Robert Wedderburn was born under the lash in mid-eighteenth-century Jamaican plantation society, the illegitimate child of a plantation owner and an enslaved Black woman. Despite the circumstances of his birth, Wedderburn would become one of the foremost abolitionists of the nineteenth century. Migrating to Great Britain as a young man, he established himself as a radical preacher and political critic in London. This volume reprints his life narrative, The Horrors of Slavery and his fiery periodical, The Axe Laid to the Root. Taken together, Wedderburnâ s writing and his public life provide a vision of transatlantic liberation and multiracial working-class agitation for social change.

The introduction and notes in this new edition uniquely situate Wedderburn and his work within a lively intersection of his Black Atlantic, Caribbean, and British contexts. This edition illustrates Wedderburnâ s enduring relevance for scholarship in Atlantic studies, Black studies, political theology, racial capitalism, and Romanticism.