Recent global events have heightened interest in the history of humanitarianism and human rights cultures. While scholars have stressed the importance of the Enlightenment and the antislavery movement to that history, we lack a clear understanding of how eighteenth-century practices and concerns gave rise to the early stages of humanitarianism. This draft chapter of my book project investigates eighteenth-century convict servitude and encourages us to consider its overlap with the early antislavery movement in the British Atlantic. In an era of expanding empires and capitalism, British courts banished over 50,000 convicted men, women, and children to the Americas, many of whom were sold as servants. In antislavery texts, letters, and public commentaries, writers increasingly used convict labor to evoke sympathy for servants and enslaved people and to advocate for new “humane” labor practices. At the same time, proslavery advocates utilized servitude to justify the enslavement of Africans and reduce the credibility of the antislavery argument, while aiming to bolster their false commitment to human welfare. The essay reveals a new, and hitherto neglected, site for shifting notions of human responsibility and a vital discursive environment regarding suffering and labor that shaped humanitarian evaluations and unfreedom in the British Atlantic world.

Nicole Dressler is an Associate Teaching Professor of History at William & Mary, and she specializes in unfree labor, the development of abolition, and humanitarianism in early America and the Atlantic world. She has published in Early American Studies and is currently working on a book manuscript that explores convict servitude, antislavery, and prison reform during the long eighteenth century to show how together they influenced the direction of humanitarian discourse, practices, and values in the British Atlantic. Before coming to William & Mary, she was a dissertation fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. Her research has also been supported by the Library Company of Philadelphia, American Philosophical Society, and the Global Humanitarianism Research Academy held at the Leibniz Institute of European History in Mainz.

Pre-Circulated Paper

The pre-circulated paper will be available one-week prior to the workshop. The paper will be available to the Princeton University community via SharePoint. All others should request a copy of the paper by emailing Augustus Mosse.