Century of Emancipation (ePub)

A Century of Emancipation, written by the English anti-slavery campaigner John Harris and first published in 1933, represents an invaluable compendium for the student of slavery and its allied forms of contract labor and forced labor, both in their historical setting and in their contemporary aspects. In this book, the author is concerned with all kind of slavery, including that of East Indians and Mongolians in the West Indies, of Kanakas in Polynesia, and of the motley crowd along the Putumayo River in South America.This book is not merely an attempt to portray suffering, it is also an attempt to give a brief account of the systems under which these things have been done, and still more an effort to recount the light and shade of the great struggles carried on by a mere handful of earnest souls beginning with Clarkson, Wilberforce, Buxton, Pitt, Sturge, Macaulay, Lushington. Grey, Livingstone, then on to Vandervelde, Dilke, Fox Bourne, Morel, Hodgkin and others.The book shows how those who have struggled and are still struggling with these sordid but powerful forces have never numbered more than a few hundreds. Whilst it may be true that those few hundreds have been men and women of wisdom and influence, yet it is even more true that they have been men and women possessed of souls burning with a spiritual passion for freedom and justice-that was and is their chief source of strength.