Abstract
The Brussels Conference Act of 1890 is a footnote in nineteenth-century imperial history. Its proclaimed aims—to eradicate the slave trade, to prohibit the importation of arms, and to regulate the consumption of liquor in Africa—seem either cynical or naïve when viewed in the context of the violent wars, brutal labour regimes, and economic exploitation which characterized the European conquest of Africa. Given that its promises and spirit were honoured more in the breach than in the observance, the gathering of the diplomats from Europe, the United States, and leading Muslim powers in Brussels in late 1889 and 1890 appears to have been little more than a talking shop. Yet the event in Brussels was significant in that it was the first diplomatic meeting of the major European powers devoted solely to the suppression of the slave trade. Diplomats recognized that the conference had a different character to the other great diplomatic set-pieces of the late nineteenth century: the Congress of Berlin in 1878 and the conference on the partition of Africa in Berlin in 1884/5.1 The Brussels Conference resulted from a brief, but intense, popular anti-slave trade campaign in Europe in 1888 and 1889. Its legacy in putting anti-slavery issues on the international political agenda was evident in the 1926 League of Nations Slavery Convention, which noted that the “signatories of the General Act of the Brussels Conference declared that they were equally animated by the firm desire to put an end to the traffic in African slaves”.
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Notes
Suzanne Miers, Britain and the Ending of the Slave Trade (London, 1975).
Francois Renault, Lavigerie, l’esclavage et l’Europe: Campagne anti-esclavagiste (Paris, 1971).
Seymour Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 381–6;
see also Kevin Grant, A Civilized Savagery: Britain and the New Slaveries in Africa, 1884–1926 (London, 2005), which is mainly concerned with campaigns against coerced labour regimes rather than with the Brussels Conference.
With good reason, most studies of popular opinion concentrate on national movements, but this has led historians to ignore European cooperation and commonalities; John Mackenzie, ed., Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester, 1986);
Raoul Girardet, L’idée coloniale en France, 1871–1962 (Paris, 1972);
A. N. Porter, European Imperialism, 1860–1914 (Basingstoke, 1994), pp. 20–4, hints at some of these commonalities;
see also the contributions by Frank Böschand John Mackenzie to Dominik Geppert, Robert Gerwarth, eds., Wilhelmine Germany and Edwardian Britain: Essays on Cultural Affinity (Oxford, 2008).
Jürgen Osterhammel, Sklaverei und die Zivilisation des Westens (Münich, 2000).
Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton, NJ, 2005);
Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago, 1999);
Brett Bowden, The Empire of Civilization: The Evolution of an Imperial Idea (Chicago, 2009), pp. 130–50, 218–31
and Thomas McCarthy, Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 166–80.
Jane Samson, Imperial Benevolence: Making British Authority in the Pacific Islands (Honolulu, 1998).
Charles Swaisland, “The aborigines protection society, 1837–1909”, Slavery & Abolition, 21, 2 (2000), pp. 265–80.
Deutsche Kolonialzeitung, 4 Aug. 1888, 25 Sept. 1888, pp. 247, 322–3; Tim Jeal, Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer (London, 2007), pp. 313–83.
Jennings, Drescher, Marcel Dorigny, ed., The Abolitions of Slavery: From F. L. Sonthonax to Victor Schoelcher, 1793, 1794, 1848 (New York and Oxford, 2003).
Cited in J. P. Daughton, An Empire Divided: Religion, Republicanism, and the Making of French Colonialism, 1880–1914 (Oxford, 2006), p. 7.
G. N. Uzoigwe, Britain and the Conquest of Africa: The Era of Salisbury (Ann Arbor, MI, 1974), pp. 156–7.
Margaret Lavinia Anderson, Windthorst: A Political Biography (Oxford, 1981), pp. 382–4;
Hans-Georg Aschoff and Heinz-Jörg Heinrich, eds., Ludwig Windthorst: Briefe 1881–1891 (Paderborn, 2002), pp. 705–7, 733–4.
Ulrich S. Soénius, Koloniale Begeisterung im Rheinland während des Kaiserreiches (Cologne, 1992), pp. 48–57; German Anti-Slavery Society to Lavigerie, 15 Nov. 1888, in Bulletin de la Société antiesclavagiste de France, 25. Oct. 1888, pp. 93–5.
Theodor Brecht, Kirche und Sklaverei: Ein Beitrag zur Lösung des Problems der Freiheit (Barmen, 1890), pp. 224–6;
Hermann von Wissmann, Antwort auf den offenen Brief des Herrn Dr Warnecke über die Thätigkeit der Missionen beider christlichen Confessionen (Berlin, 1890) contains several articles debating the relative contributions of Catholic and Protestant churches to the abolition of slavery.
Robert Gerwarth, Stephan Malinowski, ‘Der Holocaust als “Kolonialer Genozid”?’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 33 (2007), pp. 439–66.
Thomas Morlang, “‘Die Wahehe haben ihre Vernichtung gewollt’: Der Krieg der Kaiserlichen Schutztruppe gegen die Hehe in Deutsch-Ostafrika”, in Thoralf Klein and Frank Schumacher, eds., Kolonialkriege: Militärische Gewalt im Zeichen des Imperialismus (Hamburg, 2006), pp. 82–5;
Friedrich Fabri, Fünf Jahre Deutscher Kolonialpolitik: Rück-und Ausblicke (Gotha, 1889), pp. 44–50; “The Convocation of Canterbury”, The Times, 2 Mar. 1889.
J. P. Parry, “Liberalism and liberty”, in Peter Mandler, ed., Liberty and Authority in Victorian Britain (Oxford, 2006), pp. 71–100.
Gilles Pécout, “The international armed volunteers: pilgrims of a transnational Risorgimento”, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 14, 4 (2009), pp. 413–26; for the post-war period,
see Julia Eichenberg and John Paul Newman, “Afterschocks: violence in dissolving empires after World War I”, Contemporary European History, 19, 3 (2010), pp. 183–94.
See “Die Expeditionen des Anti-Sklaverei Komites”, (1892) in RWWA, Nachlass Eugen Langen, 7/7/16; Morlang, “Die Wahehe”; Jan Georg Deutsch, Emancipation without Abolition in German East Africa, 1884–1914 (Oxford, 2005).
See Deutsch, Emancipation; Paul Reichard, “Was soll mit den befreiten Sklaven geschehen?” Deutsche Kolonialzeitung, 28 Sept. 1889, pp. 281–2; this article provoked some mirth in Britain: see “What Shall Be Done with the Freed Slaves? A German View”, The Times, 15 Oct. 1889.
Grant, Civilised Savagery; John B. Osborne, “Wilfrid G. Thesiger, Sir Edward Grey, and the British campaign to reform the Congo, 1905–1909”, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 27 1 (1999), 59–80.
Frank Bösch, Öffentliche Geheimnisse: Skandale, Politik und Medien in Deutschland und Großbritannien 1880–1914 (Munich, 2009).
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© 2013 William Mulligan and Maurice Bric
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Mulligan, W. (2013). The Anti-slave Trade Campaign in Europe, 1888–90. In: Mulligan, W., Bric, M. (eds) A Global History of Anti-slavery Politics in the Nineteenth Century. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137032607_9
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