Invoking Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century British Imagination ed. by Srividhya Swaminathan and Adam R. Beach (review)

Explaining why Britain abolished its slave trade in 1807, historians highlight possible tensions between the nation’s identity with individual liberty and its global pursuit of trade commonly linked to empire and slavery, or the domination of “the other.” Such apparent tensions are typically easier to conceive than to document, but some of these essays offer evidence about how such tensions influenced the rise of British abolitionism from 1680 forward. The book’s eight case studies focus on how, between the mid-seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries, slaves and indentured servants in the Oriental and Atlantic worlds with which Britons were increasingly connected came to be perceived, rhetorically or otherwise, in Britain’s literary imagination. Of the eight case studies, two explore reactions to Ottoman slavery; two others look at the appropriation of the term “slavery” in political and other discourses within Britain in debates over political authority in the age of Locke and over servitude and freedom at the onset of British industrialization; and the rest draw on contemporaries Richard Ligon, Defoe, Smollett, and Hannah More, among others, on such issues as the impact on Africa of encounters with Britons, race and transatlantic slavery, and the human costs of white indentured servitude and British West Indian slavery. In almost every case, the analysis revolves around close content analysis of a specific literary output of the author in question, but the essays’ collective thrust yields valuable insights into how literary giants of late Stuart and Hanoverian Britain viewed the country’s connections with slavery and other forced labor when some at home were proclaiming, in the words of Thomson’s Rule Britannia, that Britons should never be slaves. For students of British abolitionism, a key issue is to understand how, by the early nineteenth century, many in Britain felt it incumbent to extend their own cherished freedoms to peoples previously seen as legitimate objects for enslavement.

This complex transition involved many factors: shifts in intellectual ideas, the rise of religious nonconformity and evangelicalism, the political crisis in Britain emanating from American independence, an increasing revulsion against violence, and the emergence of mass politics in the age of industrialization. But the essays in this book highlight some other contributory forces. Two essays especially merit attention. Inspired by an anonymous former captive’s musings about his experiences under Ottoman rule, Adam Beach notes the emergence of eighteenth-century comparative approaches to slavery, in which exotic Arabian Nights visions of Oriental slavery came to be contrasted with the savage treatment of British indentured servants overseas and, from the 1780s onward, of Africans on life-consuming West Indian sugar plantations. Mr. Beach rejects the utility of bestiality indices for measuring actual slave experiences historically, noting that all slaves were subject to arbitrary and potentially violent treatment, but he recognizes that the sense of comparative benignity of Oriental and even eventually Sub-Saharan African slavery created by Britain’s literati became a powerful weapon for abolitionists seeking to demean the reputation and honor of British West Indian planters, thereby bringing shame on the British nation.

That last message, reinforced by the poetry of Hannah More relating to slavery (1788), is Brett Wilson’s subject. In her Slavery: A Poem, More assigned to Britain collective guilt for the dire consequences of the slave trade on Africa. Mr. Wilson shows how some of its language derived from Thomson’s Liberty, published half a century earlier than More’s epic poem, dealing with the political tyranny and “slavery” being visited on Britain by the Walpole administration at that time. Borrowing from Thomson, More thus directly linked British enslavement of Africans and its destructive consequences for Africa with the threat posed by Walpole’s government to British liberties. In doing so, she brought into sharp focus the paradox of Britons defending their own liberties at home while imposing slavery on others abroad. (It was the sort of paradox that, in another context, Johnson famously...