British Anti-slavery Movement Research Articles

Christer Petley. White Fury: A Jamaican Slaveholder and the Age of Revolution.

White Fury: A Jamaican Slaveholder and the Age of Revolution is a biographical study of Simon Taylor, one of the richest sugar planters to have ever lived in the British Caribbean. Christer Petley uses hundreds of Taylor’s surviving letters to understand the world of Jamaican slavery though the eyes of a powerful planter who experienced some of the most important transformations in Atlantic history, including the American and Haitian Revolutions, the British antislavery movement, and the abolition of the British transatlantic slave trade. The first half of White Fury charts Taylor’s “rise to prominence and wealth” as a Jamaican planter in the mid-eighteenth century (14). Taylor was born into a wealthy merchant family in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1739, just as the Jamaican plantation system was taking off. After spending his teenage years in England, where he attended Eton College, Taylor returned to Jamaica in 1760, determined to build on an inheritance “that made him as rich as almost any other white Jamaican of his time” (27). Petley is particularly good at tracing Taylor’s rise as a major sugar planter, which required not only vast sums of money to invest but also a willingness to gamble. A sugar plantation was “the riskiest and most expensive branch of British capitalism during the eighteenth century,” and the problems Taylor faced, from hurricanes and droughts to crop disease and massive indebtedness, often consumed him with anxiety (75). Nevertheless, by the 1780s Taylor had created a massive fortune built on sugar and slavery, fashioning himself into one of the most powerful and respected West Indian creoles.

The British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, 1838–1956: A History

This book is a substantial, detailed organizational history of the anti-slavery movement established by British abolitionists with the ambition of achieving “universal emancipation” after the apparent end of slavery within the Empire in the 1830s. Heartfield brings context, and assessment, to the public positions and actions of the organization’s leaders in his discussions of the issues that they addressed. The book follows the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society’bfass) engagement with chattel slavery and various forms of unfree labor regimes in both the Americas and Africa before and under European imperial rule, as well as the slave trade across the Atlantic, the Arab trade in the Indian Ocean, and internal African slave trade. The chapters about the twentieth century explore bfass attempts to persuade the League of Nations and the United Nations to define and monitor slavery and other unacceptable labor practices and press for their abolition.The characteristic approach of the bfass was a partial break from the forms of action adopted by the earlier British anti-slavery movement, which had combined “agitation” (propaganda and petitioning to mobilize public sentiment and influence policymakers) with memoranda and direct lobbying. The bfass relied almost entirely on trying to work closely with officials and politicians in the Foreign and Colonial Offices, translating these methods to international bodies in the twentieth century. bfass methods never guaranteed the desired outcome, even in relation to the British government. Ending the shipping of indentured laborers from India, China, and South East Asia to colonial economies took decades, though some improvement of conditions occurred aboard ships.Heartfield concludes that collaboration with government probably made abolitionists more likely to accommodate official concerns that limited the success of their initiatives. The bfass committee became enthusiastically imperialist, believing that British territorial control would strengthen their “influence.” But this anti-slavery positioning came at a cost in the twentieth century. The issues of slavery and forced labor became less salient for the British government and less amenable to reformers in international bodies. The bfass was left stranded by the rise of anticolonial sentiment, unable or unwilling to make common cause with colonial nationalists. The book effectively narrates the eventual marginalization and declining arc of the bfass.Despite the book’s rich detail, it focuses narrowly on the organization. Its limits are due to the fact that its most important source is the official bfass paper, The British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Reporter. The larger history of the British anti-slavery movement is sometimes skewed because the bfass was not always at the center of it. Other organizations were occasionally responsible for elements of popular mobilization. Moreover, during the American Civil War and, to an extent, the Congo reform campaign in the early twentieth century, local groups emerged to assume the burden. The book does not include phases of transnational anti-slavery, such as Black Atlantic reformist networks, if they largely bypassed, or experienced uneasy relations with, the bfass.Heartfield’s study, with its heavy reliance on one mode of the bfass’ communication with the public, can provide only fragments of the bfass’ communications history. Integrating political science work on lobbying could have prompted some more reflection on the tools that the bfass employed to change policy.

Writing Africa in Belgium, Europe: A Conversation with Chika Unigwe

Winner of Africa’s largest literary prize, the Nigeria Prize for Literature, for On Black Sisters’ Street (2009) and author of three other novels and various short stories in anthologies and journals, including Wasafiri and Moving Worlds , Chika Unigwe has been hailed as a “third-generation” Nigerian writer alongside other notable young writers such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Chris Abani. In this interview, conducted right before her relocation to the United States, Unigwe reflects on what Africa means to her as a Nigerian author who has lived in Belgium for almost two decades and how her move to Europe influenced her as a person and especially as a writer. Touching on issues such as labeling, home, language, and colonization, she openly speaks of her frustrations with racism in Belgium, her therapeutic motivations for writing, and what it has meant to her to win the Nigeria Prize for Literature. At the end of the interview she also briefly comments on her latest novel about Olaudah Equiano, the famous African ex-slave whose self-published 1789 autobiography supported the British anti-slavery movement.

흑인 노예 출신 작가들과 영국 노예무역 폐지 운동의 발전 : 산초, 쿠고아노, 에퀴아노를 중심으로

흑인 노예 출신 작가들과 영국 노예무역 폐지 운동의 발전 : 산초, 쿠고아노, 에퀴아노를 중심으로

Ian Whyte, Zachary Macaulay 1768–1838: the steadfast Scot in the British anti-slavery movement

Ian Whyte, <i>Zachary Macaulay 1768–1838: the steadfast Scot in the British anti-slavery movement</i>

Bleeding Humanity and Gendered Embodiments: From Antislavery Sugar Boycotts to Ethical Consumers

The origins of humanitarian narrative are closely linked with the British antislavery movement of the late eighteenth century, with all of the deeply problematic understandings of shared ‘‘humanity’’ that it entailed. In an influential essay, the historian Thomas L. Haskell argued that it was aspects of capitalism such as contract and individual responsibility that first shaped the emergence of a sense that one’s actions could have an effect on distant others, and hence (ironically) created the conditions of possibility for humanitarian sensibility.1 Thomas W. Laqueur went on to show how ‘‘the humanitarian narrative relies on the personal body, not only as the locus of pain but also as the common bond between those who suffer and those who would help,’’ with detailed accounts of the suffering body eliciting ‘‘sympathetic passions’’ that could move a person from feeling to action.2 Closer attention to such antislavery narratives has revealed, however, that they stood in precarious relation to any sense of universal human rights and in many cases actually reinforced forms of racism and disavowal of the humanity of the enslaved. Deirdre Coleman, in particular, pointed out the virulent racism and African ‘‘otherness’’ that existed within many antislavery tracts in this period (well before the rise of nineteenth-century scientific racism), as well as the ways in which white women advanced their own claims for emancipation at the expense of Africans. ‘‘The belief in a common humanity, the sentimental identification of the African as brother: these recuperative features of abolitionism always co-exist with a panicky and contradictory need to preserve essential boundaries and distinctions,’’ she writes.3 As a matrix for the birth of European humanitarianism, then, eighteenthcentury abolitionism was extremely flawed. Lynn Festa has also examined ‘‘the way eighteenth-century abolitionists used tropes and figures borrowed from sentimental literature to delineate the parameters of the human’’ and ‘‘excite the ‘humanity’ of metropolitan readers toward the suffering of enslaved people in distant climes.’’ She argues that sentimental abolitionism involves a ‘‘double movement of empathy and usurpation’’ in which ‘‘sentimentality generates a situation in which the subjects who sympathize and the objects who elicit sympathy confront one another across an affective and cultural divide in which one set of people feels for—has feelings about and instead of—another.’’4 All of this work has crucial implications for how one thinks about humanitarian action in the world today, which arguably also ‘‘produces hierarchy and difference as much as it creates reciprocity and likeness.’’5 Indeed, very similar critiques have been extended to showing how twentieth-century narratives of suffering, victimhood, and trauma also hinge upon problematic relations between victims and would-be saviors and between

The Zong in the Context of the Eighteenth-Century Slave Trade

This contribution places the Zong tragedy in the wider context of the eighteenth-century Atlantic slave trade, a global business venture which from 1750 to 1807 was dominated by British ships. Evidence for ‘jettison’ within the British slave trade is examined, and the uniqueness of this aspect of the Zong case is emphasised. Attention is given to the role of the Zong hearings of 1783 in bringing together individuals who would go on to play a leading role in the British anti-slavery movement, established in 1787. Finally, this article examines the impact of the Zong incident upon eighteenth-century maritime insurance law relating to ‘human cargoes’, and on the passage of the ‘Dolben Act’ (the first Act to regulate British slave shipping) in 1788.

`Am I not a Man and a Brother?' The Bible and the British Anti-Slavery Campaign

After surveying the use of the Bible on behalf of slave-owners, this article studies the biblical exegesis employed by Porteus, Sharp, Hughes and others in the British anti-slavery movement. The decisive hermeneutical move was the recategorization of the slave as a man/woman and a brother/sister — part of a larger intellectual shift in philosophy and theology. The specific contribution of evangelical theology is noted in this connection.

Moral capital: foundations of British abolitionism

Revisiting the origins of the British antislavery movement of the late eighteenth century, Christopher Leslie Brown challenges prevailing scholarly arguments that locate the roots of abolitionism in economic determinism or bourgeois humanitarianism. Brown instead connects the shift from sentiment to action to changing views of empire and nation in Britain at the time, particularly the anxieties and dislocations spurred by the American Revolution. The debate over the political rights of the North American colonies pushed slavery to the fore, Brown argues, giving antislavery organizing the moral legitimacy in Britain it had never had before. The first emancipation schemes were dependent on efforts to strengthen the role of the imperial state in an era of weakening overseas authority. Brown connects disparate strands of the British Atlantic world and brings into focus shifting developments in British identity, attitudes toward Africa, definitions of imperial mission, the rise of Anglican evangelicalism, and Quaker activism. He shows that the abolitionist movement derived its power from a profound yearning for moral worth in the aftermath of defeat and American independence. Thus abolitionism proved to be a cause for the abolitionists themselves as much as for enslaved Africans.

European Travellers and Administrators in Sudan before and after the Mahdiyya

Answering the question: ‘Why do people travel and what is the effect of travel on the traveller?’, Professor M.E.Yapp quotes Lawrence Sterne, who categorized travellers by their reason for travel a...

Articles and Publications

Articles and Publications by Barbara E. Addison and Mary Ellen Chijioke Those seeking abriefintroduction to British Quaker historywill be interestedin Alastair Heron's latest publication, The British Quakers, 1647-1997 : Highlights of Their History (Kelso, Scotland: Curlew Productions, 1997). It consists ofthe introductory chapter to his book, Quakers in Britain: A Century ofChange, 18951995 (see Quaker History 85.1 (Spring 1966): 66) extended by a précis ofthe rest ofthatbook. Thebookretains Heron's strongviews aboutthe currentstate ofBritish Quakerism. For those not having access to large Quaker research collections, The Old Discipline: Nineteenth-Century Friends' Disciplines in America (Glenside, Pa.: Quaker Heritage Press, 1999) provides the text of selected published books of discipline of the early nineteenth century. Also popular in style are three biographies of famous Quakers: The Clouded QuakerStar: JamesNayler, 1618-1660,by Vera Massey (York, England: Sessions Book Trust; Richmond, Ind.: Friends United Press, 1999); Patricia L. Hudson's article on William Penn, "Penning a Legacy" (American History 32:6 (January/ February 1998): 16-19); David Sox's John Woolman: Quintessential Quaker, 1 720-1 772 (Richmond, Ind.: Friends United Press; York, England: Sessions Book Trust, 1999), which follows the chronology ofthe Journal. Maurice Jackson gives amore scholarly overview ofthe intellectual background ofWoolman's contemporary and colleague in "The Social and Intellectual Origins of Anthony Benezet's Antislavery Radicalism" (Explorations in Early American Culture: Supplemental Issue ofPennsylvania History 66 (1999): 86-1 12). While both were widely read in the intellectual trends of their day, Woolman wrote primarily for Quaker and American audiences, while Benezet addressed the wider world, having a special impact on the origins of the British antislavery movement. A number of recent works deal with Quakerism outside the Anglo-American sphere. Sheila Spielhofer's "Reflections on an Eightieth Birthday" (The Friend 158.2(14January2000): 7-8) describes the beginnings oftheViennaQuakerGroup in 19 19 with a mix offoreign reliefworkers and convinced Austrians. In her paper, "From Pastoral to Non-Pastoral: Quaker Experience in Japan" ([Yamanashi, Japan?: Yamanashi Women's Junior College?], 1999) Tetsuko Kawahara Toda describes the process by which Japanese Quakers, who had been introduced to programmed Quakerism by Orthodox Philadelphia Friends, turned to silent worship to cope with the spiritual stress ofWorld War II and its aftermath. In "? Was a Stranger, and Ye Took Me In': Charity, Moral Economy, and the Children of Peace" (Canadian Historical Review 80.4 (December 1999): 624-640), Albert Schrauwers attributes the ethical basis ofthis Canadian splinter sect's culture to its Quaker roots. Recent works related to the history of the peace testimony are similarly international in scope. Douglas Glynn examines Irish Quaker reactions to the 1798 70Quaker History Uprising in his work, Friends and 1 798: Quaker Witness to Non-violence in 18th Century Ireland (Dublin: Historical Committee ofthe Religious Society ofFriends in Ireland, 1998). Ronald Watts deals primarily with British Friends in his discussion of "Quakers and the Boer War" (The Friends Quarterly 32. 1 (January 2000): 35-41). In "Remembrances ofa German Prisoner ofWar in England" (TheFriends Quarterly 32.1 (January 2000): 22-35) consisting of extracts from his book originallyin German, HeinzKammerrelates his experienceswhile aprisonerofwar in England, 1944-48, which led him to Quakerism. Two new books document the experiences of World War II conscientious objectors and their families: Dear Heart: Letters to andfrom Two Conscientious Objectors, written by Donald and Betty Rodger, edited by F. Rodger and M. Lawson (Sheffield, England: the editors, 1997), reproduces the correspondence between a British Friend imprisoned for refusing alternative service andhis young wife; Margaret Hope Bacon's Love is the HardestLesson: A Memoir(Wallingford, Pa.: Pendle Hill Publications, 1999) is the story ofa differentyoung wife, whojoined her husband to work in a statepsychiatric institution where he was doing his alternative service. In a story ofnonviolence in Americanpublic affairs, Daniel Levine's description ofBayardRustin andthe Civil Rights Movement (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000) emphasizes Rustin's political life, dealing only briefly with Rustin's religious crisis after 1953 and ignoring his continuing Quaker activities. Daniel K. Richter's article, '"Believing That Many ofthe Red People Suffer Much for the Want of Food': Hunting, Agriculture, and a Quaker Construction of Indianness in the Early Republic" (Journal...

Equal or Different: Women's Politics, 1800-1914

Part I Citizenship and conscience: cottage religion and the politics of survival, Deborah Valenze women, work, and politics in 19th century England - the problem of authority, Dorothy Thompson a burning zeal for righteousness - women in the British anti-slavery movement 1820-1860, Louis Billington and Rosamund Billington a moral engine? - feminism, liberalism, and the English Woman's Journal, Jane Rendall. Part II Class, party and sexual politics: the married woman, the new woman and the feminist - sexual politics of the 1890s, Lucy Bland party political women - a comparative study of liberal women and the Primrose League 1890-1914, Linda Walker women in council - separate spheres, public space, Patricia Hollis in the comradeship of the sexes lies the hope of progress and social regeneration - women in the West Riding ILP, c.1890-1914, June Hannam

III. ‘Humanity Sold for Sugar!’ The British Abolitionist Response to Free Trade in Slave-grown Sugar

Prior to 1944, the interpretation of the British anti-slavery movement was dominated by the ‘humanitarian’ ideas of the school of imperial historians centred round the great Sir Reginald Coupland. The turning point in slave trade and slavery studies came with the publication of Eric Williams' Capitalism and Slavery, significantly enough published at Chapel Hill—it would be interesting to find out whether the manuscript had previously been submitted to any English firms. In his bibliography, Williams remarked of Coupland that he ‘represents the sentimental conception of history; his works help us to understand what the anti-slavery movement was not’. But the attack went much further than personalities. Capitalism and Slavery included evidence which stood the more traditional interpretation on its head, while its conclusions rejected the simple moral motivation which had previously been picked out as the main factor behind the abolition of the slave trade and slavery. The whole thesis of Williams' book was that while the moral awakening of which Coupland and his followers had written may have genuinely affected the behaviour of individual supporters of abolition, the root cause of the abandonment of the slave trade and later of West Indian slavery was a change in the balance of economic pressure groups. Building on the work of Lowell Joseph Ragatz, Williams suggested that the anti-slavery movement was a group response of the middle class, to a decline in the relative power of the West India interest on the one hand, and a change in the needs of the increasingly industrialized society in which they lived on the other.

James Cropper and the British Anti-Slavery Movement, 1823-1833

James Cropper and the British Anti-Slavery Movement, 1823-1833

James Cropper and the British Anti-Slavery Movement, 1821-1823

James Cropper and the British Anti-Slavery Movement, 1821-1823