Injection: The Global Spread of Abolitionism

Abstract

During the nineteenth century, abolitionist movements developed from small, but vocal, movements in the Atlantic world to establish global networks, based on shared ideas and support for international agreements to ban the slave trade and slavery. The global spread of abolitionism was conditioned by local contexts, particularly religion and economic conditions. This injection essay will conclude by analyzing the impact of the abolitionist movements on the ending of slavery and the limits of their influence.

Introduction

In 1808, the British anti-slavery campaigner, Thomas Clarkson, represented the origins of the abolitionist movement as a metaphorical map of streams, “joining and swelling the torrent which swept away the Slave Trade.” The tributary streams represented the great men, who developed the moral case, derived from their Christianity and enlightened thinking, against the slave trade. Drawing on deep-rooted traditions of liberty and acting in a “free country,” these men were able to furnish the “light and information,” which mobilized public opinion and shaped government action.¹ Clarkson’s account, with its neatly drawn narrative of a moral revolution, sustained by public opinion, provided an enduring framework for understanding the rise of abolitionist movements in the nineteenth century. It has remained a point of departure, even for scholars, who have dismantled Clarkson’s assumptions and who have demonstrated the contingency and variety of sources of abolition, its political travails, and the limits of abolitionist movements’ successes over the course of the nineteenth century. This injection essay examines the origins of abolitionist movements, the development of transnational networks, and the effects of those movements on the ending of slavery. It argues that anti-slavery thinking proved capacious and flexible, achieving a global reach while taking account of local conditions. Movements and networks arose from coalitions, based on shared, but contingent, interests. The effect of their campaigns often proved limited, particularly after the initial triumph of the passage of a law or military conquest. Yet despite the compromises, abolition achieved one of the most significant transformations in modern history, so that slavery was no longer considered a justifiable practice in the vast majority of societies by the turn of the twentieth century.

The Rise and Development of Abolitionist Thought

What were the sources of abolitionist thinking that condemned slavery tout court rather than the enslavement of specific groups? If Clarkson located the roots of abolitionist thought in the eighteenth-century British North Atlantic, more recently historians have debated whether slaves were the original abolitionists. Slave resistance was a feature of all slaveholding societies, but historians have distinguished between slaves revolting against their own enslavement and slaves’ role in abolitionism. Slaves and abolitionists interacted to bring about the end of slavery. There is evidence of increasing numbers of slave revolts from the mid-eighteenth century, including revolts on slaving ships crossing the Atlantic. Newspapers in Britain devoted increasing attention to slave revolts on ships, widening public sympathy for slaves, preparing the context for the popular anti-slave trade campaigns of the early nineteenth century. Abolition in Philadelphia offers an example of a pincer movement in which slaves pressured their masters for emancipation, while abolitionists shifted public attitudes to slavery.

Slave revolts contributed significantly to the development of a wider abolitionist agenda. They placed slaveholding regimes under pressure and widened the opportunities for other slaves to resist or escape slavery. The most significant slave revolt in modern history started in Haiti in 1791. Historians remain divided about the causes of the Haitian Revolution, the motivations of leaders Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the use of coercive labor practices by the rebel leaders, and relations between Haiti and the leading powers in the Atlantic world. The Haitian revolution had exemplary effects, ones that both strengthened the conviction of slaveholders in repressing any sign of resistance and prescribing a script of resistance for slaves in other societies, who heard about the revolt through mobile networks of slaves and travelers. Toussaint Louverture’s example confirmed for many slaves in the Caribbean that only rebellion could end slavery, whereas they viewed Wilberforce as a “constrained ally,” reliant on the goodwill of the monarch and only committed to the suppression of the slave trade.² Although the violence of the Haitian Revolution shocked some abolitionists, it also confirmed their criticisms of slavery. Studies of the ideology of revolting slaves in Haiti demonstrate a wide range of ideas. Not only did they draw upon French revolutionary debates and Enlightenment thinkers but also upon other political traditions, such as debates about political authority in the Congo.

The rise of abolitionist thought in the late eighteenth-century North Atlantic drew upon diverse sources, including natural rights, evangelical concerns about sin and national virtue, and arguments about the greater efficiency of free labor. Crises—such as the impact of the French Revolution on Haiti—provided the occasion for the fusion of these long-standing and diverse intellectual traditions into an abolitionist agenda. For example, Brown has shown how the American Revolution and loss of colonies created a new context for anti-slavery ideas in Britain. Bitter polemics during the American Revolution saw colonial and British politicians, thinkers, and officials accuse each of being responsible for the iniquities of slavery and the slave trade. The rhetorical demands of liberty on both sides of the Atlantic raised the issue of slavery into a yardstick against which rival moral claims to virtue could be measured. Following American independence, British campaigners argued that the loss of the colonies was a divine punishment on Britain for its role in slavery. These campaigners tended to come from evangelical groups, such as the Clapham Sect, and dissenting religious denominations, such as Quakers and Baptists. They shared a commitment to “practical Christianity” and their arguments appealed to concerns about British national interests. National renewal and the maintenance of the empire required atonement. British honor and salvation were at stake, according to the accounts of anti-slavery activists, who sometimes saw their proposed measures as a means, not an end in themselves.

On the other side of the Atlantic, Arthur Benezet, the Philadelphia Quaker and early abolitionist campaigner lamented in the early 1770s “that unfeeling disposition for the miseries of others, which so much prevails, in this age.”³ Lynn Hunt, however, argues that a revolution in sensibilities occurred during the eighteenth century, promoting an awareness of the suffering of others. The expansion of empathy derived from various sources: from compassion, born out of religious practice (as in the outward turn of Quakers, evident in Benezet’s own life), and from varieties of natural rights thought in the Enlightenment. In turn, this sensibility impelled reforms, which underpinned the modern conception of human rights. The claims set out in the American Constitution and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man drew on this sensibility and provided a language of universal humanity that slaves and abolitionists could draw to stake claims.⁴

The universalist claims of some abolitionists gave rise to a complex relationship with imperial projects and thinking over the course of the nineteenth century. The context was important in shaping the relationship between imperialist thinking and anti-slavery politics. In the British empire, by the 1840s imperialists, colonial officials, and settlers argued that humanitarian policies risked destabilizing the economic underpinnings of colonies and their internal and external security. The economic arguments about the greater efficiency of free labor persisted in abolitionist writings, but supporters of slavery claimed that the poor economic performance of former slave colonies justified coercive labor regimes.⁵ On the other hand, British and French liberals supported imperial expansion as a civilizing project that went beyond the material interests of empires. The civilizing mission, in its various iterations, aimed ultimately at the transformation of other societies. The eradication of slavery was central to liberal imperial thought. It became an important justification for imperial expansion, particularly in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Many anti-slavery activists supported European territorial conquests in Africa in the 1880s, culminating in the Brussels Conference of 1890. That said, the relationship between abolitionism and imperialism was often contingent. In 1882, Liberals in Britain suddenly adopted anti-slavery rhetoric, seeking to justify the invasion of Egypt.

William Gervase Clarence-Smith has argued that Islamic abolitionism was an autonomous force, which “played a vital role in turning the shadow of legislation into a lived reality.” Debates within Islamic societies had their own roots, as ulama scholars sought to rework the Koranic codes about slavery. Abolishing slavery in the Ottoman province of Tunis in 1846, the Governor General, Ahmad Bey, deployed arguments against Koranic injunctions about demonstrating compassion and against the enslavement of fellow Muslims. Lofkrantz’s chapter in the present volume shows that anti-slavery jihads in West African societies aimed to protect freeborn Muslims.⁶ Other scholars have been more skeptical about anti-slavery thought in Islamic societies. While acknowledging the prescription of the Koran to treat slaves well, while remarking that manumission was seen as an act of mercy, and while noting that slavery Islamic societies was sometimes less severe than on large plantations in the Atlantic world, historians have doubted the existence of significant anti-slavery traditions in Islamic societies. They argue that the ending of slavery was largely due to European, especially British, pressure. Debate about the existence of slavery, rather than the treatment of slaves, was stimulated by encounters with European and American thinkers. In Tunis, Ahmad Bey was well-informed about abolitionism in the British empire. Ahmed Shafik, an Egyptian law student in Paris, heard the opening salvo of Cardinal Lavigerie’s campaign against the slave trade in 1888. After this, he wrote a book, which defended the practice of Islamic slavery and rejected comparisons with plantation slavery. However, he also condemned the practice of the slave trade and kidnapping of slaves. His arguments drew on Koranic traditions and the circumstances of slavery in Egypt. The interweaving of justifications and intellectual encounters renders it impossible to identify a single fons et origo of abolitionist thought; indeed, the success of abolitionist networks required adaptation across different social contexts.

The Mobilization of Abolitionist Movements

How did abolitionist movements spread and mobilize throughout the nineteenth century? Specific local conditions shaped anti-slavery movements, but they also developed transnational connections and networks. In many cases, these connections were contingent and transitory, people are often thrown together by circumstances, who shared a common but momentary purpose in challenging slavery. Slaves had to organize their networks of resistance away from the surveillance of slave owners and officials. Slaves and their allies in abolitionist movements organized underground networks, not only to support fugitives and organize resistance but also to circulate information. On the other hand, anti-slavery campaigners had to sustain a popular campaign. They developed international anti-slavery networks and movements. Varied in depth and breadth, these networks sustained the globalization of anti-slavery politics, spread information, promoted mobilization, and magnified the local significance of abolitionist groups. These transnational networks produced a backlash, as opponents denounced abolitionists for fomenting sedition among slaves and for harming national interests. This section describes some of these networks to provide a sense of the diverse social and geographic connections.

Julius Scott’s The Common Wind is a pathbreaking analysis of the networks of slaves, fugitive slaves, deserters from the army, sailors, higglers, peddlers, and musicians that sustained the circulation of news and gossip in the Caribbean.⁷ The expansion of plantation society and its associated commercial and social networks produced opportunities and sites for resistance by slaves and others. Port cities, such as Havana, Kingston, and Cap Français, became “capitals of Afro-America,” where fugitive slaves formed associations to preserve their freedom and organized resistance to slavery. News traveled back and forth between countryside and city, as slaves attended markets and social occasions, while sailors and maroons sailed short distances, recounting events in one colony to slaves living in another colony. Information spread through gossip, song, and emblems, as well as texts. Through these channels, news of the Haitian revolt and other slave revolts spread, while slaves discussed the principles of liberty and equality, which they used to stake claims to freedom. What Marcus Rediker calls the “strategic application” of news played a critical role in mobilizing anti-slavery resistance among slaves. Slaves also formed alliances with others, including free blacks and European immigrants. These networks of intelligence spread far beyond the Caribbean. For example, in 1808, 300 slaves in the Cape Colony revolted. The leaders included Louis, a slave in Cape Town, Jephta, born in Indonesia and a slave on a rural plantation, and James Hooper, an Irish vagabond, who had left Ireland in 1799, and who informed others that in the United Kingdom, “every person was free.”⁸ The context of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act of 1807 was a critical impetus in spreading information about changes in imperial policy, while news of revolutions throughout the Atlantic world had long circulated in the Cape colony.

The rise of anti-slavery politics in Britain and North America owed much to the circulation of people and texts, broadening popular coalitions on both sides of the Atlantic. Anti-slavery sentiment at Cambridge University, which played a formative role in Thomas Clarkson’s life, has been traced to the writings and influence of early black abolitionists, such as Phyllis Wheatley, Ignatius Sancho, and Olaudah Equiano, which shaped the thinking of the radical abolitionist, Peter Peckard, Master of Magdalene College. Wheatley, born in West Africa, had visited Britain with her slave owner in 1773 and met campaigners, who supported the publication of her poetry. In the midst of the turmoil of the American Revolution, religious networks bound anti-slavery activism in Britain and the colonies. Quakers were particularly prominent on both sides of the Atlantic and delivered the first petition to the House of Commons in 1783.

Britain became the fulcrum of global anti-slavery politics throughout the nineteenth century, from the mass petitions against the slave trade in the early nineteenth century to the popular mobilization against the “new slaveries” in Africa in the late nineteenth century, particularly in the Belgian Congo. Britain’s own pre-eminence in the slave trade, its dominant position in the global economy, and its imperial reach informed the distinctive character of its anti-slavery politics. In addition, domestic political and social conditions, including constitutional government, centered on parliament, expanding suffrage, a largely free press, and varied religious denominations also shaped British abolitionist movements. Popular anti-slavery campaigns in Britain often formed part of campaigns for broader political and social reform.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the increasing ease of communication enabled abolitionists to deepen and institutionalize their networks. The World’s Anti-Slavery Convention met in London in June 1840, attracting 500 delegates, including former slaves, and 5000 visitors, mainly from Britain and the United States. Women were not permitted full membership of the Convention, a subject of criticism at the time. The Convention was part of a new way of conducting international politics that accelerated from the 1840s, as gentlemanly networks of a reforming bent gathered to focus on a particular aspect of transnational relations. William Ellery Channing, a leading Unitarian preacher from the United States, alluded to this: “Great men, as they are called, have seldom been moved by a higher impulse, than a narrow, unjust patriotism. It is time that the principles of universal justice and love should be recognized as the lawful sovereigns of the world.”⁹ In 1843, anti-slavery activists organized a second Convention. Tours by charismatic American personalities, such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe, supported anti-slavery activists in Britain during the 1840s and 1850s, at a time when claims about the failure of abolition in the British empire put humanitarians on the defensive.

The campaign of Cardinal Charles Lavigerie, primate of Africa and a leading French Catholic missionary, against the slave trade in central Africa in the 1880s illustrates the momentary confluence of interests that sustained a transnational abolitionist coalition. Each of the constituent elements of this coalition had its own interest. In part, Lavigerie became interested in anti-slavery politics as a means of reconciling divisions between the Catholic Church and the French Third Republic. His primary aim within Africa was the expansion of Catholic missionary reach, which he framed in public as a struggle between Christian civilization and Islamic slave traders. In a speaking tour of Britain, France, and Belgium, Lavigerie appealed to distinct national and political traditions. In France he cast anti-slavery as a shared Christian and republican project, reaching out to anti-clerical leaders. Owing to Franco-German tensions in the late 1880s, he did not travel to Germany, but German Catholics mobilized to support Lavigerie’s campaign, while the German Colonial League argued that anti-slavery policies were an essential characteristic of being a European imperial power. In 1888 and 1889, the German Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, and the British Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, drew on the popularity of the anti-slavery campaign to justify conquest in East Africa on the grounds of a military intervention against powerful local slave traders. The popular anti-slavery campaign concluded with the Brussels Conference of 1889 and Brussels Act of 1890. Though European colonial practices made a mockery of the proclaimed humanitarian goals of the Brussels Act, it also reinforced the normative claims against slavery. The 1926 League of Nations Slavery Convention cited the Brussels Act.

These networks could also shift from opposition to slavery to campaigning against new forms of coerced labor. The Anti-Slavery Society denounced “blackbirding”—the recruitment of Pacific islanders to work in Fiji and Queensland—as the revival of the slave trade, although colonial officials and planters protested that labor traders in the South Pacific never purchased nor sold slaves. Transnational networks provided an impetus for the protection of indentured labor. For example, the Chinese Educational Mission in Connecticut linked with American humanitarian groups to highlight the vulnerability of Chinese “coolie” laborers in Peru and Cuba.¹⁰

The Effects of Abolitionist Movements

Abolition was a slow, halting, even reversible process. The success of abolitionist movements often relied on accepting a gradual process that slowed emancipation. The Pennsylvania law that emancipated slaves meant that slaves born in 1780 lived in captivity, so that there were still slaves in that state as late as 1847. The abolition of slavery in the British empire in 1833 required a period of apprenticeship of up to eight years, but this ended in 1838 following further popular pressure. Brazil offers another example of a gradualist approach. In 1851, Brazil banned the importation of slaves. This was followed in 1865 with a ban on punishments, and then a free womb law in 1871. Only in 1888 did Brazil finally abolish slavery, following intensive popular campaigns, involving local manumissions, abolitionist disruption of slave markets, and slave resistance. One obvious exception to the gradualist approach was the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863 as part of the Union’s strategy during the American Civil War. In this instance, the Union compromised by retaining slavery in loyal states but had no need to negotiate about slavery with the Confederacy. The history of emancipation, its reversal, and the re-introduction of emancipation in the French colonial empire shows the reversibility of abolitionist measures. Abolition served revolutionary political agendas, imperial geopolitics, and military strategy in Paris in 1794 and 1848, while Napoleon re-instituted slavery in 1802 as part of his strategy following the peace of Amiens.

Local conditions and global connections shaped the exit from slavery. As historians have broken away from the “container box” of national histories, they have traced the effects of abolition in one country on the political economies of other societies. The elimination of slavery in one part of the world sometimes led to the rise of slaveholding and coercive labor regimes in other parts of the world. Ada Ferrer has shown how the collapse of the sugar plantation economy during the Haitian revolution led to a boom in sugar plantations in Cuba, entrenching slavery in the Spanish colony. Between 1790 and 1825, Havana doubled in size and 325,000 slaves were imported.¹¹ The American Civil War, which eventually destroyed slavery in the United States, led to a surge in slavery and coercive labor regimes in other parts of the world, driven in large part by European manufacturers’ and consumers’ demand for cheap cotton supplies. The promotion of “legitimate trade,” such as the cultivation of crops in west Africa for export, as an alternative to the transatlantic slave trade resulted in the demand for labor—and the retention of slaves in regions of West Africa.

Emancipated slaves experienced their freedom differently. The moment of liberation posed difficult questions of employment, shelter, and food. Following emancipation, slaves in thinly populated British colonies with access to land were able to secure property. In other colonies, officials rigged the labor market and denied former slaves access to land. This drove former slaves back to plantation work. Members of the American Missionary Association learned about the importance of providing economic support and opportunities during their work in Jamaica in the 1840s, but they and other abolitionists were unable to institute wide-ranging reforms in the United States after 1865. Instead, in the southern states during Reconstruction, planters and state officials stifled the labor market, restricted mobility through wide-ranging vagrancy laws, and instituted share-cropping, a strategy to restore as far as possible the conditions of slavery. In many parts of the world, Sven Beckert has argued, the use of legal codes and rigged labor markets from the mid-nineteenth century replaced “war capitalism,” the overtly violent extraction of labor, with industrial capitalism.¹²

The relationship between the expansion of indentured labor regimes and the abolition of slavery remains a subject of debate. The expansion of global demand for commodities increased the demand for labor, irrespective of the ending of slavery. Global consumption of cotton doubled between 1860 and 1890 and doubled again by 1920. A fundamental condition of slavery—ownership of a human being—did not exist in indentured labor regimes. Nonetheless, following abolition British colonial officials began to systematically arrange the importation of labor from Africa and India to the Caribbean. The rotting of the sugar crop in Jamaica in 1838 was an early signal of the economic shock caused by the ending of slavery. West Indian planters recruited Chinese labor, while 120,000 Indians went to Mauritius to work on sugar plantations. The move from slavery to indentured labor regimes provided a model for the importation of labor to regions where plantations were established only in the later nineteenth century, such as Queensland and Fiji. European migration to Brazil in the late nineteenth century changed labor market conditions and limited economic opportunities for liberated slaves, another example of how a global labor market and migration shaped the exit conditions for liberated slaves.

European naval crews liberated slaves from slave trading vessels in the Atlantic and Indian oceans but then brought those liberated slaves to European colonies. It was difficult to return liberated slaves to their homes, which were often deep inland, but European colonies profited from the supply of labor. These freed slaves found themselves working alongside coolie labor, sometimes in conditions barely distinguishable from plantation slavery. Some 2550 liberated slaves on vessels bound for Brazil were taken to work in the British West Indies between the 1830s and 1860s. In the western Indian Ocean, a Royal Navy officer condemned French vessels for importing indentured labor to plantations and viewed engagés as a synonym for slaves.¹³

The significance of European imperial expansion in the abolition of slavery has long been controversial. The work of Suzanne Miers in the 1970s established the view that the abolition of the slave trade served as a justification for imperial expansion and disguised economic and geopolitical considerations.¹⁴ Colonial security also led European powers to cooperate in the suppression of the slave trade on occasion, as British and Dutch forces intervened to suppress the slave trade in the Sulu Sultanate in the 1860s. As we have seen, leaders such as Salisbury and Bismarck exploited anti-slavery rhetoric, but imperialists had a large stock of ideas with which to justify their moves. Anti-slavery policies complicated imperial expansion and colonial governance. “Philanthropy decidedly costs money,” complained Edward Goschen, the Chancellor to Gladstone, in 1871, as the Liberal administration sought to cut expenditure.¹⁵ The economic benefits of colonies to the metropole remain contentious, but European leaders were dubious about those benefits. In addition, anti-slavery measures often alienated elites, on whom colonial rulers relied.

Britain’s anti-slavery policies were significant in reshaping the geopolitics of slavery. As the world’s most expansive empire, Britain’s anti-slavery moves immediately put pressure on slaveholding societies. First, British abolitionist measures had an exemplary effect, though the example cut both ways. In the 1830s, for example, the abolition of slavery in the British empire alarmed slaveholders in the American South and enthused abolitionists throughout the United States, but the stuttering economic performance of former slave colonies fed slaveholders’ claims. Second, there was a “soft power” effect of British imperialism. States and groups, such as liberal movements in Spain and Portugal or reformers in the Ottoman empire, sought to secure British support by demonstrating reformist credentials through anti-slavery measures. In 1872, the Meiji government implemented the Yūjo Release Act, following British support for Japanese coolie labor in Peru. Yūjo were girls, sold into prostitution. Although the equivalence between slave status and yūjo is a matter of debate, British humanitarians made the equation, creating the context for the 1872 Act. Third, British naval power enforced anti-slave trade measures, in the Atlantic in the aftermath of the Congress of Vienna and later in the Indian Ocean, with measures such as the 1873 anti-slave treaty with the Sultan of Zanzibar. There were countervailing pressures. France and the United States resisted mutual rights of search in the first half of the nineteenth century, on the grounds that the dominance of the Royal Navy would enable Britain to exploit anti-slavery measures to bolster Britain’s commercial and naval power. French and American leaders also considered the mutual right of search as a humiliation and denigration of national honor. Later in the century, imperial and naval competition, such as Anglo-French rivalry in east Africa from the 1860s, led states to push back against British anti-slavery policies and assert their sovereignty.

Deceit, inefficiency, and a lack of commitment, Hopper has argued, ensured that British anti-slavery measures had limited effect in ending the slave trade and slavery in the Persian Gulf. Hopper’s criticism can be applied more widely to abolitionist movements and policies throughout the nineteenth century. And yet, slavery was abolished in law and in practice across much of the globe by 1900. It is difficult to imagine that this transformation would have occurred in the absence of abolitionist movements’ campaigns. Those movements eliminated slavery within their own societies and shaped foreign and imperial policies that put pressure on slaveholding societies elsewhere. The transformation of British politics towards slavery in the late eighteenth century transformed the global conditions for the slave trade and slavery over the following century. Given the entrenchment of slavery in many societies and its economic importance, the halting, compromising character of the abolition of slavery reflects the challenges that abolitionists, often starting from positions of weakness, faced. Slaves, always the property of another human and legally dead in some societies, had no or very limited rights. The abolition of slavery was one of the “greatest human rights advances of the modern era,” creating new possibilities for the further expansion of social and political rights.¹⁶

Notes

• 1. Thomas Clarkson, The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (London: J. N. Parker, 1839), 1:164–7.

• 2. Hilary McDonald Beckles, “The Wilberforce Song: how enslaved Caribbean blacks heard British abolitionists,” Parliamentary History 26 (2007): 118–20.

• 3. Cited in Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital. Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 406.

• 4. Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights. A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008).

• 5. Seymour Drescher, “Free labor vs Slave Labor: the British and Caribbean Cases,” in Terms of Labor. Slavery, Serfdom, and Free Labor, eds. Stanley Engerman (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 50–86.

• 6. William Gervase Clarence-Smith, Islam and the abolition of slavery (London: Hurst & Company, 2006); Ismael M. Montana, The Abolition of Slavery in Ottoman Tunisia (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2013), 96–104.

• 7. Julius S. Scott, The Common Wind. Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution (New York: Verso, 2018).

• 8. Nicole Ulrich, “Abolition from Below: The 1808 Revolt in the Cape Colony,” in Humanitarian Intervention and Changing Labor Relations: The Long-term Consequences of the Slave Trade, ed. Marcel van den Linden, (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 204.

• 9. Cited in Maurice Bric, “Debating Slavery and Empire: The United States, Britain, and the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840,” in A Global History of Anti-Slavery Politics in the 19th Century, eds. William Mulligan and Maurice Bric (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013).

• 10. Steffen Rimner, “Chinese Abolitionism: The Chinese Educational Mission in Connecticut, Cuba, and Peru,” Journal of Global History, 11, no. 3 (2016): 344–64.

• 11. Ada Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror. Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

• 12. Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton. A Global History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014).

• 13. Raphaël Cheriau, Imperial Powers and Humanitarian Interventions. The Zanzibar Sultanate, Britain, and France in the Indian Ocean (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021), 71; Beatriz G. Mamigonian, “In the Name of Freedom: Slave Trade Abolition, the Law, and the Brazilian Branch of the African Emigration Scheme (Brazil-British West Indies, 1830s-1850s),” Slavery & Abolition, 30, no. 1 (2009): 46.

• 14. Suzanne Miers, Britain and the Ending of the Slave Trade (London: Longman, 1975).

• 15. Cited in William Mulligan, “British Anti-Slave Trade and Anti-Slavery Policy in East Africa, Arabia, and Turkey in the Late Nineteeth Century,” in Humanitarian Intervention. A History, eds. Brendan Simms and David Trim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 263.

• 16. Eric Weitz, A World Divided: The Global Struggle for Human Rights in the Age of the Nation State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 124.