New book on Britain’s opposition to the slave trade
Liverpool historian Richard Huzzey has co-edited a new collection of essays examining the role of Britain in opposing the Atlantic slave trade. The Royal Navy’s campaign to suppress the slave trade (c. 1807-1867) has puzzled 19th-century contemporaries and historians since the British Empire turned naval power and moral outrage against a branch of commerce it had done so much to promote.
The assembled authors of The suppression of the Atlantic slave trade: British policies, practices and representations of naval coercion bridge the gap between ship and shore to reveal the motives, effects, and legacies of this campaign in a book that Richard has co-edited with Robert Burroughs (Leeds Beckett University). As the first academic history of Britain’s campaign to suppress the Atlantic slave trade in more than thirty years, the book gathers experts in history, literature, historical geography, museum studies, and the history of medicine to analyse naval suppression in light of recent work on slavery and empire. Three sections reveal the policies, experiences and representations of slave-trade suppression from the perspectives of metropolitan Britons, liberated Africans, black sailors, colonialists, and naval officers. The volume is published as part of Manchester University Press’s long-running “Studies in Imperialism” series.
See Manchester University Press website to learn more about this book.