Anti-Slavery and Indentured Labor in the Age of Global Empire

Abstract

Abstract:Slavery and anti-slavery were key motifs of political imagination in the age of global Empire. This review essay discusses Amalia Ribi Forclaz’s Humanitarian Imperialism: The Politics of Anti-Slavery Activism, 1880–1940, Richard Huzzey’s Freedom Burning: Anti-Slavery and Empire in Victorian Britain, and Ashutosh Kumar’s Coolies of the Empire: Indentured Indians in the Sugar Colonies, 1830–1920 to explore the multifaceted ties between slavery, abolitionism, humanitarianism, and colonial Empire. The essay goes on to argue that anti-slavery emerged as an idiom for globalization in an imperial age—defined by the anxieties engendered by a massively accelerating mobility and the frictions underlying the colonial civilizing mission.