J. R. Oldfield's The Ties That Bind: Transatlantic Abolitionism in the Age of Reform, c. 1820–1865 is a welcome addition to the substantial canon of antislavery studies produced in the last several decades. Oldfield—most recently director of the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation at the University of Hull—is author of three previous works relating to his larger subject: Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery: The Mobilisation of Public Opinion against the Slave Trade, 1787–1807 (1995); “Chords of Freedom”: Commemoration, Ritual and British Transatlantic Slavery (2007); and Transatlantic Abolitionism in the Age of Revolution: An International History of Anti-Slavery, c. 1787–1820 (2013). In this new work, Oldfield focuses on the ways in which second-wave abolition came to rely on performance, public relations, and grass-roots organization: strategies, he emphasizes, that twenty-first-century activists, on the Left and the Right, continue to replicate, whether consciously or not.

At the core of Oldfield's narrative are the mutually reinforcing political, social, and material-cultural connections between American and British movements. Impelled in part by a strong “Anglophilia,” these “opinion-building” networks, to use Oldfield's phrase, began mainly among Quakers in 1780s and were ripe for renewal as activists confronted the West India Interest in Britain and the enduring economic and political clout of the slave-holding South in the United States.

In an introduction, six chapters, and a conclusion, Oldfield highlights key elements of transatlantic communications among abolitionists. What began as an intensive effort through correspondence and massive print output, as well as petitioning and iconic images (Wedgwood's kneeling slave, the diagram of the slaving ship Brookes), was revived in the 1820s as a mass movement adopting the same methods, enhanced by oratorical performance, consumerism, popular song, sociability, and public outreach. Between the mid-1830s and the Civil War, for just one example, the American Anti-Slavery Society and its local affiliates employed hundreds of men—including black abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Charles Lenox Remond—and a number of daring women, Angelina Grimké and Abby Kelley among them, as salaried agents to promote their cause. Altogether, Oldfield illustrates both the intimate character of second-wave abolitionists’ connections—remarkable given the distance—and the stunning geographical sweep of their movement.

Along the way, Oldfield systematically introduces the reader to dozens of major antislavery protagonists—white and black, male and female—as well as more obscure players like the Hutchinson Family Singers who successfully toured the United States and Britain through the 1840s, popularizing selections from an ever-expanding antislavery songbook. Oldfield closes his study with a chapter on the forty-five-year long friendship between American William Lloyd Garrison and the charismatic British antislavery “agent” and one-term member of Parliament George Thompson: a singular figure in his own right. Between them, these two men crossed the Atlantic eight times in the service of abolition. Garrison chose Thompson as his sole companion to attend the Union Army's ceremonial re-capture of Fort Sumter in April 1865. The two men died within seven months of each other, Thompson in 1878 and Garrison in 1879.

Oldfield's achievement in The Ties That Bind is to provide a crisp and lucid tour over what is well-trodden ground but based on fresh primary sources and vivid examples. Inevitably in a brief study, major subjects receive short shrift. As Oldfield himself stresses, he is dealing here with an exclusively “Anglo” world, in fact exclusively British, Irish, and American. The dramatic history of French Atlantic abolition (Haiti was a destination of choice for second-wave black activists in particular) and conflicts between abolition and proslavery in the English West Indies—familiar in Catherine Hall's Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the British Imagination, 1830–1867 (2002) and in Oldfield's own Transatlantic Abolitionism—barely appear. Canada—the promised land in so many fugitive slave narratives—is virtually absent.

The ideological impulses behind second-wave abolition also remain in the background. Inevitably the question arises as to why so many thousands of Americans and Britons joined a movement that the great majority of their white compatriots found uncompelling at best, seditious at worst. Addressing this question at the conclusion of his study, Oldfield writes, “The answer is fairly straightforward: a deep Evangelical faith rooted in an unshakeable belief in a vengeful god” (179). It is true that evangelicalism was a driving force for many second-wave abolitionists, black and white. (It would be instructive to know, for example, if the American Anti-Slavery Society imitated the model of the Wesleyan itinerancy in its agency system.) But enlightened ideas of human rights and equality remained influential even after the age of Revolution had ended. Thomas Clarkson—educated for the Anglican ministry—was drawn to abolition not by evangelical faith but by the example of Peter Peckard, vice-chancellor of Cambridge University, and by the Society of Friends, with whom he sustained life-long connections and who were major actors in second-wave abolition. Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition, published in 1824 by Quaker convert Elizabeth Heyrick, marked a turning point in abolition's revival. Religious and political strategies were also deeply entwined. Female Quaker abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic invented what Clare Midgley described some time ago as an innovative form of civil society: extra-Parliamentary but political nonetheless (Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780–1870 [1992], 5).

Finally, the story of transatlantic abolitionism in religious denominations—often marred by conflict and disappointment for the enslaved—has yet to be told, underplayed even in Manisha Sinha's otherwise comprehensive masterwork, The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition (2018). Scholars and readers alike would be fortunate indeed if, with the same grace and dexterity that he has employed throughout his work, J. R. Oldfield were to chart the course of antislavery within the foremost cultural institutions of the nineteenth-century English-speaking world: its churches.