This chapter discusses whether the theoretical framework of this book can explain cases outside of Borneo and the Persian Gulf. Kuwait can readily be explained by the same framework as Qatar and Bahrain. This chapter then analyzes negative cases that meet at least one of the two conditions. It first looks at the West Indies, particularly the case of Trinidad and Tobago. Trinidad was a producer of oil but became part of the West Indies Federation when it was established in 1958, although the federation collapsed four years later. It argues that Trinidad’s initial inclusion into a larger entity can be explained by the absence of the protectorate system. Second, it investigates the case of British protectorates in South Arabia. They had been governed in a similar fashion to lower Gulf sheikhdoms during the colonial period, but many of them had no choice but to join the Federation of South Arabia in 1962. This chapter argues that the difference between those states and successful cases of separate independence lies in the presence of oil. It thus shows that the theory of this book travels to other cases.

The Dutch Empire lasted from 1600 to 1975 and beyond; even now there are some Caribbean island dependencies left. The size, shape, and nature of the empire has evolved and altered, but over those centuries the Dutch colonies have been an important, if fluctuating, component of the national consciousness. Economic advantages were very considerable, but arguably the Dutch gained just as much in terms of self-confidence and status for their small nation: in the nineteenth century the empire was seen as absolutely essential in terms of both economics and prestige. Even in the twenty-first century, a centrist prime minister could call for a return to “the mentality of the VOC” (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, United East Indies Company), a remark that was not universally well received.

Chapter 17 retraces the Groupe de Coppet’s work toward abolition of the Atlantic slave trade, from Staël’s parents in the 1780s to Staël’s children in the 1840s. What links these fighters is Staël. Staël’s gender, her religion, her life of revolution and exile all fed the flame that drove her struggle forward. Staël’s thought, trained in the Enlightenment, strives constantly toward universal and timeless truths, which brings a special excitement and power to her discussion of freedom and its antithesis, slavery, in the age of the Déclaration des droits de l’homme. In the history of abolitionism, many aspects of Staël’s thought are curious: her broad refusal of the slave-despot metaphor; her geographical and historical sweep; and her refusal of topoi designed to short-circuit discussion, like the Christian slaves in Algiers. Thirty-odd years of thought about freedom will produce some words on slavery, but Staël and her circle joined deeds to words.

The Epilogue gives a brief overview of the main arguments and themes presented in the book, and explores the legacy of debates over British Emancipation within American political culture into the Civil War and Reconstruction. It also examines the unfinished business of the experiment in the British West Indies through the lens of conflicts between freedpeople and the colonial state decades after emancipation.

This chapter traces debates and arguments around black freedom that animated discussions on amelioration and emancipation in both British metropole and colony. Much of this was predicated on fear, where the ever present Hydra of slave rebellion and disorder threatened, even as enslaved people’s revolutionary acts helped stimulate a metropolitan abolitionist movement. The chapter argues that this preeminent association of black freedom with disorder shaped the boundaries of emancipation and thus the parameters of the experiment.

The chapter provides a transnational perspective on how the apprenticeship’s end caused new challenges for the free labor experiment, as British West Indian colonial economies faltered in the 1840s and former slaves asserted their rights as working people. In their pursuit of expanded liberty, black West Indians forced American antislavery to examine the limitations of a strict free labor ideology, and to envision the experiment’s success on other terms, as the issue of slavery moved to the center of national politics.

The Introduction provides an overview of the book. It charts the origin of the antislavery concept of Jubilee and the concept of British Emancipation as a "mighty experiment." It discusses the major themes of the book as well as its influences, including historiographies of British slavery and empire, the post-emancipation Anglo-West Indies, as well as American slavery and abolitionism. It also lays out the methodologies utilized in the study and concludes with a summation of each chapter.

This chapter provides a study of commemorations of British Emancipation in the Atlantic world and their political meanings, exploring their transnational divergences and intersections in the cultural production of freedom. Starting with the Caribbean, it examines freedpeople’s celebrations of emancipation and how this at times conflicted with missionary and colonial elites’ directives on how freedom and slavery should be remembered and memorialized. In the United States, it traces the development of celebrations of August 1 and argues that these events arose out of attempts to shape public perceptions on the success of the experiment. August 1 enabled abolitionists and African Americans to publicly merge political and intellectual thoughts with the transnational triumph of British Emancipation toward an antislavery strategy at home.

This chapter examines how free labor was adapted as a compelling argument in the antislavery Anglo-Atlantic. For English antislavery these strategies developed out of a need to show emancipation’s imperial commercial advantages, as parliamentary debates questioned whether former slaves would work upon emancipation. In the United States, free labor antislavery emerged from a burgeoning ideology that imbued labor with moral characteristics. Through the industriousness of black West Indians, abolitionists on either side of the Atlantic hoped to prove the moral rightness of emancipation, the capability of former slaves within democratic capitalism, and the benefits of free labor.

This chapter examines free African Americans’ perceptions of the emancipated British West Indies. As I argue, beyond many of the concerns of their white abolitionist allies, free African Americans considered the experiment’s implications for their own future prospects of liberty, racial equality, and citizenship rights in the United States. In their autonomous newspapers, speeches, and print publications, they touted the success of the emancipated British West Indies as evidence against notions of black inferiority and as a model for participatory citizenship. But this narrative was complicated by a short-lived but provocative West Indian Emigration Scheme of the late 1830s, stimulating heated debates in the black press that reveal the limits of transnational identity.

The chapter traces the project of reforming the Anglo-West Indies from early missionary efforts through the post-emancipation. Abolitionists’ assessments of moral reform in the British colonies served as a compelling argument of the experiment’s success. In the United States, influenced by the Great Awakening, morality, religious instruction, education, and spiritual uplift were appealing indicators on the success or failure of emancipation. Some American reformers journeyed to the West Indies to take part in this “civilizing mission.” But as I argue, freedpeople had their own perceptions of moral behavior, challenging the expectations of reformers in both England and America.

The chapter provides a study of how the apprenticeship implemented through much of the emancipated British West Indies posed problems for the free labor defense of the experiment, as it sought to maintain the structures of slavery — in deed if not in name. None understood this better than former slaves, who viewed the repression doled out by magistrates and planters as a subversion of both labor and freedom. Through testimonies and acts of resistance, I illustrate how freedpeople forced an end to the apprenticeship even as American abolitionists sought to use their laboring potential as a defense of the experiment.

The British Army took part in numerous operations, ranging from small expeditions to the West Indies, Africa and along the European littoral to major operations in Portugal, Spain and Belgium. Initial struggles with these responsibilities, together with those of imperial policing and maintaining order in Ireland would oblige the Army to implement extensive reforms, particularly in tactics and unit organisation, even while the system of purchase for officers remained intact. While British infantry produced mixed results in the field during the French Revolutionary Wars, in time it became noteworthy for its musketry and remarkable doggedness in battle. Chronically understrength and notoriously difficult to control, the cavalry tended to play only a minor part on campaign, while shortages of artillery and engineers plagued the Army throughout this period. Albeit comparatively small, in creating an Iberian foothold which soon developed into a major theatre of operations, the instrument forged in the battles and sieges of the Peninsula and southern France helped drain Napoleon’s resources over a substantial period and established the high standard of battlefield performance which was to reach its apogee on the field of Waterloo, from which would emerge one of history’s greatest commanders – the Duke of Wellington.

Global Britishness was encoded in complex categories citizenship and subjecthood, that had traditionally been counched in remarkably elastic terms so as to uphold the myth of imperial belonging. Into the post-war years, this global remit became encoded in the 1948 British Nationality Act, at a time when other Commonwealth countries were moving toward separate citizenship status. These tension underlined the contradictions of British subjecthood at a time of renewed global mobility. In particular, West Indian sojourners in London were reminded on a daily basis that the mutual recognition of British subjecthood could in no sense be taken for granted, their mere presence in a metropolitan setting sparking debate about the universal properties of Greater Britain

The British world was not just an assortment of widely dispersed peoples but also an empire of trade goods. Over time, the goods themselves became freighted with the ‘moral economy’ of imperial partnership. As the empire unravelled and the verities of global Britishness were called into queston, therefore, humble trade commodities were not immune to the contingencies, unable to rely on older consumer loyalties in the face of tectonic shifts in the terms of trade and the attractions of new markets outside of the British orbit. Britain’s decision to seek membership of the European Economic Community in the early 1960s represented not just a major rupture in the traditional patterns of trade, but also an audit of the emotional balance sheet. Everyday consumer items with little in the way of obvious emotional ballast — wheat, butter, lamb, tinned fruits, and especially sugar — would play a crucial role in denaturalising Britain’s place in Commonwealth markets and vice versa. Viewed from the perspective of disparate communities heavily reliant on goods for export to the UK market, Britain’s European aspirations ignited passions and resentments that could not simply be explained in terms of lost export opportunities. That such appeals to a wider moral economy ultimately failed to prevent the UK from taking the plunge — albeit delayed by a decade of false starts and endemic ill-feeling — suggests that the diminishing returns of greater British goods was a reliable index of an imploding British world.

This essay, given as a public address in St. Thomas in 1952, proposes that the West Indies represent “in microcosm the problem of our time.” Long exploited by the European powers as a “deliberate laboratory” of modern production techniques, the subjugation of labor, and the capitalist system, the West Indies now face the “world problem”: the urgent challenge of preserving capitalism’s increased power of production while using the wealth it generates to promote the health, well-being, and democratic voice of all people. Political and economic discipline can make the West Indies a haven not only for the wealthy but for all their residents: a paradise of the “higher and simpler life in which the human spirit blooms and unfolds.”

Leslie Arliss’s The Man in Grey features a Regency-period staging of Othello’s murder of Desdemona, with a white Jamaican named Swinton Rokeby (played by Stewart Granger) blacked up for the title role. Partly through Othello, the film suggests a racial fantasy in which Rokeby reaffirms his whiteness by violently reclaiming his island home from emancipated black slaves. In this way, the film captures anxieties about race, sexuality and colonial participation that are activated by the migration to Britain of black West Indians to aid in the war effort; to put it differently, The Man in Grey appropriates Othello in order to explore how racial difference reveals the limits of a coherent British identity. The film also collapses the distinction between Shakespearean tragedy and costume melodrama, thereby mocking the canons of taste (and the view of the Bard) generally shared by film companies, period critics and government propagandists

This chapter investigates two episodes in which humanitarian objectives clashed with liberal economic orthodoxy. The British India Society broke away from the Aborigines’ Protection Society in 1839. It linked ‘Justice to India’ with ‘Prosperity to England’ and ‘Freedom’ to American slaves, but its supporters were divided over the first Opium War and its campaign was derailed by the decision to prioritize Corn Law repeal over Indian reform. The relationship between ‘free trade’ and ‘free labour’ was also a focus of the campaign waged by the West India Association, in which Dr Thomas Hodgkin was prominent, to maintain tariff protection for British West Indian sugar against that produced by slaves in Brazil and Cuba. The Association prioritized free colonial labour over free trade, even though a more ethical British stance would come at the expense of British workers. The chapter reveals tensions between London and the British provinces, and within liberal imperial policy, as well as contradictions within humanitarian circles.