Christopher Schmidt-Nowara
Looking back on his active membership in the Spanish Abolitionist Society, the economist Joaquín María Sanromá reserved sarcastic words for his conservative opponents. Between the mid-1860s and the mid-1880s, Spaniards, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans had struggled to abolish and to defend slavery in Spain’s last American colonies. In Madrid, the conflict was especially sharp during Spain’s September Revolution (1868–1874), when a progressive constitution enabled broad freedoms of association and expression and a democratic franchise that brought normally marginalized parties into the center of power. The Spanish left and right both mobilized around the fate of colonial slavery, publishing newspapers, pamphlets, and broadsheets, giving parliamentary speeches, and organizing huge public meetings and marches in cities such as Madrid, Barcelona, and Seville.
The members of the Abolitionist Society, founded in 1865 in the aftermath of the US Civil War, generally had a secular outlook on the world. A few came from the infinitesimal Protestant minority in Spain but the great majority were professionals, especially lawyers and engineers, well versed in political economy, liberalism, republicanism, and the natural sciences. Many were anti-clerical (Corwin 1967: 167–171). Sanromá was especially biting in his comments on the role of Spanish Catholics in the struggle over Antillean slavery. Most were resigned to the status quo, arguing that there was no need for militant abolitionism because “Christianity had already abolished [slavery]” and that “slavery . . . is incompatible with the essence of Christianity. All men are equal before God” (Sanromá 1894: 347, emphasis in the original). The implication was that Christian apologists were hypocrites who were happy to go along with the status quo.
While Sanromá was undoubtedly correct in calling attention to the complacency, or complicity, of many Spanish Catholics in their attitude toward colonial slavery in his day, his condemnation was too sweeping because the historical record was quite mixed. If we look at other moments in the European colonization of the Caribbean and Latin America and slave trafficking from Africa, we find that Christianity not only provided justification for slavery but also sometimes the critical edge to opponents of slavery and the slave trade. Though their attacks on slavery were never unambiguous, clerics, theologians, and laypeople in sixteenth-century Spain, seventeenth-century Brazil, eighteenth-century Britain, and across Europe in the late nineteenth century found Christianity incompatible with slavery and slave trading. Moreover, enslaved peoples themselves, forcibly transported from Africa to Caribbean and American settlements, often found support in the beliefs and institutions of Christianity, helping them to ameliorate and sometimes openly defy their enslavement. Yet these moments of criticism and defiance must be set against the broader history of Christian defenses of, or indifference toward, the Atlantic slave complex.
The Iberian expansion into the eastern Atlantic and along the west coast of Africa, then into the Caribbean and Brazil, in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries occasioned the first debates over the relationship between Christianity and Atlantic-world slavery. Because the Portuguese had most successfully staked out claims to trading forts along the African coast, the Spanish colonizers of the Caribbean relied on them for the transport of enslaved Africans to settlements like Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Hispaniola. Spanish settlers turned to the transatlantic traffic because of resistance to the enslavement of the native peoples from around the Caribbean from a variety of sources, including Spanish clerics like the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas. Though Las Casas recommended the traffic in Africans as a substitute for indigenous labor, he later turned vehemently against that trade as well when he learned more about Portuguese machinations in Africa. He, along with other Dominican critics such as Tomás de Mercado, were convinced that the Portuguese were violating the tenets of just war and were perhaps even enslaving African Christians (Davis 1966: 165–196; Russell-Wood 1978; Clayton 2011). Given these violations of the justification for enslavement and trafficking, they urged the Spanish crown to distance itself from the Portuguese trade, though their suggestions to end the introduction of African slaves into the American were too radical for the vested interests in the emerging colonial system. The compromise reached in the Spanish Empire, which would last until the late eighteenth century, was one of slavery without slave-trading, realized by farming out the traffic to foreign traders like the Portuguese.
The Portuguese conquest and colonization of Brazil, and later in the sixteenth century of Angola, led to quite different arrangements. As in the Spanish orbit, there were Portuguese clerics who objected to the slave trade and the condition of enslaved Africans in Brazilian plantation society. For example, concern over whether planters were allowing the enslaved to receive the sacraments led some Jesuit missionaries to condemn the slave trade and colonial slavery. However, the ebb and flow of colonization and evangelization in West Central Africa led to a significant change of attitude among the Jesuits, the principal missionaries in the Portuguese Empire. Because of their failures in Africa, many came to argue that true conversion to Christianity could be carried out only by forcibly removing Africans from their native lands and transplanting them as slaves in Brazil, which would become the privileged site of evangelization in the Portuguese world. Moreover, the slave trade would have the added benefit of supporting the colony economically, so that the Jesuits could pursue their missionary labor not only among the enslaved Africans but also among the Brazilian Indians, whose enslavement they opposed. As Luiz Felipe de Alencastro has argued, by the mid-seventeenth century, the Jesuits had become staunch advocates of African slavery and the transatlantic slave trade as a way of joining Angola and Brazil as a unified field for their missions: “Evangelization in this one colony, Brazil, explains the apparently contradictory but in fact complementary character of Jesuit policy regarding the bondage of natives on either side of the South Atlantic. This framework defined a second complementary system, which brought together slave production zones in Brazil with slave reproduction zones in Africa” (Alencastro 2013: 67).
Yet even as they forged a robust justification for the slave trade and colonial slavery, the Jesuits were fiercely critical of the reality of slavery in the plantation societies of Brazil. Priests such as Antonio Vieira and André João Antonil likened Brazil to the Egypt of the Old Testament because of the cruelty with which planters treated their slaves. Vieira, preaching in Brazil in the mid-seventeenth century after the temporary loss of precious Brazilian territories to the Dutch West Indies Company, sought to assuage the enslaved by promising them that their earthly suffering was a sign of their liberation after death. He also warned the planters that the loss of northeastern Brazil to the Dutch was a sign of divine punishment for their cruelty. Several decades later Antonil also augured disaster and retribution: “[The slaves] will cry so loud to God that He will hear them, and do to the planter what He did to the Egyptians when they oppressed the Hebrews beyond endurance, by inflicting terrible plagues upon their estates and children, as may be read in the Holy Scriptures” (pp. 42–43). Such warnings were not abolitionist but rather forms of amelioration meant to improve the lot of the enslaved: “As Saint Paul says, Christians who neglect their slaves are behaving worse than unbelievers who do so” (p. 41).
Antonil inscribed these exhortations in a lengthy treatise on the sugar and tobacco economies of colonial Brazil published in 1711. He was concerned not only with the spiritual well-being of the enslaved but also with the stability of colonial society and the productivity of the plantations (the Jesuit order itself was a major property and slave holder in the colony): “The owner rightfully ought to give whoever serves him sufficient food, medicines when sick, and the wherewithal to dress himself decently, as befits the servile state, and not let him appear naked in the streets. The owner should also regulate the work in such a way that is not more than his laborers can perform, if he wishes them to last” (p. 41). As Rafael Marquese has argued, the Jesuits’ proslavery justifications involved not only scriptural claims but also contemporary scientific beliefs about how to govern laboring bodies. Cruel treatment of enslaved Africans was un-Christian. It was also bad management because it would excite the wrong passions in Africans, leading them to rebel. Good treatment would in turn produce good workers whose passions and humors were in balance (Marquese 2004: 82).
While Jesuit theologians elaborated sophisticated and ambiguous justifications for the slave trade and colonial slavery in seventeenth-century Brazil, other members of colonial society were able to mount serious challenges to both through a Christian idiom. The historian Robert Gray has recounted an especially compelling example, the efforts in the 1680s of the free Afro-Brazilian Lourenço da Silva, an official of a black brotherhood in Madrid, to carry a demand for the suppression of the slave trade to the papacy. His argument, and later those of his clerical supporters, echoed aspects of charges made by Spanish theologians in the previous century: that the Portuguese and Brazilian slavers were manipulating the idea of just war for their own ends, they were actively enslaving African Christians, sometimes in perpetuity, and inflicting violent punishments upon them. He urged the Pope to “liberate all these Christians” from their torment so that Christianity could truly spread among Africans on both sides of the Atlantic, an antislavery rationale that would later prove powerful in the British colonial world, though from the vantage of evangelical Protestantism (quoted in Gray 1990: 17).
Da Silva received support in his denunciation from the heart of the papacy, the cardinals of the Congregation of the Propaganda Fide. Their embrace and extension of his petition derived as well from the report of two Capuchin friars who had worked in the Caribbean and gathered information about slaving in Central Africa from their brethren. The Spaniard Francisco de Jaca and the Frenchman Epiphane de Moirans had been excommunicated for their preaching in Havana, where they had urged that “the owners of Negro slaves should liberate them and their children and pay them for their labours” (quoted in Gray 1990: 21). Yet while the Propaganda Fide endorsed the views of these radical critics of American slavery and African slaving it proved powerless to effect any change in the Hispanic world because of the opposition or indifference of vested interests, including the Iberian monarchs. Even high churchmen were skeptical of the criticisms and dismissed the possibility of enacting them (Gray 1990: 24–27).
This episode from the 1680s reveals the uneven role of Christianity in the making of the Atlantic slave complex. On the one hand, it shows that Christian theology and institutions could provide critical tools for attacking slavery and the slave trade. Lourenço de Silva was a free man of color from Brazil who had risen to some level of prominence and leadership through the black brotherhoods implanted in the Portuguese and Spanish colonies and metropoles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Our Lady of the Rosary being the most widespread in the Lusophone world (Meznar 2005). At the time of his journey to Rome, Lourenço da Silva was the procurator of the Confraternity of Our Lady Star of the Negroes in Madrid (Gray 1990: 14–15). These brotherhoods served an important role, especially in the colonial world as they offered institutions through which the enslaved and the freed might form autonomous communities and press for their collective spiritual and material interests, as da Silva’s undertaking demonstrates. On the other hand, the anticlimactic outcome of his petition, in spite of the Propaganda Fide’s support of it, shows that explicit denunciations of slavery and the slave trade were rare and, more importantly, politically and institutionally isolated. More typical was the perspective voiced by the Jesuit Antonil in Brazil several years (1711) after the decision reached by the Propaganda Fide: that slavery, if governed by Christian values, was not only beneficial to the salvation of the enslaved but also necessary for the economic support of the missions in Africa and the Americas.
However, in the second half of the eighteenth century, a large number of pious Christians decided to take action to reform and to abolish the slave trade and slavery itself. This sea change in attitude did not take place among Iberian Catholics but among Anglo-American Quakers and evangelical Protestants who elaborated sustained attacks on the Atlantic slave complex, first in their own colonial orbit and later throughout Africa and the Americas.
Britain and its overseas colonies would at first glance appear to be unlikely sites for the growth of mass antislavery movements inspired by Christian faith. What characterized British construction of slave societies like Barbados, Jamaica, and South Carolina was an apparent indifference toward the missionary spirit that motivated the Iberian Crowns and their established Church. British religious pluralism, not only at home but also in the overseas colonies, mitigated the influence of the Church of England in the colonial enterprise. Later, however, this pluralism would prove a signal advantage in fostering and mobilizing antislavery support (Drescher 1980).
The Quakers were the first religious group in the British world to question colonial slavery. For example, settlers in Germantown, Pennsylvania in the late seventeenth century opined that slavery “was not a question of fate,” as apologists of various stripes would have it: “The Africans had been criminally seized and shipped off to America without their consent. To purchase them was to purchase stolen goods” (Davis 1966: 308–309). Their objection had little resonance at the time even though similar views surfaced periodically in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, a period when the British transatlantic slave trade was assuming truly enormous proportions. Quakers on both sides of the Atlantic took part in various aspects of the slave complex and owned slaves themselves. However, by the middle of the eighteenth century, radical critics of slavery, like Benjamin Lay, who had spent time in the plantation society of Barbados before settling in Pennsylvania, began to denounce their brethren for their compromise with slavery. Lay saw slaveholding as a “black poison” that had corrupted the Quakers’ faith and which would provoke divine retribution: “The Lord was whetting his glittering sword, and his vengeance was certain, unless the new Children of Israel separated themselves from the filthiness of the Heathen, and came away from Babylon. In America, where the millennium had seemed so imminent and where Satan had committed his forces, God would show no mercy to the betrayers of righteousness” (Davis 1966: 326).
The themes of the loss of righteousness and divine punishment would animate Quakers and evangelicals alike in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These religious anxieties about slavery and the slave trade took on particular political force when they reached influential figures within the Church of England who were able to exert more effective pressure than were marginal religious groups like the Quakers. Especially influential was the Anglican clergyman John Ramsay, whose experience as a missionary in the British West Indies convinced him that action must be taken to force British planters to allow missionaries to evangelize among the enslaved and to treat their slaves in a more Christian manner. This experience in colonial society – his witnessing of the violence of the plantation, the indifference toward religion, the isolation of the enslaved – was not unique to Ramsay. Early Quaker critics had seen and attacked the same in the British colonies, while in the Iberian world, as we have seen, such criticisms were frequent among clerics, even as they justified slavery.
What was especially important about Ramsay’s experience and his reflections on it when he returned to the metropole was that it coincided with the religious crisis brought on by the American Revolution and the independence of the North American colonies. As Christopher Leslie Brown has explained, Ramsay and the evangelicals gathered around him in England viewed the loss of the colonies as evidence of divine wrath inspired by the godlessness promoted on the plantations in the Americas. The only way to regain divine favor was to act against the slavers and planters and to bring the Christian mission to the enslaved. This religious crisis and the remedy for it led to the formation of the first mass antislavery movement in the Atlantic world. Led by powerful political figures like William Wilberforce and gifted publicists like Thomas Clarkson, the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade was able to mobilize hundreds of thousands of supporters around the British Isles and to place abolition at the center of political debate, where it would remain even after the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire (1807) and of slavery in the British colonies (1834), as British evangelicals, missionaries, and the Foreign Office sought the complete disappearance of the transatlantic slave trade.
Why did religious doubts about slavery lead to a mass movement in Britain but not in the other colonial metropoles, like Spain, Portugal, and France? After all, Ramsay’s attack on the planters for incurring divine wrath was not so different from the warnings of the Jesuits Vieira and Antonil who likened Brazil to the biblical Egypt because of the suffering of the enslaved. Seymour Drescher and Christopher Leslie Brown have offered compelling answers to the question of why Britain. Drescher’s work (1980) has focused on the institutional and social aspects of British religious life. Because Britain was a religiously plural society, in spite of having an established church, there was a tradition of dissent outside the state. Moreover, the sociability of British religious life allowed for broad organization and effective publicity across British society. In France (or Spain and Portugal), in contrast, religious uniformity cut down on the spaces of dissent, debate, and propaganda. Brown has called attention to the interpenetration of religious conviction and geopolitics. The early abolitionists sought to redeem the nation and the empire by suppressing the slave trade. The British state eventually embraced abolition of the trade not only to its own colonies but to those of foreign colonies as well. Over the course of the nineteenth century Britain aggressively pursued slavers in Africa, the Caribbean, and Brazil and signed bilateral treaties with foreign sovereigns. Brown argues that official antislavery, inspired by the evangelical abolitionists, endowed Britain with a “moral capital” that allowed it to justify and to expand its intervention around the world in the nineteenth century.
In acting against the slave trade, Britain pursued policies that would promote Christianity and commerce. British abolitionists believed that the two necessarily went hand-in-hand. Indeed, even before the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, they had sought to demonstrate the economic efficacy of abolition by settling and developing Sierra Leone on the west coast of Africa. Their conviction was that if British and European slavers stopped disrupting local societies then Africans would develop free economies worked by free laborers, who would produce valuable exports and in turn create markets for British imports. The Afro-British abolitionist Olaudah Equiano summed up this ambition in his autobiography: “Cotton and indigo grow spontaneously in most parts of Africa; a consideration of no small consequence to the manufacturing towns of Great Britain. It opens a most immense, glorious, and happy prospect – the clothing &c. of a continent ten thousand miles in circumference, and immensely rich in productions of every denomination in return for manufactures” (quoted in Schmidt-Nowara 2011: 99–100). Thus, the British Empire would not only be redeemed but also enriched.
Sierra Leone developed quite differently. In the late eighteenth century it became a refuge for black loyalists who had to flee North America after the American Revolution. In the nineteenth century, the British navy settled Africans captured in illegal slaving voyages. A recent study of Sierra Leone has argued that while the abolitionists’ evangelicalism moved them to attack the slave trade and colonial slavery, it made them less inclined to intervene in the poverty and suffering that characterized the colony. The settlers received very little training or subsidy and found it impossible to create the small agricultural hamlets envisioned by the colony’s designers. Many lived in such a precarious situation that they became vulnerable once again to enslavement by raiders from beyond the colony’s boundaries. Yet reports about this misery by officials and missionaries had little impact on the abolitionists. As Maeve Ryan explains: “The humanitarians’ lack of empathy or concern for the destitute recaptive was a logical extension of their fundamental conception of the abolitionist cause as a reform not of a primarily social evil but of vice and sin – a breach of divine law that forced the possessor of one soul to be held as the property of another . . . To this view it was not the business of Britain to elevate the liberated African from poverty” (2013: 43).
Sierra Leone was not the only example of colonial reality clashing with evangelical and abolitionist ideals. In 1823, slaves in Demerara rose against the master class. What motivated them was the preaching and labor of missionaries sent to the colonies by the London Missionary Society (Viotti da Costa 1994). Though not meant to defy the planters, the missionaries’ work was deeply disruptive of the social control heretofore expected by the master class and the colonial government. Observing the Sabbath, assuming positions of authority in the mission, and gathering together in worship led many slaves to question their bondage in a new way and to expect greater freedoms from their owners. Though evangelicals were often politically conservative or quietist, the message of spiritual liberation and equality, delivered in a colony already buffeted by various antislavery currents (the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and the abolition of slavery in Haiti and the neighboring Spanish American colonies), was profoundly inspiring and subversive.
Did Catholicism play a similar role in the age of revolutions and the nineteenth century? Far from it, at least as regards Latin America and the Caribbean. Antislavery sentiment was at times robust in France, Spain, Portugal and their colonies in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. And some prominent antislavery advocates hailed from the church, most notably the Abbé Gregoire, who sought the abolition of slavery in the French Empire and looked to other clerics, like the Spaniard Bartolomé de las Casas, as sources of inspiration (Schmidt-Nowara 2013). But in general, what one finds is an almost complete absence of Catholics and Catholic theology from the antislavery struggles of the era. For example, in Spanish South America during the wars of independence in the 1810s and 1820s, leaders such as Simón Bolívar in Venezuela banned the slave trade and passed gradual abolition laws. What inspired him was not religious faith and a quest for redemption but liberalism and republicanism, as well as a good dose of pragmatism (so many slaves fought in the wars that Bolívar and other military leaders, like José de San Martín, had to appease them [Schmidt-Nowara 2011: 90–119]).
Concerning Africa, the situation was somewhat different. Brazil (1850) and Spain (1867) were the last countries to ban the transatlantic slave trade. If Christianity played a role, it was in Britain, where abolitionists continued to pressure the government to act against the traffic. However, in the aftermath of the abolition of slavery in the Americas (again, Spain and Brazil were the laggards, Spain abolished slavery in Cuba in 1886, Brazil abolished slavery in 1888) European Catholics across the continent did sign on enthusiastically to the abolitionist crusade launched by the French missionary and cardinal Lavigerie in the 1880s. In Spain, the involvement of conservative Catholics in Lavigerie’s movement provoked the ire of the abolitionist Sanromá, who asked where they had been during the struggle over slavery in Spain’s own colonies:
The same ones who, in another time, battled abolitionism, today declare themselves to be tenacious abolitionists of . . . Muslim slavery. They form societies, gather funds, hold meetings, and follow exactly in the footsteps of those crazy ones of yesteryear. It is a movement initiated in recent years by the illustrious cardinal Lavigerie: it is a noble and generous movement that deserves our applause and with which we associate with all our heart.
I only wish that they would answer the following questions. Why does the propaganda that yesterday seemed so out of place when it was in favor of some slaves, now seems so very appropriate when it favors other slaves? Why does that which seemed so natural when we had it at home, now seem so horrible when it continues outside the home? (Sanromá 1894: 346-347, emphasis in the original).
Father Lavigerie was a French missionary, whose order the White Fathers, was active around Lake Victoria and Lake Tanganyika. To further his mission, he urgently wanted to halt slave raiding in the region and across the African continent (Miers 1975: 201–206). To that end, he toured Britain, France, and Belgium in the late 1880s, speaking to enthusiastic crowds and powerful political and religious dignitaries, Protestant and Catholic alike. As Sanromá’s biting questions indicate, Lavigerie was able to mobilize groups that had either remained on the sidelines during the struggles over Latin American and Caribbean slavery or, as in the case of conservative Catholics in Barcelona, had actively sought to check the abolitionist movement (though in Britain there was continuity between the two eras of abolitionism). What now inspired them to embrace abolitionism in Africa?
European governments were interested in expanding their control on the continent; the 1890 Brussels Conference, at which Lavigerie’s demands for suppression of the slave trade were discussed and acted upon, came hard on the heels of the Berlin Congress of 1884–1885, which formalized the partitioning of Africa. The British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain was explicit: “sooner or later we shall have to fight some of the slave dealing tribes and we cannot have a better casus belli . . . public opinion here requires that we shall justify imperial control of these savage countries by some serious effort to put down slave dealing” (quoted in Miers 1975: 294). Here was the use of “moral capital” with a vengeance. However, it is important to note that this spirit of intervention against slavery in Africa was quite new. Though the British government had committed formidable resources to suppressing the transatlantic slave trade in the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century, it refused to tackle the problem of slavery and slave-trading within Africa even though, with the Atlantic slave trade reduced and then abolished, the number of slaves in Africa was peaking in the second half of the century (Drescher 2009: 374–376). The British and French governments and their agents in Africa refused to get involved; partly in response to their earlier experiences in their Caribbean colonies – many felt that forced labor turned out to be more productive than free labor – and partly because they believed that slavery was too deeply embedded in these societies to take radical actions like the suppression of slavery in the West Indies (Drescher 2009: 380–386).
The Scramble for Africa and the renewed popular pressure spearheaded by European Christians, both Protestant and Catholic, would change this situation in the 1880s and 1890s.
Religious groups across western Europe responded to Lavigerie’s campaign for related yet distinct motives. For example, in Germany, membership in anti-slave-trade committees and public meetings was a way for Catholics to show their allegiance to the German colonial enterprise and their loyalty in general in the aftermath of the Kulturkampf (Mulligan 2013: 158). More generally, the drive against slaving in Africa was aggressively anti-Muslim and staked out a claim to a universal humanity that was fundamentally Christian and European. This universal vision that cut across Christian divisions dovetailed with the imperial interests of European governments because it legitimized “violent humanitarianism” (Mulligan 2013: 155). After the 1890 Brussels Conference, imperial expansion in Africa went hand-in-hand with the efforts, uneven and incomplete, to suppress slave raiding and slavery. In many cases, freedom from slavery led to other kinds of forced labor regimes in the expanding European colonies, imposed with incredible violence, most notoriously in the Congo Free State of King Leopold. The brutality in Congo continued to provoke outrage among British nonconformist Christian sects, who organized an active campaign in the early twentieth century, eventually forcing King Leopold to abandon his private control of the colony: “it was the last hurrah of the old popular antislavery base” (Drescher 2009: 401) of evangelicals, the most potent Christian force in the struggle against slavery in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean in the modern era.
For most of the history of the Atlantic slave complex, Christianity offered justification for African slavery and – especially in the Portuguese colonial empire, by far the largest slave trading power over the centuries – for the slave trade, as we have seen in the case of the Jesuits’ complex arguments and arrangements. On a simpler level, biblical tales like the story of Ham and the enslavement of his children, the so called Canaanites, offered rich material for explaining an increasingly racialized form of slavery across the Americas: black Africans were the children of Ham, their skin color marking the divine curse (Sandoval 2008: 20). Yet certain qualms and themes continued to arise over the centuries and across the imperial and confessional divides; in particular, the idea of divine wrath for the way in which the enslaved were made to suffer or for the ignorance of Christianity in which their owners left them. Portuguese Jesuits in Brazil and British evangelicals at home in England were racked by the same anxieties triggered by imperial debacles. For the Portuguese clerics, losses to the Dutch in Brazil and Angola in the 1630s and 1640s, reversed in subsequent decades, were evidence of divine disfavor. In the late eighteenth century the loss of the North American colonies similarly affected British clerics and their followers. Christianity thus might lead to demands for amelioration across the European overseas empires but only in the evangelical and non-conformist world of the British Empire did it lead to mass mobilization for the suppression of the slave trade and the abolition of slavery. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Christianity, slavery, antislavery, and colonial crisis again formed a potent nexus, as missionaries (Catholic and Protestant) combined with aggressive states to expand European control in Africa in the cause of abolitionism. Finally, even though the dominant religion was generally a tool of social control in colonial slave societies, it also became a source of autonomy and open defiance for enslaved and freed people, as Lourenço da Silva’s petition to the papacy shows, though this particular episode was exceptional. The 1823 uprising in Demerara is more revealing because it demonstrates how the intersection of Christian missions and beliefs with the daily struggles of slavery might lead the enslaved to demand freedom and justice.