England, Slaves and Freedom, 1776-1838

About this book

Dust jacket "By the mid years of the seventeenth century the English prided themselves on their newly secured social and political freedoms. At much the same time, however, they had begun to develop their own slave colonies in the New World. By the mid-eighteenth century, the English has become the world's pre-eminent slaving nation, shipping millions of Africans from their homelands into the Americas, for the material well-being of European nations. Yet slavery, which brought so much diverse prosperity to Britain was ended, in British possessions, in a relatively brief period. In the space of fifty years first the slave trade and then slavery itself was abolished by Parliament. This book seeks to explore that process by studying abolition and emancipation as a species of popular politics. Moreover one crucial element in the complex political formula which created black freedom was black socity itself - in Britain and the West Indies. But the wider transformation, from slavery to black freedom, took place in the determining context of a changing British economy; of the emergence of the British industrial revolution. Thus this book seeks to tell the story of how a society which was, at once, proud of its internal liberties and yet a slaving nation, came to bestow similar freedoms on its slaves."