Antislavery and Civil Society in Britain and France
Seymour Drescher
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” With this Declaration of 1776 Lynn Hunt opens her Inventing Human Rights: A History. Her history is built around two more declarations. In 1789 the first two articles of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizens affirmed that men are born and remain free and equal in rights. These are “liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression.” In 1948 the first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights also begins, “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” This third document immediately proceeds to designate the first specific violation of these rights: “No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.”1 By comparison no references to slavery or the slave trade appeared in either of the two eighteenth-century declarations. Nor did the first two constitutions of the United States (1783, 1787) or of France (1791, 1793) directly refer to their slave systems.
Hunt’s account of the “invention” of human rights clearly follows a trail of declarations, from America to France to the United Nations. She also notes that human rights become meaningful only “when they gain political content.”2 This implies that declarations of human rights must somehow be articulated in enforced legal prescriptions (constitutional or legislative). Hunt’s own story begins with the prior emergence of human rights from a general eighteenth-century western European sentiment that crystallized in revolutionary epiphanies at the end of that century. It is a sequence from thought to action. Human rights thought and action were diverted from their global and universalist potential by the nineteenth-century projects of nationalism and imperialism. It required another wave of catastrophic upheavals in the twentieth century to fulfill the potential of their eighteenth-century predecessors.
Samuel Moyn argues for an even greater disjuncture between the eighteenth and late twentieth centuries in the global history of human rights. He claims that the search for historical precursors of contemporary human rights is a perfect instance of what Marc Bloch terms the “idol of origins.” Looking for the origins of a major phenomenon, like the sudden emergence of the global human rights movement, he writes, has tempted contemporaries to assume that it is the progressive result of a long historical process, an accumulation from far upstream in time. Such an impulse leads one to seek out causes of the phenomenon centuries or even millennia before the event to be explained. The result is the identification of harbingers with causes. For Moyn, it is not a persistent stream but a shocking groundswell that has to be explained. In neither Hunt’s nor Moyn’s frames of reference does the British antislavery movement have a prominent role to play on the road to the contemporary upsurge of human rights.3
I select Lynn Hunt’s and Samuel Moyn’s texts because they exemplify major points of contention in Moyn’s accounting for the history of human rights and the emergence of its contemporary form. Both the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries are virtually absent from their accounts. Yet targeting ancient revolutionary moments as the engines of expansion or insisting upon the complete novelty of contemporary human rights creates its own problems. Both approaches fail to address the question of why slavery was so conspicuously absent from those eighteenth century declarations and so prominently placed at the forefront of their twentieth century variant. They also obscure the role of other claims for humanity at local, national, and international levels of law and jurisprudence long before the late twentieth century.
The abolitions of the slave trade and slavery hold a special place in the history of the globalization of rights in law. Focusing on the comparative histories of two major national and imperial initiators of antislavery action under the standard of universal humanity, this essay will analyze the implications of their different paths to the globalization of human rights.4 In medieval times the boundaries of enslaveability were gradually, if not always rigorously, restricted by religious affiliation. Muslims and Christians were admonished to refrain from enslaving fellow believers, and especially from delivering them into the hands of infidels. The lands beyond the frontiers of monotheism in Africa and Eurasia became the largest zones of recruitment into the institution.
Although the legitimacy of the institution of slavery remained grounded in its assumed ubiquity and antiquity, “free air” or “free soil” zones emerged in local and national jurisdictions of northwestern Europe. At least as far back as the sixteenth century, juridical commentaries, court records, and popular traditions affirmed that people in bondage were released from their legal obligations when they entered certain jurisdictions. Nevertheless, affirmations of this privilege invariably recognized its particularity. In relation to the larger world, the legitimacy of slavery was the rule. Its absence was exceptional.5
Beyond their northwestern European metropoles, every one of the states subscribing to the “free soil” principle within its home territory recognized and encouraged the transatlantic slave trade and slavery in its overseas colonies. Within Europe itself, there were frequent attempts to evade the implications of the freedom principle—to create exceptions to the exception. This was especially the case concerning slaves brought to the metropole by their overseas owners. Whatever the particular outcome of these maneuvers, the ubiquity of slavery was consensually acknowledged by a legal theory steeped in the Civil Law tradition inherited from antiquity. Centuries of law treatises echoed the Roman juristic designation of slavery as being contra naturam, immediately followed by the observation that it was an “institution of the ius gentium (law common to all peoples)” and what “natural reason prescribed for all men.”6
There was a crucial novelty in the development of slavery in the early modern Atlantic world. From the end of the seventeenth century the institution’s most rapid growth was occurring under the auspices of the very societies whose rulers had declared their own realms to be “slave-free” zones. The two most important of these were the French and British Empires. In this respect the two kingdoms were in an analogous position, although there were repeated attempts to create statutes of exception to the freedom principle in France. There is also general agreement that, in cultural terms, antislavery sentiment was growing in both nations by the last third of the eighteenth century.7
Antislavery organizations emerged in the late 1780s. The first European abolitionist societies were founded in Britain (1787) and in France (1788). The development of their overseas slave systems also ran along parallel economic paths throughout the century between England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the French Revolution of 1789. Toward the end of that century their combined tropical colonies received 70 percent of the Africans landed in the Americas and exported 80 percent of the sugar delivered to Europe.8 Both nations appeared to be on a par with regard to expressions of cultural discomfort with, and economic interest in, the Atlantic slave system. Nevertheless, the two nations were to have very divergent encounters with slavery and antislavery in the following century.
After the British and French societies crossed the threshold to the formation of national abolitionist societies, their civil political and legal systems offered a striking contrast. By the late eighteenth century, British abolitionists could use mechanisms of a public sphere still unavailable to their counterparts across the Channel. Anglo-Americans on both sides of the Atlantic claimed, and were envied for, the most highly developed civil societies in the world. In Britain, a network of provincial newspapers circulated and nationalized an evolving dialogue among private individuals, civil associations, and national legislators. Published letters, mass meetings, and ongoing parliamentary debates allowed citizens to intervene in public discussion in a manner that was still inconceivable on the Continent. When the Marquis de Lafayette helped to found the French Société des Amis des Noirs in February 1788, he cautioned Wilberforce that France lacked “the blessed advantages of a National Assembly,” an institution that “seemed so remote as to preclude the citizens of France from uniting in expressions of sympathy.” France’s royal censor gave the Amis permission to publish news about abolitionist activity only on the English side of the Channel.9
Compared to their British counterparts, French abolitionists also lacked far more than a national legislature at their abolitionist point of departure. During the 1780s Great Britain was enjoying one of the outstanding moments in its economic history. British abolitionism made its great breakthrough at a moment of record-breaking prosperity and economic growth in agriculture, manufacturing, and commerce. It dominated the world’s oceanic trade in every direction. A barrier-lowering commercial treaty with France in 1787 formed the capstone to expanding markets in Europe. Month after month British newspapers reported the descent of their erstwhile military enemies and economic rivals on both sides of the Atlantic. Their pages recorded agricultural dearth, economic recession, financial bankruptcy and political crises in the republics of the United States, the Netherlands, and, above all, in the kingdom of France.10
Perhaps the most striking difference between Britain and France at the end of the 1780s was the relation of their political institutions and civil societies to the birth of abolitionism. In Inventing Human Rights, Hunt asserts that mundane collective appeals for rights, like “petitions,” “bills,” and the discourse of ordinary politics seem somehow “inadequate” in comparison with the great declarations of 1776 and 1789. The very word “declaration” had less of a “musty, submissive air than the ordinary stages of the legislative process.” Declarations were bold, aggressive, and total, signifying the intent to “seize sovereignty.”11 Like the words on the American dollar bill, they voiced aspirations to create a novus ordo secularum.
We have already noted, however, that neither the two bold declarations nor the four constitutions of the United States and France between 1776 and 1793 seized the opportunity to openly attack slavery. This failure certainly did not occur because their authors neglected to think about the institution. We know that Jefferson’s famous draft article denouncing the British slave trade was deleted from the final document. We also know that in France during the famous night of August 4, 1789, when the general assault on privileges was launched, a proposal to extend the emancipation of metropolitan serfs to colonial slaves was one of the few proposals that aroused considerable disapproval. It disappeared from the summary list of reforms composed the next morning.12
“Human rights” may seem more robust than many other terms used to designate the inherent claims human beings have upon each other. British abolitionists did not embed their demands in an attempt to “seize sovereignty.” However, their claims were, in a fundamental sense, equally comprehensive and global. Their slogan, “Humanity, Justice and Sound Policy,” was less strident but not less universalistic. Of the triad, “humanity” was more frequently associated with demands for slave trade abolition than were “justice” or “sound policy.” Their emblematic medallion, bearing the inscription “Am I not a Man and a Brother?” was intended to arouse hostility against a proposed violation of Africans’ rights as human beings.
The most important aspect of the comparison is that the British abolitionist movement, innovatively moving from mass popular mobilization and petitioning to parliamentary investigations, bills, and enactments, succeeded to a degree unmatched by the Amis des Noirs. The British campaign in 1788 accounted for more than half of the petitions reaching Parliament during that session. Their agitation absorbed a share of the public sphere that was never remotely replicated anywhere in Europe. A year later in France a great collection of national grievances was gathered in the cahiers de doléances. Its few dozen calls for action against slavery and the slave trade were completely overridden by the multitude of other demands. In Britain, both the supporters and opposers of abolition recognized the singular triumph of abolitionism in public opinion. During the making of the first constitution in revolutionary France, it was the defenders of the slave system who carried the day in organization and agitation.13
In Britain the defeat of the first bill to abolish the slave trade in 1791 produced two major responses among the British public. The first was an intensification of petitioning. By the time a second bill reached Parliament early in 1792, the number of petitions had increased fivefold over 1788. They favored abolition by a proportion of a hundred to one. The number of signers also increased sevenfold, from more than sixty thousand in 1788 to upward of four hundred thousand in the campaign of 1791–92.14 British civil society mobilization also broadened and deepened during this second wave. For many, Parliament’s first negative vote in 1791 symbolized its failure to heed the will of the people. Now “the people” had to “manifest to Europe and the World that public spirit, that virtuous abhorrence of SLAVERY, to which a British SENATE is unable—or unwilling to aspire.” A mass sugar boycott was launched. Its “antisaccarite” campaign was aimed at families and women. It appealed to women’s sensitivity to family destruction wrought by the slave trade. It offered women an indirectly political role as household managers, giving them a means of overcoming their gendered ineligibility to sign petitions. The appeal specifically intended its injunctions to rally children to the cause, enhancing their education through abstention. Decades later women entered campaigns as full-fledged petitioners for slave emancipation.15
The 1792 abolition bill successfully passed in the House of Commons only to be stymied in the House of Lords. Thereafter, the great Saint-Domingue Revolution and conflict against the radicalized French republic constrained further popular mobilization for a decade. Indeed, precisely at the moment of maximum repression of British civil society in the 1790s, British military forces were massively deployed to combat French revolutionary emancipation in the Caribbean. Moreover, during the 1790s British slavery became the most rapidly expanding slave system in the world. Only after the French military disasters on land (in Saint-Domingue, 1803) and at sea (Trafalgar, 1805) secured the British Empire did Britain’s abolitionists feel sufficiently confident to revive civil mobilization against the slave trade. In June 1806 both Houses of Parliament united in declaring the British slave trade “contrary to the principles of ‘justice, humanity and sound policy.’” (This was the same triad that Prime Minister William Pitt had employed at the very outset in 1788, when requesting Parliament to investigate the slave trade.) In retrospect, petitions and bills based upon claims to humanity might strike historians as “submissive.” But in 1807 slaveholders found the term to be potentially so inflammatory that their final plea was to have the words “humanity” and “justice” deleted from the preamble to the Slave Trade Abolition Act.16
By the time that British abolition was enacted after eighteen years of debate, the French Empire had gone through a full cycle from slavery to emancipation to slavery. Until 1791 the Amis des Noirs lost the battle to place abolitionism high on the French legislative agenda, much less in the French Constitution. The Amis’ attempts to gain traction for abolition could not have come at a less propitious moment. The tropical colonies’ share of French imperial trade was at an all-time peak. Moreover, during the period between the convening of the Estates-General in 1789 and the implementation of the first French Constitution in 1791, France’s overseas colonies were probably the quietest and most productive zone of the empire. The five reported conspiracies or revolts in the French Caribbean before the Saint-Domingue Revolution paled in comparison with the thousands of insurrectionary outbreaks in metropolitan France. Before the great slave revolution, the French government was far more concerned with colonial aspirations to greater autonomy and rising hostilities between the free colored and white populations than with the threat of a large-scale slave uprising. The very prosperity of the slave system allowed supporters of slavery to decouple the “national interest” from “humanity” and to identify abolitionists as either visionary or antipatriotic.17
The distance between the civil societies’ approach to slavery in Britain and France is best illustrated by their divergent responses to one initial impact of the Saint-Domingue Revolution. In Britain, the rising price of sugar following the uprising dismayed British abstainers. It nullified much of the potential economic pressure of abstention on British West Indian sugar planters. In Paris, reaction to the price rise registered differently. During the winter of 1792, Parisian crowds were “enraged” at having to pay twice the usual price for sugar. They regarded it as an essential item in their consumption. In a taxation populaire they sacked a major warehouse, selling sugar to participants at the prerevolutionary “fair price.” During the discussion that followed at the radical Jacobin Club, not a single speaker mentioned the link of the soaring price to the slave revolution, nor did anyone admonish the rioters for coveting slave-grown produce.18
The rapidly shifting outcomes of revolutionary conflict resulted in dramatic transformations in the status and treatment of slaves, ex-slaves, and the re-enslaved in various parts of the French overseas empire between 1789 and 1815. There is little evidence to suggest widespread French popular mobilization for abolition in the period leading up to French slave emancipation in 1794, even in the radical Jacobin Club. In 1793 a petition of Paris’s free colored men to the National Convention was not even mentioned in the club’s Journal de la Montagne. The convention’s abolition decree on February 4, 1794, resulted from a sudden policy shift in response to events in Saint-Domingue. Although it marked a decisive moment in the history of slavery in the circum-Caribbean, its impact on French popular mobilization was sporadic and fragile. Civic metropolitan practice and legal protection in the colonies did not converge following emancipation (16 pluviôse an II—February 1794). Even under the Constitution of the Year III (1795), which formally declared the colonies to be “integral parts of the nation and subject to the same laws and the same constitution” as metropolitan France, the new colonial citizens never enjoyed the full legal protections that prevailed in the metropole. Postemancipation colonial rule generally “centered on the surveillance and control of laboring bodies by decrees that would have been illegal in France.”19 Only in Saint-Domingue did the fragility of French control in the face of Spanish and British hostilities lead to the colony’s virtual autonomy under Toussaint Louverture.
Despite a flurry of metropolitan festivals celebrating emancipation immediately after 16 pluviôse, the Directory’s shifts, evasions, and nullifications of full legal implementation in the years that followed emancipation were not influenced by any popular mobilizations. Even before the Napoleonic restoration of slavery in 1802, metropolitan legislators continued to differentiate colonial from domestic citizenship. There was a brief revival of the Amis des Noirs in 1797, but without a hint of civil society mobilization. The overseas colonies empire resembled “an appendage of metropolitan soil subject to permanent siege rule.”20
The interaction of the two Franco-Caribbean theaters of revolution mutually disrupted civil societies on both sides of the Atlantic. In the colonies rulers and leaders attempted to fill the juridical and jurisdictional voids left by the shifting tides of revolutionary upheaval and the fortunes of external invasions. In Toussaint Louverture’s constitution of 1801, three basic elements of civil society were formally prohibited: the free movement of individuals from plantations, the right to public assembly, and the right of association. Most inhabitants of plantations were under regimes of iron-clad discipline and military supervision. One long-term legacy of the revolutionary conflict was a critically fragmented civil society.
France was similarly afflicted by revolutionary upheaval and external conflict, if not by foreign military occupation, before 1814. Civil society was unable to coalesce around stable alternatives regarding slavery during the decade long struggle in the colonies. The fact that the campaign for human rights and the Amis des Noirs became identified with the Girondist faction in the legislature initially drove many radical Jacobins to join the white colonists in identifying the overseas slave rebellions with the enemies of the revolution. The subsequent association of abolition abroad with the radical terror in Paris and the Vendée in the provinces made overseas emancipation as congruent with narratives of repression as of liberation. The ebb and flow of military mobilizations were chiefly responsible for the successes and failures of attempts to determine the fate of slavery in the French Empire. Napoleon engineered the greatest single antiabolitionist victory in the Caribbean, re-enslaving tens of thousands of French citizens in 1802. The following year his troops suffered a disastrous defeat while attempting to reimpose slavery in Saint-Domingue. The suppression of all independent civil society and open political opposition allowed both of these events to occur without any metropolitan manifestation of approval or disapproval.21
Well before 1802 the first French Republic demonstrated its disinterest in universalizing slave emancipation. In 1795 the French army occupied and sponsored a revolutionary Batavian Republic in the Netherlands. It made no attempt to have its new satellite republic emancipate Dutch colonial slaves, even on the island of Saint-Martin, which the French and Dutch shared jointly. Nor did the French pressure the Dutch to expand the application of the Batavian Republic’s own Declaration of Rights beyond the shores of the Netherlands. The Batavian National Constituent Assembly declined to support a motion for overseas slave emancipation on the grounds that any such action “might very well lead to a violent insurrection as bad as anything in Saint Domingue” and “was bound to bring ruin to many virtuous and patriotic burghers.” In revolutionary Batavia, the republic had different priorities than those proclaimed on 16 pluviôse in Paris.
What remained a colonial limbo in the French Empire under the Directory became a full-blown reversion to enslavement under Napoleon Bonaparte. Only in Haiti, where Napoleon’s army suffered a catastrophic defeat, did the abolition of slavery remain enshrined within the new nation’s fundamental law. Haiti joined metropolitan Britain and Canada in becoming “free soil” zones for foreign slaves who entered its jurisdiction. Haitians placed a less-than-universalistic legal limitation on their antislavery refuge. Full citizenship and the right to own property were extended only to nonwhite foreigners. Moreover, migrants, like natives, were probably subject to compulsory labor on plantations or public works and to military service. In this regard, the postliberation status of Haitian peasants bore some resemblance to the “Apprenticeship” system in Sierra Leone, Britain’s new colony on the other side of the Atlantic.22
By the end of the Napoleonic Wars Britain had established an identity as the principal global agent against the transatlantic slave trade. The British government began to wage postwar naval, diplomatic, and ideological confrontations to constrict the trade. Three times before Napoleon’s defeat, the British unsuccessfully attempted to use preliminary peace negotiations (1801, 1806, 1814) to open talks on a joint termination of the Anglo-French slave trades. Negotiations were immediately reopened with the restored Bourbon monarchy in 1814. Lord Castlereagh, the British foreign secretary, believed that he had overcome a major hurdle to international abolition when Louis XVIII agreed to continue the slave trade for only five more years. News of this extension, however, produced yet another wave of national petitions in British society. Once more the campaign produced the largest turnout of signatures in British history. Newspapers reported subscribers in the hundreds of thousands. Ultimately, 1,370 petitions reached Parliament. In a nation with no more than four million eligible signers, between a fifth and a third of them signified their disapproval of the offending slave trade agreement with France. For Britain’s foreign minister, the final total (1,370 petitions against and none in favor of the article) signaled only one thing: “The nation was bent upon this object. . . . Ministers must make it the basis of their policy.”23
Britain’s first postwar achievement was an international declaration against the slave trade at the Congress of Vienna. The article did not specifically declare the slave trade to be a violation of human rights or refer to past national declarations. Rather, it stated that “the slave trade has been considered by just and enlightened men in all ages, as repugnant to the principles of humanity and universal morality.” This formulation allowed supporters of even the most traditional institutions to retrospectively invent a tradition of long-term consensual opposition to the slave trade and slavery. The article appealed in the mode of British abolitionist rhetoric to the principle of humanity, rather than to human rights.24
With an oblique glance at and beyond British civil society, the assembled congress credited “the public voice, in all civilized countries” for “calling aloud” for suppression. The public mobilization of one civil society was thus seamlessly grafted onto all “civilized countries.” The congress could remain silent about mainland Europe’s silence before and during the gestation of the article. The negotiators also hedged the declaration with the observation that long-ingrained prejudices required patience to allow due time for all nations to come into conformity with universal compliance.
The condemnation of the slave trade was the only article in the treaty that offered any recognition whatsoever that a “world” beyond Europe had claims on those at Vienna. Still more significantly, the article allowed the time for the French, in particular, to become reconciled to a cause now imbricated with national humiliation and defeat, both by ex-slaves across the Atlantic and by victorious enemies in France. The British nation had passed through the Age of Revolution without enduring a major revolution, civil war, or foreign conquest. France had endured them all. It would take decades before another French abolitionist society could again be founded in France.25
French civil society also viewed the postrevolutionary era in another way that distinguished it from the nation’s offshore neighbor. The British had passed through the entire Age of Revolution without a single major slave uprising within their own colonies. The French experienced their Caribbean revolutions mostly through the eyes and tales of returning colonial refugees and soldiers. Stories of personal suffering gave their hearers a far sharper impression of atrocities endured than those inflicted by their ex-colonial fellow citizens. For decades the Haitian Revolution was virtually a taboo subject in French legislative discussions of the slave trade—too horrific to need or warrant discussion. When the French government finally succeeded in pressuring isolated Haiti to pay reparations in exchange for recognition of its independence in 1825, the only voices raised in France were those complaining of the insufficiency of the compensation settlement. No association in France expressed reservations about the morality of extracting reparations from impoverished ex-slaves who had been the victims of systematic brutality and violence for generations longer than their former masters and enemies.26
Even after the abolition of its second slavery, in 1848, the French government resisted allowing the warships of another nation to board suspected slavers sailing under the sovereignty of its national flag. A recalcitrant state diminished the effectiveness of international patrol arrangements. Fearing outraging French opinion, French governments helped to bury two British postwar multinational treaty initiatives. At the height of British abolitionist influence the French legislature rejected Britain’s final, and nearly successful, effort to negotiate a multinational treaty for naval patrols armed with a mutual right to search.27
A major Anglo-French crisis in the Middle East intruded before the treaty could be ratified. Resentful French legislators, urged on by the French press, forced their government to withdraw the Right to Search treaty from consideration for ratification. Even abolitionists like Alexis de Tocqueville and Victor Schoelcher refused to support a treaty that sanctioned British naval inspections of vessels sailing under a French flag. The popular outburst over the slave trade was a significant setback for the French abolitionist cause. Foreign Minister François Guizot lamented that he also had often fought popular perspectives but never a more general or stronger one. Fearing a possible outburst of violence, he banned a public meeting for an Anglo-French antislavery conference in Paris. None was ever held before French slave emancipation.28
While a new generation of French abolitionists was balancing its conflicting commitments to abolition and nationalist pride, British abolitionists deepened their nation’s commitment to abolishing its imperial slave system and to globalizing its policy of ending transoceanic slave trades. At the metropolitan level this meant again expanding active public lobbying and replenishing the reservoir of petition signers. In the period between the great petition of 1814, British colonial slave emancipation (1833), and postemancipation “Apprenticeship” (1837–38), the sources of subscribers expanded in a number of directions. The religious cohort shifted more decisively to the ranks of nonconformist Protestants. Methodists, Baptists, and Congregationalists were all experiencing their most rapid rate of growth. By the 1830s the pool of signatories in Ireland included both Protestants and Catholics. The press noted the appearance of Jewish abolitionists in London and stressed the ecumenical breadth of abolitionism in Britain.
Gender boundaries were also breached. As pioneers in modern mass petitioning, British women came into their own as organizers and signers in the 1830s. Their greatest single petition, loaded with more than 180,000 names, became the most widely publicized abolitionist document delivered to Parliament in a half century of mass mobilizations. By the end of the 1830s women had probably overtaken men as signers of abolitionist petitions to Parliament and addresses to the queen. As the campaign for slave emancipation reached its climax in 1833, working class adherents also became vocal supporters at petition rallies.29
Perhaps the most surprising additions to the ranks of British abolitionists before emancipation were those living in the West Indies. They could not form associations to agitate or petition for their own freedom on the very site where their status constituted the foundations of their masters’ authority; between Waterloo and emancipation in 1833 their entry into the public sphere came in the form of uprisings. Not coincidentally, all major British slave insurrections came in the wake of parliamentary debates or of governmental initiatives designed to limit the arbitrary powers of masters or to ameliorate the slaves’ conditions.
The British slaves’ interventions contrasted with the pattern of earlier uprisings in the French islands. The major British colonial uprisings in Barbados (1816), Demerara (1823), and Jamaica (1831), involved tens of thousands of slaves, a total exceeded only by those involved in the Saint-Domingue Revolution. As David Brion Davis observes, the combined number of whites killed in the three British revolts was less than twenty. This was not even a third of the number killed in Nat Turner’s brief revolt in Virginia in 1831. Fewer whites were killed in all three uprisings than in the opening weeks of the revolt in Saint-Domingue. The toll certainly did not equal one-tenth of 1 percent of the total who died in the Saint-Domingue Revolution.30
Beginning with the Demerara insurgency in 1823 the rebels took care to preserve the lives of all masters whom they took into custody. When negotiating with the forces of order sent to quell the uprising, they presented documents from their captives testifying to their good treatment. The most striking novelty of the Demerara uprising was how it was used by abolitionists in Britain. They stridently compared the uprising to an English-style workers’ action. Self-disciplined laborers had, in their view, behaved no differently from fellow Christians and British workers at home. If the language of abolitionists was not that of universal human rights, it was clearly the vocabulary of a common humanity and a shared civilization. The governor of the colony reprieved the rebel’s leader for his “good behavior, intelligence, and usefulness” and for his “humanity to whites” during the insurrection.31
Once again, humanity was the British proxy for human rights. From the mid-1820s abolitionist campaigners and their parliamentary spokesmen were eager to denounce slavery as an affront to Christian feelings and a denial of human rights. The British abolitionists successfully reframed slave resistance as normal civilized behavior under the stress of captivity. What most deeply impressed and inspired abolitionists abroad was what happened on the day of emancipation in the British colonies on August 1, 1834. For William Lloyd Garrison, across the Atlantic, it was “the greatest miracle of the age.” For Frederick Douglass, Americans had “discovered in the progress of the antislavery movement that England’s passage to freedom is not through rivers of blood. . . . What is bloody revolution in France is peaceful reformation in England. The friends and enemies of . . . freedom, meet not at the barricades . . . but on the broad platform of Exeter Hall [the abolitionists’ customary site of assembly].” For Alexis de Tocqueville, across the Channel, the day of emancipation—and the decade thereafter—did not produce “a single insurrection,” nor did it “cost the life of a single man” in colonies where blacks were twelve times as numerous as whites. From the perspective of French and American abolitionists that was indeed a civil transformation.32
Because French abolitionists continued to wrestle with the specter of past and potential future revolutions they hesitated to mobilize the civil society of their nation. The Abolitionist Society, founded in the wake of British emancipation (1834), continued the Amis’ tradition of a small elite organization. Two French petition campaigns in the 1840s, not initiated by the society, never accounted for more than 1 percent of supporters mobilized by the British. The first petition (1844) seemed to reinforce the distance between vocal urban workers and silent bourgeois and peasants. The workers of Paris and Lyon who organized the petition welcomed female signatories, but women remained a small contingent among the signers. French religious mobilization was equally modest. Except for one petition signed by six hundred Catholic clergy, the French hierarchy evidenced a studied neutrality toward the institution of slavery—rendering it unto Caesar as a secular legal institution. Only on the eve of the Revolution of 1848 did a Parisian Catholic newspaper initiate a call for a more coordinated mass petition. The British movement had already set the bar so high, however, that those who wished to maintain the status quo could dismissively ask, Where were the voices of millions of French peasants and workers aligned with those of “liberal théoriciens”?33
Perhaps the most significant indicator of the lack of popular pressure for slave emancipation came during the French Revolution of 1848. With conservatives momentarily immobilized, the provisional government permitted Victor Schoelcher to prepare a decree of emancipation. It was deliberately promulgated before the National Constituent Assembly convened. Schoelcher feared that this body, elected by universal male suffrage, might actually make the passage of slave emancipation hinge upon offering prior compensation to their slave owners, on the British model. This requirement might well have indefinitely postponed emancipation, pending metropolitan economic recovery and fiscal stability.34
During the same period, British abolitionists constituted the hub of a widening movement against the Atlantic slave trade and world slavery. They hosted two international conferences in 1840 and 1843. They formed the first durable nongovernmental organization for monitoring international slavery. They subsidized and distributed literature worldwide. British abolitionists and residents abroad were urged to encourage the formation of small antislavery societies in foreign countries. They dispatched agents and missionaries to engage subjects and citizens to ensure that the “free air” principle prevailed everywhere under British sovereignty.
In France, the legacy of counter-civil-society military and revolutionary mobilization continued well beyond the ending of colonial slavery. In the first decade of the Second French Empire the second French antislavery society vanished. The American Civil War and the political liberalization of the empire opened the door to a modest abolitionist revival. In 1867 the antislavery societies of Britain, France, and Spain inaugurated an international convention in Paris. Its delegations included representatives from the western European metropoles and colonies in both Africa and the Caribbean as well as Haiti and a number of South American nations. The Liberal opposition predominated, but the Haitian delegate was heard for the first time. Nevertheless, the specter of France’s turbulent past still haunted the proceedings. Neither the Amis des Noirs nor any of the revolutionaries who had decreed the first emancipation received personal recognition. The imperial government oversaw the proceedings to the extent of deciding which papers could be orally delivered. Only supplemental written amendments allowed figures like John Brown and Ogé to be honored in the written record. Only William Lloyd Garrison’s spontaneous speech, delivered in English allowed him to conclude with “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” to the echo of rousing cheers. The subsequent intervention of another war and Parisian uprising postponed the appearance of a French premier at an antislavery meeting until the consolidation of the Third Republic in 1881.35
Comparing abolitionism in Britain and France through the lens of their civil societies can be usefully extended beyond those once-leading empires of slavery. Jeremy Adelman, for example, has recently suggested that abolition in mainland Spanish America occurred not as a result of revolutionary challenges but as a by-product of the breakdown of their civil societies. As in Haiti, the violent fragmentation of some Hispanic colonial societies continued long after wartime antislavery measures had liberated many slaves and promised gradual emancipation to the others. Exploring the civil society mobilization in the Brazilian and American cases offers other comparative opportunities for further research.36
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, when British abolitionist power to mobilize massively had waned, the British Antislavery Society continued to lobby its government for international pressure on slavery and the slave trades. As late as the first quarter of the nineteenth century, British courts still unreservedly reconfirmed the traditional principle that the law of nations protected foreign slavers against peacetime seizures unless covered by mutual treaties of inspection.37 In addition to Britain’s ever-growing network of bilateral treaties with other sovereign states, a new inference of the “civilizing mission” allowed Britain to pursue suspected slavers not sailing under flags of “civilized” states. By the time that international lawyers began to organize themselves as a scholarly association in the 1870s, even Continental jurists could no longer accept the conclusion that where “the slave trade had not been outlawed by positive treaty it could only be deemed lawful” under the law of nations.38
For a new generation of self-consciously “international” lawyers, the legal status of slavery or the slave trade could no longer be allowed to depend upon variable cultural norms but upon human nature. Human nature was imagined to be evolving toward antislavery throughout contemporary Europe. An imperialist and “orientalist” perspective identified antislavery as a cutting edge of the civilizing process. As with human rights discourse, antislavery claims based upon humanity could be deployed to justify colonialism, imperialism, and many other forms of domination and coercion. At Brussels in 1890 the European nations involved in carving Africa into imperial dominions presented themselves a gathering of empires of antislavery.
Of course, it still required dedicated abolitionists to see to it that those outside the fold of civilization adhered to the new norm. This globalization of norms is nowhere better illustrated than in Japan. The Japanese Meiji Restoration literally established its antislavery and civilizational bona fides in 1872 via a legal case. The case stemmed from the involuntary transportation of Chinese coolies in transit through Yokohama en route to Peru. It was not accidental that a coolie passenger sought refuge on a British warship. Nor that the crew handed the escapee over to British consular officials. Nor that the British consul decided to intervene and to inspect the escapee’s ship. Nor that many other Westerners in Yokohama, including the representatives of “Germany, Italy, Denmark, and France were far from enthusiastic about the idea of encouraging the Japanese to interfere in foreign commerce.” Nor that, for the trial, the British consul arranged for a fellow Briton to advise Japanese judge Ōe Taku, on the bench. Nor that both the ship’s captain and the Chinese laborers aboard his ship came to be represented by British barristers. Nor that the legal proceedings were conducted primarily in English, a language not understood even by the presiding Japanese judge.
Significantly, the Meiji government had only just begun the process of creating a modern legal system, and Ōe Taku was the highest-ranking Japanese official in Yokahama. In rendering his final judgment in 1872, Ōe sounded remarkably like England’s Lord Chief Justice Mansfield in 1772, stating that slavery was “a state which is so repugnant to all sense of natural justice that it has ever been held that it can exist or be recognized only by force of express law, and which there is no obligation on the part of a sovereign state either in the law or comity of nations to in any manner assist or countenance.”39 In a single sentence Judge Ōe established Japan’s credentials as a civilized, antislavery, sovereign state.
By 1900 the slow death of slavery through the march of civilization seemed to be as inexorable to historians as it was to international culture. There scarcely seemed to be a need for a new international declaration of human rights as a call to action. “Anomalies,” such as the residues of the slave trade in Africa and the Middle East or slave-like systems of forced labor in King Leopold’s Congo or Portuguese Africa, could be scrutinized by international exposure and pressure. The ghost of the old popular mobilizations of the British antislavery tradition could occasionally be mobilized into demands for action. In the decades before the First World War Great Britain witnessed the largest resurgence of antislavery extraparliamentary protest in nearly fifty years. The 1906 British parliamentary general election was to be British nonconformity’s last hurrah in a major humanitarian mobilization against atrocities in the Congo. The fusion of humanity with human rights concerning slavery had occurred long since. As Roger Casement wrote to MP Charles Dilke in 1904 concerning the Congo, “It is this aspect of the Congo question—its abnormal injustice and extraordinary invasion, at this stage of civilized life, of fundamental human rights, which to my mind calls for the formation of a special body and the formulation of a very special appeal to the humanity of England.”40
In the twentieth century, however, the history of slavery took another turn, this time in Europe. In 1944 there were more slaves and “less-than-slaves” toiling in Europe itself than there had been in all of the Americas a century earlier. Once again this system emerged under the authority of a militarized society. In its wake came another international declaration of human rights, in 1948. In contrast to the two earlier declarations, the third, of course, did not emerge at the anticipated dawn of a new and more perfect world order. It came in grim reaction to a vast counterrevolution against the fundamental communality of human beings. The reappearance of slavery, the slave trade, and mass annihilation in Europe—the erstwhile heartland of civilization—triggered the reaffirmation of an international consensus on core human rights. In the Universal Declaration, slavery properly took its place at the forefront of the wrongs.41
For Hunt, the invention of human rights is to be found at the opening of the national revolutions in the United States and France. Moyn argues vigorously against embedding the contemporary “human rights movement” in a longue durée. A truly global movement, he posits, emerged only in the last quarter of the twentieth century. For both historians the century and a half that followed the Age of Revolution were dominated by worldwide nation-building projects that prevented human rights from emerging as a dominant global movement.
What of the alternative banner of humanitarianism, of which antislavery was emblematic? For Moyn, as for Hunt, early campaigns against the slave trade and slavery at home and abroad “that look more like contemporary human rights” campaigns were “almost never framed as rights issues.” They were rhetorically anemic and ideologically timid. Antislavery “served better,” Moyn concludes, “to justify the deployment of compassionate aid without undermining the imperialist attitudes and projects with which it was normally entangled.”42
Whatever the differences between the British abolitionist and current human rights projects two centuries later, both share a number of significant characteristics. The abolitionists’ innovative definition of the slave trade as a “crime against humanity” clearly identified every nationally sponsored transatlantic project as an assault on the human status: “Am I not a man and a brother?” was an affirmation rather than a question. Against both nationalist and imperialist projects, antislavery asserted that certain relationships were of an overriding global concern and that the acquisition of human property by the citizens of any nation should be subject to extranational jurisdiction. Even the establishment of international Mixed Commissions on both sides of the Atlantic was a very modest harbinger of that assertion.43 Interventions in favor of enslaved captives of foreign nationals were, in most respects, imperialist. But it cannot be overlooked that this long-term policy cost its principal implementers and citizens a substantial expenditure of lives and treasure. The interventions in favor of the enslaved were explicitly sanctioned in the language of universal morality.44
Finally, a comparative perspective suggests the importance of civil society activism in enhancing both the democratization and universalization of rights. It also suggests how much this activism is conditioned by political cultures and constraints within and beyond national boundaries. The social and organizational means to achieve the ending of the slave trade was grounded in civil society mobilizations both domestic and transnational. Launched almost simultaneously in Great Britain, America, and France, their participants conceived of themselves as branches of a cosmopolitan enterprise.45 The strongest branch achieved a preponderance and durability in the public sphere that was not matched for half a century by any other contemporary human rights movement. Analysts of the modern social movement like the late Charles Tilly and Sidney Tarrow now see British abolitionism as a pioneer in collective action, forecasting the modern social movement that has proliferated so widely during the past two centuries. In this sense abolitionism was the harbinger of the global human rights movement.46
I wish to thank Cheryl Welch, Stanley Engerman, and Kevin Grant for their very helpful comments and suggestions.
1. Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), appendices.
2. Ibid., 21–22.
3. Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), ch. 1, esp. 41–42. Moyn sees Hunt as a paradigmatic proponent of the “idol of origins,” projecting the causes of a phenomenon back into an invented tradition. In contrast, Moyn denies the importance of precedents for the current human rights movement, making it exclusively contingent on the collapse of alternative international moral perspectives in the 1970s. For Hunt, the long nineteenth century was a parenthesis in which nationalism and imperialism detoured the potentially universalist radicalism of the Age of Revolution’s “rights” discourse. Tellingly, half of Inventing is devoted to the preabolitionist development of sentiment against cruelty and inhumane treatment. Thereafter, while the British abolitionist movement is allotted a page for keeping alive “the flame of human rights” for more than a century and a half, a decade of Franco-Caribbean emancipation receives nine times as much attention. Moyn views the same extended period as one in which rights talk was both latent and bound within the very nation-building projects of the Age of Revolution. Abolitionism, however, even anticipates the “shocking groundswell” so central to Moyn’s account of the emergence of the contemporary human rights movement. See Seymour Drescher, “The Shocking Birth of British Abolitionism,” Slavery & Abolition 33 (2012): 571–93. For Moyn human rights were perpetuated only within nationalism and imperialism. So intertwined were the rights of man and the rights of citizens in the search for national sovereignty that in the wake of World War II, Hannah Arendt treated them as a historical conjuncture in “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man,” in Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1951), part 2, ch. 9.
4. For an alternative interpretation, see Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (London: Verso, 1988); and Blackburn, The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights (London: Verso, 2011), esp. 5, 178–79, 477–88. In this volume Blackburn notes the potential connection between human rights and the ending of slavery, especially in relation to the Haitian Revolution and the late twentieth century. See ch. 8 and 478–80.
5. See Sue Peabody and Keila Grinberg, “Free Soil: The Generation and Circulation of an Atlantic Legal Principle,” Slavery & Abolition 32 (2011): 331–39; and Seymour Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), ix–x, 23–25, 28, 66–67, 93–97, 100–105, 134, 238, 398.
6. Seymour Drescher and Paul Finkelman, “Slavery,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law, ed. Bardo Fassbender and Anne Peters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 890–916.
7. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966). Among the various long-term explanations for this emerging Western sentiment, see, inter alia, Thomas Bender, ed., The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), reflecting long historiographical debates on grounding the cultural emergence of antislavery in economic development. On the western edge of the Atlantic, abolitionist societies were founded almost simultaneously in a number of the early United States. At the national level civil society mobilization entailed both abolitionist and antiabolitionist movements. For some comparative perspectives, see, inter alia, David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Blackburn, American Crucible, chs. 8 and 12; Drescher, Abolition, chs. 9 and 11.
8. On the slave trade, see David Eltis and David Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); and David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, Manolo Florentino, and David Richardson, Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, http://www.slavevoyages.org. On the supply of North Atlantic sugar see Seymour Drescher, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), table 16, “Sources of North Atlantic Sugar Imports, 1787–1806,” 77.
9. Bodleian Library, Oxford University, Wilberforce Papers, Marquis de Lafayette to William Wilberforce, Paris, February 25, 1788.
10. See Drescher, “Shocking Birth,” 1–23; David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975); Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); J. R. Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Anti-slavery: The Mobilisation of Public Opinion against the Slave Trade, 1787–1807 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); Iain Whyte, Scotland and the Abolition of Black Slavery, 1756–1838 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006); Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). For a major alternative interpretation, see, inter alia, Blackburn’s American Crucible; and his Overthrow of Colonial Slavery.
11. Hunt, Inventing, 114–15, emphasis mine.
12. See John Markoff, The Abolition of Feudalism: Peasants, Lords, and Legislators in the French Revolution (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 431.
13. Compare Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, 53–54, 70–84; Gilbert Shapiro and John Markoff, Revolutionary Demands: A Content Analysis of the Cahiers de Doléances of 1789 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), appendix 1, “The Subject Codes,” 436–74; and David Patrick Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 160–61.
14. Oldfield, Popular Politics, ch. 4; Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, chs. 3–5; and Stephen Farrell et al., eds., The British Slave Trade: Abolition, Parliament and People (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007).
15. On abstention see W[illiam] A[llen], The Duty of Abstaining from the Use of West India Produce (London: T. W. Hawkins, 1792), iii (“advertisement”). On British women, see Clare Midgley, Women against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780–1870 (London: Routledge, 1992), 18–19; Oldfield, Popular Politics, 135–41.
16. For the British attempt to suppress the Franco-Caribbean slave liberation, see David Patrick Geggus, Slavery, War and Revolution: The British Occupation of Saint Domingue, 1793–1798 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). On British wartime policy, see Michael Duffy, “The French Revolution and British Attitudes to the West Indian Colonies,” in A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean, ed. David Barry Gaspar and David Patrick Geggus (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 78–101. On the inversion of British and French abolitionist mobilization during the decade after the outbreak of Anglo-French hostilities in Europe and the Caribbean, see Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, 98–99. Regarding the impact of the French Revolution, David Geggus concludes that it set back British slave trade abolition by a decade. See his “The Caribbean in the Age of Revolution,” in The Age of Revolution in Global Context, c. 1760–1840, ed. David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 83–100, esp. 83–88 and 240–46. But see also Claudius K. Fergus, Revolutionary Emancipation: Slavery and Abolitionism in the British West Indies (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013). On the resurgence of abolitionism in 1806–7, see Seymour Drescher, “Whose Abolition? Popular Pressure and the Ending of the British Slave Trade,” Past & Present 143 (May 1994): 136–66. On the fate of the abolitionist slogan in 1807, see Stephen Farrell, “‘Contrary to the Principles of Justice, Humanity and Sound Policy’: The Slave Trade, Parliamentary Politics and the Abolition Act, 1807,” in Farrell et al., British Slave Trade, 141–71.
17. Compare Geggus’s table of Caribbean slave rebellions and conspiracies in “Slavery, War, and Revolution in the Greater Caribbean, 1789–1815,” in Gaspar and Geggus, Turbulent Time, 46–49; and Markoff, Abolition of Feudalism, 271, fig. 6.1. Markoff counts 4,689 “insurrectionary events” in France between late 1788 and early 1793 (counting only rural conflicts).
18. See Darline Gay Levy et al., eds., Women in Revolutionary Paris 1789–1795 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), 103–22. For a description of the riots, see also George Rudé, The Crowd in the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 95–98.
19. See Carolyn E. Fick, “The Saint-Domingue Slave Revolution and the Unfolding of Independence, 1791–1804,” in The World of the Haitian Revolution, ed. David Patrick Geggus and Norman Fiering (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 177–96 (quote on 179); and Miranda Frances Spieler, “The Legal Structure of Colonial Rule during the French Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 66 (2009): 365–408 (quote on 373). On the continuities and transformations wrought by the Haitian Revolution, see Malick W. Ghachem, The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 303–14.
20. Spieler, “Legal Structure,” 398–408; and Jeremy D. Popkin, You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), ch. 10. On popular commemorations in France, see Jean-Claude Halpern, “The Revolutionary Festivals and the Abolition of Slavery in Year II,” in The Abolitions of Slavery: From L. F. Sonthonax to Victor Schoelcher, 1793, 1794, 1848, ed. Marcel Dorigny (Paris: UNESCO, 2003), 155–66. On the brief impact of the revived Société des Amis des Noirs et des Colonies in 1797–99, see Pernille Røge, “Political Economy and the Reinvention of France’s Colonial System, 1756–1802” (PhD diss., Cambridge University, 2009), 175–79. The last quotation is in Spieler, “Legal Structure,” 408.
21. See especially three essays in Geggus and Fiering, World of the Haitian Revolution: Malick Ghachem, “The Colonial Vendée,” 156–76; Fick, “The Saint-Domingue Slave Revolution,” 177–96; and Jeremy D. Popkin, “The French Revolution’s Other Island,” 199–222.
22. Ada Ferrer, “Haiti, Free Soil, and Antislavery in the Revolutionary Atlantic,” American Historical Review 117 (2012): 40–66.
23. Paul Michael Kielstra, The Politics of Slave Trade Suppression in Britain and France, 1814–1848: Diplomacy, Morality and Economics (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), 30–31.
24. British and Foreign State Papers, 1815–1816 (London: James Ridgeway, 1838), 292.
25. Lawrence C. Jennings, French Anti-slavery: The Movement for the Abolition of Slavery in France, 1802–1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
26. Darrell Meadows, “The Planters of Saint-Domingue, 1750–1804: Migration and Exile in the French Revolutionary Atlantic” (PhD diss., Carnegie Mellon University, 2004), 323–40. French cultural attitudes toward abolitionism were as deeply impacted by the Haitian Revolution as by the world of politics. Christopher L. Miller contrasts the difference in the British and French experiences with slavery to highlight the wariness of French writers in coming to terms with both Haiti and antislavery. See his The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), esp. chs. 4 and 10.
27. Kielstra, Politics of Slave Trade Suppression, 150–62.
28. For accounts of the anti-British outburst against the right to search and its impact upon French abolitionism, see Kielstra, Politics of Slave Trade Suppression, 160–62, 207–60; and Lawrence C. Jennings, French Reaction to British Slave Emancipation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), ch. 6, 144–68. At a private gathering held in lieu of the prohibited assembly, the leading British antislavery spokesman emphasized:
It is not, however, gentlemen, as an Englishman I meet you on the present occasion—it is not as a Frenchman I address you. Proud as we may be of these appellations, there is one more sacred and tender—one that links us with the whole human race—that of man! It is as a man sympathizing with his oppressed fellowman—feeling the pressure of his chain, and earnestly desiring his deliverance from bondage, that I address you, and conjure you—by all that is immutable in justice—and by all that is sacred in religion, to urge forward the cause of abolition in this country, as a great debt you owe to mankind; and, above all, to him who is the great father of all, and who commands us to “break every yoke and let the oppressed go free.”
British and Foreign Anti-slavery Reporter, April 6, 1842, 49.
29. See, inter alia, Seymour Drescher, From Slavery to Freedom: Comparative Studies in the Rise and Fall of Atlantic Slavery (New York: New York University Press, 1999), chs. 1, 2, and 6; Midgley, Women against Slavery; Christine Kinealy, “The Liberator Daniel O’Connell and Antislavery,” History Today 57 (2007): 51–57; C. S. Monaco, Moses Levy of Florida: Jewish Utopian and Antebellum Reformer (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005). On the limits of the relationship between Irish Catholics and abolitionists over Ireland, see David Turley, The Culture of English Antislavery, 1780–1860 (London: Routledge, 1991), 150–51. Even the radical working-class manifesto entitled the Objects of the Productive Classes demanded “free and protected ingress and egress of all persons into and out of all countries” (article 3) and “the rights of humanity to be universally established” (article 15).
30. Davis, Inhuman Bondage, ch. 11, esp. 208–21.
31. Emilia Viotti da Costa, Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood: The Demerara Slave Rebellion of 1823 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), ch. 16; Seymour Drescher, “Civilizing Insurgency: Two Variants of Slave Revolts in the Age of Revolution,” in Who Abolished Slavery? Slave Revolts and Abolitionism, ed. Seymour Drescher and Pieter C. Emmer (New York: Berghahn, 2010), 120–32.
32. See James Walvin, “The Propaganda of Anti-slavery,” in Slavery and British Society, 1776–1846, ed. James Walvin (London: Macmillan, 1982), 49–68; William Lloyd Garrison, The Liberator, August 20, 1841; John W. Blassingame, ed., The Frederick Douglass Papers: Speeches, Debates and Interviews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979–92), 1:373; Alexis de Tocqueville, “On the Emancipation of Slaves” (1843), in Tocqueville and Beaumont on Social Reform, ed. and trans. Seymour Drescher (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 137–73, esp. 138, 150–54. For a Haitian perspective of the British people’s “wisdom and energy” in exercising their political rights, see “Celebration of Negro Emancipation at Haiti,” Anti-slavery Reporter, November 17, 1841, 241–42. For the impact of British emancipation on African American abolitionists, see David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), ch. 11; and Edward Bartlett Rugemer, The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008), ch. 8.
33. See Jennings, French Antislavery, 101–8; Drescher, From Slavery to Freedom, ch. 6 (quotation on 178). On the eve of the Revolution of 1848, the French Abolition Society finally attempted to launch a large-scale abolitionist petition campaign by shaming its compatriots: “France blushes to still have slaves when England has no longer had them for more than eight years, when Tunis, Sweden, Wallachia, Egypt have successively delivered themselves from this hideous plague; France views slavery as an iniquity and abolition as one of its highest duties, but it has not yet manifested its wishes with enough unity to move the legislature to act definitively; even one that would be a belated homage to human dignity.” See Nelly Schmidt, Abolitionnistes de l’esclavage et réformateurs des colonies 1820–1851 (Paris: Éditions Karthala, 2000), 468–70 (my translation). Schmidt observes that it is erroneous to consider the period immediately prior to the Revolution of 1848 as a rising tide preparatory for definitive emancipation legislation (298).
34. Drescher, From Slavery to Freedom, 180–81.
35. For accounts of the meetings of 1867 and 1881, see Anti-slavery Reporter, September 16, 1867, 193–200; New York Tribune, September 13, 1867, 2; and New York Tribune, May 22, 1881, 2.
36. Jeremy Adelman, “The Rites of Statehood: Violence and Sovereignty in Spanish America, 1789–1821,” Hispanic American Historical Review 90 (2010): 391–422; Edwin Cruz Rodríguez, “La abolición de la esclavitud y la formación de lo público-político en Colombia 1821–1851,” Memoria y Sociedad 12 (2008): 57–75; Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, Empire and Antislavery: Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, 1833–1874 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999); and Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, “Wilberforce Spanished: Joseph Blanco White and Spanish Antislavery, 1808–1814,” Albert Garcia Balaña, “Antislavery before Abolitionism: Networks and Motives in Early Liberal Barcelona, 1833–1844,” and Josep M. Fradera, “Moments in a Postponed Abolition,” in Slavery and Antislavery in Spain’s Atlantic Empire, ed. Josep M. Fradera and Christopher Schmidt-Nowara (New York: Berghahn, 2013), 158–75, 229–55, and 256–90. On Portuguese abolitionism, see João Pedro Marques, The Sounds of Silence: Nineteenth-Century Portugal and the Abolition of the Slave Trade (New York: Berghahn, 2006).
37. Drescher and Finkelman, “Slavery,” 890–905.
38. Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 54–57. On the eve of the international congress on Africa at Berlin in 1884, the British government decided to propose an anti-slave-trade declaration, “making it a crime against the Law of Nations.” It was to be subject to the legal jurisdiction of all civilized nations, whatever the nationality of the accused. See Suzanne Miers, Britain and the Ending of the Slave Trade (New York: Africana, 1975), 171.
39. Daniel V. Botsman, “Freedom without Slavery? ‘Coolies,’ Prostitutes and Outcastes in Meiji Japan’s ‘Emancipation Moment,’” American Historical Review 116 (2011): 1323–47 (quotes on 1331 and 1336). By contrast, the Habsburg Empire, lacking a civil antislavery tradition, demonstrated the ease with which small economic interests could constrain British diplomatic pressure to shut down the seaborne slave trade. See Alison Frank, “The Children of the Desert and the Laws of the Sea: Austria, Great Britain, the Ottoman Empire and the Mediterranean Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century,” American Historical Review 117 (2012): 410–44.
40. Roger Casement to Charles Dilke, February 1, 1904, quoted in Kevin Grant, A Civilised Savagery: Britain and the New Slaveries in Africa, 1884–1926 (New York: Routledge, 2004), 62. For details of the Congo campaign, see pp. 66–78. Even the British antislavery society officially argued that two generations in Europe and America “had been taught to regard personal freedom as the inalienable right of every man, without distinction of race, clime, or colour, . . . a principle so potent for good is destined to achieve universal triumph” (85). See also, inter alia, the following issues of the Anti-slavery Reporter: January 1848, 1; December 1849, 184; July 1846, 108; June 1851, 94, evoking both “inalienable rights” and “rights of humanity”; June 1847, 89; May 1851, 76; October 1851, 165; July 1848, 118; November 1846, 184. The fusion of human rights with humanitarian discourse actually preceded the extension of European domination of Africa by more than half a century. At the celebration of the end of apprenticeship in 1838 the extension of concern to British “colonial barbarities” against “one hundred millions of human creatures, under British rule, in a far worse condition than less than one million negroes had ever been in the West Indies.” It was a call to action by those who were carrying out the principle “that all men are created free and equal, and have an equal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The Aborigines Protection Society expanded its active surveillance beyond the orbit of the empire to native populations in the Americas, Africa, and East Asia. See Zoë Laidlaw, “‘Justice to India-Prosperity to England-Freedom to the Slave!’ Humanitarian and Moral Reform Campaigns on India, Aborigines and American Slavery,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 22 (2012): 299–324. The fusion of humanity and human rights was a secularized and culturally relativized version of antislavery. Just as rights to their bodies, land, and labor, Africans had rights to respect for their distinctive cultures. For the interweaving of human rights terminology into antislavery during the half century after the Congo campaign, see Kevin Grant, “Human Rights and Sovereign Abolitions of Slavery, c. 1885–1956,” in Beyond Sovereignty: Britain, Empire and Transnationalism, c. 1880–1950, ed. Kevin Grant, Philippa Levine, and Frank Trentmann (New York Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 80–102.
41. See Drescher, Abolition, ch. 14.
42. Moyn, Last Utopia, 6 and esp. 32–33. Michelle Tusan demonstrates the continued tension between human rights mobilization and imperial policy rather than its presumptive service of imperialist projects. See “‘Crimes against Humanity’: Human Rights, the British Empire, and the Origins of the Response to the Armenian Genocide,” American Historical Review 119 (2014): 47–77. For the extension of British antislavery concepts of human rights into discussions of postslavery systems of indentured servitude and the history of international labor rights, see Rachel Sturman, “Indian Indentured Labor and the History of International Rights Regimes,” American Historical Review 119 (2014): 1439–65.
43. See Jenny S. Martinez, The Slave Trade and the Origins of International Human Rights Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 138. “Humanity” emerged as a key word early in discussions of the problem of Russian serf emancipation at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Proponents quickly discovered that most nobles “quickly fell back into exclamations about the French Reign of Terror.” In response, radical reformers pointed to the Saint-Domingue uprising as a warning of serfdoms’ dangers. The appeal to action was couched in terms of the need to end “slavery in Russia,” the right to possess other humans as contrary to “Humanity, Natural Law, the Holy Christian Religion and the Will of the Almighty.” See Susan P. McCaffray, “Confronting Serfdom in the Age of Revolution: Projects for Serf Reform in the Time of Alexander I,” Russian Review 64 (2005): 1–21 (quotations on 18).
44. Martinez, Slave Trade, 139. The intervention in favor of the enslaved was explicitly grounded in the language of universal morality. The social and organizational means to achieve the ending of the slave trade were embedded in civil society mobilizations, again simultaneously domestic and transnational. See Chaim D. Kaufman and Robert A. Pape, “Explaining Costly International Moral Action: Britain’s Sixty-Year Campaign against the Atlantic Slave Trade,” International Organization 53 (1999): 631–68. For a perspective emphasizing the role of religious mobilization as the pioneering development in a long-term transnational advocacy of rights, see Peter Stamatov, The Origins of Global Humanitarianism: Religion, Empires, and Advocacy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
45. See, inter alia, Davis, Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, ch. 5; Drescher, Abolition; and Brown, Moral Capital, 391–424. For a perspective that views the breakdown of civil society in “the onset of war, civil war, revolution or narrowly averted revolution” as the fundamental impulse to global slave emancipation and the expansion of human rights, see Blackburn, American Crucible, 485. Significantly, Blackburn observes that Moyn, in his own review of Hunt’s Inventing Human Rights, remarks that “it is worth pondering in what ways the campaign to abolish slavery, which began in the years that Hunt covers, anticipated human rights movements. But to do so one would have to move beyond her way of defining human rights so as to see in them a set of institutional practices, prominently including international mobilization, information gathering, public shaming and so forth.” Samuel Moyn, “On the Genealogy of Morals,” Nation, April 16, 2007, http://www.thenation.com/article/genealogy-morals/, emphasis added. Here Moyn clearly draws attention to the modus operandi of British abolitionism.
46. See Charles Tilly, Social Movements, 1768–2004 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2004), 32–34; and Charles Tilly and Sidney Tarrow, Contentious Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), ch. 1. For recent indications of the increasing interest in antislavery’s role in long-term processes of democratization and international law see, inter alia, Fassbender and Peters, Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law; Benjamin Isakhan and Stephen Stockwell, eds., The Edinburgh Companion to the History of Democracy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012) ch. 27, 325–36; and Jean Allain, ed., The Legal Understanding of Slavery: From the Historical to the Contemporary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 25–31. On recent reiterations of abolitionism, see Joel Quirk, The Anti-slavery Project: From the Slave Trade to Human Trafficking (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).