Richard Huzzey – författare

Throughout history, across very different types of state and society, petitions and petitioning have been ubiquitous practices and the interaction between petitioners and authority has been a crucial dynamic in exercising and contesting power. Consolidating and advancing a rapidly expanding field of research across history, law, and the social sciences, Petitions and Petitioning in Europe and North America is the first study of these venerable practices from their development in the late medieval period to the emergence of e-petitions in the twenty-first century. With a broad focus on Europe and North America, this ambitious volume breaks new ground by examining the concept, history, and practice of petitions and petitioning across chronological and geographical boundaries, opening up this important topic using an interdisciplinary approach across the humanities and social sciences.

The suppression of the Atlantic slave trade has puzzled nineteenth-century contemporaries and historians since, as the British Empire turned naval power and moral outrage against a branch of commerce it had done so much to promote. The assembled authors bridge the gap between ship and shore to reveal the motives, effects and legacies of this campaign. As the first academic history of Britain’s campaign to suppress the Atlantic slave trade in more than thirty years, the book gathers experts in history, literature, historical geography, museum studies and the history of medicine to analyse naval suppression in light of recent work on slavery and empire. Three sections reveal the policies, experiences and representations of slave-trade suppression from the perspectives of metropolitan Britons, liberated Africans, black sailors, colonialists and naval officers.

After Britain abolished slavery throughout most of its empire in 1834, Victorians adopted a creed of "anti-slavery" as a vital part of their national identity and sense of moral superiority over other civilizations. The British government used diplomacy, pressure, and violence to suppress the slave trade, while the Royal Navy enforced abolition worldwide and an anxious public debated the true responsibilities of an anti-slavery nation. This crusade was far from altruistic or compassionate, but Richard Huzzey argues that it forged national debates and political culture long after the famous abolitionist campaigns of William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson had faded into memory. These anti-slavery passions shaped racist and imperialist prejudices, new forms of coerced labor, and the expansion of colonial possessions.In a sweeping narrative that spans the globe, Freedom Burning explores the intersection of philanthropic, imperial, and economic interests that underlay Britain's anti-slavery zeal— from London to Liberia, the Sudan to South Africa, Canada to the Caribbean, and the British East India Company to the Confederate States of America. Through careful attention to popular culture, official records, and private papers, Huzzey rewrites the history of the British Empire and a century-long effort to end the global trade in human lives.

This volume considers the varied forms of parliamentary pressure in the period between the civil wars and the advent of universal suffrage in the twentieth century.  The authors examine the ways in which parliament accepted, invited, or moulded channels of political pressure from those outside their ranks and outside the electoral processChapters highlight the technologies of growth of private and public petitioning, the pressure to act on new national and international questions, and the ways in which parliamentarians themselves orchestrated pressureIncludes a range of insights into the collaborative porousness of political pressures on parliament, not simply as the force of ‘pressure from without’