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Britain and Slavery: Context

Module description

Britain led the world in pursuing both slavery and its abolition. For some, this global system of theft and murder generated vast wealth and enabled access to influence and prestige at the highest levels of British society. For others, it represented a mortal evil that had to be stopped at any cost. In this module, we will examine attempts to make sense of Britain’s historical relationship to slavery and its impact on our lives today. Covering issues of race, resistance, revolution, labour, economics, and memory, we will explore how our reckonings with this violent history have changed since the age of abolition.

Module aims - intentions of the module

This module, along with its Sources co-requisite, examines historians’ evolving responses to the relationship between colonial slavery and metropolitan life in Britain from the mid-seventeenth-century to the mid-nineteenth, along with how that history has been publicly commemorated and deliberately forgotten.. It gives you a chance to engage in depth with the extensive historiography surrounding Britain and slavery, introducing you to a range of approaches and ways of reading the primary material presented in the Sources co-requisite. It complicates familiar narratives of slavery and abolition by exploring the ways in which both sides of the discussion were linked to imperial expansion, political economy, racial thought, social hierarchies, and international diplomacy. Crucially, it interrogates how historians have helped to shape the discussion about slavery and abolition, from the celebratory narratives of the nineteenth century to the decolonial and intersectional approaches that characterise much recent scholarship. On this module you will have an opportunity to work with economic, social and cultural histories, as well as insights from the fields of English Literature, Sociology and Art History, helping you to make sense of a colonial entanglement that touched almost every aspect of British life. A survey of approaches to this aspect of Britain’s past also leads on to challenging ideas surrounding the contemporary legacies of slavery and abolition, and the ways in which these have been celebrated, remembered, forgotten, and covered up, and what we might be able to do about historical injustices.

Through engaging with the complex historiographies and controversies over different aspects of British slavery, the module aims to develop research, analytical, interpretative and communication skills that can be applied in further academic studies or in graduate careers.

Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs)

ILO: Module-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 1. Identify and evaluate the different complex themes in the history of Britain’s relationship to colonial slavery since the eighteenth century
• 2. Understand and explain the key developments within the study of slavery and its impact on Britain, including in the contemporary world

ILO: Discipline-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 3. Analyse the key developments within a particular historical context
• 4. Comprehend and explain complex historical issues
• 5. Understand and deploy relevant historical terminology in a comprehensible and sophisticated manner

ILO: Personal and key skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 6. Select, organise and analyse material for written work and/or oral presentations of different prescribed lengths and formats.
• 7. Present an argument in a written form in a clear and organised manner, with appropriate use of correct English
• 8. Through essay development process, demonstrate ability to reflect critically on your own work, to respond constructively to feedback, and to implement suggestions and improve work on this basis

Syllabus plan

This module focuses on a range of different historical interpretations exploring the relationship between Britain and slavery from the mid-seventeenth century to the abolitionist era and beyond. Organised broadly chronologically, it examines the following themes: the beginnings of British slavery; slavery and the development of the British economy; the effects of slavery on migration to Britain and its demography; conceptions of human difference, especially the emergence of whiteness; slavery and British responses to the American, French and Haitian revolutions; the resistance of the enslaved, including violent uprisings, absconding, tool-breaking, infanticide, and publishing testimony; slave-produced commodities and consumer culture, including boycotts; the abolitionist movements; the role of antislavery in the expansion of the British Empire; the lasting legacies of British slavery; and the commemoration and forgetting of slavery in contemporary culture.

You will be introduced to the broad chronology and key controversies in the historiography of transatlantic slavery at the beginning of the course, along with some of the major developments in the historiography since the nineteenth century, including the impact of Eric Williams and CLR James and the methodological framework of the ‘New Imperial Histories’. Each seminar we will explore a set of contextual readings which help to situate that week’s Source(s) and clarify a theme or important episode in the history of slavery in Britain. We will regularly include readings from outside the discipline of History, helping to gain new perspectives and approaches to the problems posed by this complex and methodologically challenging history. You will be expected to prepare for seminars by reading and evaluating the relevant materials in advance, and we will discuss the issues raised by them in the seminars.

Learning activities and teaching methods (given in hours of study time)

Details of learning activities and teaching methods

Summative assessment (% of credit)

Details of summative assessment

Details of re-assessment (where required by referral or deferral)

Re-assessment notes

Deferral – if you miss an assessment for certificated reasons judged acceptable by the Mitigation Committee, you will normally be either deferred in the assessment or an extension may be granted. The mark given for a re-assessment taken as a result of deferral will not be capped and will be treated as it would be if it were your first attempt at the assessment.

Referral – if you have failed the module overall (i.e. a final overall module mark of less than 40%) you will be required to submit a further assessment as necessary. If you are successful on referral, your overall module mark will be capped at 40%.

Indicative learning resources - Basic reading

Surveys:

• Robin Blackburn, The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights (London, 2011)
• Seymour Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (Cambridge, 2009)
• Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause (New Haven, 2017)
• Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade (London, 1997)

Key Interventions:

• David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Oxford, 1975)
• Seymour Drescher, The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation (Oxford, 2002)
• Catherine Hall, Macaulay and Son: Architects of Imperial Britain (New Haven, 2012)
• Catherine Hall, Nicholas Draper, Keith McClelland, Katie Donington and Rachel Lang, Legacies of British Slave-ownership (Cambridge, 2014).
• Clare Midgley, Women against slavery: the British Campaigns, 1780-1870 (London, 1990, repr. 2005)
• John Oldfield, Popular politics and British anti-slavery : the mobilisation of public opinion against the slave trade, 1787-1807 (Manchester, 1995)
• Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill, 1939, repr. 2016)
• Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia, 2000).

Interdisciplinary Perspectives:

• Brycchan Carey, British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility (Basingstoke, 2005)
• Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670-1834 (London, 1992)
• Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge Mass.,, 1982)
• Sarah Thomas, Witnessing Slavery: Art and Travel in the Age of Abolition (New Haven, 2019)

Indicative learning resources - Web based and electronic resources

• ELE – https://vle.exeter.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=11354

Key words search

Slavery; Abolition; Empire; Britain; Race