Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa, and the Atlantic

by Peterson, Derek R.

• ISBN13: 9780821419021
• ISBN10: 0821419021
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-01-12
• Publisher: Ohio Univ Pr

Summary

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 Atlanticexpands 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 Imperialismshows that British values were formed, debated, and remade in the space of empire. Africans were not simply objects of British liberalsrs" 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.

Author Biography

Derek R. Peterson teaches African history at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Creative Writing: Translation, Bookkeeping, and the Work of Imagination in Colonial Kenya and coeditor of Recasting the Past: History Writing and Political Work in Modern Africa.

Table of Contents

Series Editors' Preface	p. vii
Acknowledgments	p. ix
Introduction: Abolitionism and Political Thought in Britain and East Africa	p. 1
African Political Ethics and the Slave Trade	p. 38
1807 and All That: Why Britain Outlawed Her Slave Trade	p. 63
Empire without America: British Plans for Africa in the Era of the American Revolution	p. 84
Ending the Slave Trade: A Caribbean and Atlantic Context	p. 101
Emperors of the World: British Abolitionism and Imperialism	p. 129
Abolition and Imperialism: International Law and the British Suppression of the Atlantic Slave Trade	p. 150
Racial Violence, Universal History, and Echoes of Abolition in Twentieth-Century Zanzibar	p. 175
Bibliography	p. 207
Contributors	p. 229
Index	p. 231
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