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4 books match the query 'Abolitionism'
Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa, and the Atlantic
Derek R. Peterson
Ohio University Press, 2010
The abolition of the slave trade is normally understood to be the singular achievement of eighteenth-century British liberalism. Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa, and the Atlantic expands both the temporal and the geographic framework in which the history of abolitionism is conceived. Abolitionism was a theater in which a variety of actors—slaves, African rulers, Caribbean planters, working-class radicals, British evangelicals, African political entrepreneurs—played a part. The Atlantic was an echo chamber, in which abolitionist symbols, ideas, and evidence were generated from a variety of vantage points. These essays highlight the range of political and moral projects in which the advocates of abolitionism were engaged, and in so doing it joins together geographies that are normally studied in isolation.
Where empires are often understood to involve the government of one people over another, Abolitionism and Imperialism shows that British values were formed, debated, and remade in the space of empire. Africans were not simply objects of British liberals’ benevolence. They played an active role in shaping, and extending, the values that Britain now regards as part of its national character. This book is therefore a contribution to the larger scholarship about the nature of modern empires.
Contributors: Christopher Leslie Brown, Seymour Drescher, Jonathon Glassman, Boyd Hilton, Robin Law, Phillip D. Morgan, Derek R. Peterson, John K. Thornton
In the Blood of Our Brothers
Abolitionism and the End of the Slave Trade in Spain's Atlantic Empire, 1800–1870Jesús Sanjurjo
University of Alabama Press, 2021
FINALIST FOR THE PAUL E. LOVEJOY BOOK PRIZE
Unraveling the complex politics behind the end of the slave trade in Spain's Atlantic Empire.
Throughout the nineteenth century, very few people in Spain campaigned to stop the slave trade and did even less to abolish slavery. Even when some supported abolition, the reasons that moved them were not always humanitarian, liberal, or egalitarian. How abolitionist ideas were received, shaped, and transformed during this period has been ripe for study. Jesús Sanjurjo’s In the Blood of Our Brothers: Abolitionism and the End of the Slave Trade in Spain’s Atlantic Empire, 1800–1870 provides a comprehensive theory of the history, the politics, and the economics of the persistence and growth of the slave trade in the Spanish empire even as other countries moved toward abolition.
Sanjurjo privileges the central role that British activists and diplomats played in advancing the abolitionist cause in Spain. In so doing, he brings to attention the complex and uneven development of abolitionist and antiabolitionist discourses in Spain’s public life, from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the end of the transatlantic trade. His delineation of the ideological and political tension between Spanish liberalism and imperialism is crucial to formulating a fuller explanation of the reasons for the failure of anti–slave trade initiatives from 1811 to the 1860s. Slave trade was tied to the notion of inviolable property rights, and slavery persisted and peaked following three successful liberal revolutions in Spain.
Visit https://inthebloodofourbrothers.com/ for more information.
The Fugitive’s Gibraltar
Escaping Slaves and Abolitionism in New Bedford, MassachusettsKathryn Grover
University of Massachusetts Press, 2001
The Fugitive's Gibraltar is a richly researched work of social and cultural history that examines the city of New Bedford, Massachusetts as one of the most important and welcoming refuges for freedom-seeking enslaved people in antebellum America. The book's title derives from the phrase used by Frederick Douglass—himself among the most famous of New Bedford's many fugitive residents—to describe the city's reputation as a place of relative safety and freedom for Black Americans fleeing enslavement in the South.
Grover draws on an extraordinary breadth of primary sources to reconstruct the lives of fugitive slaves who came to New Bedford before the Civil War, as well as the city's larger African American community and the white and Black abolitionists who worked alongside them. The book explores how New Bedford's booming whaling economy—which depended heavily on Black labor and offered Black sailors wages equal to those of white sailors—created economic and social conditions unusually hospitable to free and freedom-seeking Black people. New Bedford's maritime character is thus deeply intertwined with its abolitionist identity.
The work examines the networks of people and organizations that sheltered, employed, and advocated for fugitives; traces individual stories of escape and resettlement; and situates New Bedford's experience within the broader national struggle over slavery, the Fugitive Slave Acts, and the abolitionist movement. Notable figures discussed include Frederick Douglass and Henry "Box" Brown. The book also sheds light on the daily lives, livelihoods, and community institutions of New Bedford's African American population—their churches, mutual aid societies, and social networks—providing a nuanced portrait of Black life in a northern city during this turbulent era.
Till the Dark Angel Comes
Abolitionism and the Road to the Second American RevolutionWilliam S. King
Westholme Publishing, 2016
Establishing himself as a fresh and important voice in the history of African American emancipation,William S. King provides a critical introduction to the lead-up to the Civil War. A skilled and judicious chronicler, King seamlessly weaves multiple and seemingly disparate threads, including early nineteenth-century Revivalism, the emergence of the Republic of Texas, the fugitive slave laws—and even the explosion of a cannon aboard the U.S.S. Princeton in 1844—to explain how the opposition to slavery in America changed from producing speeches and pamphlets to embracing the reality that slavery could be eradicated only through armed conflict. By tracing this transformation through the life of John Brown, King provides an entirely new assessment of this enigmatic figure who was characterized as a “mad man” in the wake of his butchering of proslavery settlers in Kansas and the inept raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia. King puts these actions in context to explain the paradox of Brown’s legacy. On one hand he was vilified as an unstable threat to American democracy or a fanatical sideshow to the history of the Civil War, while on the other he was an inspiration to the oppressed, a man who garnered the indomitable Harriet Tubman’s commitment to the righteousness of his endeavor.
Elegantly written with a command of period sources, Till the Dark Angel Comes: Abolitionism and the Road to the Second American Revolution is the story of interracial opposition to slavery, the important debates among free blacks as to their future in America, and the arguments and compromises at the highest levels of government. Here we encounter many personalities of the time, some well known, such as Frederick Douglass,William Lloyd Garrison, and John C. Calhoun, and others less so, but no less important—Martin Delany, Henry Highland Garnet, and Elijah Lovejoy.