The suppression of the Atlantic slave trade has puzzled nineteenth-century contemporaries and historians since, as the British Empire turned naval power and moral outrage against a branch of commerce it had done so much to promote. The assembled authors bridge the gap between ship and shore to reveal the motives, effects and legacies of this campaign. This paperback edition is the first academic history of Britain's campaign to suppress the Atlantic slave trade in more than thirty years, and book gathers experts in history, literature, historical geography, museum studies and the history of medicine to analyse naval suppression in light of recent work on slavery and empire. Three sections reveal the policies, experiences and representations of slave-trade suppression from the perspectives of metropolitan Britons, liberated Africans, black sailors, colonialists and naval officers. -- .

The humanitarian movement against Leopold's violent colonisation of the Congo emerged out of Europe, but it depended at every turn on African input. Individuals and groups from throughout the upper Congo River basin undertook journeys of daring and self-sacrifice to provide evidence of atrocities for the colonial authorities, missionaries, and international investigators. Combining archive research with attention to recent debates on the relation between imperialism and humanitarianism, on trauma, witnessing and postcolonial studies, and on the recovery of colonial archives, this book examines the conditions in which colonised peoples were able to speak about their subjection, and those in which attempts at testimony were thwarted. Robert Burroughs makes a major intervention by identifying African agency and input as a key factor in the Congo atrocities debate. This is an important and unique book in African history, imperial and colonial history, and humanitarian history.

The humanitarian movement against Leopold's violent colonisation of the Congo emerged out of Europe, but it depended at every turn on African input. Individuals and groups from throughout the upper Congo River basin undertook journeys of daring and self-sacrifice to provide evidence of atrocities for the colonial authorities, missionaries, and international investigators. Combining archive research with attention to recent debates on the relation between imperialism and humanitarianism, on trauma, witnessing and postcolonial studies, and on the recovery of colonial archives, this book examines the conditions in which colonised peoples were able to speak about their subjection, and those in which attempts at testimony were thwarted. Robert Burroughs makes a major intervention by identifying African agency and input as a key factor in the Congo atrocities debate. This is an important and unique book in African history, imperial and colonial history, and humanitarian history.

This book caters for the demand in new black histories by rediscovering several little-known Black people's experiences in late-Victorian Britain. It centres on The African Institute of Colwyn Bay, or 'Congo House', at which almost 90 children and young adults from Africa and its diaspora were enrolled to train as missionaries between 1889 and 1911. Burroughs finds that, though their encounters in Britain were shaped by the racism and paternalism of the late-nineteenth-century civilising mission, the students were not simply the objects of British charity. They were also agents in a culture of evangelical humanitarianism. Some were fully absorbed in the civilising mission, becoming leading missionaries. Others adapted their experiences to new ends, participating in networks of pan-Africanism that questioned race prejudice and colonialism. In their negotiations of the challenges and opportunities at the heart of the empire, the students of Congo House reveal how the global currents of black history shaped the localised cultures of Victorian philanthropy. From racism to pan-Africanism, this study sheds new light on key issues in black British history.