Manufacturing Crisis: Anti-slavery ‘Humanitarianism’ and Imperialism in East Africa, 1888–1890

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the 1888–1889 Bushiri War, German chancellor Otto von Bismarck seized upon pan-European rhetoric of the ‘Arab slave trade’ to organise a coalition of Europe’s colonial powers to blockade the East African coast. The blockade was the most direct international action against the slave trade at the height of antislavery activism but has largely been left out of narratives about 1880s antislavery. Historians working in recent years have complicated the story of European antislavery in the late nineteenth century from an idea of antislavery as merely a façade for imperial expansion. These studies have examined the intersections of humanitarianism and imperialism in the major conferences of the Scramble for Africa. Bismarck tried to replace conference diplomacy with an Anglo-German alliance. But when the highest profile blockade capture was German, supporters of a more aggressive approach in both Germany and the UK overwhelmed the small abolitionist movement and demanded their governments quit working together in the manner of the blockade. The individual national action of the 1890s overtook other methods of humanitarianism in empire. The blockade’s failure helps explain why the Brussels Anti-Slavery Conference unfolded as it did and the course of antislavery internationalism after 1890.