This book is a substantial, detailed organizational history of the anti-slavery movement established by British abolitionists with the ambition of achieving “universal emancipation” after the apparent end of slavery within the Empire in the 1830s. Heartfield brings context, and assessment, to the public positions and actions of the organization’s leaders in his discussions of the issues that they addressed. The book follows the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society’bfass) engagement with chattel slavery and various forms of unfree labor regimes in both the Americas and Africa before and under European imperial rule, as well as the slave trade across the Atlantic, the Arab trade in the Indian Ocean, and internal African slave trade. The chapters about the twentieth century explore bfass attempts to persuade the League of Nations and the United Nations to define and monitor slavery and other unacceptable labor practices and press for their abolition.
The characteristic...