Revisiting the origins of the British antislavery movement of the
late eighteenth century, Christopher Leslie Brown challenges
prevailing scholarly arguments that locate the roots of
abolitionism in economic determinism or bourgeois humanitarianism.
Brown instead connects the shift from sentiment to action to
changing views of empire and nation in Britain at the time,
particularly the anxieties and dislocations spurred by the American
Revolution.
The debate over the political rights of the North American
colonies pushed slavery to the fore, Brown argues, giving
antislavery organizing the moral legitimacy in Britain it had never
had before. The first emancipation schemes were dependent on
efforts to strengthen the role of the imperial state in an era of
weakening overseas authority. By looking at the initial public
contest over slavery, Brown connects disparate strands of the
British Atlantic world and brings into focus shifting developments
in British identity, attitudes toward Africa, definitions of
imperial mission, the rise of Anglican evangelicalism, and Quaker
activism.
Demonstrating how challenges to the slave system could serve as
a mark of virtue rather than evidence of eccentricity, Brown shows
that the abolitionist movement derived its power from a profound
yearning for moral worth in the aftermath of defeat and American
independence. Thus abolitionism proved to be a cause for the
abolitionists themselves as much as for enslaved Africans.
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