The debate about the reform and dismantling of the British-Atlantic slave system, which began in earnest during the 1780s, threatened more than the economic interests of the British-Caribbean planter class.
This absorbing study of the "racing" of Englishness will be invaluable for imperial and cultural historians. And in Birmingham, abolitionist enthusiasm dominated the city in the 1830s, but by the 1860s, a harsher racial vocabulary reflected a new perception of the nonwhite subjects of empire as different kinds of men from the "manly citizens" of Birmingham. In Jamaica, a group of Baptist missionaries hoped to make African-Jamaicans into people like themselves, only to be disappointed when the project proved neither simple nor congenial to the black men and women for whom they hoped to fashion new selves. Hall uses the stories of two groups of Englishmen and -women to explore British self-constructions both in the colonies and at home. How did the English get to be English? In Civilising Subjects, Catherine Hall argues that the idea of empire was at the heart of mid-nineteenth-century British self-imagining, with peoples such as the "Aborigines" in Australia and the "negroes" in Jamaica serving as markers of difference separating "civilised" English from "savage" others.
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