Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation: Writings in the British Romantic Period

This facsimile edition brings together a corpus of work which reflects the major issues and theories concerning slavery and the status of the slave. The Romantic period witnessed the beginnings of the sustained British imperial expansion that was to dominate its history, bringing with it a sometimes anxious awareness of other cultures and societies. This was also the period when criticism of the slave trade was at its most intense, finally leading to the formal abolition of the trade within the British colonies in 1807 and the emancipation of the slaves in the British colonies in 1833. Most writers associated with the first generation of British Romanticism - William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Robert Southey, John Thelwall, and a host of other non-canonical writers - wrote against the slave trade and their writing inevitably engaged in representing the African 'other'