ABSTRACT
In the early days of the First World War, British anti-slavery activists looked forward to peace on their own terms. This humanitarian lobby was represented primarily by the Reverend John and Alice Harris, the Joint Organizing Secretaries of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery and Aborigines' Protection Society, a dynamic organization that brought together missionary societies, the Society of Friends, merchants, and various other groups who interested themselves in international labor policies and opposition to slavery “in all its forms.” Over the previous dozen years, these groups had participated in widely publicized campaigns against the so-called new slaveries, ranging from forced labor to indentured servitude, in colonial Africa and elsewhere. The most prominent of these campaigns, orchestrated by the Harrises and E.D. Morel under the auspices of the Congo Reform Association (CRA), had exposed slavery and atrocities in the Congo Free State, fueling the largest humanitarian controversy in British imperial politics since the age of emancipation in the nineteenth century.
