This volume of eight essays examines the role that religious traditions, practices and beliefs played in women's involvement in the British and American campaigns to abolish slavery during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It focuses on women who belonged to the Puritan and dissenting traditions.

Empire, Kinship and Violence traces the history of three linked imperial families in Britain and across contested colonial borderlands from 1770 to 1842. Elizabeth Elbourne tracks the Haudenosaunee Brants of northeastern North America from the American Revolution to exile in Canada; the Bannisters, a British family of colonial administrators, whistleblowers and entrepreneurs who operated across Australia, Canada and southern Africa; and the Buxtons, a family of British abolitionists who publicized information about what might now be termed genocide towards Indigenous peoples while also pioneering humanitarian colonialism. By recounting the conflicts that these interlinked families were involved in she tells a larger story about the development of British and American settler colonialism and the betrayal of Indigenous peoples. Through an analysis of the changing politics of kinship and violence, Elizabeth Elbourne sheds new light on transnational debates about issues such as Indigenous sovereignty claims, British subjecthood, violence, land rights and cultural assimilation.

Born into a Xhosa royal family around 1792 in South Africa, Jan Tzatzoe was destined to live in an era of profound change—one that witnessed the arrival and entrenchment of European colonialism. As a missionary, chief, and cultural intermediary on the eastern Cape frontier and in Cape Town and a traveler in Great Britain, Tzatzoe helped foster the merging of African and European worlds into a new South African reality. Yet, by the 1860s, despite his determined resistance, he was an oppressed subject of harsh British colonial rule. In this innovative, richly researched, and splendidly written biography, Roger S. Levine reclaims Tzatzoe's lost story and analyzes his contributions to, and experiences with, the turbulent colonial world to argue for the crucial role of Africans as agents of cultural and intellectual change.

The social conscience of Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton (1786-1845) developed as he operated a brewery in Spitalfields, nineteenth-century London’s poorest parish. His interest and research on penal discipline brought him national prominence and led to a parliamentary career that lasted nearly two decades. Buxton’s association with noted activist William Wilberforce led to his own involvement in the anti-slavery movement, a cause he fiercely championed, resulting in Britain’s abolition of slavery in 1834. Buxton’s involvement in the disastrous 1841 Niger expedition effectively ended his public career and paved the way to British imperialism in Africa. A man of many interests, Buxton also supported Catholic emancipation and ending the Hindu suttee. Few nineteenth-century social reformers have had as much of an impact or have cast as long a shadow as Buxton. At the time of his death, many saw him as the epitome of Christian activism, yet today Buxton remains largely ignored and forgotten. David Bruce examines the life of one of Great Britain’s most prominent social activists. Using his personal papers, and the papers and books of his friends, associates, and contemporaries, The Life of Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton paints a portrait of a unique individual driven to improve his world.

England in the nineteenth century became a predominantly middle-class society, with new opportunities for men, but new social and economic restrictions on "respectable" women. This book describes the emergence of exceptional women from their assigned domestic sphere to positions of public leadership, and finally to the cause of women's rights. Evangelical women in John Wesley's time preached publicly, but after his death were banished from the pulpits of mainstream Methodism. Other women, particularly Quakers, were soon heard in the anti-slavery movements and other reform causes of the 1820s, 30s, and 40s. In the middle of the century opposition to women entering public life was at its greatest. But some pathfinding women emboldened others by their leadership in the reforming missions and the revival campaigns of the 1850s, 60s, and 70s, especially within the temperance movement. By the last quarter of the century talented women were learning "unwomanly" skills of political leadership, particularly mastery of the public platform. In a succession of national women's organizations they applied the lessons learnt to women's issues, preparing for the final assault on "the key to all reform", women's suffrage. At the century's end the walls that had so long excluded women from public life were beginning to crumble.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1950.