Robert Wedderburn was born under the lash in mid-eighteenth-century Jamaican plantation society, the illegitimate child of a plantation owner and an enslaved Black woman. Despite the circumstances of his birth, Wedderburn would become one of the foremost abolitionists of the nineteenth century. Migrating to Great Britain as a young man, he established himself as a radical preacher and political critic in London. This volume reprints his life narrative, The Horrors of Slavery and his fiery periodical, The Axe Laid to the Root. Taken together, Wedderburn’s writing and his public life provide a vision of transatlantic liberation and multiracial working-class agitation for social change.
The introduction and notes in this new edition uniquely situate Wedderburn and his work within a lively intersection of his Black Atlantic, Caribbean, and British contexts. This edition illustrates Wedderburn’s enduring relevance for scholarship in Atlantic studies, Black studies, political theology, racial capitalism, and Romanticism.
