Episode
Matthew Mason, "Seeking the High Ground: Slavery and Political Conflict in the British Atlantic World" (U Virginia Press, 2025)
- Podcast
- New Books Network
- Published
- Sep 24, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 2120
- Processing state
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- https://newbooksnetwork.com
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Summary
How is it, Samuel Johnson famously asked on the eve of the Revolution, that Americans could so vociferously demand freedom for themselves while so conspicuously continuing to deny it to those they held in slavery? With Seeking the High Ground: Slavery and Political Conflict in the British Atlantic World (U Virginia Press, 2025), Matthew Mason helps answer that piercing question. As he shows, the language of slavery and freedom had long suffused Anglo-American political debates in the eighteenth century, with the Revolution emerging as one particularly hyperdramatic act during which combatants on both sides of the war of words connected the idea of slavery to the headline issues of the day. Mason details how Patriots and Loyalists alike deployed the rhetoric of slavery in their debates about all the crucial questions of the day, including republicanism, taxation and representation, and—by claiming the moral high ground—the nature of the Revolutionary War itself. These debates left complex rhetorical and political legacies for those seeking to abolish and defend slavery in both the new US and the remaining British Empire. “No one understands the politics of slavery and the rise of antislavery better than Matthew Mason. This is because he knows the original sources and deeply understands what historians have done and where they've taken detours. He keeps his eye on the big picture and his feet on the ground even while explaining the achievements and the limits of those who reached for the higher ground.” - David Waldstreicher, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, author of The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journeys Through American Slavery and Independence “Matthew Mason's important new book cuts through some of the sharpest historiographical debate…