Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa, and the Atlantic — 2010 ·

Edited by Derek R. Peterson

“I must pay Derek Peterson an enormous tribute for selecting and editing such marvelous and cutting-edge scholarship. This volume should have a major impact for years to come on our interpretations of the broad and often unexplored effects and consequences of British abolitionism.”

David Brion Davis

“Derek Peterson has assembled a sparkling collection which seriously challenges the narrative of abolition as British triumphalism, and incisively demonstrates the global reach of abolitionist discourse long after the abolition of slavery. It is refreshing to see a new cast of characters people the abolitionist stage, and from parts of the world well beyond Britain and the Atlantic.”

Philippa Levine — author of The British Empire: Sunrise to Sunset

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

Derek R. Peterson is a senior lecturer in African history and director of the Centre of African Studies at Cambridge University. He is the author of Creative Writing: Translation, Bookkeeping, and the Work of Imagination in Colonial Kenya, and editor of The Invention of Religion: Rethinking Belief in Politics and History.