Böcker av Helmut Meier

Helmut Meier's study of pro- and anti-slavery texts from 1784-1825 focuses on understanding the distinct image of Africans in the British debate on the slave trade and slavery as such. Starting from the premise that, at the threshold from the early to the late modern period, the distinct image of Africans as slaves was instrumental in universalizing a Eurocentric concept of capitalist wage labor both at the colonial centres and margins, Meier argues that, by portraying African slaves as suffering wretches, especially anti-slavery texts created colonial Others in an indistinct zone between inclusion and exclusion from humanity. The discourse on slavery thus constructs African slaves as mimetic Others which could subsequently become the objects of a discourse of colonial reform and 'betterment'.

Although he put an immense personal effort in the cause of abolishing the British triangle trade, Thomas Clarkson tends to be overshadowed by his better known fellow-abolitionist William Wilberforce. Unjustly so - while Wilberforce acted as the abolitionist movement's spokesperson in parliament, Clarkson travelled enormous distances through all of England in search of public support for the abolitionist movement. His various essays and pamphlets made Clarkson the ideological mastermind of the British antislavery movement.Until the present day, Both Clarkson and Wilberforce rank among the saints of antislavery hagiography. Many scholars, however, have set out to discuss British antislavery in a critical way. This book examines in depth three of Clarkson's essays (An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species - 1786; An Essay on the Impolicy of the African Slave Trade - 1788; Thoughts on the Necessity of Improving the Condition of the Slaves in the British Colonies - 1823) and shows changes in style and ideas. Helmut Meier tries to exemplify the links of abolitionist discourse and ideology to such phenomena as the rising of a new capitalist order in the late 18th and early 19th century, the Industrial Revolution, the emerging Imperialism of the period and the connected proliferation of abolitionist ideas around the world.