Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa, and the Atlantic

Derek R. Peterson

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9780821443057
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Slavery
• Index: Social Sciences

The abolition of the slave trade is normally understood to be the singular achievement of eighteenth-century British liberalism. Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa, and the Atlantic expands both the temporal and the geographic framework in which the history of abolitionism is conceived. Abolitionism was a theater in which a variety of actors—slaves, African rulers, Caribbean planters, working-class radicals, British evangelicals, African political entrepreneurs—played a part. The Atlantic was an echo chamber, in which abolitionist symbols, ideas, and evidence were generated from a variety of vantage points. These essays highlight the range of political and moral projects in which the advocates of abolitionism were engaged, and in so doing it joins together geographies that are normally studied in isolation.
Where empires are often understood to involve the government of one people over another, Abolitionism and Imperialism shows that British values were formed, debated, and remade in the space of empire. Africans were not simply objects of British liberals' benevolence. They played an active role in shaping, and extending, the values that Britain now regards as part of its national character. This book is therefore a contribution to the larger scholarship about the nature of modern empires.
Contributors: Christopher Leslie Brown, Seymour Drescher, Jonathon Glassman, Boyd Hilton, Robin Law, Phillip D. Morgan, Derek R. Peterson, John K. Thornton

Table of contents

• Series Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Abolitionism and Political Thought in Britain and East Africa
• Chapter One: African Poltical Ethics and the Slave Trade
• Chapter Two: 1807 and All That: Why Britain Outlawed Her Slave Trade
• Chapter Three: Empire withou America: British Plans for Africa in the Era of the American Revolution
• Chapter Four: Ending the Slave Trade: A Caribbean and Atlantic Context
• Chapter Five: Emperors of the World: British Abolitionism and Imperialism
• Chapter Six: Abolition and Imperialism: International Law and the British Suppression of the Atlantic Slave Trade
• Chapter Seven: Racial Violence, Universal History, and Echoes of Abolition in Twentieth-Century Zanzibar
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index