Memorializing Empire, Producing Global Citizens

Abstract

This essay examines the 2007 British bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act as a means of remembering empire with a specific end. Trends within the disciplines of critical development and international relations are turning their attention to empires past and present. At the same time, metropolitan countries are beginning to make gestures for reconciliation for the injustices of empires, and one such example is the British commemoration of the abolition of slavery. This essay is a retrospective on the policy of development advocacy of the British Department for International Development (under New Labour) that situates these two sites of remembering empire alongside new types of development advocacy (such as Make Poverty History and Live8) that, prior to the global financial crisis, had the production of ‘global citizens’ as their aim. The essay then illustrates the way in which, in official communication, the bicentenary for the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act was utilized as a vehicle for development communication, a means of advertising the UK Labour government development agenda, which had as its aim the production among domestic citizenry of a global citizen who advocates for development under neoliberal terms.

• abolition
• bicentenary
• development
• empire
• global citizenship
• slavery

Notes

¹ This insightful account of waiting as the normal condition of globalization comes from the chapter ‘When Waiting is an Urgent Matter’ in Bayart (2007).

² It needs to be emphasized that the New Labour vision of development education didn't always chime with that of civil society and educational practitioners on the ground who took New Labour's funding and did some quite interesting things with it.

³ A cursory glance at the canonical texts of postcolonial theory (Said, Bhabha, Spivak) will show that subjectivity under empire has been one of postcolonial theory's primary preoccupations.

⁴ Scholarly engagement with the Bicentenary is best exemplified by the University of York's project ‘1807 Commemorated’ (http://www.york.ac.uk/ipup/projects/1807.html) and by the special issue of History Workshop Journal, issue 64, 2007.

⁵ http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/www.direct.gov.uk/en/slavery/DG_065970 (accessed 3 April 2013).

⁶ http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http://www.dfid.gov.uk/Media-Room/News-Stories/20071/Bicentenary-of-the-Abolition-of-the-Slave-Trade--/ (accessed 3 April 2013).