Writing the World at the End of Empire

The mythmaking began in 1808. Soon after the Parliament of the United Kingdom passed an Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, the English abolitionist Thomas Clarkson published the first history of the movement that had led to the ban on the trafficking of enslaved Africans within the British Empire. It was a testament to British benevolence. A tribute to Christian virtue. “The abolition of the Slave-trade took its rise, not from persons, who set up a cry for liberty when they were oppressors themselves, nor from persons who were led to it by ambition or a love of reputation among men, but where it was most desirable, namely, from the teachers of Christianity in those times,” Clarkson proclaimed. In his telling, the inspiration for abolitionism had risen naturally from the same people who had dominated the transatlantic slave trade during the preceding century and would maintain colonial slavery for another three decades.