Having looked at the way the enslaved resisted slavery, this lecture considers the challenge to the Caribbean plantation system that came from outside the Caribbean. The first half of the lecture will discuss some of the strategies employed in West Africa in opposition to the slave trade. The second half of the lecture will discuss the contributions of British abolition movement. Yet whilst opposed to slavery, this campaign was still bound up with the perpetuation of racial discourse.

Lecture reading

Besson, Jean, ‘Missionaries, Planters, and Slaves in the Age of Abolition’ in Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (eds), The Caribbean: A History of the Region and its Peoples (Chicago, 2011), pp. 317-329.

Davis, D. B., The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (London, 1975).

Drescher, Seymour, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (Cambridge, 2009).

Fergus, Claudius, ‘"Dread of Insurrection:" Abolitionism, security, and labor in Britain’s West Indian colonies, 1760-1823’, The William and Mary Quarterly, 66: 4 (2009), pp. 757–80.

Ferrer, Ada, ‘Cuban Slavery and Atlantic Antislavery’, in Fradera, Josep M. and Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher (eds), Slavery and Antislavery in Spain’s Atlantic Empire (New York: Berghahn Books, 2016), pp. 134–57.

Hall, C., Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830-1867 (Oxford: Polity, 2002), chapters 1 and 2.

Heuman, Gad, The Caribbean (London, 2006), chapter 8.

Heuman, G., ‘The British West Indies’, in Porter, A. (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire: Volume 3 - The Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1999), pp. 470-493.

Knight, F. W., ‘The disintegration of the Caribbean slave systems, 1772-1886’, in Knight, F. W. (ed.), The Slave Societies of the Caribbean (London, 1997), pp. 322-345.

Moya Pons, Frank, History of the Caribbean: Plantations, Trade, and War in the Atlantic World (London, 2007), chapter 13.

Paton, Diana, ‘The Abolition of Slavery in the Non-Hispanic Caribbean’ in Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (eds), The Caribbean: A History of the Region and its Peoples (Chicago, 2011), pp. 289-301.

Pieterse, J. ‘Slavery and abolitionism’, in White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture (London: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 52-63.

Rashid, Ismail, '"A Devotion to the Idea of Liberty at Any Price": Rebellion and Antislavery in the Upper Guinea Coast in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries' in Sylviane A. Diouf (ed), Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies (Athens, OH, 2003), pp.132-151.