What’s particularly difficult about this history — and lots of history, actually — is that it contradicts itself often. The years 1833 to 1838 are generally considered a time of emancipation from slavery in Britain. But at the same time, in the following few decades, Britain was just as reliant on slave labor as ever. Commodities produced by U.S. slavery, such as cotton, were pouring into metropolitan Britain at this time. More than 80% of the cotton arriving in factories in Lancashire and Manchester was coming from the American South. Slavery was propelling the country’s explosive manufacturing growth and allowing its economy to dominate.

This cuts against a heroic story of this period as an era of British emancipation. If this is a time when slavery in most of the British Empire was abolished,  it was also a time when manufacturers and colonial officials were seeing how slavery was giving the U.S. this unmatched economic dynamism and wondering how to surpass that dynamism through colonial projects. That is what scholars are beginning to grapple with.

Q: What are some examples of the influence American slavery had on the British Empire?

Much of my book examines how U.S. slavery influenced British colonial projects, especially across the Americas, Asia, and the Pacific.

U.S. slavery had a particularly deep impact upon British colonial projects in India. At this time in India, there was a huge aspiration among British manufacturers to transform agrarian relations. They looked toward the legacy of global transformations in indigo production.  In this time, production of indigo — the plant that produces blue dye — had grown massively in India following a decline in production in the U.S. Manufacturers and colonial officials believed that cotton could follow a similar trajectory and that India could take the place of the U.S. as Britain’s cotton field. They shipped seeds and plantation implements from the United States to India en masse. Plantation overseers and colonial officials travelled between Britain, India and the U.S. to manage such a transformation. However, despite these efforts, these projects were constantly disrupted.  

Such interconnected histories of slavery and colonialism are part of the broader world of global capitalism. Colonialism is capitalism. Slavery is capitalism. Through these histories, you can see how these worlds are not separated from one another.

Q: What stories in your book might surprise people?

My research on British Honduras shares a side of American Civil War history people may not know. After slavery was abolished in British Honduras, their economy stagnated, and landholding companies were looking for ways to revitalize it. In the midst of the American Civil War, the area’s largest landholding company expressed an interest in relocating formerly enslaved people in the U.S. to British Honduras. This idea actually had mainstream support in the U.S., including from President Lincoln. Company representatives met with Lincoln and had a whole series of conversations about how to make this work. It ultimately fell apart, partly because formerly enslaved people refused to relocate to British Honduras. However, after this project fell apart, landholding interests turned toward bringing indentured labor from China to perform plantation labor and also depended upon the arrival of former U.S. slaveholders to manage plantations. This history had a particularly violent legacy and is another point where you can see ideas of colonialism being very influenced by how slavery and emancipation in the U.S. are unfolding.

Q: Why was the British Empire drawing lessons from U.S. slavery when it had just ended slavery across its empire?

When I first started doing research, I took time to just listen and read and reconstruct the language and understand the discourse in the records I found. But at some point I had to stop listening and start understanding why all of this change was happening. 

This was an era of colonial uprisings and also ultimately when enslaved people in the U.S. ended their enslavement. This was an era when colonial subjects across the British Empire really challenged the conditions of British rule. These uprisings, unfortunately, were also producing these terrible ideas among people in power — people W.E.B. Du Bois called the “white masters of the world” — of how to extend capitalism’s lease on life through slavery and empire, even in the age of putative emancipation. 

British manufacturers and colonial bureaucrats were looking for ways to produce commodities at a higher volume, and more cheaply, as was being done through U.S. slavery. In the process of looking toward slavery, they fastened new obligations onto colonial society, often through perverse imaginations, and this had a really devastating effect on colonial subjects across the British empire. It didn’t need to be this way.

Q: Why are these domestic and international histories still relevant today?

Sometimes, drawing parallels between the past and the present is a risky business. But the events I describe in this book are unfolding at a time of huge upheaval — emancipation, uprisings, famine in India, white British workers relocated to Australia in huge numbers. In 1858, the idea that slavery would soon come to an end would have sounded unbelievable. Seven years later, the largest slaveholding society in the modern world collapsed. 

Right now, we’re in this period of tremendous crisis, characterized in the U.S. by anti-Black racism and police brutality, characterized in India by blocked paths to citizenship and new mass dispossessions due to the pandemic, and characterized by global reckonings with racist and colonialist legacies. Just like that period in the 1800s, it’s this era of massive upheaval where there are new questions being raised and new challenges emerging. For some, this crisis was unimaginable even a few months ago. Looking toward the past reveals ways that unexpected possibilities can also arise in moments of upheaval. Then, as now, people are resisting structures with an eyes-wide-open, realpolitik approach.

I would be reticent to offer prescriptions based upon my book — the present crisis involves unique new circumstances that can’t be solved by reading a history book about the 19th century. But I do think that what happened in that era is that people — from those who were enslaved to colonial subjects — dreamed impossible things. Those visions really subverted or undercut these hallucinatory colonial prescriptions. If there’s any lesson we can take away, it’s that people seize history and change its meaning in dramatic ways. That’s always a possibility.