Robert M. Burroughs – författare

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.

This book examines eyewitness travel reports of atrocities committed in European-funded slave regimes in the Congo Free State, Portuguese West Africa, and the Putumayo district of the Amazon rainforest during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. During this time, British explorers, missionaries, consuls, journalists, soldiers, and traders produced evidence of misrule in the Congo, Angola, and the Putumayo, which they described their travel and witnessing of colonial violence in travelogues, ethnographic monographs, consular reports, diaries and letters, sketches, photography, and more. As well as bringing home to readers ongoing brutalities, eyewitness narratives contributed to debates on humanitarianism, trade, colonialism, and race and racial prejudice in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. In particular, whereas earlier antislavery travelers had tended to promote British imperial expansion as a remedy to slavery, travel texts produced for the three major humanitarian campaigns of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century expressed — and, indeed, gave rise to — changes in the perception of Britain as a nation for whom the protection of Africans remained paramount. Burroughs's study charts the emergence of a subversive eyewitness response in travel writing, which implicated Britons and British industries in the continuing existence of slave labor in regions formally ruled by other nations.