Robert Wedderburn, Abolition, and the Commons

Building on scholarship in Romanticism, Black studies, and environmental humanities, this book follows the political thought of Robert Wedderburn, a Black Romantic-era writer. Wedderburn was deeply influenced by his enslaved mother and grandmother, who raised him in Jamaica. After migrating to London, he became a key figure in ultraradical circles and was prosecuted by the British government for blasphemous libel. Wedderburn's vision for abolition from below sought to forge a transatlantic alliance between English agrarian radicals and enslaved people in the Caribbean. Instead of emancipation administered by British colonial and commercial interests, Wedderburn championed the ecological projects of enslaved and Maroon communities in the Caribbean as models for liberation. His stories of Black, place-based opposition to slavery provide an innovative lens for rereading significant aspects of the Romantic period, including the abolition of slavery, landscape aesthetics, and nineteenth-century radical politics.