UC Davis

This dissertation historicizes a textual archive on Africa and Africans that a generation of enslavers created in reaction to the movement to abolish the transatlantic slave trade in Britain in the late-eighteenth century. It focuses on five white men who wrote about Africa and Africans as a strategy for opposing this abolitionist movement: Edward Long, Robert Norris, John Matthews, Archibald Dalzel, and Bryan Edwards. Over five chapters, the project traces the trajectory of this particular cohort as they migrate into the Atlantic World, engage in the practice of colonial slavery, and then return home to Britain to encounter the anti-slavery movement and conceive their archive. It builds on a generation of scholarship that examines the effects that the debates about the British slave trade had on issues other than slavery itself. It also engages with a literature on the production of European knowledge about non-European people in the early-modern Atlantic World. It argues that the “autoptic,” or eyewitness, politics of the British abolitionist movement reshaped traditions of knowledge production in the British Empire and, in doing so, gave birth to a political consciousness that would persist long after the end of that movement. In writing texts on Africa and Africans, this cohort of enslavers was reacting to the emergence of a humanitarian discourse on those subjects by metropolitan, anti-slavery activists. In the process, however, they were also reacting to a geopolitical hierarchy of knowledge production that supported that discourse. A such, the archive they constructed was a statement against the geopolitics of knowledge production.