Colonial Aftershocks in the Nineteenth Century

The establishment of the United States marked both the launch of new notions of human rights and a competing entrenchment of hierarchical ways held over from their colonial origins. These ideas often clashed, sometimes producing compromises and other times clear winners. In the United States, the failure to resolve the issue of slavery in the Constitution left a legacy of simmering, and sometimes boiling, conflict. In addition to slave insurrections and rebellions, conflict manifested over the ability to spread abolition material and efforts to maintain the status quo.

But while the United States grappled with the problem of slavery, the aftershocks of the American Revolution spread beyond the shores of the United States. With the loss of a nearly ⅓ of their colonial holdings, Britain went through its own reckoning with slavery. The loss of a portion of their slave-holding colonies left the proponents of slavery within British government in a weaker position, allowing abolitionists to gain ground. Combined with significant slave insurrections within colonies such as Jamaica, the abolitionists shifted the political winds and positioned Britain as a morally superior empire–first by abolishing slavery in 1833, and then by employing the Royal Navy to impede the transatlantic slave trade. Yet Britain’s reckoning was only partial–slaveholders were well-compensated for the loss of their enslaved laborers, and Britain’s domestic manufacturing relied on products produced by enslaved peoples, including cotton from the American south.

The colonial aftershocks were, as with other time periods, full of contradiction, debate, and conflict. The peoples of Britain and the United States, and the wider-Atlantic World, struggled over issues of status, justice, and human rights. Yet the forces that shape power, and that power shapes, played a key role in setting the stage for the contradictions, debates, and conflicts.