tim fulford questions the imperial project per se, asking his nation whether it is not becoming alienated from the virtues of liberty and lawfulness on which it prides itself It was not only the colonization of the East Indies that worried Cowper and others like him Increasingly through the 1780s Britons began to make objections to the enslavement of Africans in the West Indies Many of those objecting were men and women who, appalled by the culture of consumption they saw spreading across Britain, participated in a religious revival of the Church of England These Evangelicals attacked colonial slavery as a violation of Christian principles Committed to reviving Britons’ national morality, they campaigned in Parliament and the press Those who possessed literary ability, Cowper and Hannah More among them, wrote propaganda verse that demanded readers’ pity for black slaves They wrote verse because it was a prestigious genre, taken seriously in the public sphere Published in newspapers and magazines, it was respected by legislators such as Charles James Fox, the Whig leader and parliamentary opponent of the slave trade, who prided himself on his knowledge of the classics of English and ancient poetry At the same time, verse also aimed to change the hearts and minds of the expanding bourgeoisie who increasingly read periodicals: it was emotively powerful as well as culturally authoritative Abolitionist texts, however, were not necessarily anti-imperialist: More, for example, wanted an end to slavery in the West Indies but not to the plantation system or to Britain’s occupation of the Caribbean The sugar and coffee, it was hoped, would be harvested by the willing labor of emancipated former slaves.8 Some writers took the Evangelicals’ verse in a more radical direction Typically, these writers were from groups that faced social disadvantage or exclusion within British culture The Unitarians were one such Prohibited because of their unorthodox religious belief from holding public office, they regarded themselves as victims of unjust laws maintained by an unrepresentative Parliament In their eyes, colonial slavery was not an anomaly in an otherwise peaceful mercantile empire, but the epitome of a system of arbitrary government that, at home and abroad, enriched a few at the expense of others’ freedom If Britain did not reform this system and grant liberty, then revolution was justified Thus Robert Southey, one of a generation of intellectuals who embraced Dissenting religion, condoned the uprising of enslaved Africans against planters in his “To the Genius of Africa” (1797) His friend Coleridge, also a recent convert to Unitarianism, not only justified slaves’ violent rebellion but also connected their treatment with that of the other native peoples ruled by Britain In “Africa,” he wrote, “the unnumbered Victims of a detestable Slave-trade – in Asia the desolated plains of Indostan 182 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008