In the eighteenth century, the British empire in the Atlantic grew through the brutal exploitation of enslaved laborers on Caribbean sugar plantations. In the nineteenth century, Britain abolished its slave trade, and then slavery in its colonial empire. And yet, ascendant antislavery presumed British power and superiority – the abolition of slavery seemed to prove that Britain was modern, enlightened, and fit to govern the empire slavery had made. There was a wide gulf between the gradualist politics and civilizing mission of the antislavery movement in Britain and the demands of enslaved revolutionaries in Britain’s Caribbean colonies.

Padraic X. Scanlan is Assistant Professor in the Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources and the Centre for Diaspora & Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. He received his PhD in History from Princeton University in 2013 and is the author of Freedom’s Debtors: British Antislavery in Sierra Leone in the Age of Revolution (Yale, 2017), which was awarded the 2018 James A. Rawley Prize and the 2018 Wallace K. Ferguson Prize, and Slave Empire: How Slavery Built Modern Britain (Robinson, 2020). He is writing The Irish Question, a history of British land reform and political economy in the era of the Irish Famine to be published by Robinson (UK) and Basic Books (USA).