Robin Blackburn
GUNBOAT ABOLITIONISM
Richard Huzzey opens his study of Victorian Britain’s anti-slavery crusade with an account of a British naval force burning a village on the Gallinas River in West Africa in 1845; a painting of this event made by a witness supplies the image on the book’s cover. The commander believed that African traders had been using the site to traffic slaves. This was not an isolated occurrence—the bombardment of Lagos in 1850 followed the same pattern. For nearly half a century, Britain maintained a large squadron on the West African coast in order to enforce ‘abolition’—an anti-slave trading policy initially proposed by pacifists, but which was later adopted by the country’s rulers as part of a new way of waging war. This would allow Britain to respond to the ideological challenges of the epoch by redefining the moral basis of its conflicts with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France and the United States of Thomas Jefferson. Huzzey’s book is dedicated to exploring how Britain could present itself as—and believe itself to be—an ‘anti-slavery nation’, while remaining the metropolitan hub, and maritime arbiter, of a slavery-based Atlantic economy and empire.
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Robin Blackburn on Louis Sala-Molins, Dark Side of the Light. Polemical assault on the French Enlightenment’s record on slavery—Condorcet’s contradictions, Diderot’s compromises, Montesquieu’s motivations.
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As reverberations from the stricken mortgage market reach the real economy, Robin Blackburn reveals the origins of the crunch in the shadowy realms of financialization. Precedents from the bubbles and crash of the 1920s, warnings from pioneers and venture capitalists, and proposals for how to turn the crisis to socially redistributive effect.
