The British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, 1838–1956: A History by James Heartfield (review)

The 1889 Brussels Conference, where the European powers carved up the African continent, took place beneath a map supplied by the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, as James Heartfield notes in this new history of that organization. The chart's delineation of slave routes also symbolized the overlapping frontiers of imperial expansion and so-called anti-slavery civilization, for which the Society came to advocate. The British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, 1838-1956: A History traces the strange career of the Society, founded in 1839 by the most zealous agents of the emancipation campaign and the righteous advocates of an early end to a transitional system of apprenticeship in the West Indies.

Heartfield offers a rigorous survey of the Society's concerns, assembled from a diligent reading of their Anti-Slavery Reporter and other contemporary print sources. As his footnotes demonstrate, the Society used their journal to publicize concerns or government reports in a wide variety of other organs, reaching well beyond the small circle of subscribers. While the book notes long-standing debates over the motives for government action against the slave trade and slavery in 1807 and 1833 to 1838, it focuses instead on the sheer range of post-emancipation activism. This approach has the virtue of tracing the Society's wavering and contradictory views on particular crises of abolitionism and humanitarianism.

In the first decades, the pacifism of many officers, especially Quaker founder Joseph Sturge, meant that the Society opposed naval suppression of the Atlantic slave trade. Moreover, they initially supported the Confederacy against the North's aggression in the American Civil War. Heartfield's review of these wavering public professions will encourage future researchers to delve into the organization's archive and uncover the debates and networks of intelligence-gathering, which lay behind the editorial line of the Reporter. The Society's uneasy relationship with free trade, so far as it involved slave-produced goods, was especially complex and controversial, for example.

In many ways, however, it is this book's treatment of the later Victorian and twentieth-century career of the Society that opens up the maximum number of new avenues for investigation. Heartfield shows the ways in which the Reporter erratically cheered or chided charlatans such as Charles George Gordon, Henry Morton Stanley, Leopold II of the Belgians, and Benito Mussolini; the Society looked, first, to pursue their own goals and, later, to distance themselves from ensuing scandals. In exploring the abolitionists' support for British commercial or colonial expansion, Heartfield pays particular attention to the sophistries which excused new and continuing forms of forced labor in British colonies in favor of a focus on slave trades.

At the time of its founding, the Society had been denounced in some quarters as a presumptive sect of fringe radicals, in contrast to the Society for the Extinction of the Slave Trade and the Civilization of Africa (oddly referred to as the "African Institution" in this volume) (203–04). Established by Thomas Fowell Buxton, this rival group enjoyed the patronage of Prince Albert, the Whig government, and Tories, including the young William Gladstone. By the final decades of the nineteenth century, however, the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society welcomed mainstream politicians, missionaries, and retirees from the Foreign Office onto their committee. As Heartfield suggests, these personnel changes help to explain the Society's evolution from critical pressure group to responsive policy forum. Moreover, the Society started to play a role as a supporter of expanding imperial rule. David Livingstone, who witnessed the launch of Buxton's Niger expedition in 1841, embodied his expansionist goals of commerce, Christianity, and so-called civilization in the mid-Victorian period. By the end of the nineteenth century, the leaders of the Anti-Slavery Society, including the descendants of Buxton, fulfilled his mission rather than that of their own, more idiosyncratic founders.

In the twentieth century, the Society, as...