Frictions of Circulation in the Abolitionist Atlantic

Both nineteenth-century abolitionists and subsequent scholars emphasised how the fluid circulation of money, print, and people between American and Britain created a productive climate for abolitionism. Using the British and... [ view full abstract ]

Both nineteenth-century abolitionists and subsequent scholars emphasised how the fluid circulation of money, print, and people between American and Britain created a productive climate for abolitionism. Using the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society archives, my paper suggests that this picture of a frictionless public sphere belies the interruptions, and belatedness that characterized the transatlantic circulation of American abolitionist texts. The archives reveal difficulties in importing American books, and show that the Society struggled with volunteer agents and publication delays in its own circulation of slave narratives. Delays between the lecture tour of John Brown, a fugitive slave, and the Society’s publication of Brown’s Slave Life in Georgia (1853) frustrated agents who wanted Brown to appear simultaneously in person and in print. The Society thus employed a distribution model that relied on circulating black bodies, even as Brown’s narrative stressed that trading human bodies was prohibited in Britain, creating further friction between the materiality circulation of antislavery and its ideology. I conclude by considering how acknowledging these frictions and delays reshapes our understanding of the Atlantic as arena for transnational reform.