Session Abstract

This panel investigates the themes of anti-slavery principle and imperial power in the Atlantic world, examining how moral principles could lead to subjugation. As such, the session will challenge the comforting distinctions between anti-slavery humanitarianism and imperial inhumanity. The papers reflect a growing historiographical interest in the intersections between a redemptive story about anti-slavery and a pessimistic story of racial and imperial bigotry. All of the speakers will address the question of how anti-slavery ideals developed in the United States or European metropoles took on new meanings when enacted in Africa and the Atlantic world. Moreover, all of them look at the ways that anti-slavery ideas placed an instrumental value on the lives of Africans “saved” from slavery or the slave trade.

As such, the panel’s topics speak to the AHA meeting’s themes, but we will also tackle these by taking a different focus in individual papers. Scanlan’s research considers the way that British abolition policy “monetarised” the lives of Africans, declaring the slave trade illegal and simultaneously putting a price on the capture and career of liberated captives. These financial incentives shaped the enforcement of British abolition, undermining international cooperation with Portugal and the United States, just as “liberated” Africans were put to work in forced “free” labor. The paper by Everill will explore the influence of abolitionist colonies in the “sub-imperialism” of American, French and British empires in Africa. She takes a comparative view of these purported refuges for liberated Africans, examining how they became or did not become bridgeheads for expansion in different cases. In the panel’s third paper, Huzzey will examine the role of anti-slavery ideas in not simply shielding, but also motivating, the acquisition of territory in Africa during the later nineteenth century. He focuses on Anglo-Portuguese rivalries in the Nyassa region of the Great Lakes. The paper explores on how Sir Harry Johnston, first resident of the British protectorate over this area, told stories in the metropole, including his imaginary first-person narrative of History of a Slave, to present a clean, uplifting narrative of British anti-slave-trade purposes in the region.

As chair and respondent, Seymour Drescher is uniquely qualified to lead attendees in interrogating the broader themes and commonalities between these linked but distinct stories. By looking at the new contexts these moral, anti-slavery projects took in Africa and the unfree world of the Atlantic, the panel will explore larger questions of how uneasily material rewards and moral purpose interacted when American and European powers were unleashed in Africa.