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Going global: British abolitionists and the campaign to export anti-slavery

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Abstract

This article explores the global campaign against slavery carried out by the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (the BFASS) during the nineteenth century. The BFASS strove to frame British anti-slavery as exportable to settings abroad, including the USA, Brazil, Spain, and the Netherlands. Drawing on a range of primary sources—including newsletters, meeting minutes, and memos—this article unpacks how the BFASS repurposed the British anti-slavery movement into the global anti-slavery movement. In pursuit of this aim, the BFASS was a flawed organization that adopted positions toward Britain’s naval effort to suppress the trade of enslaved persons in the Atlantic and the North’s campaign within the American Civil War incongruous with its commitment to abolitionism. Accordingly, the article explores why the organization adopted policy positions that contradicted its professed mission.

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Notes

  1. The Anti-Slavery Society Convention, 1840, by Henry Beckford. Accessible at https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw00028/The-Anti-Slavery-Society-Convention-1840.

  2. As Forclaz notes: “late-nineteenth-century anti-slavery organizations combined traits of humanitarian pressure groups and imperial propagandistic agencies” (9).

  3. The link between economic change and British abolitionism is contested. For example, Heartfield (2016) argues that the industrial revolution decreased Britain’s economic reliance on slavery. Anstey (1980) refutes this interpretation seeing no link between economic forces and abolition.

  4. See Sharp (1783), An Essay on Slavery.

  5. “Immediatism” refers to the ideological position that the anti-slavery movement should pursue sudden and decisive policies to abolish the practice.

  6. Quote recorded in the Anti-Slavery Reporter, accessed in Teall (1897).

  7. See summary paper titled “Emancipation,” accessed through the UK National Archive’s online portal.

  8. Journal entry by Joseph Sturge, December 31, 1835, in Tyrrell (1987, 63–64).

  9. Founding Charter of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, page 1.

  10. See Williams 1994, 258. The author’s endnotes suggest that by the 1850s some abolitionists (including early BFASS organizer Fowell Buxton) had shifted their views in support of the state’s policy of forcible suppression.

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Correspondence to Matthew N. Timmerman.

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For helpful comments and advice, the author thanks Joseph Young, Diane Singerman, Boaz Atzili, Jaclyn Fox, the journal’s anonymous reviewers, and the American University library staff. This manuscript benefitted from audience feedback at American University’s 2019 Tri-School Doctoral Research Conference.

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Timmerman, M.N. Going global: British abolitionists and the campaign to export anti-slavery. Int Polit 60, 62–75 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41311-021-00369-2

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