The Geography of Freedom in the Age of Revolutions

Abstract

This chapter explores a contradiction at the heart of the mainstream abolitionist movement: colonialism in India was promoted as a solution to the problem of slavery. It focuses on forms of unfreedom that trouble the geographical divide drawn in abolitionist discourse between slavery and freedom within the British empire. The chapter begins with a brief discussion of Marianna Starke's pro-imperialism/antislavery drama (set in India), The Sword of Peace (1788). It then turns to Maria Edgeworth's anti-Jacobin short-story collection Popular Tales (1804), which features nearly identical scenes of slavery set in Jamaica and India. Edgeworth's fiction might seem worlds away from actual colonial policy; but by contextualizing her writing amid debates about the slave trade and proposals for the cultivation of sugar in Bengal, the chapter shows that her stories were important and highly regarded thought experiments in colonial governance. Finally, the chapter discusses an important historical instantiation of the Indies mentality that falls outside the time frame of this study: the transportation of Indian indentured laborers to the Caribbean in the 1830s.