Author Archives: Lasse Heerten

About Lasse Heerten

Lasse Heerten is lecturer in transnational history at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. His first book, The Biafran War and Postcolonial Humanitarianism: Spectacles of Suffering (Cam-bridge, 2017), analyzes how the Nigerian Civil War, a “third world” conflict of initially mar-ginal international interest, was turned into the global media and protest event “Biafra,” epitome of humanitarian crisis and distant suffering. He is currently working on his second monograph, a global urban history of the port of Hamburg in the age of empire.

Anti-Slavery and Indentured Labor in the Age of Global Empire

January 17, 2021 by
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Abstract: Slavery and anti-slavery were key motifs of political imagination in the age of global Empire. This review essay discusses Amalia Ribi Forclaz’s Humanitarian Imperialism: The Politics of Anti-Slavery Activism, 1880–1940, Richard Huzzey’s Freedom Burning: Anti-Slavery and Empire in Victorian Britain, and Ashutosh Kumar’s Coolies of the Empire: Indentured Indians in the Sugar Colonies, 1830–1920 to explore the multifaceted ties between slavery, abolitionism, humanitarianism, and colonial Empire. The essay goes on to argue that anti-slavery emerged as an idiom for globalization in an imperial age—defined Continue reading → Continue reading →