Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa, and the Atlantic, and: Who Abolished Slavery? Slave Revolts and Abolitionism: a Debate with João Pedro Marques (review)

As the literature on the Atlantic slave trade has proliferated, so too have a series of debates. One of the sources of debate is the connection of the abolition movement to nineteenth-century imperialism, a topic linked to a 65-year exchange on Eric Williams's Capitalism and Slavery. Another source of debate in recent years has been the desire of people of African descent to connect with their origins. Like Jews, Armenians and other victims, many of them have developed sites that symbolize the bitter memories of suffering in slavery. Though most academic historians, including all of the authors gathered in these two collections, would agree that the slave trade was a brutal and traumatic experience, some sites have become the subject of myth making, of tales that never happened, and of elaboration on what did happen. On the other side, there are official memories that celebrate abolition as a moral triumph, often touted by political leaders who would rather remember abolition and the good persons who produced it than the trade it ended. All of these engagements have produced not only contested sites of memory, but valid debates shaped by the desire of some to confront the suffering and of others to remain emotionally at a more removed place. The two books under review deal with these questions.

The Peterson collection is surprisingly coherent for an edited collection. It emerged from a series of lectures at Cambridge University which in Peterson's words 'was conceived as a contrarian effort to challenge the self-congratulatory frame in which the bicentenary of the Abolition Act was being cast' (p. 4). The authors are mostly established scholars, who approach the relationship between abolition and imperialism in different ways. John Thornton does not even deal with abolition, though his chapter ably uses the correspondence of a series of African monarchs to explain their definition of who was enslaveable. This flows from Thornton's effort in other publications to present the logic of African participation in slaving and the slave trade. The other articles all deal in some way with the relation between imperialism and abolition. Peterson's opening essay starts with the way different peoples use slavery as a metaphor for different kinds of oppression. He also lays out the problems of discourses of abolition, which are important to a number of authors. The rest of the volume is clearly linked to connections between abolition and empire.

Christopher Brown, one of the most interesting younger scholars working on slave trade history, points out that the slave trade involved little investment in Africa and that the slave traders had no desire to see any investment. The end of Britain's American empire and the development of abolition created a constituency interested in Africa. In a sense, the abolitionists are able to imagine a different Africa, though their efforts to create it run into difficulty and the longrun effects of their efforts produce results very different from what they wanted. Both Seymour Drescher and Robin Law take that discussion into the nineteenth century. Drescher looks at abolition's relations to colonization, and then at the way British foreign policy used the abolitionist crusade to justify intervention abroad. Law argues that in this effort, while Britain paid lip service to international law, it regularly violated its precepts over the protests of its own experts and of African rulers. Like Thornton, Law makes it clear that African rulers operated with clear sets of rules and had a good understanding of the way the international political system was supposed to operate.

There are particularly interesting pieces by Philip...