ABSTRACT
The emerging anti-slavery movement enhanced popular views of Britain’s unique commitment to liberty at a time when conflict with America had called it into question, so making abolitionism ‘an emblem of national virtue’. In Phillip's brief and puzzling comments never elaborated or repeated he also expressed a view of convicts as morally undeserving and contemptible, and yet as British subjects with irreducible rights. Historian Alan Atkinson explores how both the status of Black people throughout the empire and penal discipline especially 'challenged the imagination of reformers' during the 1780s. Rather than pleading with the white philanthropist like Wedgwood's slave, the convicts will free themselves, pursuing hard work and discipline as a means to liberation. Over the first decades of colonization, Aboriginal people were often rejected as potential converts for their failure to adopt Protestant work values, expressed through diligent, disciplined labour especially in agriculture.
