Antislavery in the Dissenting Atlantic - (Antislavery, Abolition, and the Atlantic World) by Bridget Bennett (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Winner of the Shelley Fisher Fishkin Award for International Scholarship in Transnational American Studies

Bridget Bennett's Antislavery in the Dissenting Atlantic explores the impact of a historically situated set of transatlantic networks, chiefly centered on prominent communities of religious nonconformists in England and Pennsylvania in the decades between the American Revolution and American Civil War. The study reveals the alliances forged out of progressive religious and political commitments to dissent that enabled expansive connections across the Atlantic world. These developments emerged from local proximities and combined an optimistic devotion to social justice and education with a global vision. Bennett's work offers an original and innovative reading of transatlantic partnerships, exploring obscure writings, overlooked individuals, and the cultures of the everyday, while also affording fresh understandings of familiar antislavery texts.

Review Quotes

"Antislavery in the Dissenting Atlantic is a landmark approach to grassroots transatlantic antislavery activism among British religious communities that mobilized political and practical principles of 'dissent' to transformative effect in the decades between the American Revolution and the Civil War. It provides an important corrective to the underacknowledged influence of Moravians on British antislavery and demonstrates how measures undertaken at the local and even the domestic level, particularly by women, contributed economically and in other significant ways to the work of antislavery."--Fionnghuala Sweeney, author of Frederick Douglass and the Atlantic World

"Bennett greatly enriches our appreciation of dissenting factions, abolitionist campaigning, and the interaction between written texts, artifacts, and everyday conversations and debates. Based on meticulous research, Antislavery in the Dissenting Atlantic presents a richly nuanced account of some of the lesser-known elements of the common antislavery story, setting them in a transatlantic context that poses critical questions about the 'connectedness' of reform efforts during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries."--J. R. Oldfield, author of Transatlantic Abolitionism in the Age of Revolution

"In this deeply investigated, well-written book, Bridget Bennett expands our understanding of transatlantic abolitionism by examining the groups that nurtured the movement's activists. Bennett focuses on the people, ideas, objects, and printed materials that united these individuals across the Atlantic world. She supplies surprising and considerable insights, highlighting, for example, the relationships between Quakers, Moravians, and Black abolitionists."--Julie L. Holcomb, author of Moral Commerce: Quakers and the Transatlantic Boycott of the Slave Labor Economy

About the Author

Bridget Bennett is professor of American literature and culture at the University of Leeds and author of Transatlantic Spiritualism and Nineteenth-Century American Literature.