Anti-Slavery and the Reconstitution of Empire

This survey article combines some recent scholarship on anti-slavery with work on humanitarianism and legal history to explore ways in which anti-slavery fed into the legal transformation of the British Empire in the first decades of the nineteenth century. It argues that campaigns for abolition, emancipation, and the amelioration of slavery did more than use law as a means to the end of slave emancipation. Anti-slavery efforts were integral to a larger process of imperial legal reordering: they often aimed, and invariably worked, to transform the legal relationship among subjects, colonial states and the imperial centre.