The British antislavery movement, which worked for half a century to finally end slavery in the empire in 1838, was the first time that a large number of people in one country became outraged for many years over the plight of other people, of another color, in another part of the world. The pioneering protest created a template, and this interesting and subtle study by Kevin Grant looks at three successor movements that stirred Britain many decades later. He is wise enough to know that there can be more than meets the eye whenever a moralistic crusade against somebody else's slave system springs to life in a country that is itself an imperial superpower.

The episodes he looks at are three campaigns from the decade 1900–1910: against the brutal forced labor system for collecting rubber in the Congo, then the personal colony of Belgium's King Leopold II; against the importation of Chinese indentured workers for the South African gold mines; and against slave labor cultivation of cocoa in Portuguese Africa.

Grant perceives several impulses driving these latter-day antislavery protests; sometimes one predominates, sometimes another, and sometimes they are wound together. The first is the notion of trusteeship, which he traces back to Edmund Burke: the idea that the British had the right to control others’ destinies because they were more civilized. The second impulse is that of evangelicalism, in which the freeing of dark-skinned people from bondage was closely linked to converting them from “savage” ways to Christianity. And the third is the conception of human rights, including the right to land ownership by Africans and the right (greatly restricted by King Leopold, for instance) for them and British merchants to trade freely with each other. None of these three strands, of course, encompassed the idea of African self-government; that would be for protest movements of a later time.

Grant's longest chapter is on the most vocal and widespread of these crusades, that for reform in the Congo. He takes to task a long list of historians, myself included, who have given, he feels, too much credit to the movement's best-known figure, the journalist E. D. Morel, with his attractively modern passion for human rights, and not enough to evangelical missionaries. It was they, Grant points out, who first began turning out crowds of thousands for Congo protest meetings in Scotland before the very secular Morel even started his Congo Reform Association (CRA). Congo missionaries not only took the atrocity photographs Morel later spread throughout the world, but, Grant emphasizes, they also pioneered the use of these in the “magic lantern” slide shows that then became a hallmark of the CRA's campaign; one missionary, H. Grattan Guinness, had once even run a photography studio. (Guinness's new ways of reaching the public includes one Grant does not mention: he enthusiastically endorsed, and may well have helped write, a book called Bokwala: The Story of a Congo Victim, a melodramatic, first-person tale whose supposedly Congolese author survived or witnessed every conceivable atrocity. Morel, scrupulous about documentation, ignored it.)

Grant is convincing that some of us have understated the role of the evangelical impulse in the Congo reform movement and the missionaries’ groundbreaking use of photography as a campaign tool. But at the same time he is too eager to downplay Morel's crucial role by pigeonholing him to the side as a creature of the “Liverpool Sect” of Africa merchants. For example, he incorrectly places the 1913 final, celebratory meeting of the CRA in Liverpool, instead of in London, which had been the CRA's headquarters for some years. Congo reform was, in fact, a potent blend of several strands of humanitarianism. Missionaries had been decrying Leopold's rule since the 1890s, but it was only in 1904, when they joined forces with Morel and his organizational and journalistic talents, and his connections to the national press and politicians, that the country fully began to pay attention.

Grant's account of the little-known scandal over “Chinese slavery” in South Africa makes clear that here the British labor movement was using antislavery rhetoric to decry immigrants taking jobs that might otherwise be done by British or South African whites. As such, the protest was a club that the Liberals could use in the 1906 British election campaign. When they won, however, they were none too eager to get rid of these workers who kept the gold mines going for so little pay, and the last Chinese indentured laborer was not repatriated until 1910.

In the third episode treated here, protests against Cadbury Brothers for using slave-grown cocoa in their chocolate, Morel appears in a most unsavory light. Indebted to his friend William Cadbury for lavish financial support of the Congo reform campaign and also convinced that a campaign against Portuguese slavery would detract from his Congo efforts, Morel vigorously backed Cadbury, even helping edit a book Cadbury wrote in his defense. But the cocoa workers were every bit as enslaved as the unhappy rubber gatherers of King Leopold's Congo.

Morel comes out much better in Grant's final chapter, about World War I and the creation of League of Nations mandates for Germany's African colonies. The mandates were basically window dressing—buttressed by the old humanitarian rhetoric about “trusteeship”—for Britain, France, and Belgium to take over Germany's colonies for themselves. Many British evangelical missionaries, somewhat at sea now in a less evangelical age, got shamelessly swept up by patriotic fervor during the war, producing reports on abuses in Germany's African territories but ignoring those in the colonies of Britain and her allies. Morel bravely opposed the war, went to prison for his beliefs, and argued for internationalized protection of the continent against what he called any “attempted monopolisation of the raw materials of Africa by this or that European Power in the interest of its own nationals” (138). But this was not to be, then or today.

A Civilised Savagery is clearly written, well documented, and could serve as reading material in courses on the antislavery movement and its political heirs.