The past five years have seen a flourishing of studies on British abolitionism, with notable new works especially by Seymour Drescher, David Beck Ryden, Nicholas Draper, and Richard Huzzey. This scholarship has examined the wider perspective of British antislavery activities in the first four decades of the nineteenth century, within the context of the expanding empire and the justification of British world imperial rule in relation to what Christopher Brown has called the “moral capital” associated to abolitionism. Though scholars have focused primarily on the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade and of slavery in the British Caribbean, they have also referenced India within the imperial context, and the final “delegalisation” of slavery there by 1843. Yet, until now no full-length account existed of the difficult relationship between British abolitionism and Indian slavery in the decades that saw the peak of the British antislavery struggle. Andrea Major's new book has filled this gap in scholarship. The author, a specialist in British colonial rule in nineteenth-century India, is able to bring a fresh, extremely welcome, and altogether different perspective to the topic by arguing convincingly that “the question of Indian slavery provides an anomalous chapter in the history of British abolitionism” (p. 8).

Major relies mainly on British parliamentary records, missionary accounts, and a number of contemporary newspapers and periodicals to sketch a history of the development of British involvement with, and changing attitudes and perceptions of, Indian slavery between the later decades of the eighteenth century and the early 1840s. She begins with a sensitive portrayal of the difficulty of defining the category of “Indian slavery” when dealing with European sources. She looks first at the moral justification the East India Company employed for ruling India in the 1780s–1790s, with its convenient policy of suppressing a slave trade that harmed British economic interests. This was in marked contrast with the situation in the West Indies. Major then moves on to show how the Company constructed specific images of the different slaveries practiced in India in order to suit the main purpose of ensuring an efficient and ordered British colonial rule, particularly through an artificial distinction between the internal slave trade, which needed to be eradicated, and domestic slavery, which was mostly allowed to continue. Finally, she demonstrates clearly how the efforts of evangelical missionaries and abolitionists led to the instrumental conclusion that, “Whereas slavery in the West Indies was a scandal of the British state, slavery in India … was repositioned as a scandal of Indian society” (314). This explains the absence of British parliamentary debates about Indian slavery in the 1810s and 1820s, and of any idea of British responsibility. Only after the British government emancipated slaves in the West Indies in 1833–1838 did Indian slavery became a target of British abolitionists, most significantly through the 1839 establishment of the British India Society (BIS) “for the amelioration of India” (330), and that society's subsequent argument with the East India Company up until the latter's “delegalisation” of slavery in India in 1843.

Major says her aim was to write “a study of how slavery in India was constructed in various colonial discourses and what this tells us about ideologies of colonial rule; how ideas of Indian slavery intersect with wider debates about slavery, abolition, trade, empire, evangelicalism, missionary enterprise and civilizing mission” (14). Reading her book, one can only think that she has amply fulfilled her objective, and that this will remain the standard history of British abolitionism and Indian slavery for years to come.