This chapter explores the significance of race for the landscape of genius in relation to the overall racial construction of nature in American society. It focuses on Frederick Douglass’s attempt to establish his own landscape of genius at his estate at Cedar Hill in Ancostia, overlooking Washington DC. Douglass was famous for his genius as an orator and as an abolitionist and civil rights activist. This chapter also demonstrates his deep immersion in nineteenth-century discourses of literary landscape and nature. By seeking to naturalize his genius in the Cedar Hill landscape, Douglass affirmed not only his full cultural citizenship in the nation but also, as a representative figure, the cultural rights and status of all African Americans. Cedar Hill was memorialized after Douglass’s death and eventually became a National Historic Site, but its racial associations disqualified it as “nature” in the dominant White environmental imagination, obscuring this important aspect of Douglass’s identity.

This essay addresses the role of whiteness in slave narratives, a body of writing that featured the voices and experiences of African Americans, arguing that white American culture is fundamental to these narratives. This foundational presence is clear in the narratives’ representation of white slave owners, in the prefaces or other material added to slave narratives by white writers, and in the fact that some narratives were wholly written by white writers, representing the experience of formerly enslaved African Americans. But it is important to understand that white American culture made the slave narratives necessary and that these narratives work to persuade white Americans of moral imperatives for which African Americans needed no persuasion.

Besides discussing previous scholarship on gender and the rhetoric of slavery, the introduction provides a historical overview and historiography of the nineteenth-century international women’s movement, particularly illuminating interpersonal and cultural connections with organised antislavery. The introduction also outlines an understanding of the woman–slave analogy as part of the international women’s movement’s memory culture. It sets up a common-sense conceptual framework that guides the rest of the book, introducing the terms usable past and the (collective) memory work involved in creating it, as well as the umbrella term memories of antislavery, narratives which were circulated transnationally both during the campaign to end slavery and afterwards.

Chapter 3 offers a materially focused consideration of the practical minutiae of memory work among nineteenth-century women’s right advocates. It considers the collaboration between English Quaker Anne Knight (1786–1862) and Parisian socialist Jeanne Deroin (1805–1894), which began in the aftermath of the events in Paris in 1848. The chapter argues that following the February Revolution and abolition of slavery, Knight and Deroin, both ardent women’s rights advocates, promoted memories of antislavery to inform the usable past of a transnational women’s rights community. Through their transatlantic networking, their circle compiled and made available an archive of memories and materials of Garrisonian abolitionism, reprinting, for instance, William Lloyd Garrison’s declaration of principles for the National Anti-Slavery Convention from 1833. By circulating these materials, they promoted a cosmopolitan outlook on abolition and women’s emancipation which contrasted both with the national orientation of Parisian women’s rights colleagues and with that of prominent Republicans, who sought to commemorate abolition as a victory of French Republicanism.

The final chapter considers the legacy of memories of antislavery in first-wave feminism. It looks at the impact of these memories on the rhetoric of ‘sisterhood’ and the role these memories played in what has come to be called ‘imperial feminism’. Finally, it reflects on how feminism affected the historical transmission of the cultural memory of slavery and abolitionism, which is still a potent model of reform today.

Chapter 12 looks at the abolition movement, primarily as it targets prisons but also with respect to its stance on the police. As a foil, the chapter reacts to an article entitled The Dangerous Few: Taking Seriously Prison Abolition and Its Skeptics, in which Thomas Frampton proffers several reasons why those who want to abolish prisons should not budge from their position even for offenders who are considered dangerous. This chapter rebuts each of these reasons. In the process of doing so, it demonstrates why a criminal law “minimalist” approach to prisons is preferable to abolition, not just when dealing with the dangerous few but also as a means of protecting the nondangerous many. It argues that a minimalist regime patterned on preventive justice precepts can radically reduce reliance on prisons and on the police, without the loss in crime prevention capacity and legitimacy that is likely to come with abolition.

Chapter 5 addresses a major demographic puzzle concerning thousands of New York slaves who seem to have gone missing in the transition from slavery to freedom, and the chapter questions how and if slaves were sold South. The keys to solving this puzzle include estimates of common death rates, census undercounting, changing gender ratios in the New York black population, and, most importantly, a proper interpretation of the 1799 emancipation law and its effects on how the children of slaves were counted in the census. Given an extensive analysis of census data, with various demographic techniques for understanding how populations change over time, I conclude that a large number of New York slaves (between 1,000 and 5,000) were sold South, but not likely as many as some previous historians have suggested. A disproportionate number of these sold slaves came from Long Island and Manhattan.

Noting the proliferation of human rights leagues at the turn of the twentieth century, and their significance up to the interwar period, this chapter argues that such leagues built on an organizational and discursive repertoire built over the course of the prior century by three transnational movements above all: the abolitionist, women’s suffrage, and peace movements. These movements shared a recognition of a systemic link between the rule of law, humanitarianism, and political participation by the people, and they sought to realize these connected values through new forms of association and mobilization. These movements shared some personnel, organizing strategies, and rhetoric. Although the language of rights and more particularly “human rights” or “droits de l’homme” was relatively marginal to these movements, especially outside France, their members did invoke human rights both to make their case on behalf of each of these humanitarian aims and also to draw connections between them, particularly between the abolition of slavery and women’s emancipation. Peace societies offered another model for bringing together diverse social groups around common political and humanitarian goals. Members of the French Ligue pour la défense des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, founded in 1898 in the context of the Dreyfus affair, as well as its provincial affiliates and human rights leagues it inspired in other countries, drew not only or even primarily on the legacy of the few prior organizations dedicated specifically to rights, but more generally on the example of these three humanitarian social movements.

The rights of man and the citizen were in conflict in West African abolitionism because the universalism of the rights of man was not enforceable without encroaching on the sovereignty of African states. This chapter will explore the development of ideas of rights in the engagements between West Africa and the abolitionists and imperialists who intervened there across the nineteenth century. The three sections explore the forms of civil, political, and ‘universal’ rights that existed in West Africa at the beginning of the nineteenth century; the ideas of rights that abolitionists developed in their antislavery interventions against the slave trade in West Africa; and the ideas of rights that emerged in debates over imperial citizenship in these colonies towards the end of the century. A multiplicity of rights regimes existed in overlapping and competing spaces as West Africa became a site for differentiating the civilizing mission and citizenship; duties and rights; and the boundaries of universal privileges and assertive versus paternalistic rights. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen may have laid out the theory for citizenship, law, and universal rights, but it was through the attempt to implement those ideas as universal that differentiation between basic rights and citizenship rights began to be articulated. That differentiation emerged through negotiations over the power to implement universal ideals in places like West Africa, which were undergoing their own revolutions in ideas of universal legal regimes and notions of citizenship, while maintaining political privileges for a subset of the population. In the process, European colonial governments came into conflict with each other and with African governments’ ideas of the universal moral values that conferred rights on their members.

Part I centers Italy in British heritage discourse, showing how nineteenth-century writers used Italy (especially Pompeii, Rome, and Florence) to redefine their own historical and political identities. Amid political resurgence and ongoing unification efforts, the long tradition in British writing of depicting Italy as culturally and politically dead faltered. In response to the Risorgimento, British writers deployed fractal and syncretism – two temporal forms that afford nonlinear historicisms. Rather than the timelines that locate Italy in a distant past, fractal and syncretism connect past and present. One result is a redefined political liberty that can transcend national, gender, class, and race boundaries, as I explore through forgotten transnational figures including the writer Susan Horner and the abolitionist Sarah Parker Remond.

Even after the soldiers of the West India Regiments helped to suppress enslaved uprisings in Barbados (1816) and Demerara (1823), they continued to be objects of suspicion. This chapter examines the efforts that commanding officers and supporters of the regiments made to challenge such opposition by seeking to manage the image of their Black soldiers and portray them in a favourable light. What emerged was the ‘steady Black soldier’, an ambiguous racial-martial figure that was simultaneously soldierly yet passive. This theme is explored through both the predominant representation of the soldiers as standing ‘ready for inspection’ and the elision of any active military role. This image is placed in the context of wider debates about the figure of the Black subject that characterised the contemporaneous controversy over slavery and it will be argued that the steady Black soldier represents the military equivalent to the kneeling enslaved figure promulgated by anti-slavery advocates.

Amid epidemics, droughts, and a bourgeoning abolitionist wave in the late 1870s and 1880s, the Brazilian Empire internalized migration protocols long in the making. Crucial to the development of new migration policies was the Sociedade Central de Imigração (SCI), a new association midway between a corporation and a literary club. The SCI and its abolitionist members, which included conservative noblemen and republican professionals, synthesized the lessons learned by three generations of political elites, and avidly lobbied for reform policies pertinent to land surveying and distribution, naturalization, and immigration promotion. Dismissed by scholars as a bourgeois and largely failed experiment in immigration advocacy, the SCI in fact furnished the policy tools for the Brazilian government to counter German and Italian interdictions on migrations to Brazil, which, as the chapter demonstrates, had more to do with commercial and geostrategic concerns than with immigration issues themselves. Ultimately, the SCI laid the building blocks for the new Republican government to welcome exponentially growing cohorts of migrants despite the persistence of international prohibitions in Italy.

Social scientists recently claimed Darwin’s Descent of Man (1871) is a racist text; that Darwin’s racism blinded him, impacting his science. Biologists and philosophers countered that Darwin’s work should be championed because it undercut slavery-justifying polygenism (independent origins for human races). Others extol Darwin for his emotional condemnation of slavery when he first encountered it on the Beagle voyage. This essay systematically explores Darwin’s views on human race expressed in Descent and then digs through a half-century of Darwin’s correspondence with prominent scientists to answer the question: what were Darwin’s views not just on the human torture involved in the enslavement process but on human race more broadly?

The Congress of Vienna in 1814–1815 delineated territorial settlements, coronated several newly independent monarchs and resulted in an official declaration on the abolition of the slave trade, but it did not treat the issue of piracy. This paradox is the key concern of this chapter. Vienna’s Final Acts were the end product of these talks, and though they did not mention ‘Barbary piracy’, their conclusion would nevertheless have a great impact on the international treatment of this newly perceived threat to security. The years 1814–1815 were an important turning point because they initiated a period of transition. The congress created an international context in which North African corsairing could be reconceived as a threat to security. This new perception of threat hinged upon misconceptions of the supposed fanaticism and irrationality that allegedly characterised North African privateering. It also disregarded the long history of diplomatic and commercial contact between both sides of the Mediterranean Sea.

This chapter explains how and why Topsy – a “little negro girl” featured in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) – became a symbol of artificial life during the long wake of slave emancipation in the United States. It begins by recontextualizing Stowe’s abolitionist melodrama in relation to arguments about human–machine difference in the industrial North. Because the automated Black slave girl was a perfect foil to the autonomous white man, Topsy could critique slavery while affirming the race and gender hierarchies of white bourgeois society. Turning to the material history of plush “Topsy” dolls – the handicraft of enslaved women turned into factory-made commodities – the chapter argues that Topsy as doll gained its cultural power as a reaction to fears of Black autonomy in the South and white automatization in the North. It concludes by considering Topsy’s unruly afterlife in the “technopoetics” of Black modernism in the Jazz Age.

The conclusion opens with interwar debates on the deportation of women working in prostitution, highlighting how for many reformers, trafficking was a migration problem to be solved through migration controls. Rather than protecting vulnerable women, however, anti-trafficking policies that relied on exclusion and expulsion safeguarded the perceived vulnerability of national borders instead. The conclusion then turns to contemporary examples in which humanitarian efforts to protect “trafficking victims” serve as punishments instead, particularly if individuals are unable to rehearse the script of ideal victimhood, and embody its accompanying form of gendered sexual respectability. It closes with a discussion of French prostitution policy in the postwar period, including the abolition of regulationism in two stages, in 1946 and 1960; the domestic security law of 2003; and the criminalization of sex buyers (the “Nordic Model”) in 2016. In each of these examples, advocates framed the respective laws as humanitarian, progressive, and protective of sex workers. Yet all were efforts to moralize public space, promote law and order, and comply with a larger infrastructure of migration controls.