This provocative and original volume enriches the scholarship on the post–Civil War United States as a nation and empire. It avers that conservative and pragmatic arguments reoriented antislavery in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Originating in Britain, this transformation spread to the United States after its grinding Civil War and legal abolition of slavery. There, despite occasional dissent, postbellum currents saw antislavery marshaled behind anti-immigrant, patriarchal, and imperial policies. The volume is wide-ranging, surveying Anglo-American commentary on unfree labor in places such as Hawaii, Nigeria, the Ottoman Empire, and South Africa.
The volume delivers a complex portrait of ideological change in the United States. The struggle over southern slavery, it holds, narrowed domestic understandings of unfree labor to the chattel form present there. Transatlantic polemics about the institution, moreover, left enduring intellectual legacies, including antislavery strategies of foregrounding ideal victims and firsthand accounts. From Appomattox to the early...
