ROBERT WEDDERBURN

A little-known Jamaica-born antislavery activist at the radical edge of the British abolitionist movement.

Arriving in England as a teenager, “just one of thousands of Black men, many of them survivors of slavery in the Americas, who had settled in London following service in the British military,” Robert Wedderburn declared that he was the son of a prominent British colonist and an enslaved woman. Raised by a grandmother who vocally and vigorously resisted colonial authority, he emerged as a firebrand in the growing antislavery movement. As University of Exeter historian Hanley writes in this spirited biography, one of Wedderburn’s notable moments came when he loudly denounced reformer Robert Owen, whose social engineering projects amounted to slavery by another name whereby “the urban unemployed would be whisked away and engaged in wholesome, highly disciplined labor in the country, rendering them economically productive and removing them from the temptations of the big cities.” Wedderburn hated slavery, Hanley observes, but he also despised the “respectable” British establishment that slavery enriched and supported; in time he joined his abolitionist activism with the proto-Marxist revolutionary support of the demands of the working class writ large. Yet, Hanley observes, Wedderburn was a problematic figure in numerous ways, a sometimes violent criminal who was imprisoned several times, a seditionist who claimed as his motto, as he wrote, “assassinate stab in the dark.” Although he was largely written out of history, Wedderburn made significant contributions to the proletarian struggle as a polemicist and activist, championing the rights of sex workers and the indigent, carefully chronicling the fate of the Haitian Revolution and promising that it would one day arrive in the British colonies. In the end, Hanley holds in this swift-moving biography, Wedderburn “faced and overcame terrible material hardship to rise to a position of extraordinary prominence, an achievement that few other people could claim.”

A significant contribution to British working-class, abolitionist, and Atlantic history.