The Making and Remaking of an Abolitionist

As writer and grassroots campaigner, Thomas Clarkson was a central figure in the eighteenth and nineteenth-century anti-slavery movement. In this first biography of Clarkson in over three decades, John Oldfield explores his career and afterlife, focussing, in particular, on his commitment to rational critiques of the 'inefficiency' and 'impolicy' of the slave trade and his creation of an anti-slavery public. As his monumental History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade amply demonstrates, like many white activists Clarkson took it as axiomatic that emancipation was in the gift of people like himself, studiously avoiding any mention of African struggle or self-determination. Though controversial, his History would play a key role in the shaping of British identity post-1807 and a version of the abolitionist past that we are still contending with today, which viewed the legacy of transatlantic slavery through the moral triumph of Abolition.