Read more
'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 EconomistThe British empire, in sentimental myth, was more free, more just and more fair than its rivals. But this claim that the British empire was 'free' and that, for all its flaws, it promised liberty to all its subjects was never true. The British empire was built on slavery.
Slave Empire puts enslaved people at the centre the British empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In intimate, human detail, Padraic Scanlon shows 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.
About the author
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.
Summary
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.
Foreword
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.
Additional text
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.
