FRANCAISAnti-Slavery International - Comments
4) Links to politics
-With a very institutional and legal approach of issues, ASI is essentially a lobby which, historically, first concentrated its efforts on the British Parliament before turning to intergovernmental organisations. Despite numerous disagreements, the Society has often received the support of the British government; the BFASS’s patron was King Edward VII in 1900 for instance. As for the APS, which published the Colonial Intelligence from 1874 to 1882 and the Aborigines Friend from 1901 to 1903, it contributed to the elaboration of an anthropology which helped to administer the natives in the British Empire. In 1843, the dissidents of the APS thus formed the Ethnological Society of London, first embryo of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1871. According to Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, “abolitionists in Britain often combined antislavery principles with support for British imperialism”. Initially, they opposed colonisation schemes to transfer American slaves to their African homeland in the 1830s. But “they believed that imperialism would spread Christianity, Westernization, and the benefits of trade, and ingenuously saw no contradiction among these principles”.
-Anti-Slavery originated in the progressive milieu of the British non conforming Churches, notably Quakers, and its advocacy against slavery and exploitation could be seen as a Marxist rhetoric from a certain point of view. But the Society finds its true force in an enlightened bourgeoisie. Politically, it is difficult to pinpoint precise partisan inclinations. On the one hand, it never expressly denounced the forced labour camps in the USSR during the cold war; on the other it fought the Chinese gulags in the 1990s.
