On 1st August 2013, we commemorated 175 years since the emancipation of all persons enslaved-as-Negroes in the British Empire. This event, in 1838, fell in the middle of a Century of Emancipations that stretched from the very first emancipation of persons enslaved-as-Negroes (declared by the French civil commissioner, Léger-Félicité Sonthonax, on Saint-Domingue/Haiti, 220 years ago, in 1793) to the very last emancipation of persons enslaved-as-Negroes (enacted by Isabel, Princess Imperial of Brazil, in the Golden Law, 125 years ago, in 1888). In the intervening 95 years, our ancestors across the planet struggled to free themselves from a soci…
On 1st August 2013, we commemorated 175 years since the emancipation of all persons enslaved-as-Negroes in the British Empire. This event, in 1838, fell in the middle of a Century of Emancipations that stretched from the very first emancipation of persons enslaved-as-Negroes (declared by the French civil commissioner, Léger-Félicité Sonthonax, on Saint-Domingue/Haiti, 220 years ago, in 1793) to the very last emancipation of persons enslaved-as-Negroes (enacted by Isabel, Princess Imperial of Brazil, in the Golden Law, 125 years ago, in 1888). In the intervening 95 years, our ancestors across the planet struggled to free themselves from a social world in which slavery was legal and struggled to establish for themselves a social world in which slavery was against the law.
Re-imagining the way in which the state viewed slavery required re-imagining the established and entrenched political philosophies upon which the modern world, since Europe's so-called 'discovery' of the Americas, in 1492, had been constructed. Prior to, and during, the Century of Emancipations, political philosophers were pro-actively, publicly, and explicitly engaged in this complicated and iconoclastic business of re-imagining the Philosophy of Slavery. Yet, as the Century of Emancipations drew to a close, and, in the 125 years since it ended, most political philosophers have had little or nothing substantial to say about the Philosophy of Slavery. Since the Century of Emancipations, the Philosophy of Slavery has seemed, to those working in the mainstream, to be redundant.
However, the Philosophy of Slavery is not redundant: it is relevant to contemporary political questions in Britain, in the Commonwealth, and in the rest of the world. My work aims to demonstrate this relevance: (1) through a critical study of R. M. Hare's essay 'What is wrong with slavery', (2) in a monograph entitled 'Why was Negro Slavery wrong?: British disutility, French disrespect, or Negro disrepute?', and (3) by co-editing, with Dr Simon Roberts-Thomson, a new anthology of essays on the 'Philosophy of Slavery Since the Century of Emancipations'.