Pioneering and provocative, in Slavery and Sentiment, Christine Levecq reads both black and white writers to argue that the transatlantic English-speaking world saw the development of not one but two often competing and sometimes complementary Black Atlantics during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The book is instrumental in demonstrating the roles of the tension between republican and libertiarian concepts of sentiment. The great strength of Slavery and Sentiment is its meticulous attention to the political theory of republicanism, reworked by Afro-British abolitionist writers. Republicanism survives as a trace, an antidote to the liberalism that pervades American writings of the era. Its most sophisticated version is a
