We tend to think that imperialism is motivated by greed and racism, but it’s just as often inspired by altruism. From Rudyard Kipling urging colonization of the Philippines to Christopher Hitchens urging regime change in Iraq, humanitarian concerns make for foreign adventures. In case after case, empathy turns out to be another word for invasion.
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Freedom Burning focuses on British antislavery sentiment in the years after 1833, when the government of King William IV essentially outlawed slavery throughout the empire. The topic is fascinating, and certainly relevant to our own imperial moment.But Huzzey, an English academic, isn’t an especially engaging writer. His book is a dry read, laboriously wending its way through a maze of Foreign Office policy, parliamentary politics, and dead controversies. Huzzey often seems to go out of his way to avoid telling a good story. Case in point: he repeatedly refers to the British Niger expedition of 1841, an antislavery-inspired disaster in which more than a third of the 159 European participants died, but eschews every opportunity to give us even the outlines of what happened.
Antislavery principles became not an excuse but a motive for the exercise of British power. “[A]nti-slavery was the popular aspect of imperial expansion,” Huzzey says, and “one of the principal ways that commercial, spiritual, and moral objectives could be combined.” Like their constituents, British politicians thought about foreign policy against the backdrop of tenets to which virtually everyone subscribed. It was just about impossible, Huzzey notes, “to be taken seriously in public debates if an author defended slavery.” Thus, when some Brits argued against the naval suppression of the slave trade, they did so on the premise that it would force the trade underground, which might worsen conditions for transported slaves and even cause slavers to throw their cargo overboard at the approach of a British ship.
Did those consequences negate the benefits of abolition? Would an earlier end to slavery have triggered an even more thorough and rapacious imperial presence in Africa? And conversely, if slavery had been allowed to continue—say, until after the American Civil War—would Africa have suffered a shorter, less crippling colonization?
