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"The Land of their Captivity": Milton and the Abolition of the British Slave Trade

Dr Anne-Julia Zwierlein. University of Bamberg

While the British slave trade was already in full gear by Milton’s time, there are no explicit references to black slaves or the slave trade in Paradise Lost. Yet until abolition was achieved in 1807 and emancipation in 1833, British anti-slavery agitators nevertheless found ample material to support their own cause in Milton’s republican tenets on "native liberty" as voiced in the prose tracts and epics. Eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century abolitionists expressed their own concerns in Miltonic language, secularizing the transcendental message of Milton’s epics and rewriting the religious focus of his prose tracts. Moreover, along with Dryden, they saw the noble task of freeing "the fetter’d Slave" to be predicated on British imperial and cultural hegemony, thus extending the concept of translatio imperii et studii to include the civilizing of former black slaves.
Examining selected examples of British abolitionist writing, Milton commentaries and eighteenth-century creative adaptations, I will show how Milton’s epic was exploited to justify racial prejudice but also to further the cause of abolition. On the one hand, cultural relativism and the archaic idea of the cyclical rise and fall of empires contributed to a strand of anxiety running through much abolitionist writing: The violent nature of the slave trade disrupted the ideology of the ‘Pax Britannica’ and kept alive fears of the empire’s self-induced fall. Essential to this model of history was Milton’s idea of the mutually depraving dynamic of the master-slave relationship. I will show how his alignment of political and spiritual enslavement and his definition of ‘servitude’ as based on the Church Fathers and classical law were strategically redeployed by abolitionist agitators as a concrete political language.

On the other hand, the developments of a Lockean work ethic, the division of labour, and the progressive racialization of slavery also allowed the transformation of Milton passages into pro-slavery statements; this is especially evident in eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century rewritings of the biblical and Miltonic stories of Ham’s hereditary curse. The subtext of these Milton versions is the antagonism between essentialist versus constructivist concepts of culture and race. Meanwhile, the Whig discourse of propertied individuality that had been firmly installed by John Locke and Adam Smith, while entirely reinterpreting Milton’s own concept of labour, did help to shape abolitionist argumentation. Finally, I will show that the Miltonic fear that the formerly enslaved might not be fit to use their new-found freedom is echoed in plans for gradual abolition and emancipation, for instance in Edmund Burke, Coleridge, and Macaulay.

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