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Zusatztext Freedom's Debtors is timely, original, and lucid. Its analysis of the political, economic, and cultural forces that shaped the development of Sierra Leone challenges celebratory narratives about the abolition of the slave trade and offers a new account of life in this British colony. Padraic Scanlan's attention to the agency of West Africans and to 'British antislavery in practice' makes this work an important contribution to our understanding of the nature and locus of Atlantic history. Informationen zum Autor Dr Padraic X. Scanlan earned a BA (Hons) in History from McGill University in 2008, and a PhD in History from Princeton University in 2013. He is Assistant Professor in the Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources and the Centre for Diaspora & Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto and a Research Associate at the Joint Centre for History and Economics at the University of Cambridge. He has also held appointments at the London School of Economics and Harvard University. Klappentext In the eighteenth century, Britain rose to global power on the backs of enslaved workers. Liberty and property, venerated as cornerstones of the British state, were secured with blood on colonial plantations. In the nineteenth century, Britain ended its slave trade and abolished slavery in its empire. But even the antislavery movement was twisted by the legacy of the slave empire. The British empire, in sentimental myth, was more free, more just and more fair than its rivals. But the claim that the empire, for all its flaws, promised liberty to all its subjects was never true. In intimate, human detail, Slave Empire shows how Britain's empire was built on sugar, tobacco and coffee plantations worked by enslaved African labourers and their descendants. With original research and synthesis of new scholarship, it explores two clashing visions of the British empire after emancipation. To abolitionist leaders in Britain, the end of slavery would usher in cheap wage labour on plantations and new missions to 'civilise' the formerly enslaved. To freedpeople, emancipation meant liberation and autonomy. There was no bright line between the brutality of plantation labour and the 'civilisation' that the empire promised to its subjects. Antislavery laws and policies dissolved colonial slavery but preserved white supremacy. And as freedom - free elections, free labour, free trade - became watchwords in the Victorian era, the British 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. Modern capitalism and liberalism emphasise 'freedom' - for individuals and for markets - but are built on human bondage. The idea that the British empire was built on freedom is a myth. Britain rose to global power in the eighteenth century on the backs of enslaved workers. And although Britain was the first European empire to abolish slavery, even British abolitionism was shaped by the slave empire. Zusammenfassung 'Engrossing and powerful . . . rich and thought-provoking' Fara Dabhoiwala, Guardian 'Path-breaking . . . a major rewriting of history' Mihir Bose, Irish Times ' 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 eco...
