Remembering Dinah Nevil: Strategic Deceptions in Eighteenth-Century Antislavery

Abstract

What is a founding moment? Who is a founder? Recent scholarship on British antislavery demonstrates why such questions are at once vexing and engaging. In scholarly trade books and popular film timed to coincide with Britain's bicentennial commemoration of the 1807 abolition of the slave trade, Britain's eighteenth-century abolitionists perform cultural work akin to that done by political founders in the United States. Much of this new literature recapitulates, for a transatlantic audience, the nationalistic arguments made by abolitionists themselves. Slavery served them, and apparently still serves us, as a testing ground for competing British and American claims to be beacons of liberty in an emerging global order. The best new scholarship on the foundations of British abolitionism, on the other hand, raises provocative questions about who and what transformed long-circulating antislavery sentiments into antislavery actions. Histories that document “how moral-political choices are framed for an effective popular response” in such “protean moments,” observes a tretransformations in , offer lessons “that may be of use in our own historical moment.”1