Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa, and the Atlantic by Derek R. Peterson (review)

Although it is now some years since the flurry of bicentenary activity in commemoration of the abolition of the slave trade, the topic remains of interest to historians. This collection, conceived in that moment, provides analyses of the relationships between slavery, abolition, and imperial control from the founding of the slave trade through the end of empire. Reflecting a twenty-first-century—and post-September 11—trend in abolition history, the volume’s focus on ethics, religion, and the tension between moral and materialistic antislavery exemplifies a changed attitude to the practical effectiveness of religious conviction in actively changing the world. Although material concerns are discussed by Seymour Drescher, Christopher Leslie Brown, Robin Law, and Philip D. Morgan, no author in this collection doubts that there was a strong moral argument for the abolition of slavery. This consensus is refreshing in the context of a book that looks at both abolitionism and imperialism because it acknowledges that one does not have to separate the moral from the imperial or the material from the anti-imperial. Throughout the Victorian era, they were intricately bound together by abolitionism and the civilising mission.

This connection is clearest in the essays concerned with the period of Victorian antislavery and empire. Drescher investigates abolitionism’s relationship to imperialism in the nineteenth century, particularly focusing on the case of Sierra Leone. Contributing to the volume’s focus on the importance—and complications—of moral arguments against slavery, Drescher shows that the British, in sticking to their antislavery policy after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, also committed themselves to the expense of running an antislavery naval squadron, maintaining the colony of Sierra Leone, and dealing with the diplomatic complications arising from antislavery enforcement. However, as Drescher sees it, while both abolitionism and slavery were related to imperialism, in the era of mid-Victorian imperialism, abolition rarely provided grounds to expand in Africa, with Sierra Leone providing a caveat for any parliamentarians interested in using abolition for those reasons.

Drescher makes a valid case that “abolitionism could and did rationalize, but clearly did not cause” the Scramble for Africa (145). His argument that abolition never provided grounds for imperial expansion in Africa (in which he skips from the failure of the Niger Expedition in 1841 to the late 1860s), however, is contradicted by the next chapter, in which Law focuses on three clear instances in the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s when British antislavery intervention “came to involve systematic encroachment on the sovereignty of states in Africa” (151). Law argues that the decision to classify slave trading as piracy, combined with the growing opinion that international law did not apply to African states, allowed the British to encroach in the Gallinas, Dahomey, and Lagos. This is a far more convincing argument about the extension of British authority beyond internationally recognized boundaries and helps to challenge the traditional view of the mid-Victorian period as one opposed to expansion in Africa.

The chapters covering the antislavery movement’s origins in the imperial anxieties and experimentation of the eighteenth century also help to complicate the moral and material arguments for abolition and empire. Boyd Hilton presents a convincing reassessment of the historiography and memorialization of the British abolition movement. He argues that a combination of factors contributed to a moral crisis for the British Empire and that the different ways in which this moral crisis manifested itself in popular culture, Whig and Tory politics, and international relations shaped the particular trajectory of British abolition. Brown’s chapter explores the often-overlooked Senegambia colony, founded in 1765. The colony reflected many of the wider mercantile colonial policies of the eighteenth century, and although it was a failure, the speculators involved helped abolitionists and others envision a world that would be more profitable without slavery. Morgan argues that abolition “always involved political machinations, a mix of moral and material motives” (103...