Ephemeral conversations between enslaved people about the laws of slavery and freedom constituted an exchange of precious knowledge and legal know-how that shaped Black life and thought in the early Atlantic world. This chapter explores enslaved people's petitions to the crown for freedom on the basis that their enslavement was illegitimate to write a history of ideas among enslaved Black people about the illegitimacy of certain types of enslavements in the Spanish empire. These petitions are indicative of a rich landscape of ideas about freedom and slavery among free and enslaved Black people in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and their engagement with Castilian rules of law of slavery and freedom. They argued that they were legally free and that their freedom had been stolen from them. Pedro de Carmona, for example, protested in his petition in 1547 about the “great injury and disturbances (agravios y turbación) that have been done to my liberty.” The chapter traces how enslaved Black litigants accrued this know-how through their discussions with other enslaved and free Black people during their desperate pursuits to reclaim the freedom that had been stolen from them.

Even after the soldiers of the West India Regiments helped to suppress enslaved uprisings in Barbados (1816) and Demerara (1823), they continued to be objects of suspicion. This chapter examines the efforts that commanding officers and supporters of the regiments made to challenge such opposition by seeking to manage the image of their Black soldiers and portray them in a favourable light. What emerged was the ‘steady Black soldier’, an ambiguous racial-martial figure that was simultaneously soldierly yet passive. This theme is explored through both the predominant representation of the soldiers as standing ‘ready for inspection’ and the elision of any active military role. This image is placed in the context of wider debates about the figure of the Black subject that characterised the contemporaneous controversy over slavery and it will be argued that the steady Black soldier represents the military equivalent to the kneeling enslaved figure promulgated by anti-slavery advocates.

This chapter explores the transformation of British responses to slavery during the 1830s through the writing of Frances Trollope. In this decade, Britons declared the abolition of colonial slavery as proof of their superior morals and impeccable manners. Trollope’s travel narrative Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) and anti-slavery novel Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw (1838) participated in the reconstruction of racism as a peculiarly American form of bad manners. Although Black women are virtually absent from Domestic Manners, Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw is notable for its range of Black female characters and its frank exploration of the sexual exploitation to which enslaved women were subjected. Trollope’s belated acknowledgement of the gendered effects of enslavement reflects the sensational impact of the publication of The History of Mary Prince (1831). Trollope reveals a historic kinship and complicity between Great Britain and the United States as slaveholding nations. The reception of Prince’s History among British abolitionists who did not want to acknowledge this complicity demonstrated how well-intentioned good manners could function as a form of racism.

This chapter focuses on planters manuals beyond Saint-Domingue published by Jean Samuel Guisan and Jean-Baptiste Poyen de Sainte-Marie. Writing respectively in the very different circumstances of an underdeveloped French Guiana and an economically mature Guadeloupe, both writers urged planters to adopt technological innovations, regiment their workforce, keep detailed records, and prioritize long-term profitability over short-term profits. Publishing in close proximity to the French and Haitian Revolutions (1788 and 1792, respectively), they also had to consider increased anti-slavery sentiment, even revolutionary ferment, in expressing their pro-slavery views. They responded by promoting the ideal of an “enlightened” planter, which is contrasted to the ideas of the marquis de Casaux, published in a 1781 treatise. Appropriating the language of sentiment, Guisan and Poyen folded “humanity” into plantation management, asserting that this would harmonize with the planter’s self-interest and increase his happiness by promoting that of the enslaved. Ultimately, though, they construed the planter’s mastery differently: for Poyen, a benevolent plantation monarch ruled over his subjects while Guisan’s planter was accountable to a wider social and political order devoted to collective good.

Volume 2 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations presents an authoritative overview of the various continuities and changes in migration and globalization from the 1800s to the present day. Despite revolutionary changes in communication technologies, the growing accessibility of long-distance travel, and globalization across major economies, the rise of nation-states empowered immigration regulation and bureaucratic capacities for enforcement that curtailed migration. One major theme worldwide across the post-1800 centuries was the differentiation between “skilled” and “unskilled” workers, often considered through a racialized lens; it emerged as the primary divide between greater rights of immigration and citizenship for the former, and confinement to temporary or unauthorized migrant status for the latter. Through thirty-one chapters, this volume further evaluates the long global history of migration; and it shows that despite the increased disciplinary systems, the primacy of migration remains and continues to shape political, economic, and social landscapes around the world.

Why did people petition and why did they continue to do so when petitions were rarely successful in securing immediate change? The point of petitioning was extensively discussed within nineteenth-century political and social movements. Critics questioned the wisdom of petitioning and argued in favour of electioneering or more direct forms of protest. Tellingly, however, many of these alternatives were either petitions by another name or were facilitated by subscriptional activity. Even if they were ignored or rejected by authorities, petitions were indispensable to political campaigns and social movements, including Chartism, anti-slavery, women’s suffrage, anti-Catholics, and the Anti-Corn Law League, for a variety of reasons. This explains why so many Victorian activists were indefatigable petitioners. Petitioning was the key method for mobilising popular support and pressuring Parliament; an important way of recruiting activists and developing formal political organisation, at both national and local level; raising public awareness and political consciousness; and finally, for forging valuable networks with elite politicians. Petitioning thus underpinned and made possible a broader repertoire of modern campaigning.

In this chapter, Hesford examines the humanitarian imperatives of contemporary anti-slavery and anti-trafficking campaigns and their calculated appropriations and parasitic logics. She considers in what contexts, under what conditions of visibility and legibility, and in support of what political investments are humanitarian tropes deployed? To better understand the contemporary anti-slavery movement’s perpetuation and parasitic appropriation of humanitarian tropes, Hesford turns to the rhetorical mediation of human trafficking subjects and their stories. Understanding these mediations, she argues, is important because how trafficking subjects and their stories are framed sets the parameters for public recognition and political action.

Focused on a discussion of escape within and across national and imperial borders, the first part of this chapter analyses events following convict escape to other jurisdictions. It covers absconding to and from British, Spanish, French, and Danish islands in the Caribbean, and from British Gibraltar to the Spanish peninsular. The second part focuses on French Guiana, because the scale of transportation to the colony from the mid-nineteenth to early-twentieth centuries, coupled with a highly organized traffic of convicts over river and sea borders, enabled and facilitated large numbers of escapes. It especially focuses on a group of 1848 convicts who fled to the USA and became involved in anti-slavery movement. Overall, the chapter stresses that convict absconding not only offers insights into convict agency and experience, but had profound and enduring legal consequences, notably a series of international agreements and ultimately laws on extradition and deportation. The experiences of these runaways varied widely, and whilst they sometimes demonstrated a sophisticated understanding of legal process, and ingenuity and ambition in determining their fate, the difficulties of remaining at large often confounded their desire for freedom. At the same time, their testimony on appalling conditions contributed to growing global anti-transportation.

How might a close reading of the language of revolutionary-era anti-slavery petitions contribute to a broader understanding of the politics of the American founding? This chapter focuses on one of the earliest surviving examples of African American political writing, the petition submitted to the Massachusetts House of Representatives in January 1773, by an author named FELIX. Revolutionary republicans came to disparage the petitionary form, because it had failed to persuade King George to defend his colonial subjects. The petition’s conventional language of deference and its tendency to “pray” or plead rather than to demand or insist led many colonists to reject the form in favor of far more assertive declarations of individual and collective right. By reanimating the petition, however, African Americans like FELIX not only contributed to the work of anti-slavery agitation; they also, as this chapter suggests, registered resistance to some of the dominant political ideas of the republican revolution. Drawing on historical studies of the significance of the petition in the colonies as well as accounts of the petition’s key formal and rhetorical features, this chapter makes the case for a specifically African American contribution to the political discourse of the founding.

This chapter traces Dr Thomas Hodgkin’s engagement with British anti-slavery, the American Colonization Society, Liberia and the African American Emigration movement. Hodgkin was the leading advocate in Britain for the colony of Liberia, and became its British consul after independence in 1848. Hodgkin conceived of solutions to slavery within an unusually transnational framework. However, his championing of gradual emancipation for British slaves and plans to civilize West Africa by repatriating emancipated slaves from the New World, led him into unsavoury alliances and conflict with leading British and US abolitionists. Hodgkin’s correspondence with humanitarian opponents, doyens of British abolition, leading Liberians, African American Emigrationists, and the American Colonization Society, reveals deep divisions within anti-slavery which had ramifications for the campaigns for indigenous protection and civilization.

This introductory chapter examines the archive of Thomas Hodgkin and its value for understanding British humanitarianism and activism on behalf of indigenous peoples, and particularly the activities of the Aborigines’ Protection Society. It considers the history and historiography of humanitarianism and indigenous protection. It also explores scholarship on settler colonialism, imperial networks, critical indigenous studies and new imperial histories, before presenting the book’s argument.

Byzantium continued traditions of slaveholding it inherited from the Roman Empire, but these were transformed significantly from the fourth century onward as slavery came to play a diminished role in the generation of economic surplus. Laws governing slaveholding gradually diminished the power of slaveholders and improved the rights of slaves by restricting a master’s right to abuse, prostitute, expose, and murder slaves and their children. Legal norms also eliminated penal servitude, opened the door wider to manumission, and created new structures for freeing enslaved war captives through the agency of the Christian church. Simultaneously, new forms of semi-servility arose with the fourth-century invention of forms of bound tenancy, which largely replaced the need for slaves. Byzantine society commonly used slaves in household and industrial contexts but only sporadically for agriculture, although slave prices remained constant through the eleventh century and even increased beginning in the thirteenth century as Italian traders turned Constantinople and Crete into conduits for slave commerce from the Black Sea. From the fourth century onward, Christian discourse began questioning slavery as contrary to natural and divine law, a tradition that continued throughout Byzantine history without ever leading to a call for abolition.

Over the last two decades, fighting modern slavery and human trafficking have become a cause célèbre. Yet, large numbers of researchers, nongovernmental organizations, trade unions, workers, and others who would seem like natural allies of the fight against modern slavery and trafficking are hugely skeptical of these movements. They object to anti-slavery and anti-trafficking framings of the problems, and are skeptical of the "new abolitionist" movement. Why? In this Introduction, we explain how our edited book tackles key controversies surrounding the anti-slavery and anti-trafficking movements and scholarship head-on. We have assembled champions and sceptics of anti-slavery to explore the fissures and fault-lines that surround efforts to fight modern slavery and human trafficking today. These include: whether efforts to fight modern slavery displace or crowd out support for labor and migrant rights; whether and to what extent efforts to fight modern slavery mask, naturalize, and distract from racial, gendered, and economic inequality; and whether contemporary anti-slavery and anti-trafficking crusaders’ use of history are accurate and appropriate.

Historians, like contemporary activists, use numbers to make moral claims: the greater the number of victims, the greater the moral value of a given phenomenon. But rarely do historians or contemporary activists reflect on how they use numbers or historicize the complex ways numbers have clarified or conversely obscured ethical claims about stopping slavery. In “Counting Modern Slaves,” I examine the particular political work that counting slaves has historically accomplished. I begin with the first British actors to make counting slaves profitable, the metropolitan architects of the planet’s first global marketplace, one in raced slaves. I then consider how abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic flipped that calculating script by brilliantly deploying metrics to hammer home key arguments about the universal values in slavery’s demise. Contemporary abolitionists, in turn, have eschewed the racism of the quantifying architects of the slave trade, but use numbers to aggregate modern slaves without clarifying the ethical choices that shape their calculations. In “Counting Modern Slaves,” I do not condemn using numbers, but rather seek to clarify how, when, and why counting slaves has accomplished its emancipatory possibility.

Violent conflict between white settlers and Aboriginal people had ceased across most of the continent, but north-western Western Australia continued to witness clashes, brutal labour practices and sexual exploitation. In 1885, the missionary John Brown Gribble, fresh from a visit to London’s Exeter Hall circle, attempted to establish a mission in the Gascoyne River region. He quickly antagonised the region’s pastoralist interests and a press scandal eventuated, in which the pastoralist lobby sought to ridicule Gribble’s claims for sympathy toward Aboriginal people, and assert their own. Gribble aspired to what is often termed ‘muscular Christianity’, a form of masculinity that linked spiritual belief to more secular values of bravery and heroism, and his hero was African abolitionist and missionary David Livingstone. British anti-slavery sentiment framed Gribble’s notorious 1886 denunciation, Dark Deeds in a Sunny Land. Yet the colonial public was sceptical regarding what many considered sensational and excessive. Gribble’s writing is typical of narratives of Christian heroism within a religious literary tradition of persecution, self-sacrifice and redemption that were ultimately modelled upon the life of Jesus Christ himself.