The end of the American Revolution energised concerns about the political, economic, and moral state of an empire that had become inextricable from the plantation economy and the transatlantic trafficking of enslaved Africans. Intent on forging an empire without slave-trading, some Cambridge students and fellows took a leading role in attacking the slave economy, enslavers, and the consumption and production of goods tied to the plantation economy. Other past and present Cambridge fellows, however, were emboldened by defeat in the Revolution to support enslavers, arguing that enslavement was the principal foundation of Britain’s rapidly growing economy and should remain entrenched in the British Caribbean. The problem of the slave trade was particularly evident in Britons’ engagement with West Africa, where antislavery activists, colonisers, and explorers had to negotiate and collaborate with local slave-traders and imperial companies to achieve their aims. These conflicts reveal the challenges and limitations of idealism when confronted with the realities of Britain’s slave empire.

The slavery debates at Cambridge did not end with the emancipation of enslaved people in the Caribbean and India in 1843. In fact, undergraduates, fellows, and professors increasingly turned their attention to enslavement in the United States of America. Cambridge-educated abolitionists, such as Edward Strutt Abdy and Alexander Crummell, sought to mobilise opinion in both America and Britain against the persistent power of the enslaver class in the Southern United States. The outbreak of the American Civil War (1861–1865) inspired growing sympathy amongst educated British elites, including those at Cambridge, towards the Confederate cause, with many comparing American enslavers to landed British gentry in order to build camaraderie between British and American elites. The Confederacy, in turn, sought to lobby university men and mobilise student opinion in their favour to further the cause of Confederate diplomatic recognition in Britain.

Following the abolition of the slave trade, Cambridge men turned their intellectual attentions to the institution of slavery as a whole. Nevertheless, students, alumni, and fellows were torn on how best to create an empire of free labour and on the prospects for freed people of colour in post-emancipation societies. The early nineteenth century was a colorful era of experimentation as Cambridge activists sought to gradually achieve abolition without precipitating the violence and rebellion that characterized the Haitian Revolution, whilst Black and radical white abolitionists advocated for an immediate end to racial slavery. Historians have long ignored this phase of Cambridge debate on enslavement post-1807, which has resulted in a historiography of Cambridge abolitionism which overemphasizes its radical nature. In reality, a growing conservatism dominated this period of abolitionist thought at Cambridge – particularly as some Cambridge fellows and alumni continued to eschew pro-slavery rhetoric.

Following the colonisation of Ireland, North America, and the Caribbean, British society, politics, and the economy were forever transformed by the growing transatlantic empire. The University of Cambridge was intimately connected to that Atlantic world. The introduction provides context on Cambridge’s history and the long-term development of racial slavery, examining how enslavement and the plantation economy were of incredible significance to British life from the beginning of the seventeenth century through to the end of the American Civil War and beyond. More than a history of plantation owners purchasing stately homes or consumers eagerly consuming sugar, a case study of Cambridge’s town and gown communities highlights the vast spectrum of connections, ties, and interests that many Britons held to a slave empire.

The book concludes by pointing out two major shifts that my reading of the Shepherd produces: one focused on how the centrality of slavery in the Shepherd that complicates earlier treatments of the text as most invested in baptism and/or repentance, and the other focused on the ethical and historical anxieties that emerge from the enslaved–enslaver relationship being so deeply embedded in early Christian literature, ethics, and subject formation. Additionally, I point to how my findings reveal why the Shepherd would be appealing to late ancient Christians: its visionary, dialogical, parabolic, and ethical content are aimed toward crafting obedient enslaved believers who were unified in their ecclesiastical vision. The work of feminist, womanist, Africana, and slavery studies scholars offer an intellectual and ethical scaffolding upon which I contend with the centrality in early Christian thought of God as an enslaver and believers as enslaved persons, as well as the continuations and challenges of the embeddedness of slavery in Christian vocabulary into the twenty-first century.

From his 1982 conviction for killing a police officer and death sentence to the 2010 commutation of that sentence to life-in-prison-without-parole, Mumia Abu-Jamal has experienced and studied mass incarceration intimately as a political prisoner. At the local level, Mumia’s case is a microcosm of the period of the 1970s and 1980s in Philadelphia – the highpoint of rogue white supremacy within the city’s police department and the District Attorney’s office. At the macro level, the period of his incarceration spans the decades of exponential carceral expansion in the US that began in the 1980s. In the more than four decades since his 1982 conviction, the Abu-Jamal has penned thirteen books and thousands of short radio commentaries from prison, most notably Live from Death Row, which features harrowing, first-hand accounts of aging men and their struggles for medical care in the face of physical illness, younger men who are psychically and spiritually pulverized by guard brutality, barbarous conditions, humiliating body cavity strip searches, and the unnatural social isolation of death row imprisonment.

Angela Davis, George Jackson, and other prominent Black intellectuals and radicals shaped abolition in different ways. The evolution and popularization of abolition promoted by Angela Davis was influenced by her own traumatic incarceration. Jon Jackson, the younger brother of George Jackson, had worked with Angela Davis to support the incarcerated men through the Soledad Brothers Defense Committee. Without her permission, in August 1970, Jonathan Jackson took guns belonging to Angela Davis to wage a raid at Marin County Courthouse in order to take hostages that could be exchanged to free Black prisoners. Prison guards shot and killed Jon Jackson, two Black prisoners, and a white judge in a stationary van. Davis fled the state, fearing reprisal from reactionaries, and was arrested by the FBI in October. During her incarceration, George Jackson was also killed by prison guard(s) in August 1971. Acquitted of all charges in 1972, Angela Davis advocated for abolition and over decades aligned abolition with advocacy academics; her work also increasingly focused on gender leadership of women and feminism, as noted in Women, Race and Class.

George Jackson inhabits a central position in the living archive of diasporic Black radical and global revolutionary intellectuals. This chapter examines how Jackson’s political thought emerged through his consistent self-identification as an ordinary Black person inhabiting the historical, structural antiblackness of the United States. Against the telos of many carceral/prison narratives, Jackson’s Soledad Brother reflects the developing thought of a Black liberationist, carceral insurrectionist, and diasporic revolutionary whose primary political and cultural work is not focused on achieving his personal freedom (i.e. release from prison) but rather on organizing and proliferating radical ruptures of an existing oppressive order – what Jackson famously identifies in Blood in My Eye as “perfect disorder.” To study Soledad Brother and Blood in My Eye is to meditate on the consistency and militant commitment with which Jackson exhibited characteristics that made him an influential educator, organizer, and political intellectual during and beyond his lifetime, especially among contemporaneous and subsequent generations of politically activated (Black) captives of the state.

Women’s prison zines in the 1970s represent a pivotal moment in the evolution of feminist grassroots media, marking a sustained effort by incarcerated women to create their own platforms for self-expression and political organizing. Emerging from Black Power, queer liberation, and prison abolition movements, zines challenged dominant narratives about crime, punishment, and women’s experiences of incarceration. Historically, the carceral state and its monopoly over the bodies of imprisoned individuals played crucial roles in suppressing the voices and experiences of incarcerated women, particularly women of color and LGBTQ+ individuals. Zines like Through the Looking Glass, No More Cages, and Bar None were consequential to incarcerated women’s ability to forge solidarity networks, articulate anti-carceral feminist perspectives, and imagine alternatives to incarceration. The chapter utilizes literary analysis to delineate the impact of these zines, demonstrating how these publications functioned as tools for activism, self-expression, and community-building within the constraints of the carceral system.

The antislavery campaign was in many ways the cradle of the constellation of reform movements and ideologies that are usefully understood as part of a nineteenth-century global reform culture. Chapter 1 surveys the cultural legacy of antislavery among reformers, as it offers a typology of the main motifs and dominant memories. To set the stage for the following chapters, it discusses how abolitionism served both as an organized and as a cultural movement in the US, the UK, France, the Low Countries, and the German states. It argues that though organizational efforts were insignificant compared to the unprecedented scale of popular mobilisation achieved in the Atlantic World, the cultural impact in Continental Europe – divided into a pre- and post-Uncle Tom’s Cabin phase – was lasting and diverse. This impact was twofold: it lay both in the depictions of the institution of slavery that the movement promoted (in a coordinated fashion) and in the way abolitionism itself came to serve as a venerated model.

In the days leading up to Jamaica’s 1865 Morant Bay rebellion, and in a circulated letter written after the initial violence outside the Morant Bay courthouse on October 11, Black Native Baptist deacon Paul Bogle called on other residents of St. Thomas-in-the-East to join him in fighting for the rights of the parish’s Black residents. He framed the events that were unfolding as a race war and urged others to join the cause, “Skin for skin!” Chapter 2 traces the interpretive history of this slogan, drawn from Job 2:4, and shows how it came to be used within the international anti-slavery movement. In using the phrase, Bogle aimed at a Black alliance that would cut across ethnic, religious, and class lines and that would be willing to meet White violence with a violent Black response. Although the rebellion was crushed, Bogle’s vision has lived on, shaping the experience of race in Jamaica today.

On behalf of the Edinburgh Ladies Emancipation Society, Quaker reformer Eliza Wigham drafted a public letter of condolence to Maria Jane, wife of George William Gordon, who had been executed for his alleged involvement in Jamaica’s 1865 Morant Bay rebellion. Wigham applied Matthew 25:40 – “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me” – to George William Gordon. Chapter 5 shows how this text reflected a central pillar of the logic of the international anti-slavery movement. As deployed in sermons, speeches at public meetings, and argumentative pamphlets and books, including some penned by Wigham, this biblical text encoded a hierarchy that valued White heroism while delegitimizing Black agency in resisting White power. The chapter thus reckons with the fact that in the years and decades after the rebellion Bogle and other Black Jamaicans who died with him were viewed, even by White liberals, as misguided, or even barbarous.

Chapter 1 recounts some of the main events of Jamaica’s 1865 Morant Bay rebellion. Compared to other historical reconstructions, the chapter emphasizes the influence of the end of the American Civil War and debates about Reconstruction on the rebellion and its coverage in the press. The chapter offers a basic narrative framework within which to understand the arguments presented in Chapters 2 through 6.

Having been found guilty of treason, George William Gordon spent his last hour writing to his wife a letter containing personal goodbyes, business notes, and a firm protestation of innocence. Thanks to the newspaper-savviness of his mother-in-law Ann Shanon and his acquaintance Louis Chamerovzow, the letter was published in dozens of papers around the world. It fell like a thunderclap, helping to turn the tide of public opinion against the Jamaica government and the island’s White English governor, Edward John Eyre. Chapter 3 examines Gordon’s use of biblical language in his final letter. Enslaved at birth on the Cherry Garden estate, and rising to become an elected member of the House of Assembly, the island’s highest legislative body, Gordon invoked 2 Timothy 4:17 – “I have fought a good fight” – to present an alternative to Paul Bogle’s vision of a Black alliance prepared to meet White violence with a violent Black response. For Gordon, Black advancement would come only through what he considered legitimate forms of protest, namely political agitation and the shaping of public opinion in newspapers.

Chapter 6 sets the book’s four detailed case studies within broader patterns of public discourse around Jamaica’s 1865 Morant Bay rebellion. Jamaican Jewish newspaper editor Sydney Levien, White American abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, Black American Baptist missionary Samuel Ward, White English Baptist leader Edward Bean Underhill, Black American abolitionist and physician Sarah Parker Remond, and dozens of others this chapter mentions appealed to biblical slogans as they discussed race relations in Jamaica and their implications for the United States. The chapter illustrates the range of opinions expressed and affirms the importance of the Bible to debates about race relations after emancipation.

Modern theory of punishment generally conflates two questions. The first concerns the justification of state punishment, the second the moral–psychological damage that occurs when a person is violated. The first leads to political theory and a legally based account of wrongdoing and punishment. The second considers the moral–psychological nature of violation, grief and reconciliation. Hegel’s early theological writings provide a critical vantage point from which to view law and the dominant liberal theory of punishment, including his own ‘mature’ position as a founder of modern retributivism. Based on a metaphysics of love, he develops there his account of a perpetrator’s guilt and how a victim might deal with violation, finding a common ground in the grief both may feel. This early metaphysical ethics contrasts with the Philosophy of Right’s later rational, retributive, metaphysics of punishment. The chapter considers critically Axel Honneth’s approach and suggests that the early theological writings are worthy of more consideration than they are often given. This early work might be more mature in psychological terms than Hegel’s later legal and political theory, providing the basis for a critique of that theory that is ethically real and institutionally critical. This is a prototypical ERIC critique pointing towards penal abolition.

The Conclusion summarizes the book’s arguments and contextualizes them within broader patterns of public discourse in which Jamaica was conceptualized as especially revealing about race, and in which biblical slogans were used to encode universal claims about race. The conclusion analyzes a speech given by English lawyer and politician Charles Savile Roundell, who had served as secretary to the Royal Commission of Inquiry appointed to investigate Jamaica’s 1865 Morant Bay rebellion. Addressing the Tenth Annual Meeting of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, held in Manchester, England, Roundell proposed taking Jamaica as a crucial instance, a term taken from Francis Bacon’s program for a new scientific method. And he cited the Bible as he made claims about how the races could and should relate to one another.

The Introduction frames the book’s argument by analyzing coverage of Jamaica’s 1865 Morant Bay rebellion in the American Missionary (New York), published by the American Missionary Association. The editors invoked Ecclesiastes 7:7, “Surely oppression maketh a wise man mad,” to blame Jamaica’s largely White plantocracy for pushing Black laborers to breaking point. They drew out the implications of this lesson on race for the United States – White Americans who had participated in the system of slavery should not be entrusted with safeguarding the rights of free Black citizens. This book shows how Jamaicans, Britons, and Americans understood Jamaica as a prime example, a test case that shed light on great questions about race and race relations occupying the Atlantic world at the end of the American Civil War. It argues that they used biblical slogans to encode a wide variety of claims about race and race relations. This Introduction relates the book’s argument to work by historians on Jamaica, the British Empire, and abolitionism, on the one hand, and work by biblical and religious studies scholars on the Bible and race, on the other.