Books
Dr Scanlan’s first book, Freedom’s Debtors: British Antislavery in Sierra Leone in the Age of Revolutions, will be published by Yale University Press in August 2017 as part of the Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History. Freedom’s Debtors argues that British antislavery, widely seen as an historic sacrifice of economic and political capital on the altar of humanitarianism, was in fact profitable, militarily useful, and crucial to the expansion of British power in West Africa. After the British slave trade was abolished by Act of Parliament in 1807, antislavery activists in England profited, officials in the colonial capital, Freetown, came to rely on former slaves as soldiers and as cheap labour, and the British armed forces conscripted former slaves to fight in the West Indies and in West Africa. The book explores in intimate detail the improvisations, miscommunication, military campaigns, utopian Christian missionary projects, moneymaking schemes and everyday violence that occurred in West Africa as the abstractions of abolitionist principle were translated into the practices of imperial expansion and colonial rule.
Dr Scanlan’s new project, Empire Unbound: The Reformed British World, 1776-1840 is a global history of the ‘age of reform’ in Britain and the empire. Empire Unbound argues that the end of slavery in the British empire in 1833 is essential to understanding the ambition and scope of moral, political and economic reform from the American Revolution to the dawn of the Victorian age. Freedom for enslaved people was the point of origin for experiments in defining, documenting and promoting ‘civilisation,’ and in transforming labour management. Emancipation was a catalyst for the intrusive, bureaucratic measurement of everyday life at home and in the colonies. Techniques for ‘reforming’ freedpeople filtered back to Britain, where they were applied to Irish peasants and English slum-dwellers. British schemes for civilisation and free labour circulated among the states of the American South, the republics of South America and the European colonies of the greater Caribbean.
The first part of this project is an institutional, social and material history of 'special' or 'stipendiary' magistrates, a class of jurists appointed to the geographically and culturally remote parts of the British empire, from Catholic Ireland to rural post-emancipation Jamaica, with wide powers to interpret and enforce imperial laws, and to define in practice the meaning of 'civilised' life in the British world.
Articles
• “The Colonial Rebirth of British Anti-Slavery: The Liberated African Villages of Sierra Leone, 1815–1824.” The American Historical Review 121, no. 4 (October 1, 2016): 1085–1113.
• “Blood, Money and Endless Paper: Slavery and Capital in British Imperial History.” History Compass 14, no. 5 (2016): 218–30.
• “The Rewards of their Exertions: Prize Money and British Abolitionism in Sierra Leone, 1808-1823.” Past and Present 225 (2014): 113-142.
For a full list of publications, presentations and lectures, including links to selected works-in-progress and articles under review, please see
Dr Scanlan’s curriculum vitae.