Robert Wedderburn: British Insurrectionary, Jamaican Abolitionist - Hardcover

by Ryan Hanley (Author)

The first-ever biography of the ultra-radical thinker Robert Wedderburn, from his native Jamaica to metropole London, by an award-winning historian

Robert Wedderburn (1762-1834/5) was one of the most charismatic, irascible, and radical intellectuals of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Atlantic world. Born to an enslaved woman and a slavemaster in Jamaica, and moving in the radical working-class circles of London, Wedderburn made his name as a fiery political writer and orator--before dying, forgotten, in poverty.

Among the few abolitionists bold enough to publicly call for the enslaved in the British West Indies to rise up and violently overthrow their colonial "masters," Wedderburn was also among the most outspoken and--amid an increasingly repressive British establishment--dangerous advocates for domestic political reform and working-class rights.

From award-winning scholar Ryan Hanley, this is the first full-length biography of a man increasingly recognized as central to Black radical political thought in the Revolutionary Atlantic. Tapping newly rediscovered sources, Hanley details Wedderburn's extraordinary public and private life, explores the central influence of enslaved women on his political ideas, and offers fresh analysis of his contributions to British political thought and activism.

Author Biography

Ryan Hanley is lecturer in modern British history at the University of Exeter. He is the author of Beyond Slavery and Abolition: Black British Writing, 1770-1830 and coeditor of Britain's History and Memory of Transatlantic Slavery. He is the winner of the Alexander and Whitfield Prizes and the Philip Leverhulme Prize. He lives in Bristol, UK.