Abolitionism In Britain Research Articles

Friends of Freedom: The Rise of Social Movements in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions by Micah Alpaugh

Alpaugh’s Friends of Freedom provides an integrated narrative of the rise of social movements, political protest, and revolutionary mobilization in the eighteenth century in the United States, Britain, Ireland, France, and Haiti. The author contrasts his own work with that of Palmer, who undertook a similar project more than half a century ago in The Age of the Democratic Revolution.1 Like Alpaugh, Palmer argued that common ideals motivated eighteenth-century revolutionaries on both sides of the Atlantic, but as Alpaugh points out, Palmer’s account portrays the American and French Revolutions as “more simultaneous than interrelated” and has little to say about slavery or Haiti. Alpaugh answers these deficiencies, elucidating interconnections between events in various parts of the Atlantic World and highlighting the importance of abolitionism as a precocious protest movement that developed arguments and tactics that would later be adopted by revolutionaries in every place he examines.Alpaugh has overcome daunting challenges in producing this book. Drawing on material from archives in France, Britain, Ireland, and the United States, and engaging with scholarship in a range of historical fields, he has pulled his material together effectively, telling coherent stories and making his argument clear. The book operates on two scales. On the large scale it is divided into two halves, Part I emphasizing the influence of the American Revolution, and Part II tracing the widespread impact of the French Revolution, with French Revolutionary influences ultimately crossing the Atlantic to become manifested in the formation of U.S. party politics. Within this broad framework, the eight chapters in Part I and the five chapters in Part II tell smaller-scale discrete stories including, for example, the struggles of various Protestant groups in America to secure religious liberty and the campaigns of the United Irishmen in the 1790s. This structure allows Alpaugh to recount local developments clearly while emphasizing their Atlantic contexts.The book had to be divided in this way. The overall story is too rich, detailed, and intricate to be conveyed in a single uninterrupted narrative. But there is a noticeable tension between Alpaugh’s claims about interconnected Atlantic revolutions, giving primacy to the American and French Revolutions, and his smaller-scale efforts to recount local developments accurately in detail. The struggle for Protestant American religious liberty, for example, started long before the American Revolution, as did the transatlantic struggle over slavery. In both instances, while the American and French Revolutions changed the terms of argument in important ways, Alpaugh strains to acknowledge the diverse range of voices engaged in the long-running debates.In discussing abolition, Alpaugh emphasises the role of Quakers and white evangelical Protestants who championed new tactics and lines of argument to recruit allies in America, Britain, and France. Africans and people of African descent enter the analysis only mid-stream. On the twelfth page of his discussion of abolitionism in America, Alpaugh introduces Black abolitionists with a paragraph starting, “African-Americans advanced their own cause” (183). Similarly, in the chapter on abolitionism in Britain, Black abolitionists appear only after eight pages discussing white abolitionist leaders. “Blacks living in England,” he writes, “allied for the cause” (205). Black leaders figure more prominently in Alpaugh’s discussion of the Haitian Revolution, but he is emphatic that they were responding to events in France and French debates, and he criticizes historians who fail to center their analysis on the influence of the French Revolution.While Africans and people of African descent figure in the book’s narrative, many inhabitants of the Atlantic world who contributed to the tumult of the revolutionary era—indigenous Americans, Spanish, Portuguese, Latin Americans—are left out. Alpaugh has demonstrated that Atlantic history is intrinsically liberating, releasing us from the confines of national narratives, but—especially if historians wish to work from archival materials—a fully inclusive, comprehensive history of the Atlantic World will almost always be out of reach.

Envisaging a Future for Slavery: Agostino Brunias and the Imperial Politics of Labor and Reproduction

The paintings and prints of Agostino Brunias (1730–1796) served not only to visualize some of the British Empire's newest colonies following the conclusion of the Seven Years' War, but also to encourage settlement by presenting a utopian vision of slave societies that were content, wealthy, and, most importantly, self-sustaining. This article argues that Brunias's imagery contributed to the ameliorationist rhetoric that accompanied the rise of abolitionism in Britain. By avoiding scenes of plantation labor, discipline, and punishment, and emphasizing instead the refinement, robust health, and fertility of slaves and free people of color, it purported to confirm that amelioration could safeguard slavery's future.

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

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. …

Powerless Masters: The Curious Decline of Jamaican Sugar Planters in the Foundational Period of British Abolitionism

This essay focuses on the competing identities that came to be associated with British West Indians during the foundational period of British abolitionism. The essay evaluates the competing images of the West Indian planter class, paying particular attention to how place and time influenced political, cultural and racial perceptions of British planters in the Caribbean. The article addresses the impact that a rising tide of abolitionism in Britain had on perceptions of West Indian planters, and contends that planters became relatively powerless to define their own image in the face of growing abolitionist attacks on slavery.

Colonialism, Biblical World-Making, and Temporalities in Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative

The autobiography of Olaudah Equiano (1745–1797) offers an unusual portrait of the dynamic relationship between scripture and colonialism. In 1789 Equiano, who also went by the name Gustavus Vassa, related his experience of slavery to support abolitionism in Britain in the form of a best-selling, two-volume autobiography titled The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself. Equiano's autobiography comprises a striking description of religion and culture among the Igbo of West Africa, the nation with which he identified by birth. According to Equiano, the Igbo were descended from ancient Jews, and their religion was a modern survival of ancient biblical religion. This claim, seemingly casual at first, is actually a complicated maneuver that reveals how deeply he had mined a trove of biblical commentary to shape his interesting narrative for a skeptical readership. The early modern genre of biblical commentary, which was deeply influenced by the exigencies of European colonialism, constitutes in its own right an authoritative literature that proved quite useful for Equiano.