Robert Wedderburn: British Insurrectionary, Jamaican Abolitionist

Robert Wedderburn (1762-1834/5) was one of the most charismatic, irascible, and radical intellectuals of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Atlantic world. Born to an enslaved woman and a slavemaster in Jamaica, and moving in the radical working-class circles of London, Wedderburn made his name as a fiery political writer and orator-before dying, forgotten, in poverty.



Among the few abolitionists bold enough to publicly call for the enslaved in the British West Indies to rise up a...