation and indentured servitude, as well as evidence of atrocities. A Civilized Savagery illuminates the multifaceted nature of British humanitarianism by juxtaposing campaigns against different forms of imperial labor exploitation in three separate areas: the Congo Free State, South Africa, and Portuguese West Africa. In doing so, Kevin Grant points out how this new type of humanitarianism influenced the transition from Empire to international government and the advent of universal human rights in subsequent decades.

With the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and the Emancipation Act of 1833, Britain seemed to wash its hands of slavery. Not so, according to Marika Sherwood, who sets the record straight in this provocative new book. In fact, Sherwood demonstrates that Britain continued to contribute to the slave trade well after 1807, even into the twentieth century. Drawing on government documents and contemporary reports as well as published sources, she describes how slavery remained very much a part of British investment, commerce and empire, especially in funding and supplying goods for the trade in slaves and in the use of slave-grown produce. The nancial world of the City in London also depended on slavery, which - directly and indirectly - provided employment for millions of people. "After Abolition" also examines some of the causes and repercussions of continued British involvement in slavery and describes many of the apparently respectable villains, as well as the heroes, connected with the trade - at all levels of society. It contains important revelations about a darker side of British history, previously unexplored, which will provoke real questions about Britain's perceptions of its past