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INTRODUCTION: SLAVERY, MEMORY AND IDENTITY: NATIONAL REPRESENTATIONS

AND GLOBAL LEGACIES

Douglas Hamilton, Kate Hodgson and Joel Quirk

Th e contested nature of public memories of slavery, slave trades and their abo-litions was made manifest at Westminster Abbey in London in March 2007. Th ere, surrounded by the pomp of the British state and the shrines of British heroes, the British monarch, her ministers and an invited audience celebrated the bicentenary of the abolition of the British transatlantic slave trade. Some groups were incensed by the apparent ‘white-washing’ of Britain’s slave past; the Westminster service was disrupted by a leading pan-African activist who pro-claimed the event a ‘Wilberfarce’. Amidst much head-shaking and tut-tutting, he was forcibly ejected from the building.1

Memories of British slavery and abolition thus varied widely; so, too, did the politicized contexts from which they sprang. Yet this is far from being a solely British phenomenon. Eff orts to describe and delineate slavery to and by the public have never been objective or disinterested. Instead, they have been consistently animated by prevailing conceptions of national ‘honour’, under-standings of ‘civilization’ and a sense of imagined citizenship and community. In the last case, national representations of slavery have oft en sought to minimize collective responsibility for enslavement, while emphasizing contributions to abolitionism. In the twenty-fi rst century, these national perspectives continue to infl uence public representations of slavery across the globe, oft en through new forms of multiculturalism and manifestations of a shared historical ancestry and sense of collective identity.

Th e ten chapters that make up this volume speak to the modern fascination with slavery and try to suggest why it emerged with such force at the end of the twentieth century. Th ey are particularly concerned with the way in which slavery and its legacies have found expression in the commemorative contexts of museums, memorials and other sites of memory, as well as in national education systems. Th ey also show that although the political and temporal contexts may

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have changed, understandings of slave pasts (broadly defi ned) have always been intertwined with evolving forms of identity, belonging and community.

Th is introduction has two main goals. Firstly, it introduces and contextual-izes the individual essays in this collection. Secondly, and more widely, it seeks to begin to understand and analyse a number of recurring patterns that have had an enduring impact on both public representations and collective understandings of slavery and its legacies. Th ese recurring patterns link together both historical and contemporary settings, and can be chiefl y understood in terms of an endur-ing relationship between slavery and collective identity. To help advance these goals, the narrative which follows begins with a thematic analysis of some of the main dynamics behind recent representations of slavery and from there goes on to explore comparable patterns in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Th e last two decades have seen a remarkable surge of public, political and intellectual interest in slavery and its legacies. Th is began in earnest in the mid-1990s, and while not all countries or regions have been aff ected to the same degree, it is nonetheless possible to speak in terms of a genuinely transnational phenomenon, which has seen renewed interest in – and signifi cant political activism connected with – the history of slavery and abolition in many settings across Western Europe, the Caribbean, the Americas, Africa and parts of the Middle East.2 Much of this activity has been articulated in terms of the idea of ‘breaking the silence’ surrounding slavery. As the reference to ‘silence’ makes clear, there is a widespread sentiment – most notably among peoples of African descent – that slavery has tended to be reduced to a minor historical problem, rather than a major issue of enduring consequence. Th is ‘silence’ has never been total, as a number of important studies of commemorative activities and memories can attest, but slavery has rarely been accorded the types of public recognition that might have been expected of a key institution practised by most peoples at most times for nearly all of recorded human history.3

While numerous shortcomings and silences surrounding the history and lega-cies of slavery undoubtedly persist, eff orts at ‘breaking the silence’ have had a major impact and, as a consequence, slavery and its legacies have received much greater global attention and recognition than had previously been the case. Groundbreak-ing initiatives such as the 1994 UNESCO Slave Route project; commemorative occasions like the tercentenary of the famous Maroon leader Zumbi in Brazil in 1995 and the 1998 anniversary of the abolition of slavery in France; and the opening of new museums as far apart as Europe and South Africa, led the way in the late twentieth century towards a commemorative model of engagement with slavery on both national and international levels. Th e creation of memorial practices, sculptures, monuments, museums and associations is explored in this volume in the context of Brazil, by Ana Lucia Araujo; in France and the Franco-phone world by Charles Forsdick; and in South Africa and Mauritius by Anne Eichmann in Chapter 4. Clear parallels can be noted in the driving forces behind

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such initiatives, in their links to postcolonial (and in the case of South Africa, post-apartheid) issues and the politics of race, culture and national identity.

Th e surge of interest in remembering slavery can be traced to a combination of both subject specifi c and more general trends. Most scholars in the fi eld have approached slavery as a single issue, and thereby frequently overlooked a num-ber of broader infl uences and ideas. To understand why slavery (re)emerged as a political and sociological focal point from the mid-1990s, a number of trends, which help to explain both the terms and timing of many of the key innovations, need to be taken into account.

One major set of infl uences arose from the emergence and subsequent dis-semination of truth and reconciliation and, more broadly, transitional justice.4 While truth and reconciliation is most prominently associated with the aft er-math of the end of apartheid in South Africa in 1994, commissions of various kinds have now been established in over twenty countries, with the vast majority following in the wake of the South African example, which continues to be widely celebrated.5 One distinctive feature of truth and reconciliation has been its fl ex-ibility: commissions have been established in many diff erent contexts, such as the aft ermath of civil war (as in Sierra Leone or Guatemala), the past excesses of authoritarian regimes (Brazil or Argentina), or even in relation to specifi c abuses perpetrated under democratic regimes (Canada or the United States).6 While the issues involved may vary, the underlying rationale remains much the same. According to its numerous proponents and practitioners, truth and reconcilia-tion requires a full and frank accounting of crimes against humanity committed in the past in order to provide a fi rm foundation for moves towards social and political reconciliation in the present.

One important consequence of truth and reconciliation has been a new approach to systemic – and frequently government-sponsored – abuses from earlier periods.7 Rather than being treated as something that should be, or can be, easily forgotten or silenced, uncomfortable historical truths have instead acquired new political and ideological currency as objects of lasting contempo-rary concern, which need to be publicly analysed and appreciated in order to repair relationships – both within and between various communities and insti-tutions. Th e popularity of truth and reconciliation has not only helped to draw attention to a variety of other historical wrongs, such as transatlantic slavery or the abuse of indigenous peoples, it has also further infl uenced how various historical wrongs have tended to be conceptualized and discussed.8 Innovations associated with truth and reconciliation have provided instruction and inspiration both to African Americans and political elites in Africa who have recently made renewed eff orts to secure recognition and restitution for slavery and its legacies.

Truth and reconciliation draws extensively on therapeutic frameworks in gen-eral, and restorative justice frameworks in particular.9 Th e concepts of harm, repair, atonement, forgiveness and apology can be grouped together (albeit imperfectly)

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under the banner of restorative justice. Th is holds that all kinds of wrongdoings can be best understood as violations of individual relationships, rather than as breaches of public order to be corrected by government offi cials.10 Within this overall frame-work, the primary task of justice is not so much to punish off enders as to repair broken relationships, with considerable emphasis being placed on off enders aton-ing for their past misdeeds, and victims in turn working towards forgiveness for past harms infl icted on them. Th ere are both theological and psychological strands to this approach, with the two variants coming together around a shared goal of improving self-esteem, overcoming trauma and repairing relationships.

Applied to society as a whole, these overlapping objectives have helped to pave the way for a variety of eff orts to help repair enduring historical divisions between diff erent ethnic, racial and religious groupings. As many scholars have shown, slavery and its legacies has long been a key source of division in much of Western Europe, Africa and the Americas, most notably but not always exclusively around questions of racial diff erence. In addition, the popularity of various models of multiculturalism and diversity has facilitated greater recognition of previously mar-ginalized categories of people. Faced with enduring social divisions, various actors and institutions have made sustained eff orts to promote and improve the social standing and self-image of previously discriminated groups, thereby promoting reconciliation and understanding across racial and ethnic divides. Several chapters in this volume attest to the various ways in which the memories and legacies of slav-ery have been employed to empower groups previously marginalized by their slave pasts. Th is process has played out diff erently in diff erent places, and there oft en remain signifi cant disagreements over the relative achievements of these eff orts.

In Anne Eichmann’s chapter, the process of memorializing slavery in South Africa became part of the means of emphasizing a shared past and shared values, which stands in sharp contrast to another ‘rainbow nation’, Mauritius. Th ere, in keeping with the notion of the empowerment of marginalized groups, slavery and its representation at Le Morne, have served to underpin conceptions of Cre-ole community and their own distinct identity.

Th e sense that those groups once adversely aff ected by slavery try to use that past to enhance their contemporary status gathers pace in Eric Hahonou and Lotte Pelckmans’s study of West Africa in Chapter 6. In Benin, in particu-lar, the struggle of the Gando community for recognition highlights both the entrenched prejudice against formerly enslaved communities as they struggle for citizenship and the Gando people’s particular success in securing education, rela-tive wealth and, ultimately, political authority.

Ana Lucia Araujo’s wide-ranging discussion of public memory in Brazil in Chapter 8 develops this point further. Th ere, while Afro-Brazilian pasts remained important to those communities, their public acceptance sat uncomfortably with national political positions. While cultural legacies of slavery continue to reso-

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nate in various informal settings – notably through cultural forms like Carnival and capoeira – the Brazilian mass media, like telenovelas, have instead tended to perpetuate old stereotypes. In Brazil, the transition of the memory of slavery to the general public sphere has been confounded by persistent setbacks. As Araujo shows, the growing political visibility of Brazil’s substantial Afro-descendent community and their demands for equality has projected the question of the slave past and its memorialization into the political arena.

Engaging with the wrongs of the past has been widely regarded as central to eff orts to secure restitution for past wrongs. Unlike professional historians, who tend to approach historical inquiry as an end in itself, this more therapeutic approach is especially concerned with the emotional responses and psychologi-cal orientations – such as shame, anger or resentment – popularly associated with a particular sequence of historical events. From this standpoint, history becomes integral to identity, with the contemporary representatives of both previously wronged and previous wrongdoers being collectively defi ned and diff erentiated on the basis of grievous harms committed in the past.11 As a consequence, rec-ognizing – and perhaps even partially redressing – the history and legacies of slavery has emerged as a prominent avenue for eff orts to promote social cohesion and citizenship.

Th e infl uence of restorative justice models is especially apparent in the politi-cal and social dynamics surrounding offi cial apologies.12 Since apologies cost nothing in fi nancial terms (another source of persistent controversy), their main contribution had tended to be framed around the positive eff ects said to be gen-erated by governments fi nally acknowledging that a wrong had actually taken place. Th is is partly a question of offi cially recognizing and thereby validating the experiences of aff ected groups, and partly to do with establishing more healthy and inclusive forms of dialogue and community. Since the mid-1990s, numerous governments and other institutions – such as corporations and universities – have faced demands for a full accounting of their involvement in slavery. Responses to this growing pressure have varied signifi cantly. Governments have frequently fallen short of off ering a full apology, such as Tony Blair’s expression of ‘regret’ in 2006, but the fact that there has been a sustained barrage of calls for various actors to atone for their past conduct is nonetheless signifi cant. Having long been sub-merged or marginalized, the history and legacies of slavery have recently acquired both a signifi cant public audience and political constituency in many countries.

Offi cial apologies for slavery have tended to be paired with fi nancial repara-tions. Th e theory and practice of reparations has a long and complex history.13 According to John Torpey, the idea of reparations unexpectedly acquired political and ideological currency during the 1990s in response to the faltering momentum of previous campaigns for racial and gender equality. It is possible to point to several campaigns which pre-date this period, such as West German

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reparations for the Holocaust during the 1950s and 1960s, but these can best be understood as individual actions, rather than being emblematic of larger trends. Within Torpey’s chronology, the 1990s was defi ned by a new approach, which resulted in the politicization of a signifi cant number of issues and events that had previously been submerged or conceptualized in quite diff erent ways. In the case of slavery, the most signifi cant example of the politics of reparations came in 2001, during the United Nations World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance. When the ques-tion of reparations came up for discussion profound diff erences of opinion over its relative merits were confi rmed, with European nations and their allies strongly opposed, and African and Caribbean nations generally supportive but ultimately unsuccessful. Financial reparations have tended to be more divisive than any other issue, and as a consequence have made relatively limited headway.

Unlike fi nancial reparations, commemoration and education have rarely provoked sustained popular opposition (although this may refl ect public apathy rather than positive support). Since the mid-1990s, monuments com-memorating various aspects of the history of slavery have been unveiled in many countries, including installations in Martinique (Anse Cafard), the Netherlands (Amsterdam), South Africa (Cape Town), Benin (Ouidah), the United King-dom (Lancaster) and France (Nantes). Th ese installations have in turn paved the way for a new permanent memorial to slavery which will be based at the United Nations headquarters in New York. Th is new memorial has been conceived as

a reminder of the legacy of the slave trade. It will provide future generations an under-standing of the history and consequences of slavery and serves as an educational tool to raise awareness about the current dangers of racism, prejudice and the lingering consequences that continue to impact the descendants of the victims today.14

Here, as elsewhere, the history of slavery is primarily framed in terms of lega-cies and lessons which can be applied to our own times. In keeping with larger trends, these commemorative eff orts have also extended to museums, resulting in the opening of both new slavery museums and new exhibitions on slavery in established museums.

Th ese issues cut across a number of chapters in this volume. In Chapter 5 Jim Downs assesses three sites of memory in three diff erent countries. In the Bahamas, a slave-built staircase – not originally conceived as a memorial – has come to acquire commemorative signifi cance. Th e other two case studies, one in Britain, the other in the United States, are respectively a museum and a his-toric house. Both locations are steeped in connections to slavery and the slave trade. Yet, as Downs suggests, both institutions struggle to come to terms with either their own complicity in slavery or with developing and narrating a clear and coherent message. To be sure, many organizations have grappled with these

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issues, but it is striking that these commemorations remain ambiguous even in states which might regard themselves as being at the forefront of the heritage industry and public history.15

In his exploration of the memory of slavery in the ‘francosphere’ in Chapter 7, Charles Forsdick picks up on the contested nature of representations of slav-ery. In France – metropolitan and outre mer – the public history of slavery did not emerge fully formed in the 1990s, but followed a number of developmental stages. Much like in the United Kingdom, the Atlantic ports were the initial locations for museum commemorations in the early 1990s. For France 1998 also saw the shared impetus of the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery and the World Cup, the importance of which Forsdick explains. While in Britain disputes over the anniversary were focused internally, the divergent memories of slavery separating metropolitan France and the overseas départements created additional complications around commemorating this shared national past.

Comparable issues can also be identifi ed in relation to education. Both France (2001) and Britain (2007) have made slavery a compulsory part of their national curricula, and a number of other countries have also made eff orts to bolster the teaching of slavery. Not every country has demonstrated the same level of interest or commitment, but there is nonetheless ample evidence to suggest that an international shift in attitudes towards slavery has taken place within a fairly short time period. As Nikki Spalding makes clear in Chapter 9, the teaching of slavery in the British educational system is part of the citizen-ship curriculum as well as the history curriculum. Discussions of belief, racism, identity and empathy are integrated into pedagogical approaches to slavery in an attempt to shape pupils’ understanding of this problematic past and Brit-ain’s role in it. Th e representation of slavery in Portuguese school textbooks, as analysed by Marta Araújo and Silvia Rodríguez Maeso in Chapter 10, reveals the assumptions linking slavery, race and colonial dominance that underpin the teaching of the history of slavery in the Portuguese national sphere. A series of interviews with educators and historians exposes the cracks in a narrative which attempts to include ‘other perspectives’ but does not pose a real challenge to dominant national and Eurocentric approaches. Th is chapter helps to expose the structural limitations of post-1990s innovations in the memorialization of slav-ery through education, which are geared towards fairly modest reforms rather than radical redefi nition. Signifi cant steps have been taken on some fronts, but there remains much work to be done, both in terms of reshaping curricula and in refl ecting on current practice. Since the history of slavery poses all kinds of uncomfortable questions for the educational and heritage sector, there remains signifi cant resistance to a full and frank consideration of the key issues involved.

Th e signifi cant international trend that emerged in the mid-1990s can ulti-mately be traced to an enduring connection between slavery and collective

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identity. While there are many strands at work, the main one is the central role that slavery and its legacies have played in shaping how particular groups have defi ned both themselves and their relationships to others.16 Th e concept of iden-tity has been dissected from many diff erent perspectives, but in this context it can be understood primarily as a category of self-description, in which numerous individuals collectively defi ne themselves according to a common referent, or, in many cases, an ‘imagined community’.17 Th e relationship between slavery and collective identity has found expression in a wide variety of ways, but it would be a mistake to let these variations overshadow a number of recurring themes. Signifi cantly, these themes are not limited to the recent past, but also apply to the global history of slavery and abolition more broadly.

First, and perhaps most important, is the ideological and political resonance of slavery as a relational source of self-defi nition and external diff erentiation. Th e ways in which various social formations – nation-states, religious institutions, ethnic and racial groupings, and even ‘civilizations’ – approach slavery and its leg-acies have long been heavily infl uenced by highly stylized comparisons with their relevant peers. Th ere are two main variants to this overarching theme. On the one hand, there is self-congratulation by way of comparison, which typically involves a particular government and/or social grouping favourably contrasting their record on slavery with the ostensibly less salutary record of others. Like all self-congrat-ulatory comparisons, this usually involves accentuating positives over negatives. Prominent examples of this theme include self-serving representations of ‘benign slavery’, which usually involves actors seeking to excuse or otherwise minimize their involvement in slavery by depicting their own histories as being ‘less’ oppres-sive than those of their peers. In similar ways governments and peoples also tend to contrast their ‘early’ and/or ‘strong’ commitment to the anti-slavery cause to the ‘late’ and/or ‘lesser’ commitment displayed by their rivals. Much the same dynamic can be found in operation since the mid-1990s in relation to commemo-ration and reparations. Whenever a monument is unveiled, a museum opened, an apology off ered, or an education programme introduced we invariably encounter various forms of self-congratulation, explicit and implicit, particularly in relation to aspirations to be progressive, tolerant and inclusive of diff erence.

Th e second variant is ‘falling behind’ as a catalyst for action. Th is relational comparison operates on negative terms, with various actors (oft en reluctantly) determining that their lack of action relative to that of their peers has become a source of collective dishonour, or a symbol of ‘backwardness’. Th ey thus fi nd that it is now necessary to take further action in order to restore their credibility and good name. Th is variant can once again be found in both historical and contem-porary settings. In 1846, the legal abolition of slavery by the ‘uncivilized’ Bey of Tunis was portrayed as a source of great shame for France, with one abolition-ist commentator proclaiming that allowing Tunisia to overtake France ‘would

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be more than a shame … it would be a crime for our country’.18 For much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the legal abolition of slavery was widely understood as being a key test of national honour, with countries such as Brazil and Ethiopia having their ‘civilized’ credentials questioned by their failure to follow their peers in legally abolishing slavery.19 Th e proliferation of slavery monuments provides an excellent example of the continued resonance of this theme. Th e fact that many diff erent countries decided to create new monuments to the history and legacies of slavery around the same time cannot be primarily explained by domestic developments, or by case-specifi c considerations. Instead, it needs to be understood in terms of a relational logic, where decisions to create a monument in one location aff ect decision makers elsewhere.

Th ese relational comparisons are far from static, but instead tend to be impli-cated in various forms of redefi nition and reinvention. From this vantage point, the relationship between slavery and collective identity can be best understood as a fl uid process in which changing attitudes towards slavery and its legacies pro-vide a means to articulate and disseminate new understandings of community, belonging and identity. Th is can sometimes be an inclusive process, in which the history of slavery and abolition is deployed as a vehicle for the development of new models of – or perhaps aspirations for – citizenship or multicultural-ism. Th ere are times, however, when slavery can be closely tied to forms of social exclusion, in which the history of slavery and abolition becomes a source of divi-sion and separation. Th is is once again a theme that spans past and present.

Much like the 1990s ‘slavery surge’, the emergence of an organized anti-slav-ery movement from the late eighteenth century cast slavery in a substantially new light, with a once valuable institution instead being increasingly challenged as immoral, ineffi cient and impermanent.20 By the early nineteenth century, the passage of a number of anti-slavery measures in places such as the northern United States, Denmark, France and the United Kingdom had raised the pros-pect of slavery becoming a thing of the past, rather than a continuing concern (at least within certain jurisdictions). Whatever their other diff erences, the vari-ous political authorities involved shared a common approach as far as the legal abolition of slavery was concerned: enslaving nations suddenly forgot, or at least repressed, their slave pasts and rapidly reimagined themselves as liberators.21

Aft er the end of the British slave trade, for example, there was a profound rhetorical shift away from the suff ering of Africans in the slave trade towards a celebration of the end of Britain’s role as Atlantic slave trader. Th is shift was made manifest by a series of publications and widely-circulated images that glo-ried in Britain’s abolitionism.22 While concerns about slavery persisted (and the campaign against it was reinvigorated in the 1820s) the blame for slavery was now heaped on ‘colonials’ or West Indians, rather than on Britons. Th e target had changed: no longer was it the British slave trade that had to be abolished

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but colonial slavery. Th is rhetorical sleight of hand at once denied that the plant-ers were British (despite their protestations to the contrary) and, at the same time, established both geographical and metaphorical clear blue water between Britain and slavery. Th e complicity of Britons in the degradation of Africans as a stain on Britain’s character and reputation, so much a feature of the late 1780s, was now downplayed. At the same time, Britain’s role was entirely trans-formed. No longer was Britain the leading slave trading nation, now it was the great emancipator: the moral, enlightened nation that had ended the slave trade and now presumed to impose its will on less ‘civilized’ states which allowed and encouraged the continuation of the slave trade.23

Britain’s reinvention of itself as abolitionist nation rather than slave trader was subsequently reinforced by the creation of the Royal Navy’s anti-slavery squadrons which patrolled the Atlantic and Indian oceans.24 While the squad-rons’ effi cacy may be questioned, reports of the captures of ‘piratical slave ships’ like the Bolodora or the El Almirante meant that the patrols had a high and approving public profi le by the 1830s, although this waned for a period in the late 1840s.25 By the second half of the nineteenth century, with much of the anti-slavery focus on the Indian Ocean, popular illustrated newspapers like the Graphic and the Illustrated London News off ered extensive coverage of the patrols and brought tales of British bravery, exoticism and the freeing of unfortunate Africans to a wide audience. Th ese media, along with a series of published accounts of the patrols in the Indian Ocean, ensured that Britons regarded themselves not only as abolitionists but as the active suppressors of for-eign slave trades, whether French, Spanish, Arab or Asian.26 Indeed, this view may be summarized in the historian W. E. H. Lecky’s notorious remark, fi rst published in 1869: ‘Th e unwearied, unostentatious, and inglorious crusade of England against slavery may probably be regarded as among the three or four perfectly virtuous acts recorded in the history of nations.’27

Th is promotion of anti-slavery was closely bound up with a rhetoric of empire that emphasized both the ‘civilizing’ mission and the ‘trusteeship’ of non-European peoples.28 Th e Aborigines Protection Society was founded in 1837 by abolitionist Th omas Fowell Buxton, among others, ‘to secure protection to the aboriginal inhabitants of all countries colonized by Great Britain; extending to their political and social rights, ameliorating their condition, and promoting their civilization’.29 While this portrayal of Britons doing ‘good works’ overseas was notably silent on the realities of imperial expansion, Britain chose to depict itself as the world’s policeman and its moral guardian, while simultaneously mar-ginalizing complicity with slavery in the British public imagination.

Th is concern for anti-slavery did not immediately gain traction in continen-tal Europe. Certainly there were always individuals and groups that campaigned against slavery and the slave trade, but national consensuses proved rather more

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elusive. In France, where political reactions to the revolutionary period tended to perceive anti-slavery campaigners as radicals, attacks on slavery remained muted until the 1830s and the foundation of the Société pour l’abolition de l’esclavage, per-haps not coincidentally, in 1834. Even then, abolition required a further change in government with the 1848 revolutions. Like Britain, anti-slavery coincided with France’s imperial mission civilisatrice. Closely linked to the colonization of Algeria in 1830, this tended actively to reinforce a positive national self-image at home via the rhetoric of benevolent action overseas and progress measured in terms of encouraging foreign conformity to European cultural, intellectual and governmental norms. Th e project of ‘civilizing’ Africa was a cause deemed to be ‘worthy of French politics and French grandeur’, based on a principled policy of ‘honourable’ long-term investment, ‘work and sacrifi ce’, as opposed to the ‘monstrous abuse of brute force’ perpetrated by the slave trade.30 Th e coming of abolition brought with it a sense both of national pride being restored and of France’s proper place at the forefront of European civilization being confi rmed. Anti-slavery gradually became both patriotic and pan-European.

Th e desire to be seen to conform to European norms of civilization applied equally to Russia as debates there about the emancipation of serfs gathered pace. Russian intellectuals were all, as Walicki argued, ‘acquainted with and interested in the intellectual life of Europe’, and it is clear that the continuing serfdom of over twenty-three million Russians was regarded not only as a fundamental drag on Russian economic progress but as a stain on the moral character of the nation.31 Russians’ concern for their national reputation mirrors that of the other European countries. Indeed, while anti-slavery eventually became, by the late nineteenth century, closely bound to shared European conceptions of both national iden-tity and Christian civilization, the shift ing relationship between anti-slavery and various national identities over the course of the century was complex. Although the motivation for anti-slavery might have been a concern for the plight of the enslaved or enserfed, the emerging consensus was less a concern with attaining a notional ‘European’ standard, and more a desire to be regarded as at least no less civilized than their rivals. What made the diff erence in generating anti-slavery as a marker of European civilization was the widespread nineteenth-century European impulse to establish empires. In a European context anti-slavery was a matter of national honour, in a global setting, ‘civilization’ became a particularly ‘European’ value relative, and in contradistinction, to non-Europeans, whose continued use of slavery became a marker of their lack of civilization.

As Kate Hodgson points out in Chapter 1, as early as the 1815 Congress of Vienna, European political leaders at least signed up to the notion that the slave trade was inimical to the beliefs of civilized, Christian nations. Perhaps not surpris-ingly, reinforcement of these broad principles in practice was largely contingent on each country’s particular relationship to slavery but, nonetheless, over the

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nineteenth century, anti-slavery became one of the assumptions that reinforced European notions of their own superiority and a rationale for overseas interven-tions: if all nations and peoples were to be ‘raised’ into civilization, then legalized and institutionalized forms of slavery under their jurisdiction would have to go.

While North American abolitionists also sought to establish clear connec-tions between Christianity, the idea of civilization and the politics of anti-slavery within their own national context, this picture was disrupted by the issue of Indian slave ownership, as Natalie Joy demonstrates in Chapter 2. Th e contra-dictory and overlapping philanthropic interests at work can be compared to the support of European abolitionists for trusteeship and the ‘protection of the abo-rigines’. Yet in North America, as Joy explains, the language of benign slavery and civilization were appropriated in surprising ways. In Europe, nations used their own (apparently) benign slavery to indicate their relative superiority. For some American abolitionists, however, it was precisely the lack of civilization among Native Americans living in an apparently ‘indolent’ and Edenic state that meant their forms of slavery were demonstrably more benevolent than among civilized white people, driven by standards of industry and profi t to squeeze as much labour as possible from their slaves.

Th ese complexities notwithstanding, so well secured was the equation of anti-slavery with civilization, and such was the capacity of European states to set global agendas, that it became enshrined in international convention and law. As the Europeans managed (none-too-subtly) to cover their slave pasts with abolitionist cloaks, so anti-slavery was transformed over a century into a transnational, global phenomenon. Eff orts to secure an end to slavery in Abys-sinia, Sierra Leone and, intriguingly, in Nepal around the time of the League of Nations Convention in 1926 are extraordinarily signifi cant in this respect. As Sara Elmer and Christine Whyte show in Chapter 3, the case of Sierra Leone was mired in the ambiguities, complexities and contradictions of colonial rule. For Nepal, on the other hand, the abolition of slavery enabled it to make a powerful political statement about both its status as an independent sovereign nation and its civilization. Th at the critical statement of abolition was published in English – a language that, as Elmer and Whyte point out, the almost-uniformly illiter-ate Nepalese people did not understand and could not read – indicates that it was intended for a wider international audience and highlights its inherently politicized nature.

Th e question of audience is a key one in considering global representations of slavery and its abolitions since the nineteenth century. Substantial diff er-ences can be noted between internal and external memorial practices, as well as between metropolitan and colonial contexts. European imperial memories of past enslavement have tended to remember the act of ending slavery rather than the system itself, as examples cited throughout this volume testify. Th e grand

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gesture of abolition as a royal favour or republican decree and the retrospective patriotic construction of a benevolent power granting liberty to the enslaved, have tended to obscure powerful memories and experiences of enslavement and racism on the part of former slaves and their descendents.

In terms of contemporary memorialization, the products of the labour of the enslaved and the sites of their enslavement, many of which are re-emerging, such as the African Burial Ground in New York, are being allowed to speak for themselves via increasingly sophisticated archaeological tools. Th e importance of oral history and preserving and unearthing slave voices is another prominent contemporary theme which speaks to both the need to record a vanishing past and the claims of memory. Finally, the elusive economic legacies of slavery – the contribution of slave labour (and compensation claims following abolition) to the construction of institutions across Europe and North America – are also coming under increasing scrutiny.32

Th ese formalized historical and state-sponsored attempts to remember slav-ery are inseparable from its ongoing legacies in the present day. Th ere are still some parts of the globe, most notably in West African states such as Mali, Mau-ritania and Niger, where slave ancestry remains a continuing source of social discrimination.33 In other parts of the globe, slave ancestry has been recast as a source of pride and identity, with the shared experiences and struggles associated with slavery providing a shared point of identifi cation for numerous peoples of African descent. Clearly processes of remembering and forgetting are complex and subject to shift ing historical and political national contexts. While much remains to be done, the emergence of slavery as a focal point for political and popular discussion in the mid-1990s has nonetheless enabled these experiences and memories to belatedly move from marginal to mainstream.