Slave Empire: How Slavery Built Modern Britain - Paperback

by Padraic X. Scanlan (Author)

'Engrossing and powerful . . . rich and thought-provoking'
Fara Dabhoiwala, Guardian

'Path-breaking . . . a major rewriting of history'
Mihir Bose, Irish Times

'Slave Empire is lucid, elegant and forensic. It deals with appalling horrors in cool and convincing prose.'
The Economist

The British empire, in sentimental myth, was more free, more just and more fair than its rivals. But this claim that the British empire was 'free' and that, for all its flaws, it promised liberty to all its subjects was never true. The British empire was built on slavery.

Slave Empire puts enslaved people at the centre the British empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In intimate, human detail, Padraic Scanlon shows how British imperial power and industrial capitalism were inextricable from plantation slavery. With vivid original research and careful synthesis of innovative historical scholarship, Slave Empire shows that British freedom and British slavery were made together.

Author Biography

Dr Padraic X. Scanlan earned a BA (Hons) in History from McGill University in 2008, and a PhD in History from Princeton University in 2013. He is Assistant Professor in the Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources and the Centre for Diaspora & Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto and a Research Associate at the Joint Centre for History and Economics at the University of Cambridge. He has also held appointments at the London School of Economics and Harvard University.