WAGING THE WAR AGAINST SLAVERY

Dr Lizzie Rogers examines the impact of the abolitionist cause on the age in which Jane Austen and her family lived

- Dr Lizzie Rogers

In October 1562, English merchant John Hawkins set sail from Plymouth for the West African coast. Having heard of the great profits to be made from capturing people there and selling them in the Caribbean, he filled his ships with enslaved Africans - and became the first known Briton to profit from the transatlantic slave trade. Over the following three centuries, some 12 million Africans were forcibly transported.

During Jane Austen's lifetime, abolition and slavery became an incredibly important moral, political and social issue, intertwined with various aspects of life in Britain. Indeed, her father, Reverend George Austen, was co-trustee of a marriage settlement that included a responsibility for dispersing the property of a plantation and its profits.

Austen's novels feature several allusions to slavery. In Mansfield Park, the wealthy Bertram family owns estates in Antigua, and the name of the titular country house is a nod to the first Earl of Mansfield, Lord Chief Justice from 1756 to 1788. He ruled in significant cases that helped promote the notion of the illegality of slavery in England. In 1772, he ruled that it was unlawful for Charles Stewart, who had purchased an African named James Somerset in Virginia and then brought him to England, to forcibly deport that man to slavery in the Americas. Somerset's lawyer was Granville Sharp, an influential anti-slavery campaigner and scholar. Such rulings bolstered the abolition movement in a period marked by uprisings by enslaved people, such as the Haitian Revolution led by Toussaint L'Ouverture from 1791 to 1804, and the dynamic actions of campaigners such as Sharp.

FORCES FOR GOOD