Rebecca S. Schneider

The Wages of Abolition: Liberation Beyond Labor in Edward Rushton’s West-Indian Eclogues and the Pamphlet War surrounding James Ramsay’s Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves

This essay brings together British abolitionist poetry and pro-slavery essays from the 1780s, when British abolition was not yet a foregone conclusion. The examined texts center enslaved people’s rejection of wage labor schemes. When read together, a theory of self-emancipatory p...