ABSTRACT
This chapter explores many of the striking ways of thinking about slavery in the period that are occluded when people accepts a retrospective view that equates slavery with colonialism and with racial difference. It illuminates three major aspects of slavery in the consciousness of eighteenth-century Britons: first, 'international' slavery, that is the practices of slavery within North Africa and the Islamic world; second, the rhetoric of slavery and its opposite, liberty, in British political discourse; and finally, the ways in which Britons imagined that they themselves could become enslaved, whether through indenture in their own colonies, abuse of coercive aspects of the labor system, or capture by foreigners. The chapter describes the conceptions of slavery they examine explicitly in relation to modernity, but only because they offer compelling images of key aspects of modern experience. As in the chapter, slavery is atomism, liberty is social.
