Empire and Slavery

This previously neglected area has grown into one of the most exciting in the field. Although slavery forms an integral part of the British Empire, especially in our period, it has developed its own distinct area of inquiry. See also Writings on Slavery and Anthologies: Primary, especially texts edited by Wood, Basker, and Kitson and Lee (8 vols.). Studies in this dual area also overlap with several others under Women & Gender: see especially the bibliography in Wilson (2004).

Good places to start are with the general historical studies by Walvin, Davis (2006), Anstey, and Blackburn on slavery and the two Cambridge volumes edited by P.J. Marshall on empire. C.A.Bayly's work on British imperialism is standard for our period; solid older studies (now dated) are by Fieldhouse, Harlow, Koebner, and Parry. The older, controversial, influential study by Eric Williams is the subject of research by Cateau and Carrington and essays in Solow and Engerman. Stokesbury offers a readable overview from a naval perspective. Kathleen Wilson's work is recommended; it forms part of the so-called "New Imperial History" school, a scholarly development in post-colonial studies (for two introductions to this disparate field, see Young and Ashcroft et al). Wilson is solid on both the domestic and foreign policy fronts and is especially attuned to women and gender.

For work focused on the relation of empire to British Romantic literature, see the collections by Fulford and Kitson, Richardson and Hofkosh, and individual studies by Green, Leask, Perera, and Trumpener. The Fulford and Kitson volume is related to work in the anthology by Kitson and Lee (described more fully under Writings on Slavery, linked above).

Studies of anti-slavery texts and their relation to British Romantic literature can be found in the dated but valuable book by Sypher, the collection edited by Plasa and Ring, and individual studies by Baum, Ferguson, Lee, Lively, Thomas, Turley, and Wood. Thomas and Wood are advanced but intelligible; Lee's work is recommended.
____________________________________________________________________

Empire | Slavery

Empire

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, eds. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (1995)

Bayly, C.A. "The First Age of Global Imperialism, 1760-1830." Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 26 (1998):28-48

Bayly, C.A. Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World 1780-1830 (1989)

Duffy, Michael. Soldiers, Sugar, and Seapower: The British Expeditions to the West Indies and the War Against Revolutionary France (1987)

Fieldhouse, D.K. The Colonial Empires: A Comparative Survey from the Eighteenth Century (1966)

Fulford, Tim, et al, eds. Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era: Bodies of Knowledge (2004)

Fulford, Tim and Peter J. Kitson, eds. Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780-1830 (1998)

Gascoigne, John. Science in the Service of Empire (1998)

Green, Martin. Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire (1979)

Harlow, Vincent T. The Founding of the Second British Empire (1964)

Hyam, Ronald. Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (1990)

Koebner, Richard. Empire (1961)

Judd, Denis. Empire: The British Imperial Experience, from 1765 to the Present (1996)

Leask, Nigel. British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (1993)

Makdesi, Saree. Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (1998)

Marshall, P.J., ed. The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol. II: The Eighteenth Century (1998)

Marshall, P.J., ed. The Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire (1996)

Morgan, Philip D. “The Black Experience in the British Empire, 1680-1810” in Marshall (1998)

Nussbaum, Felicity. Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in the Eighteenth-Century English Narratives (1995)

Parry, J.H. Trade and Dominion: European Oversea Empires in the Eighteenth Century (1971)

Perera, S. Reaches of Empire: The English Novel from Edgeworth to Dickens (1991)

Rosso, G.A. "Empire of the Sea: Blake's King Edward the Third and English Imperial Poetry," in Blake, Politics and History, eds. Jackie DiSalvo, G.A. Rosso and Christopher Z. Hobson (1998)

Stokesbury, James L. Navy and Empire (1983)

Trumpener, Katie. Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and British Empire (1997)

Wilson, Kathleen, ed. A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660-1840 (2004)

Wilson, Kathleen. "Women and Empire, 1700-1850," in British Women's History 1660-1850 eds. Elaine Chalus and Hannah Barker (2004)

Wilson, Kathleen. The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (2003)

Young, Robert J.C. Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (2001)

Slavery

Anstey, Roger. The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760-1810 (1975)

Baum, Joan. Mind-Forg'd Manacles: Slavery and the Romantic Poets (1994)

Blackburn, Robin. The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern 1492–1800 (1997)

Blackburn, Robin. The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery: 1776-1848 (1988)

Caretta, Vincent. Equiano the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (2005)

Carretta, Vincent and Philip Gould. "Genius in Bondage": A Critical Anthology of the Literature of the Early Black Atlantic (2001)

Cateau, Heather and Selwyn H.H. Carrington. Capitalism and Slavery Fifty Years Later: Eric Eustace Williams--A Reassessment of the Man and His Work (2001)

Davis, David Brion. Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (2006)

Davis, David Brion.The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (1975)

Eltis, David. The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (2000)

Ferguson, Moira. Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670-1834 (1992)

James, C.L.R. The Black Jacobins: Touissaint L'Overture and the San Domingo Revolution (1936, 1963)

Lee, Debbie. Slavery and the Romantic Imagination (2002)

Lively, Adam. Masks: Blackness, Race, and the Imagination (1999)

Midgley, Clare. Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780-1870 (1992)

Myers, Norma. Reconstructing the Past: Blacks in Britain 1780-1839 (1996)

Oldfield, J.R. Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery: The Mobilisation of Public Opinion against the Slave Trade, 1787-1807 (1995)

Plasa, Carl, and Betty J. Ring (eds.) The Discourse of Slavery: Aphra Behn to Toni Morrison (1994)

Richardson, Alan and Sonia Hofkosh, eds. Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, 1780-1834 (1996)

Sandiford, Keith. Measuring the Moment: Strategies of Protest in Eighteenth-Century Afro-English Writing (1988)

Solow, Barbara Lewis and Stanley L. Engerman, eds. British Capitalism and Caribbean Slavery: The Legacy of Eric Williams (new ed. 2004)

Sypher, Wylie. Guinea 's Captive Kings: British Anti-Slavery Literature of the [18th] Century (1942)

Thomas, Helen. Romanticism and Slave Narratives: Transatlantic Testimonies (2000)

Turley, David. The Culture of English Antislavery, 1780-1860 (1991)

Walvin, James Black Ivory: A History of British Slavery (1993)

----- Slaves and Slavery: The British Colonial Experience (1992)

Wheeler, Roxann. The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (2000)

Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery (1944)

Wood, Marcus. Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography (2003)
Top