In Freedom Burning, Richard Huzzey launches a provocative and beautifully written statement of the importance of antislavery as the motive force of British imperial policy and expansion. His study spans not only an extraordinarily ambitious range of imperial sites, from the West Indies to West Africa and East Africa, but also an extended time period, running the length of the nineteenth century. The book thus connects colony with metropole and the emancipation period with the race for Africa. Huzzey is extremely subtle in drawing out the complexities under the umbrella of antislavery, although if antislavery could support, as he shows it did, diametrically opposed policy positions on sugar duties, on the forcible suppression of the slave trade, on colonial expansion in Africa, and even on tolerance of local slavery, then there may be a basis for questioning how useful it is as a historical category. It was hegemonic (it certainly precluded the public and perhaps even personal espousal of a proslavery position by slave owners as early as the 1820s), and that recognition is important, but to what extent does it explain the paths taken and not taken by the imperial British state? The status of “antislavery nation” (19) was not a necessary, let alone sufficient, condition for other European powers in the scramble for Africa, who were pretty skeptical of claims for British exceptionalism, as the book reports without really responding to their more jaundiced readings of Britain's international conduct.

The book fits (unannounced) into a long-running controversy that has pitted Eric Williams and his followers against David Brion Davies, Seymour Drescher, David Eltis, and others. The first group posits a materialist account of slavery and abolition (and of empire and indeed of history itself); the second group is not really interested in slavery but locates abolition (and implicitly empire and history as well) in the realm of politics, culture, and ideology. Richard Huzzey belongs firmly in the second camp, including Davies, Drescher, and Eltis in his acknowledgments. There is not necessarily a problem with this. But the book perpetuates a polarization that might be unhelpful. Antislavery is conceived in Freedom Burning as born fully-fledged as a given ideological movement that then motivates and shapes policy. Although in the chapters on Africa and on indenture, Huzzey does register the presence of material interests and, in the former in particular, the nexus of commerce, Christianity, and civilization is undeniable, such interests are not permitted to play any role either in the initial take-up of antislavery by an expansive Britain prior to emancipation or in midcentury imperial expansion itself. His story is thus one of the progressive erosion of a self-denying tradition as it deteriorates into self-interest. Williams, who wrote expressively about the same issues and same period as Huzzey and argued for the essential unity of the pre- and postemancipation periods in terms of the relationship between antislavery and national policy, is dismissed in one line: “evidence of abolitionist protectionism . . . proves Williams wrong” (108), which comes within a page of the acknowledgment that “[a]nti-slavery protectionism never had a grip in the firmest anti-slavery constituencies” (107). In what I am sure is intended as a symbolic omission, Williams's Capitalism and Slavery (1944) itself does not make it into the bibliography of Freedom Burning. Nor does the joint work of Cain and Hopkins on the shaping of imperial expansion by financial interests: neither does Hobson nor, less surprisingly, Lenin. But neither Williams nor these latter theories of imperialism can simply be left behind as too stale and tired to consider if Freedom Burning is going to argue, as it does, for the disinterested nature of the original antislavery movement, for the subsequent “entangling logic” (144) of antislavery ideologies as the primary motive in imperial expansion, and for antislavery as “its own material motive” (164).

In the absence of economic and commercial motivations for empire—alongside others, of course—it becomes impossible to explain why and how antislavery deteriorated (not in force but in character) from its zenith at some indeterminate time before emancipation. If, however, an earlier, heroic period of antislavery purity was itself the construction of mid-nineteenth-century polemicists, and if British merchants had always “picked and chose when they wanted anti-slavery intervention by the state and when they disavowed it depending on their own interests” (140), not simply after emancipation as Huzzey believes, then perhaps the problem of such perceived deterioration becomes less troublesome, even if it does not go away. Huzzey's own conclusion on late nineteenth-century Africa, that “anti-slavery translated commercial interests into national interests” (174), is the case Williams made for the earlier era of abolition.

At the conference at St. Catherine's College in Oxford in 2011 to commemorate the centenary of Williams's birth, it was clear that there was no dialogue between the two sides: each was waiting for the other to stop talking in order to continue proceeding by assertion. It would be a shame if the coming generation of scholars, whose role in part is surely to seek to overcome the contradictions of earlier fixed positions, were drawn into the same refusal to engage.