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This article offers new perspectives on the commemorative events organized around the UK in 2007 to mark the bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act (1807). Drawing from the resources contained in Remembering 1807, a digital archive of information about nearly 350 events and exhibitions held in 2007, it offers a closer look at the variety, diversity and creativity of projects organized by heritage organizations and community groups from all parts of the UK. While agreeing that much of the national narrative focused on the celebratory aspects of Britain’s role in abolition, we argue that many other projects gave voice to a wide range of concerns relating to transatlantic slavery, challenging participants to rethink the boundaries of slavery and abolition in Britain’s public history. This included highlighting the role of transatlantic slavery in hitherto unexplored areas of British history, in local stories and in broader narratives of Britain’s commercial, military, and imperial expansion. Other projects drew attention to the lasting legacies of slavery, emphasized stories of resistance or celebrated the Black presence in Britain. Recognizing these other perspectives within the commemorative impulse in 2007 can help us to (re)orientate future memory work around Britain’s role in transatlantic slavery.

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This is the third book in a trilogy that began with Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery (1995).1 Two broad themes have been at the heart of this endeavour. The first is opinion-building. Popular Politics sought to answer a simple question: how did eighteenth-century activists turn an idea into a successful popular movement? Creating a constituency for abolition, especially at a period when transatlantic slavery was considered a necessary adjunct of empire, demanded skill and ingenuity. It also required highly developed organizational skills and an eye for business. Anti-slavery activists cleverly exploited an expanding consumer society to push their ideas and values, as well as their insistent demands, from the periphery to the centre of public debate. In the process, they helped to make abolition fashionable, Josiah Wedgwood’s famous cameo of the kneeling slave being an obvious case in point. Cheap disposable literature, inertia selling and the innovative use of images and image-making, all excited an interest in anti-slavery that found expression in mass petitioning and the emergence of the first modern reform movement. By shifting attention away from the narrow confines of Westminster, ...

This Chapter looks in details at the close personal friendship between George Thompson and William Lloyd Garrison, from their first meeting in London in 1833 to Thompson’s death in 1878. It explores in detail Thompson’s loyalty to Garrison, a loyalty that in many ways alienated him from mainstream British abolitionists. The Chapter also discusses Thompson’s role in raising British support for the Union cause during the American Civil War. Part of the intention here is to set Anglo-American co-operation within a personal context. The friendship between Thompson and Garrison sheds important light on how personal bonds underpinned the wider transatlantic abolitionist movement, at the same time accentuating the importance of international co-operation, not simply as an idea but as a lived experience.

This Chapter deals with the wider question of political influence and how anti-slavery activists engaged with politics. In the past, this topic has been dominated by studies of anti-slavery petitions. While recognising the importance of petitioning, this chapter looks at complementary forms of political protest, chief among them the pledging of prospective parliamentary candidates, or what in the USA was called ‘the interrogatory system’. Pledging proved singularly effective in flushing out reluctant candidates but by its very nature it was seen as symptomatic of a new kind of politics that was at once brash, noisy and confrontational. The chapter looks at how these tactics were widely adopted in the USA, where direct political action eventually led to the organization of the Liberty Party, a new departure that took it as axiomatic that the existing two-party system (Whigs/Democrats) was not working. The chapter argues that the Liberty Party had a significant impact on divorcing the federal government from the idea of slavery.

This Chapter deals with a hitherto neglected aspect of anti-slavery opinion building, namely the role of anti-slavery songs. Hundreds of these songs – really abolitionist poems set to popular melodies -- were produced during the nineteenth century, on topics as diverse as the slave experience and contemporary public events. In essence, these were protest songs, designed to inform and inspire. The Chapter also looks at the emergence of anti-slavery performers, chief among them the Hutchinson Family Singers from New Hampshire, who electrified audiences during the 1840s with their performances. In 1846, the Hutchinsons visited Britain where they met with a different reception, their peculiar brand of musical advocacy alienating some section of the British public. The chapter analyses the reasons for this ‘failure’, while concluding with a discussion of spirituals (slave songs) as performed by African American visitors to the UK, among them Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown.

This Chapter deals with Anglophilia as an animating principle in a lot American anti-slavery thought and practice. It begins with an account of how early anti-slavery activists appropriated Wilberforce, Clarkson and Sharp into their rituals, before moving on to discuss how after 1833 William Lloyd Garrisonian and his supporters deliberately set out to create a continuous link between the British past and the American present, perhaps most evident in the elevation of 1 August (Emancipation Day in the Caribbean) into the American abolitionist calendar. These affinities cut across racial lines. African Americans were just as quick to appropriate figures such as Wilberforce and Clarkson, weaving them into a black protest tradition that elevated abolitionism into a global struggle, even if in doing so they put themselves at personal risk. Anglophilia not only shaped how the American anti-slavery movement should be understood but also how it should be remembered.

This Chapter explores the complex relationship between anti-slavery activity and consumerism. It begins with a discussion of the resonance and meaning of anti-slavery artefacts, from Wedgwood’s famous cameo of the kneeling slave to ceramics, needlework and fabrics. It then goes on to discuss the significance of the Boston Anti-Slavery Bazaar, not least as a successful commercial enterprise. The Bazaar, however, was in many ways a victim of its own success, leading its organisers to abandon it in favour of a subscription system. The same was true of the huge popular success of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853). ‘Tom’ became a fad or ‘mania’ but in doing so became divorced form his original (anti-slavery) context. By placing consumerism in a wider perspective, this chapter probes the sometimes-difficult relationship between consumerism and anti-slavery, highlighting the threats as well as the opportunities.

In recent years, there has been growing interest in freedom suits, whether prosecuted by white abolitionists or by blacks themselves. Karen Woods Weierman tackles another one of these cases, the ‘s...

As the recent release of Nate Parker’s film, The Birth of a Nation, demonstrates, the Nat Turner slave revolt (August 1831) continues to resonate in American popular culture. By contrast, the schol...

In recent years, there has been growing interest in transatlanticism, particularly among eighteenth-century scholars. In his excellent new book, The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery, W. C...

On both sides of the Atlantic, states have tended to react nervously to reparative claims for slavery, just as they have tended to be wary of making apologies of any kind. In the absence of more radical gestures, public history has taken on an added significance, not least as a way of providing some kind of recompense for past suffering. But to what extent can public history be used to repair historical wrongs? This essay sets out to explore this question, taking as its point of departure the bicentenary of the abolition of the British slave trade (2007). In particular, it focuses on three inter-related areas of activity: heritage funding, museums and, finally, monuments and memorials. The 2007 commemorations generated a wide range of public history initiatives, from small-scale exhibitions, plays, workshops and installations to larger capital projects that in different ways, and with different degrees of success, reshaped representations of British transatlantic slavery and, in doing so, invited Britons to look again at the paradoxes embedded in national histories that first enslaved and then liberated persons of African descent.

In March 1807 the British parliament took the dramatic step to end British involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. A year later, the United States followed suit, in accordance with the provis...

In the past decade there has been an explosion of interest in what might be loosely described as "transatlanticism." Prompted by Paul Gilroy's immensely influential book, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), scholars have eagerly sought to chart the exchange of ideas, peoples, and cultures across and within the Atlantic world. As Gilroy argued, the African Diaspora was the site of one of the most important of these exchanges. Whether as slaves, sailors, or abolitionists, blacks shaped and transformed the dominant white culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, often in unforeseen ways. Of course, in turn they were shaped by it. But how these negotiations took place, and at what speed, is only now emerging. The African Diaspora, and the introduction of slavery in the Americas, created a relatively cohesive international economy that bound together the interests of people on both sides of the Atlantic. Although all the major European powers had a stake in the Atlantic slave system, the role played by the British was crucial. Overall, between 1662 and 1807 British Empire ships carried approximately 3.4 million slaves from Africa to America. At the height of the slave trade, Britain exported more slaves than any other nation, her slave colonies produced vast quantities of tropical goods, and the country as a whole grew rich on the profits of African slavery. Until recently, historians have tended to assume that slavery and colonialism went hand in hand with the emergence of modern racist attitudes that emphasized blackness and African origins. But in The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture, Roxann Wheeler offers us a very different understanding of racial differences. Eighteenth-century Britons, she argues, did make distinctions between themselves and "others"; however, those distinctions did not involve race, at least not in the modern sense of the term. Christianity, for instance, was an important register. As Wheeler puts it: "To be a Christian was to be fully human, an association that reverberates throughout the

Some years ago I was invited to spend a day in an elementary school in Columbia, South Carolina. The day began, as I imagine every day began, with the national anthem and the pledge of allegiance to the American flag. The children then sang a song, a ditty really, which began as it ended with the simple refrain: ‘I am special’. Later I was shown some of the work the class had been doing. Across the back of the room were pinned up the children’s attempts to answer a question that had been exercising me, namely what was special about the United States. Some of the responses were fairly predictable. America was special, one seven-year-old wrote, because it was a democracy. Others singled out freedom or liberty as their country’s unique virtue. One brave soul boldly asserted that America was special because Americans were rich, while another thought the secret had something to do with happiness.

Christopher Leslie Brown Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006 x + 480pp., ISBN 0-8078-3034-8 ($55.00 hardcover); 0-8078-5698-3 ($22.50 paper) Explaining rather than describing ...

Transatlantic Abolitionism in the Age of Revolution offers a fresh exploration of anti-slavery debates in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It challenges traditional perceptions of early anti-slavery activity as an entirely parochial British, European or American affair, and instead reframes the abolition movement as a broad international network of activists across a range of metropolitan centres and remote outposts. Interdisciplinary in approach, this book explores the dynamics of transatlantic abolitionism, along with its structure, mechanisms and business methods, and in doing so, highlights the delicate balance that existed between national and international interests in an age of massive political upheaval throughout the Atlantic world. By setting slave trade debates within a wider international context, Professor Oldfield reveals how popular abolitionism emerged as a political force in the 1780s, and how it adapted itself to the tumultuous events of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

In the 26 years between 1807 and 1833, Britain not only put an end to its involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, but also abolished slavery in the British Caribbean. These momentous events figure largely in the nation’s imagination and, indeed, its memory. But instead of seeing 1807 and 1833 as acts of closure, as happened in 2007 when the nation paused to mark the bicentenary of the 1807 Abolition Act, it is perhaps more meaningful to see them as part of a broader historical narrative (a specific national history) that spoke to and reinforced Britain’s tradition of humanitarian interventionism. Though it is sometimes easy to forget, Britain would retain a close interest in the slavery question after 1833, not least through its involvement in the suppression of the international slave trade. This complex history is perhaps best explained in terms of four broad and interrelated themes: humanitarian effort on the part of British abolitionists, official government policy, naval suppression of the slave trade and empire. As we shall see, emancipation came to define the morality and purpose of the Victorian Empire, lending it a legitimacy that justified not only its imperialistic ambitions, but also its ability to speak for those who were too weak to speak for themselves.

A la lumiere des differentes reecritures du Oroonoko de Southerne et de The Padlock de Bickerstaffe, l'auteur demontre comment les premieres interrogations sur la moralite de l'esclavage formulees par les mouvements abolitionnistes contribuerent a ameliorer la perception de la communaute noire dans le theâtre anglais de la fin du XVIII e siecle.

A collection of new essays, Imagining Transatlantic Slavery offers the latest research and thinking on current debates about the representation – past and present – of transatlantic slavery. Building on the interest generated by the bicentenary in 2007–8 of the end of British and American involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, our volume is interdisciplinary, drawing on history, literature and museum and heritage studies. Its focus is on the transatlantic nature of slavery and abolition, and the essays range from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century. Its distinguished contributors offer a critical view of the histories leading up to the defining decisions of 1807–08 and its complex legacies over the last two centuries. Essays on notable figures such as Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, Hannah More, Benjamin Flower, and William and Ellen Craft are juxtaposed with those on early Quaker writing and the use of photography in abolitionist discourse. The last part of the book on 'Remembering and Forgetting' addresses debates surrounding the representation of slavery in drama, visual culture, museums and galleries, and appraises the importance of recent research to public understanding of slavery today.

During the late eighteenth century organized anti-slavery, in the shape of the campaign to end the African slave trade (1787–1807), became an unavoidable feature of political life in Britain. Drawing on previously unpublished material in the Josiah Wedgwood Papers, the following article seeks to reassess this campaign and, in particular, the part played in it by the (London) Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. So far from being a low-level lobby, as historians like Seymour Drescher have suggested, it is argued here that the Committee's activities, both in terms of opinion-building and arranging for petitions to be sent to the house of commons, were central to the success of the early abolitionist movement. Thus while the provinces and public opinion at the grass roots level were undoubtedly important, not least in the industrial north, it was the metropolis and the London Committee which gave political shape and significance to popular abolitionism.

Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery, by Seymour Drescher, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2009, xi + 471 pp., £15.99, ISBN 978-0-521-60085-9 DOI: 10.1080/0144039X.2011.568235 Hot ...

Challenging Slavery in the Chesapeake: Black and White Resistance to Human Bondage, 1775–1865, by T. Stephen Whitman, Baltimore, Maryland Historical Society, 2007, xv+301pp., $20.00, ISBN 978-0-938...