Beyond Slavery and Abolition: Black British Writing, c.1770–1830 by Ryan Hanley (review)

This impressive first book by Ryan Hanley sets out to answer two inter-related questions: how did black people in Britain become authors, and why did they write what they did? In exploring both topics, Hanley highlights the significance of the networks surrounding these individuals, be they political, religious, economic, or social. As the book's eight case studies illustrate, these connections were critical in making authorship possible: they enabled transcription and editing, provided financial support, organized publication, and cultivated readerships. The influences of these networks—and the ideas and discourses that circulated in them—are therefore imprinted upon the texts produced by the writers examined. Tracing these relationships, Beyond Slavery and Abolition not only sheds light on the provenance of works familiar to many readers of Eighteenth-Century Studies but also provides insights into issues of race, religion, politics, and culture during the era of antislavery.

Underscoring the reliance of black writers on their networks throughout the period under study, this book is organized in three thematic sections, rather than chronologically. It begins with a section of three chapters on black literary celebrities and their circles. The first explores Ignatius Sancho, whose reputation as a respectable man of letters was shaped primarily by the posthumous publication of a collection of his correspondence. Though Sancho adopted diverse epistolary personae during his lifetime, including that of the manly libertine, his editor Frances Crewe selected, sanitized, and even modified many of his letters prior to making them public. As Crewe intended, the image of the enlightened African that emerged from these letters served as an implicit challenge to the Atlantic slave system. In Chapter Two, Hanley demonstrates the utility of Sancho's personae as a template for the later antislavery author Olaudah Equiano. The chapter shows Equiano's strategic use of his bestselling autobiography and other writings not only to promote antislavery but also to "build his brand" and increase his commercial potential (57). Chapter Three examines the autobiography of Mary Prince, the most mediated text of all those analyzed in Beyond Slavery and Abolition. Through extensive intervention by an amanuensis and editor, Prince's narrative was made to appeal to respectable British women both by casting its subject as a helpless victim of male rapacity and by omitting references to Prince's premarital sexual relations. Like Sancho and Equiano before her, Prince had her character publically debated as a proxy for broader attitudes towards race and slavery.

Part Two explores three lesser-known writers who owed their literary influence in large part to evangelical networks. Chapter Four tracks the shaping of Ukawsaw Gronniosaw's 1772 autobiography by his proslavery Calvinist friends through both their influence on his thought and their involvement in the book's production, the combined force of which led Gronniosaw to describe his former enslavement as spiritually enriching. Chapter Five examines a very different relationship between a black writer and an evangelical network: namely, the use made by a transatlantic network of Methodists of the memoirs of Boston King, a black Loyalist emigrant to Nova Scotia, to support abolition and highlight Methodist loyalty to the Crown during the era of the French Revolution. Chapter Six also considers Methodism's relationship to slavery and the politics of the day, here through the lens of lay preacher John Jea. Specifically, Hanley shows how Jea fused antislavery with Methodist theology and tailored his message to the local communities in which he preached. The limited literacy of Gronniosaw, King, and Jea made all three dependent on their co-religionists, to varying degrees, for both writing and financial support.

The two chapters in Part Three focus on authors enmeshed in London's radical scene in ways that point to the interconnectedness of debates about slavery and political reform. Chapter Seven describes Ottobah Cugoano's campaign against the 1786/87 plan to expatriate members of London's poor black community to Sierra Leone; Cugoano criticized the scheme as xenophobic, doomed...