The chapter reviews the scholarly interpretations of abolition that have appeared in the last two decades. One group, influenced by Eric Williams, looks for economic motivations stemming from a decline of the British plantation sector; a second focuses on rebellions by slaves, the chief of which was that in St. Domingue, which gave birth to Haiti in 1802. Some in this category see the slaves freeing themselves. Others argue for long-run changes in public attitudes toward violence within Western Europe, especially England, that occurred in the 150 years after the British established their Caribbean plantations. In the eighteenth century the nascent London press began to report slaves resistance to enslavement both on board slave ships and in Caribbean colonies. These reports became more frequent and more detailed as the century progressed. Other cruelties such as burning at the stake, abandoning children, masters’ right to chastise their servants, and the lords’ power over their serfs (in mainland Europe) either ceased or became less frequently exercised. At the same time awareness of Africans and their forced use in the Americas as represented in the London press greatly increased after 1750. Where “slaves” meant English captives in North Africa at the beginning of the century, by 1800 the term referred to Blacks in the Americas.

More than 200,000 Africans were freed from slave ships after 1807 as a result of British policy. Most were processed by Mixed Commission or Vice-Admiralty Courts and assigned the status of “Liberated Africans,” but their freedom was severely restricted by “apprenticeships” of varying lengths supposedly to prepare them for entering a free labor market. However those entering Cuban or Brazilian jurisdictions had lives little different from slaves. In Sierra Leone, by contrast, apprenticeships were short-term and did not involve plantation labor. Photographic, anthropometric, and per capita income evidence indicates that most did not do as well as the poor European migrants who were emigrating in large numbers to the Americas at this period. Liberated Africans did not have the same opportunities as Whites because of racism. They did not have access to the land distributed by the Homestead Act, and could not enter labor markets on the same terms as Whites. In other words, the anti-Black attitudes that made the transatlantic slave trade possible continued after its abolition. The Liberated African records allow us to examine the African origins of enslaved people. The nineteenth-century slave trade from West Africa had a preponderance of Yoruba, Igbo, and Mende speakers.

Lauren Dembowitz’s chapter focuses on race and visual culture, drawing on Blake’s notion of the “bounding line” with its “infinite inflexions and movements” that recast the visual image without relying on the inhumanity and philistinism of mass production. These “inflexions and movements” allow us to imagine new possibilities for familiar images, such as that of the “Hottentot Venus,” Sarah Baartman. Rather than write off these images as racist stereotypes, we can, with Dembowitz’s Blakean method, attend closely to how the material history of the visual text is imbricated with the history of race, which is subtly transformed with each new iteration. As Dembowitz powerfully concludes, the image compels us to “contend with the ways we are ‘intimately connected’ with, ‘bound up in,’ and ‘dependent upon’ that figure and the real women she overwrites for understanding how racial capitalism lives on in our present.”

Joseph Albernaz examines how “the modern category of lyric voice is entangled with processes of racialization.” Albernaz focuses on the complaint poem, a subgenre that was especially important to Romantic-era abolitionists, who often ventriloquized enslaved Africans. And yet, Albernaz contends, Romantic poetry, particularly as it is taken up by Black writers, is also capable of refusing the racial logics it has traditionally upheld. In such instances, complaint negates the world as it is and reveals, however briefly, “the collective undersong of No, the depthless well of non-sense from which all sense springs.”

Mathelinda Nabugodi traces the shifts in Coleridge’s thoughts on race from his early abolitionist writings to his later reflections on beauty and aesthetics. Focusing on his comments about Africans, Nabugodi demonstrates a crucial tension between the Romantic poet’s youthful commitment to abolition and the embrace of scientific racism in his later writings. This tension also informs the revisions that Coleridge made to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) when he prepared it for republication in Sibylline Leaves (1817). Nabugodi’s careful comparative reading of the 1798 and the 1817 versions highlights the way a representative poet’s work embodies the contradictions of a Romanticism in which freedom could be imagined as universal even as European superiority was taken for granted.

This chapter covers Haitian periodical culture in early nineteenth-century Haiti (1804–1843) and the spirited, fraught process of national literary formation under Henry Christophe, Alexandre Pétion, and Jean-Pierre Boyer. It considers early periodicals and their engagement in political combat and partisan confrontation, within Haiti and in the broader Atlantic world. Early Haitian writers refuted European racial pseudoscience that sustained slavery and engaged in internal polemics on the nature of Haiti’s independence; the best form of governance for the nation’s survival; and the meaning of freedom, civilization, and literature. The chapter argues that these aspects of early periodical culture were central to the development of Haitian literature. It traces the development of an idea of Haitian national literature in that culture. Whereas earlier newspapers presented ‘literature’ as the inclusion of occasional verse and creative poetic production in their pages, newspapers, magazines and eventually specialized journals began to theorize the existence of a national Haitian literature national literary culture—an idea that would become fully realized by the late 1830s.

The historical context of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s antislavery speeches between 1844 and 1855 indicates that he gave them reluctantly after yielding to entreaties and that they are confused, contradictory, and without direction. Stunningly, between 1851 and 1854, years of monumental events in the time of abolitionism, there is no evidence that Emerson ever uttered a single word about slavery publicly. Although hating slavery with a passion, he disliked abolitionists almost as much and shied away from taking a public stand until 1856.

The historical context of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s antislavery speeches between 1844 and 1855 indicates that he gave them reluctantly after yielding to entreaties and that they are confused, contradictory, and without direction. Stunningly, between 1851 and 1854, years of monumental events in the time of abolitionism, there is no evidence that Emerson ever uttered a single word about slavery publicly. Although hating slavery with a passion, he disliked abolitionists almost as much and shied away from taking a public stand until 1856.

The British decision to dispatch expeditions to trace the courses of the Niger and Congo rivers was driven by two major considerations—strategic worries that the French would displace the British as the dominant European power in the region after the war and abolitionist concerns that the only way to stop the slave trade was to pressure Africans in the interior to turn to ‘legitimate commerce’. Acting on Park’s suspicion that the Niger and the Congo were the same river, officials organized expeditions to explore both of them. The Niger expedition was an army operation, its caravan consisting mainly of soldiers. The Congo expedition was a more scientifically-oriented naval endeavor that initially intended to use a steamship to go upriver. Both expeditions were large, costly ventures, indicating that various British ideological, political, and commercial groups had an interest in their success.

Chapter 5 studies the “problem of evil.” Violence is a learned behavior; peaceful interventions and de-escalation disrupt the learning cycles of violence. By 1859, Black and White abolitionists had been attempting to bring about peaceful interventions to stop slavery since the nation’s founding. But southern slaveholders were not going to give up their slave property. In the Civil War enslavers refused President Lincoln’s offer of compensated emancipation (being paid market price per slave in exchange for setting slaves free) time and again. This is the problem of evil. How does one disrupt a violent institution when, in this case, slaveholders refused peaceful means of abolishing it? John Brown understood this dynamic and he challenged the greatest enabler of slavery in the United States, the federal government. This chapter explores understandings of Black violence and Black authority (threats to the hostile differences of liberal society), the legal mechanisms used to deploy troops against slave uprisings, and interprets Brown’s interracial Virginia attack as an attempt to fashion a government that backs the enslaved over the slaveholder.

Chapter 3 examines policing as a street-level form of governance which is central to racial capitalism. Focusing on the murder of Marielle Franco and police violence in Rio de Janeiro, it argues that policing functions as an ongoing war on groups and communities deemed wayward, delinquent, and undeserving: what I describe as a ‘war on dirt’. From Rio to London, Ireland to India, policing has been a key mechanism through which the state orders bourgeois society. Policing thus understood is a dirt-producing system which orders as it rejects, sanitizes as it represses. Drawing on afro-feminist quilombismo and recent work on black anarchism, the chapter argues that the struggle for police abolition must be anarchised and extended to target the racial capitalist state as a whole. Viewed antipolitically, abolition requires a break, not just with carcerality, but with state logics and governance in its entirety.

Chapter 4, “‘A Wandering Maniac’: Sojourner Truth’s Demonic Marronage” turns to a prophet seldom associated with the Caribbean. Yet Sojourner Truth, who was born in 1797 in the predominantly Dutch Ulster County, grew up in a world shaped by Atlantic empires; steeped in African, Native American, Caribbean, Spanish, Dutch, and French histories; and shaking with the tremors of the Haitian Revolution. Her first language was Dutch, her early spiritual beliefs were African, and her community was influenced by transatlantic and Caribbean channels of trade, labor, and revolution. This chapter examines the energy practices of Truth’s creolized milieu within a broader discourse on Truth’s celebrated mobility, historicizing her fugitivity within a transnational history of female marronage throughout the Americas. This hemispheric history of wandering evokes what Sylvia Wynter has understood as the “demonic grounds” of Black women’s liberation. Suturing the demonic (an energy force that emerges from Wynter’s critique of nineteenth-century physics) with Caribbean practices of marronage (a kinetic practice of flight against the immobilizing energy demands of chattel slavery), Truth, I argue, not only is an Atlantic subject but also expands critical understandings of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Caribbean philosophy and specifically Black women’s energy in the Americas.

Jacques Pierre Brissot founded the Society of the Friends of the Blacks in Paris in early 1788. Although primarily operational in Paris, the society was very much an Atlantic organization. Through superficial examinations of the efforts of the Friends of the Blacks, scholars have categorized the French movement as based solely in the printed word and engagement through revolutionary assemblies. Taken in isolation from other Atlantic philanthropic activity, the movement appears diminutive, sporadic, and ineffectual. Yet, France granted rights to free people of color and abolished slavery – lasting from 1794 to 1802 – before England, the United States, and other countries deeply entangled in the Atlantic struggle over the status of peoples of African descent. The French movement was not a failure; it was part of a longer process of abolition. While late eighteenth-century efforts did not bring about the permanent end to slavery in the French Caribbean – something only achieved in 1848 – those like Brissot advocated for peoples of African descent during the French Revolution, laying the groundwork for the later success of the nineteenth-century abolitionists.