Joseph C. Miller Memorial Lecture by Miles Ogborn

This lecture examines the ways in which Christianity came to define the debate over slavery and freedom – and the nature of the free black subject – in the early nineteenth-century Anglo-Caribbean world. Responding to the movement for the abolition of the slave trade, and the question of slavery’s future, the role of Christianity in the sugar colonies was rethought by both the established church and nonconformist (Baptist and Methodist) missionaries in ways which made religion central to the definition of a shared humanity and to any reconfiguration of rights.