This paper is an overview of the central arguments of my book, Faces of Perfect Ebony: Encountering Atlantic Slavery in Imperial Britain, which is forthcoming with Harvard University Press and slated to launch at the 2012 AHA.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Britain became a formidable imperial power in Europe and the leading slave trading nation, transporting more than three million African captives to the New World. Because domestic landowners never turned to slavery as a source of labor, the metropolitan market for African slaves remained small, urban, and largely luxury. Historians have often thought, as a result, that Britons at home did not think very much about African slavery until the abolitionist movement brought it to popular attention in the late eighteenth century. Using a variety of forms of popular visual media (shop signs, tea trays, cheap prints, etc.), this paper argues that ordinary Britons actively imagined their connection to African slaves from the earliest decades of slave-based colonization. I show that these popular fantasies played a critical role in shaping emerging notions of racial difference and conceptions of Britain as an imperial nation. Artists struggled against, embraced, and brought into being this enlarged and racially plural imperial community in Britain through the circulation, appropriation, adaptation, and recirculation of stories and iconographies about British relationships with black slaves. By idealizing black servitude and obscuring slavery’s brutalities, these images of African subordinates became symbols of empire to a general populace that had little contact with the realities of slave life in the distant Americas and Caribbean. I show how, over the course of the eighteenth century, news of slave unrest and the growing black presence in Britain itself posed persistent and critical challenges to how white Britons envisioned the imperial peripheries fitting into their imagined community.