Slave Empire : How Slavery Built Modern Britain

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  • Author: Padraic X. Scanlan
  • Format: Hardback 464 pages
  • Publisher: Little Brown
  • Published: 26 Nov 2020
  • Slave Empire is lucid, elegant and forensic. It deals with appalling horrors in cool and convincing prose. 'The Economist 'A sweeping and devastating history of how slavery made modern Britain, and destroyed so much else .

    A shattering rebuke to the amnesia and myopia which still structure British history 'Nicholas Guyatt, author of Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation 'Scanlan shows that the liberal empire of the nineteenth century was the outcome of the long encounter of antislavery and economic expansion founded on enslaved or unfree labour. Antislavery was itself the excuse for empire 'Emma Rothschild, Jeremy and Jane Knowles Professor of History, Harvard University 'Fresh and fascinating, a stunning narrative that shows how an empire built on slavery became an empire sustained and expanded by antislavery.
  • In intimate, human detail, the chapters show how British imperial power and industrial capitalism were inextricable from plantation slavery. With vivid original research and careful synthesis of innovative historical scholarship, Slave Empire shows that British freedom and British slavery were made together. In the nineteenth century, Britain abolished its slave trade, and then slavery in its colonial empire.

    Because Britain was the first European power to abolish slavery, many Victorian Britons believed theirs was a liberal empire, promoting universal freedom and civilisation. And yet, the shape of British liberty itself was shaped by the labour of enslaved African workers. There was no bright line between British imperial exploitation and the 'civilisation' that the empire promised to its subjects.

    Nineteenth-century liberals were blind to the ways more than two centuries of colonial slavery twisted the roots of 'British liberty'. Freedom - free elections, free labour, free trade - were watchwords in the Victorian era, but the empire was still sustained by the labour of enslaved people, in the United States, Cuba and elsewhere. Modern Britain has inherited the legacies and contradictions of a liberal empire built on slavery.