Slavery’s Long Goodbye: A Wilberforce Institute Lecture by Prof Chris Evans

Slavery’s Long Goodbye: Capitalism, Nationalism, and Christianity in the Age of British Emancipation by Professor Chris Evans

We are delighted to host Professor Chris Evans as part of the Wilberforce Institute's Public Lecture programme, in association with Hull Museums.

In the 1830s, the British state turned its back on chattel slavery, abolishing slavery as a legal condition in the British Atlantic world. Leaving slavery behind was no simple matter, however. Although the British liked to think of themselves as unswervingly hostile to slavery, abolitionism was just one component of British national identify in the early Victorian decades. The British were also pathfinders for global capitalism (even when new areas of capitalist endeavour rested upon slavery). They saw themselves as advancing Christian civilisation (including forms of Christianity that were indifferent to emancipation). And they often looked favourably on the emergence of new nations (even if, as was the case with the Confederate States of America, that new nation was aggressively pro-slavery).

This paper deals with three cousins who found it impossible to disentangle themselves from slavery, despite a family tradition of anti-slavery activism. One cousin was a prominent businessman who became a corporate enslaver in Cuba in the 1830s. Another was a High Church naval chaplain, sailing out of Cape Town in the 1840s, who came to reject the British policy of intercepting slave ships headed for Cuba or Brazil. The third was a ne'er-do-well who embraced Southern nationalism in the 1860s and fought with the Confederate States Army. Their experiences reveal the limitations of Britain’s Age of Emancipation.

Professor Chris Evans is head of the History Research Group at the University of South Wales. He works on industrial history from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, and the history of Atlantic slavery. His current interests include abolitionism in the British world in the nineteenth century, the links between European industry and the Atlantic slave trade, eighteenth-century whaling, and Swansea copper as an agency of global change in the nineteenth century. He is the author of Slave Wales: The Welsh and Atlantic Slavery 1660-1850.

This year we are teaming up with Hull Museums to offer attendees at our public lectures the opportunity to visit Wilberforce House Museum next door before they join us for the lecture. As a result all our lectures will begin at 4.30pm, directly after the Museum closes, and all will take place at our home in Oriel Chambers, 27 High Street, Hull, HU1 1NE. We are very grateful for the financial support Hull Museums is providing to the Wilberforce Institute’s public lecture programme, and hope that some of you will take the opportunity to have a look round their exhibitions and displays in advance of the lectures. Please join us for refreshments from 4.15pm onwards, and if you can, stay afterwards for a glass of wine and a chance to talk with our speaker.

There are a limited number of tickets available to attend in person. If you can’t make it in person, you can still enjoy the lectures by streaming online – please select the ticket according to your preference when you make your booking.

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