Slave Empire

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In the eighteenth century, Britain rose to global power on the backs of enslaved workers. Liberty and property, venerated as cornerstones of the British state, were secured with blood on colonial plantations. In the nineteenth century, Britain ended its slave trade and abolished slavery in its empire. But even the antislavery movement was twisted by the legacy of the slave empire.In intimate, human detail, Slave Empire shows how British imperial power was built on sugar, tobacco and coffee plantations worked by enslaved African labourers and their descendants. With original research and synthesis of new scholarship, it explores two clashing visions of the British empire after emancipation. To abolitionist leaders in Britain, emancipation would usher in cheap wage labour on plantations and new missions to 'civilise' the formerly enslaved. To freedpeople, emancipation meant liberation and autonomy. And yet, there was no bright line between the brutality of plantation labour and the 'civilisation' that the empire promised to its subjects. Antislavery laws and policies dissolved colonial slavery but preserved white supremacy. And as freedom - free elections, free labour, free trade - became watchwords in the Victorian era, the British empire was still sustained by the labour of enslaved people, in the United States, Cuba and elsewhere. Modern Britain has inherited the legacies and contradictions of a liberal empire built on slavery. Modern capitalism and liberalism emphasise 'freedom' - for individuals and for markets - but are built on human bondage.