| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Kevin Grant. A Civilised Savagery: Britain and the New Slaveries in Africa, 1884–1926. New York: Routledge. 2005. Pp. xii, 223. $22.95.

In this book Kevin Grant's aim is twofold. He wishes to bridge the historiographical gap in British antislavery studies between the high tide of the movement during the early nineteenth century and the encoding of antislavery into international law under the auspices of the League of Nations in 1926. Grant contextualizes reform movements within strands of humanitarian ideologies during the scramble for Africa and the consolidation of the "New Imperialism" in the half century after 1880. He begins by outlining the development of three variants of British humanitarian discourse. The first, the principle of trusteeship, is traced back to the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century. Grant argues that this principle was the repository of colonial humanitarian politics until the end of the eighteenth century. The relationship of "trusteeship" to the "new slaveries" before the outbreak of the Great War is not entirely clear. Trusteeship appears to have been unconnected with any major variant of overseas antislavery or unfree labor before the 1780s. Moreover, two of this study's examples of British humanitarian targets—the Congo Free State and Portuguese West Africa—were located outside the empire. Nor is trusteeship clearly linked to the third case: post-Boer War Transvaal. In Grant's telling, trusteeship emerges in humanitarian garb only in the wake of the Great War. The second strand of humanitarianism, evangelical discourse, was linked with British abolitionism from the 1780s. The third, what Grant calls the "politics of human rights," arose at the end of the nineteenth century. In contrast to evangelicalism, this last discourse emphasized cultural relativism and racial essentialism. It viewed commercial capitalism and property rights for Africans as the solution to the "new slaveries" in imperialized Africa.

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