In Barbaric Culture and Black Critique: Black Antislavery Writers, Religion, and the Slaveholding Atlantic (University of Virginia Press, 2015), Dr. Stefan M. Wheelock analyses a little-discussed episode in the the late Enlightenment, namely, criticism of slavery by black writers such as Ottabah Cuguano, Olaudah Equiano, David Walker, and Maria Stewart. These authors marshaled a variety of religious and secular arguments to attack bondage and, in so doing, promoted important ideas concerning democracy, Christianity, freedom, and their race’s role in all of these projects.

Adam McNeil is a PhD student in the Department of History at the University of Delaware.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices