The lords of humankind re-visited

This article uses the World Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840, and the way in which it was represented in Benjamin Robert Haydon's painting of it, to reflect on the ways in which Britons thought of themselves as an 'imperial people', 'lords of humankind', fit to rule over others. The Whig reforms of the 1830s had brought the enfranchisement of large numbers of middle-class men, and the emancipation of the enslaved across the British Empire. Excavating the assumptions of the abolitionists who gathered at the Convention allows us to see how new hierarchies of difference were encoded by 1840, placing freed black men, middle-class women and Irish Catholics on the margins of the new body politic

Body politic · Convention · Emancipation · Empire · Irish · Middle class · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Law · Philosophy

• The drinking habits of our countrymen’

  Harald Fischer-Tiné•The Journal of Imperial &…•2012

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• All in the Same Uniform’? The Participation of Black Colonial Residents in the British Armed Forces in the First World War

  Jacqueline Jenkinson•The Journal of Imperial &…•2012

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• Art, Genius, and Racial Theory in the Early Nineteenth Century

  David Higgins•History Workshop Journal•2004

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• British Humanitarian Political Economy and Famine in India, 1838–1842

  Open Access•Andrea Major•Journal of British Studies•2020

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• Britain's other civilising mission

  Open Access•Harald Fischer-Tiné, Harald Fischer–Tiné•The Indian Economic & Social…•2005

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