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.

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.

In 1833, the British Parliament voted to abolish slavery in its overseas colonies, establishing a four-year “apprenticeship” system to gradually transition the slave-based agricultural system to a wage-based economy. This chapter focuses on American responses to British abolition. People on both sides of the slavery issue were keen to observe the outcome of freedom at the heart of Britain’s lucrative plantation economy, and both Americans and the British clamored to witness and record the unfolding of emancipation on the black-majority sugar islands. In the process, this chapter shows, anti-slavery advocates honed various forms of social investigation to prove and publicize their belief that emancipation could succeed in the sectionally divided United States.