Freedom Burning: Anti-Slavery and Empire in Victorian Britain.

‘For our necessities and luxuries in life, for the employment of our people, for our revenue, for our very position in the world as a nation,’ observed the Earl of Clarendon, President of the Board of Trade, in 1846, ‘we are indebted to the production of slave labour’ (p. 98). Like Clarendon, Briton...