Freedom Burning: Anti-Slavery and Empire in Victorian Britain, by Richard Huzzey

Abstract

Freedom Burning: Anti-Slavery and Empire in Victorian Britain, by Richard Huzzey. Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press. 2012, xvi, 303 pp. $29.95 US (cloth). What becomes of abolitionism in Britain and throughout the British Empire after the emancipation of all slaves in British territory in 1833? It does not disappear, in large measure because the slave and continue in other countries and their colonial possessions. Moreover, controversies arose immediately after emancipation regarding free in places like Jamaica. Parliament not only voted for 20 million pounds to compensate slave owners in the Caribbean, it also created an apprenticeship system through which supposedly freed slaves kept on doing the same work they been doing before emancipation. Did emancipation improve conditions for the freed people of the Caribbean? The Jamaican rebellion and the Governor Eyre controversy that it engendered suggested otherwise. Another controversial step to replace the labour of slaves imported from Africa was the importation of indentured workers particularly from India, who were of ten treated no better than slaves. More than 1.5 million Indians left their homeland in the 1838-1922 period on contracts of indenture (p. 181), winding up in such places as Demerara (British Guiana) and Trinidad. Huzzey shows in rich detail the diverse ways ideology tried to meet these new challenges. Meanwhile, Britain signed treaties with other nations to allow British naval vessels to patrol the Atlantic in search of ships carrying slaves to the Americas. This practice, as Huzzey demonstrates, gave many Britons the impression that they were the most humane of all nations, while also producing controversy over whether coercion by the Royal Navy would be more effective than letting free trade work its magic in ending the slave trade. While the British government was trying to eradicate the slave in the Atlantic, however, it did little to stop in the Ottoman Empire, so long as it saw the Empire as an ally against Russian imperial ambitions (pp. 60-63). At the same time, the cause provided a motivation for explorers and missionaries to increase their activities throughout sub-Saharan Africa, leading on to the Berlin Conference of 1884 and the Scramble-for-Africa at the end of the century. Huzzey probes the rich relationship between anti-slavery and reform movements such as Chartism and unionism. He draws on critiques of abolitionism, philanthropy overseas, and Exeter Hall by such major writers as Carlyle and Dickens, while also analyzing the rhetoric of wage slavery in the cause of factory reform. He examines how the 'woman question' was imported into British antislavery in 1840, at the World Anti-Slavery Convention, and how Josephine Butler, feminist campaigner against the Contagious Diseases Acts, had her first taste of activism through fund-raising for American freed people after the Civil War (p. …