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Australia and Anti-Slavery

This Special Issue of Australian Historical Studies sets out to investigate Australia’s relationship with the history of human rights by critically examining anti-slavery discourse and its various mobilisations in Australian humanitarian politics from the 1890s to the present. Originally these articles were papers presented to a Griffith Centre for Cultural Research workshop in Brisbane in December 2012 at which Professor Ann Curthoys was our insightful commentator for the day. This collection of articles emanating from that workshop shares a concern with the longevity of anti-slavery discourse (that is, not only its representation, but material practices) in Australia and, in particular, with the ways that the accusation of ‘slavery’ and the advocacy of anti-slavery as its antidote have been invoked in Australia where no formal history of ‘slavery’ has existed. A slave is typically defined as a person who is the property of another and who is forced to obey them, while the institution of slavery is generally understood as a condition or system of subjection based on inhumane conditions of life and coercive work practices. Today we think of slavery and its abolition as a nineteenth-century process. But the Atlantic slave trade had begun in the sixteenth century and thus lasted almost three hundred years. Over this period, millions of African men, woman and children were captured and shipped across the Atlantic to work as slaves in the Americas, an economy in human life driven by European demand for work in the sugar, tobacco and rice industries that helped to shape the modern world and define what we have understood as ‘slavery’ ever since. Slavery did not end with abolition. For one thing, despite the AngloAmerican abolition of their slave trades in 1807–8, demand for imported Africans continued until the 1860s. For another, the American slave population became self-sustaining, and on the eve of the Civil War there were almost four million slaves in the United States. Furthermore, not only did abolition not end slavery; it prompted a proliferation of myriad new forms with dynamic transnational and imperial trajectories. Similarly, anti-slavery continued as a movement beyond achievement of Emancipation in 1833. As the historian of slavery James Walvin points out: ‘The