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Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa, and the Atlantic

The central point that Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa, and the Atlantic makes is that abolition was not just a nineteenth-century event in history. The book shows that from the nineteenth century onward, abolitionist ideas flowed across the Atlantic and became geographically widespread. Moreover, they were usurped and employed by a variety of oppressed people who used abolitionist symbolism, rhetoric and ideology in their struggle to improve their conditions or throw off oppression, even when their cause had only a slim connection to the alleviation of chattel slavery. In essence, ‘abolitionism was a theatre in which a variety of actors – slaves, African rulers, Caribbean planters, working-class radicals, African political entrepreneurs, Christian evangelists – played a part. The varied cast of characters was not working from a script authored in London’ (27). To be sure, the strength of the book is that it ‘highlights 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’ (ibid.). The result of a series of lectures convened by the Centre of African Studies at the University of Cambridge in 2007 – the bicentenary of the Act for the abolition of the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans then being celebrated enthusiastically by the Tony Blair Labour government – the book focuses primarily on slavery, abolitionism and imperialism. It has an introduction by Derek Peterson and seven well-crafted and substantial chapters by prominent scholars. John Thornton leads off appropriately with an examination of the ethical grounds on which the leaders of three states in western Africa – Kongo, Ndongo (now part of Angola) and Dahomey (now Benin) – participated in the Atlantic slave trade. Drawing upon hitherto neglected archival sources, Thornton argues that African leaders viewed the slave trade, in which they participated voluntarily, as a means to extend their authority over refractory people and to defend themselves against external enemies. The trade posed no moral dilemma for them; indeed, it was a pragmatic vehicle of polity-building and a routine means of political consolidation. Boyd Hilton then surveys the historiography of the slave trade abolition and charts the shift in attitudes to abolition, arguing that by 1907 – a century after British abolition – there was public indifference to slavery and anti-slavery. The lack of public support for preserving William Wilberforce’s house at Battersea Rise, where the Slavery and Abolition Vol. 33, No. 1, March 2012, pp. 157–178