Anti-Slavery and Australia: No Slavery in a Free Land? by Jane Lydon

Reviewed by: Anti-Slavery and Australia: No Slavery in a Free Land? by Jane Lydon John Coffey Anti-Slavery and Australia: No Slavery in a Free Land?. By Jane Lydon. London and New York: Routledge, 2021. The starting point for this thought-provoking study is a statement made by Captain Arthur Phillip shortly before the First Fleet sailed for New South Wales in 1787. The founding principle of the new settlement, he declared, should be "[t]hat there can be no slavery in a free land, and consequently no slaves" (xi). Jane Lydon examines this dichotomy between "slavery" and "freedom" and finds it wanting. She suggests that abolitionists, past and present, have obscured as much as they revealed. The binary distinction between free labour and slave labour hid the fact that there was "a range of intermediate positions between 'wages and the whip'" (Anita Rupprecht, cited by Lydon, 78). Together with penal reformers and colonial administrators, anti-slavery elites did little to counter (and a good deal to support) other forms of forced labour and work discipline among convicts, Indigenous peoples, white settlers, Asian indentured labourers and British industrial workers. Six chapters survey the period between 1787 and 1900, dissecting "the new reformist impulse combining anti-slavery sentiment, penal reform and systematic colonization" (99). Chapter 1 considers the founding moment in the 1780s; Chapter 2, the twenty years before the abolition of the slave trade; Chapter 3 turns to the era between slave trade abolition and the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833; Chapter 4 covers the "systematic colonization and the end of colonization" in the 1830s; Chapter 5 concentrates on the genocide of Australian Aboriginal people, arguing that abolitionists, by legitimising Britain's civilising mission, were "deeply complicit with dispossession" (128). A final chapter considers campaigns against "modern slavery" in contemporary Australia, finding that here too "narratives focussed on victim and trafficker displace attention" from the structural context of global inequalities, debt, immigration status, demand for forced labour and workforce casualization" (166–167). Thus, the book requires readers to move beyond comfortable or celebratory stories and to explore the shadow side of anti-slavery. In doing so, Lydon joins a distinguished group of recent scholars, including, inter alia, Marcus Wood, Natasha Lightfoot, Catherine Hall, Emma Christopher and Padraic Scanlan. The book's major achievement is to make connections that are easily missed by historians working in regional silos or disparate fields. Lydon explores the links between anti-slavery, business elites, penal reform and settler colonialism, and highlights imperial lives lived between the British West Indies and Australasia: Captain Arthur Phillip had visited many Caribbean islands before sailing with the First Fleet; John Bigge had been Chief Justice of Trinidad prior to arriving in New South Wales; Joseph Orton had served as a Methodist missionary in Jamaica before settling in Tasmania; Sir George Arthur was a colonial official in Belize and then Tasmania. It is easy to overlook the fact that the First Fleet was launched in 1787, the same year as the Sierra Leone Colony and the Abolition Society. Edward Gibbon Wakefield's labour schemes connected West Indian slavery, American slavery and what he called Australian "penal slavery." Disappointment with the progress of "civilisation" among Black West Indians found its parallel in missionary disillusionment with Australia's Indigenous people. And West Indian emancipation created a labour and production shortage to which settler colonialism, slave-produced American cotton and various forms of forced labour were the solution. The book also makes striking new connections between visual sources. It juxtaposes Wedgwood's famous abolition medallion of the kneeling African with two other images: the Sydney Cove medallion Wedgwood created to celebrate the founding of New South Wales (30–31), and a Peterloo Medal commemorating the radical protestors killed in Manchester in 1819—"Am I not a man and a brother?" "No! You are a poor weaver" (66–67). Through the caricatures of Robert Cruickshank, Lydon shows how critics reversed the abolitionist dichotomy between "Negro Slavery" and "English Liberty," contrasting instead "Negro Emancipation" with "English Factory Slaves" (88–91). While it makes a telling contribution to comparative history, Anti-Slavery and Australia does have some weak points. There is the occasional slip. The...