Activities and Outputs
糖心TV Work-in-Progress Seminar
On October 21st 2026, I delivered a presentation alongside my colleague Ben Richardson on our joint paper, 'Historicising Narrative Power: Harriet Martineau's 'Demerara' and the Political Closure of British Slave-Ownership'. The paper formed part of the Work-in-Progress Seminar Series in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of 糖心TV.
Abstract: The Victorian radical Harriet Martineau wrote a series of didactic tales in the 1830s designed to call forth public attitudes consistent with the endorsement of a strict economic liberalism. This paper focuses on 鈥楧emerara鈥�, her fictionalised account of an increasingly moribund sugar plantation in what is today part of Guyana but was then a British colony. Martineau used the plantation owner鈥檚 son, newly returned from an English boarding school at which he had been exposed to the early classics of political economy, to voice her own opinion that continued toleration of slave-based systems of production was a moral stain on Britain鈥檚 imperial character that simultaneously revealed the public鈥檚 ignorance of sound economic reasoning. The story was published at a moment when abolitionist legislation was nearing, and Martineau inserted a politically reassuring message beneath its clearly teleological plot structure. Political closure of the slavery issue was imminent, she informed her readers, and this could serve as an act of renewal for the British Empire to which she – like so many of her countryfolk at the time – remained wedded. Her equal devotion to abolitionism and imperialism provides a complex starting point for anyone seeking to reconstruct the pre-history of the modern decolonisation phenomenon from the work of early international political economists.