Abolitionist Research Articles

The British Empire's Mixed Legacy: An Analysis of Slavery Abolition, Industrial Revolution, and Disease Management

This paper examines the complex legacy of the British Empire, focusing on three key areas: the abolition of slavery, the Industrial Revolution, and the management of diseases, particularly malaria. While acknowledging the Empire's role in perpetuating slavery, this study argues that its eventual abolition efforts, contributions to industrial progress, and advancements in disease control had significant positive impacts. By analyzing historical events and their long-term consequences, this research provides a nuanced perspective on the British Empire's influence on global development and human rights.

‘An Absurd Rage for Public Speaking’: An Abolitionist Fair Orator in the London Debating Societies, 1788–1791

ABSTRACT On 11 May 1789, the night before Parliament’s first debate on ending the slave trade, a woman advocated for abolition before hundreds of Londoners at a debating society. Despite her compelling oratory and numerous speeches on the slave trade, her name remains unknown, and she is recorded only as the ‘Fair Orator’. This article begins to restore her place in history by examining the role of London debating societies as crucial yet neglected venues for abolitionist advocacy in late-eighteenth-century Britain. By drawing on newspaper advertisements and government spy reports, it highlights the Fair Orator’s impact, explores her potential identity—possibly Mary Robinson—and addresses the historical anonymity that has obscured women speakers’ contributions to the abolitionist movement. The article also sheds light on the hostile environment women orators faced during this period. In doing so, it argues for the recognition of women’s vital yet often overlooked roles in the abolitionist soundscape and the campaign against the slave trade.

Between abolition and opium: civility and force across Asian and Caribbean British imperialisms

ABSTRACT This paper explores the relationship between Britian’s abolition of slavery in its Caribbean colonies in 1838 and its instigation of the First Opium War with China in 1840. In so doing, it works against the occlusion of this relationship in the study of British imperialism despite the centrality of these events to the birth of global systems of free trade and free labour. It draws on the parliamentary debates and correspondence of British Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston to analyze Britain’s negotiation of anti-slavery efforts with Haiti and its trade of Indian opium with China. It argues that these negotiations position British masculine civility against less-civilized foreign others in ways that legitimate the use of maritime force. This logic of imperial civility produces contradictory effects by demanding an end to the brutality of African enslavement while condoning the devastation of Asian opium addiction enacted in the name of free trade.

Reflection on the bicentennial of Brazil's independence in the period from 1822 until 2022

This article reflects on the international conference for the bicentenary of Brazil's independence, held in São Paulo, from the 6th to the 15th of February 2023, organized by the University of São Paulo and sponsored by the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP). It aimed to publicize the essence of the bicentenary of Brazil's independence, which was led by Emperor D. Pedro I, in 1822. Throughout the history of Brazil, there were two reigns, the first was that of D. Pedro the First, who succeeded his father in 1821, and the second was the reign of D. Pedro II, which began in 1840. The causes and actions that led to the abolition of slavery in Brazil. It was concluded that Brazil's independence was achieved on September 7, 1822, and was manifested by the scream on the banks of the Ipiranga river in São Paulo, by the characters who were involved together with D. Pedro I. Thus, Brazil ceased to be kingdom of Portugal. On November 15, 1889, the Federative Republic of Brazil was proclaimed, thus ending the monarchy regime.

Negotiating Empathy

This article proposes an ecocritical reading of two lithographs by Italian Brazilian artist Angelo Agostini to shed light on the tensions between the abolitionist movement and the animal rights movement in Brazilian visual culture. This question is never discussed in scholarship about nineteenth-century Brazil. Moreover, studies on the history of animal rights in the country focus on the republican period, when the first associations and laws for the protection of animals were created. This article, conversely, reconstructs the history of a seldom-remembered Society for the Protection of Animals, active between 1885 and 1890 in Rio de Janeiro, during the last years of the monarchy. Through visual documentation concerning this society and its negative local reception, I reflect on slavery’s connections to the animal rights debate during the last decades of the nineteenth century. I argue that two causes—abolitionism and animal welfare—were competing for visibility in this fundamentally unequal society. Artists like Agostini contributed to the polemic by using a combined aesthetic that questioned what they perceived as an incongruous situation: protecting animals before abolishing human slavery.

Engendering carcerality: An introduction

AbstractReflecting the carceral turn in scholarship, this introduction to a special issue on engendering carcerality explores the difference that gender makes in the history of the carceral in its various forms over time and space. It considers the multiple meanings and spaces of imprisonment, surveillance, and confinement; incarceration of mothers; confinement of sex workers; imprisoning of political prisoners, and reforming of youths, taking account of intersectional identities, sexuality and resistance. It looks forward by looking back, engaging in a dialogue with abolitionist movements and current global struggles to encourage critical gendered histories of incarceration and resistance.

Police abolition and transformative justice in the footsteps of Thomas Mathiesen’s penal abolition

Thomas Mathiesen’s theories, his activism and his scholarship are needed, important and useful for contemporary researchers concerned with social change and social justice. At this moment in time, when strong social movements and abolitionism are back on the agenda, Mathiesen’s theories can not only be revitalised, but moved forward in the everlasting unfinished fashion. Mathiesen’s work might be of support to researchers and activists confronted with the ‘system members’ as he calls them, to identify the structures of power one is up against and its strategies. His work provides a roadmap of how to handle repressive powers to reach the long-term goal of penal abolition. In this article, I will outline Mathiesen’s central theories of penal abolition as they are connected to political activism, then trace the role of the police in his abolitionism and, finally, I will argue for the relevance and development of Mathiesen’s abolitionist thinking in the contemporary and burgeoning field of transformative justice and police abolitionism. I aim to show the continuing relevance of Mathiesen’s theories for contemporary abolitionist movements and scholarship, and how they contribute to push these theories forward into new areas.

From Valuable Merchandise to Violent Rebels

From the moment the Dutch West Indian Company formally entered the slave trade in 1637, the Dutch periodical press consistently carried reports on slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. This article offers a long-term analysis of this coverage in the Dutch Republic, showing for the first time how the representation of slavery developed over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It demonstrates, first, that through the periodical press, knowledge of slavery was more widely spread in the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century than is often assumed. The consistent, if intermittent, newspaper coverage meant that – well before the debates on abolition emerged – Dutch readers would be familiar with stereotypes of enslaved Africans as valuable merchandise or violent rebels. Second, this article argues that, in the second half of the eighteenth century, the periodical press offered its readers an ambiguous and contradictory image of slavery, contributing, on the one hand, to a public discourse underpinning slavery by depicting enslaved Africans as violent rebels, while at the same time covering political debates on the abolition of slavery.

‘Oh Dutchmen, Defer this Catastrophe’

‘Oh Dutchmen, defer this catastrophe’ wrote a former Dutch plantation owner commenting on the temporary abolition of slavery in the French empire in 1794. It seems that his advice was heeded, as it took close to 70 more years to abolish Dutch slavery. Strangely, however, the successful defence of slavery does not feature prominently in the historiographical debate over the late abolition of Dutch slavery. This article ventures to explore the ideological defence of slavery in the Dutch Republic around the turn of the eighteenth century, and how it was connected to Atlantic debates on race, slavery and civilisation in the wake of the Haitian revolution (1790-1804). By studying historical publications I show that the Dutch interpretation of the Haitian Revolution came about through translated works. These works almost exclusively supported a racial conservative interpretation of Haiti. The revolt even became an important point of reference in Dutch political circles. These findings offer a new perspective on the decline of principled abolitionism in the Netherlands from the late eighteenth century until the 1840s.

Repentance and Reappraisal

In this introduction to a special issue on the history of anti-abolitionism in the Netherlands, the 160th anniversary of the Dutch abolition of slavery is discussed in relation to the culture of commemoration in the Netherlands and the international historiography of abolition. A reappraisal of the role of the State in the commemoration of slavery coincides with a more critical view of history and a change in perspective on the colonial past. The recent trend of cities and institutions investigating their ties to slavery and subsequently often apologising for centuries of compliance and collaboration necessitates a more integrated approach to the analysis of the ideas that shaped colonial policy. Each contribution in this issue adds to the rich historiography on Dutch abolitionism but redirects the attention towards politicians, governors, investors, publishers and authors who defended the trade in people and their enslavement. The case studies presented here range from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, which makes this special issue the first presentation of how the Netherlands normalised colonial slavery over more than 250 years.

An Overview of Caribbean and African Literary Theories

As it is believed, Africa is the cradle of humankind, where humans also left for other parts of the world during the slave trade and also during World War I and II. At the abolition of the slave trade, many African descendants settled where they could call home, like in the Caribbean islands and other parts of the world, as a result of the ancestral and cultural attachment between Africa and the places where the descendants of the slaves where we could see some similarities in their ways of life. We can see these facts also translate into the African and Caribbean writers' literary works, among other spheres of life. The analyses show that while both literatures share common concerns related to colonial legacy and the quest for identity, they are distinguished by unique historical and socio-political contexts that influence their narrative perspectives. For example, African literature tends to focus more on the effects of colonization and decolonization on the African continent, while Caribbean literature often emphasizes the dynamics of the diaspora and the multiple facets of Caribbean identity. In addition, this study examines the use of language and literary techniques specific to each region, as well as the contributions of major literary figures such as aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Monique Ilboudo, Werewe Liking, Wole Soyinka, Maryse Condé and many others. Finally, this comparison offers a deeper understanding of the richness and diversity of postcolonial literature while highlighting the unique voices and shared experiences of African and Caribbean writers.

Altruism and self-interest in constitutional reform: the case of the British abolition of slavery and the slave trade

AbstractWas the British abolition of slavery and the slave trade a triumph of altruism over pecuniary self-interest? Analysis of qualitative data reveals the importance of self-interested motives underlying this ostensibly other-regarding reform. The abolitionists worked to alleviate the suffering of enslaved Africans, but their campaign faced a collective action problem that was solved by the supply of the private benefits of status, esteem, and possible religious salvation to the leading figures. Abolition was also consistent with the desire of many ordinary Britons to eradicate the remnants of feudal society and move to a more liberal order. The payment of compensation to slaveowners on abolition also made reform consistent with their interests, and the interests of the individuals and financial institutions that processed and invested the payments. This analysis coheres with aspects of Eric Williams’ thesis that abolition took place because it benefited Britain’s ruling elite, although more Britons gained from abolition than Williams supposed. It is concluded that constitutional reform to remove oppressive and exploitative institutions does not follow from a sudden outpouring of societal altruism but requires the supply of private benefits to constitutional entrepreneurs able to make change consistent with the interests of the wider population and powerful groups who would otherwise lose from liberalization.

“Trauma scrambles things, trauma fragments…” A cross-cultural conversation with Corban Addison in the context of A Walk Across the Sun

ABSTRACT In this interview, Corban Addison exposes the harsh reality of child sex trafficking in India and across borders with his first-hand experiences with victims, survivors, and activists. Addison has written books on human rights, injustice in the world, and its culture. His works include A Walk Across the Sun (2012), The Garden of Burning Sand (2013), The Tears of Dark Water (2015), A Harvest of Thorns (2017), and Wastelands: The True Story of Farm Country on Trial (2022). Addison, being an engineer, lawyer, and author, began experimenting with writing at the age of fifteen years. He has used his profession as a lawyer in his writing to depict human atrocities, provide validity to victims, and advocate the abolition of modern slavery through his narratives. In this conversation, Addison talks about how he ended up writing A Walk Across the Sun while discussing sexual slavery, his background research, and how he was able to understand the experiences and trauma of sexual violence. He shares anecdotes of his journey to tsunami-affected areas, brothels, and meetings with victims and activists and how he portrays the sexual violence, trauma, and redemption from it.

Communities of exposure, community as exposure: Thinking collective life in the police abolitionist movement

The growing police abolitionist movement in the United States invokes the figure of community to bind various political claims, from shifting the arena of justice to fiscal restructuring. Geographic scholarship on community has yet to conceptualize its usage in this movement, and existing literature tends to critique conceptualizations of community-as-political-resistance by demonstrating a given community’s exclusionary practices and reasserting a liberal politics of inclusion. This article combines analysis of activist literatures from the liberatory harm reduction and transformative justice movements with elements of Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophy to offer an understanding of community as a shifting and provisional spectrum of relations at once structural and intimate, thus challenging its prevailing figuration as a form of enclosure mediated by the terms of inclusion and exclusion. Drawing on archival work into informally circulated, praxis-based ephemera from movements under the umbrella of police abolition, I conceptualize an abolitionist understanding of community at the juncture of ‘communities of exposure,’ formed along a structurally-produced spectrum of exposure to the harms of white supremacy, settler colonialism, and cis-heteropatriarchy, and ‘community as exposure,’ the condition of relationality that resists enclosure and, in understanding our essential vulnerability to one another as a resource for care, refuses the notion that police could sanitize community of its risks.

English Studies from Global to Nepali Context: Critical Debates, Challenges and Possibilities

This paper aims to present an analysis of the critical debates in the area of English Studies emerged from the time of its initiation and still going on, various challenges that this discipline has undergone, and its future prospects. Based on library research method, the analysis of the relevant online and physical library materials related to English Studies has been conducted. The findings show how English Studies has undergone the critical debates like whether English is the subject of colonial domination or socially progressive project, whether it has to give privileges to literary studies or creative writing, and whether it has to adopt a single standarised form of English or world Englishes. In addition to it, it shows that despite undergoing a number of critical debates and challenges due to either the ongoing process of departmentalisation or the African abolitionist movements, English Studies has become refined, updated and interdisciplinary area of study. Proper redesign and reformulation of English courses, incorporation of local art, culture and literature, adoption of new technology and vocational aspects etcetera could make it more relevant, effective and impactful in the days to come.

‘Where Liberty is Not, There is My Country’: Nineteenth-Century American Abolitionist Writings on India and its Legacies

ABSTRACT This article examines nineteenth century American abolitionist writings on India. My sources include abolitionist newspapers, primarily focusing on William Lloyd Garrison’s newspaper the Liberator, but also incorporating other abolitionist newspapers. These include the Friend of Man and publications of individual abolitionists like Lydia Maria Child’s The History of the Condition of Women, in Various Ages and Nations. By looking at their writings on Christian missionary activities in India, Indian women, and British rule in India, this article argues that although many abolitionists Orientalized India, they at the same time found many parallels between Indian society and the US. Although they did not develop a full criticism towards colonialism in the antebellum period, their criticism towards Empire matured by the early twentieth century. My scholarly intervention centres on acknowledging the hitherto unknown role of abolitionist writings on India in the intellectual history of American abolitionism and US-India transnational history. By not fully engaging with India, the scholarship on US-India relations and abolitionism misses a critical dimension of the abolitionist movement’s intimate relationship with related causes of feminism, anti-clericalism, and anti-imperialism. Most importantly, this article demonstrates that abolitionist writings on India far exceeded Orientalism as the only frame of understanding.

Inscribed in Liberalism: racism in International Relations and abolition of slavery in Brazil

The beginning of 20th Century was a moment of great transformations, amongst which the first impulse in institutionalize a field of knowledge of International Relations. A structural change that happened 30 years after the abolition of slavery in Brazil. Despite the fact of being unrelated historical phenomena in objective terms, I argue that the possibility of analyzing them in tandem widens the critique to the racist premises of liberalism, a powerful ideological motivator in both events. The vitality of critical studies in IR has helped denounce the premises upon which the discipline is grounded and the definition of what is within the scope of its interest. The disciplinary critique is reconstructed in the first section and, in the second, I present the marginalization inscribed in legal norms of late 19th and early 20th Century Brazil. The technique of developing conditions for the segregation of a sector of the population disguising it from full-citizens by granting conditional-citizenship to former enslaved people is a sophisticated use of liberalism. Such use not only presents in full the critique of structural racism developed by the critique to this political project, already advanced by IR scholars, it also presents another discussion that has yet ground to cover in the field: the unchallenged premise of homogeneity within political communities.

Fertility responses to short-term economic stress: Price volatility and wealth shocks in a pre-transitional settler colony

This paper examines the effects of short-term economic stress, captured by general price volatility and a negative wealth shock on short-run fertility behavior in the rural pre-transitional society of the Cape Colony. First, we link complete birth histories of settler women from the South African Families database to consumer price index data to examine the effect of price volatility on conceptions. Next, we link the same birth histories to slave owner and slave emancipation data to examine the effect of a negative wealth shock on conception. Upon slave emancipation in 1834, former slave owners received on average only between 40 and 50 % of the market value of their slaves as compensation, resulting in a substantial reduction in their wealth. Relying on event history models that look simultaneously at stopping and spacing, we do not find strong evidence in support of fertility control in response to general price volatility. We do find greater variance in birth interval lengths for former slaveholding households during and immediately after emancipation, suggesting that a negative wealth shock is associated with increased fertility limitation through postponement in this context.

Constructing an Antislavery Hero: The Portrayal of Toussaint Louverture in British Abolitionist Texts, 1803–1863

ABSTRACT Shortly after Toussaint Louverture died in 1803, a literary tradition emerged in British abolitionist texts which portrayed the character of Toussaint in heroic terms. This article takes five texts written between 1803–1863 to demonstrate how Toussaint was constructed as an antislavery hero and what the motivations were behind this construction. The hero can be understood as a lens through which Toussaint’s character, and the character of the whole Haitian Revolution, was flattened. The hero was a frame that made him knowable and understandable to European audiences, but that also erased both the mass of enslaved people that formed the grassroots of the revolution in Haiti, as well as the many aspects of Toussaint himself that were not deemed to fit the hero narrative. This literary tradition arose because the mainstream of the nineteenth-century British antislavery movement opposed and feared rebellions led by enslaved people, believing on racist grounds that they were violent, uncontrolled, and anarchic, and at odds with the new liberal vision of empire that most British abolitionists wanted to create.

Enslaved People, Aliénés, and Gradual Freedom: Condorcet and Pinel on Sensibility

ABSTRACT In his 1781 work, Réflexions sur l'esclavage des nègres, Condorcet argued for a gradual abolition of slavery, driven by his concerns about the enduring impact of violence on enslaved people's sensibility. He recognized that “sensibility,” or the locus of a person's sensory, emotional, and intellectual interaction with the world, could be severely affected by oppression, a point also emphasized by his friend, alienist Philippe Pinel. While Condorcet proposed a state-regulated transition to freedom for enslaved people, Pinel warned that the damage to their sensibility might be too profound for his treatment to work, paving the way for subsequent racial theories.