“Where blacks and whites in scorching valleys sweat”: British labouring-class writers and colonial slavery, 1660-1800

This thesis develops the first full-length account of the representation of colonial slavery in British labouring-class writing from 1660 to 1800. It offers a critical reassessment of the diverse social and political significances of slavery across a range of texts and genres — from ballads, plays, romances, portraiture, and pageants, to transportation accounts, periodicals, satires, georgics, narrative poems, and anti-slavery polemics. Recent scholarship has presented labouring-class writing on slavery as an opportunistic response to the nationwide campaign to abolish the slave trade in 1787–88. This suggests that labouring-class authors automatically sympathised with enslaved Africans due to their own subordinate class position, but that they inevitably adopted and echoed prejudicial colonialist views in order to conform to polite expectations. This thesis complicates this paradigm by drawing attention to a much broader range of labouring-class writing on slavery, and argues that over this period: (1) such writing consistently subverted dehumanising portrayals of enslaved Africans, and (2) that these subversions were often in direct response to the representation of enslaved Africans in more elite and canonical texts. The forced enslavement of Africans was not a subject that was altogether distant from Britons in this period. It not only permeated British culture in terms of the capital’s growing wealth, but was also encountered directly in ports, through forms of work such as seafaring, in the colonies by those transported there as indentured servants, and — most importantly — in print. This thesis explores how a range of anonymous balladeers and labouring-class authors conceptualised and responded to slavery in their written works. The first two chapters consider the response of balladeers during the seventeenth century, respectively, to the increasing presence of Africans in Britain, and to the emergence of forms of forced labour in the New World colonies. The subsequent three chapters concern the writings of Ned Ward, Stephen Duck, and Ann Yearsley, and their responses to the increasing centrality of slavery to British commerce and empire. Slavery was written about in this period by authors from all backgrounds, although most polite, educated writers until the late eighteenth century avoided taking any stance on the issue, even as they often justified the economic basis of slavery. This thesis shows that this was not the case in British labouring-class writing. Overall, it concludes that to fully understand the development of more critical, anti-colonial responses to slavery in this period, it is essential to consider labouring-class writing.