Slavery & Abolition

Arnita Ament Jones describes the collaboration of Frances Wright and Robert Dale Owen in the American movement for reform and the conduct of Utopian communities.

Stephen Clissold describes a world of Christian slaves and Moslem masters in North Africa, from the twelfth to the nineteenth centuries.

Harold Kurtz traces colonial influence from the days of Cromwell, to those of Napoleon.

Though the massacre of captives aboard the British slave ship Zong scandalised society, the pace of reform was slow.

Amid jungles and mountains the negro hunters of the wild pig, or “mareno,” long put up a ferocious resistance to the British Governors of the island. By Simon Harcourt Smith.

Charles Chenevix Trench finds that, as Governor of Equatoria and then Governor-General of the Sudan from 1874-1880, one of C. G. Gordon’s chief concerns was suppressing the slave-trade.

Louis C. Kleber profiles the tenth President of the United States, 1841-5, who survived a charge of impeachment and acquired Texas.

After bringing slavery in the West Indies to an end in 1834, Britons differed over how to treat other forms of oppression around the world, says Richard Huzzey.

Jos Damen tells the stories of two unusual men who lived a century apart in the Dutch colony at Elmina in West Africa; a poet who became a tax inspector and a former slave who argued that slavery did not contradict ideas of Christian freedom.

William Beckford was the model of an 18th-century progressive and aesthete. But the wealth that allowed him to live such a lifestyle came from the slaves he exploited in his Caribbean holdings. Robert J. Gemmett looks at how an apparently civilised man sought to justify his hypocrisy.