Floating Signifiers of Britishness in the Novels of the Anti-Slave-Trade Squadron

Abstract

When taken from Africa as a boy, Olaudah Equiano asked a fellow slave if the men transporting them “‘had no country but lived in this hollow place, the ship”’ (p. 34). Equiano’s question, reported as evidence of his childish naïvety, may now strike us as very sophisticated, anticipating as it does recent descriptions of the creation of Britain through the military and imperial mobilization of its constituent peoples. Britain, many would now agree, began less as a homeland than as a way of being abroad. It did not pre-exist its empire and then ‘expand’ overseas, but was instead produced by expansion and might therefore be analysed as a phenomenon of extra-territorialization. Indeed, the shipboard life of Equiano could itself, in this light, be considered prototypically British.