Abstract: “Human Rights, Human Value in the Age of Transatlantic Slavery: Assessing the Subject in British Romanticism” (Keynote 1)
Several of the most influential commentaries on value in the eighteenth century and Romantic era, particularly that of the human, were shaped by the transatlantic slave trade. The definition of “slave trade” in the Enlightenment philosophes’ Encyclopedia (1762-72) defines human „natural rights“ – a new concept for the eighteenth century and influential for discussions of human rights for centuries to follow – as precisely that which exempts humans from valuation: “Men and their freedom are not objects of commerce; they can be neither sold, nor purchased, nor bought at any price,” as a human’s “freedom” is “his natural right.” Equally influential was Adam Smith’s foundational commentary on value in The Wealth of Nations (1776), in which he, despite the Encyclopedia’s pronouncements, freely considers the value of people. Smith does so, for example, in his discussions of slavery, which appears at least 75 times in the work, amongst which are commentaries on transatlantic slavery. In The History of Sexuality (1978), Michel Foucault terms such increasing attention to the value of the human “biopower,” a recognition that, in this period, social power structures increasingly viewed human life in terms of its economic and other benefit to society as a whole, and managed and sought to increase it accordingly, although Foucault does not trace this interest to the slave trade, as I do. In this presentation, I will delineate the effects of the slave trade on the valuation of the human in the period and show how several key Romantic-era literary texts, including those by Wordsworth, Byron, Mary Shelley, and Wollstonecraft, reveal popular discomfort with the notion that individuals were viewed as so many resources in power’s coffers.
Bio: University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada
Michelle Faubert is a Professor at the University of Manitoba, Visiting Fellow at Northumbria University, UK, and recent Chair of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (2023 and 2024). Her monographs are Romanticism and Subversive Suicide: Human Rights, Existential Freedom and Biopower(Edinburgh UP, 2025), Granville Sharp’s Uncovered Letter and the Zong Massacre (Palgrave, 2018), and Rhyming Reason: The Poetry of Romantic-Era Psychologists (Pickering & Chatto, 2009). She has also published Broadview Press editions of novels by Mary Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft, the Shelley-Godwin Archive edition of Mary Shelley’s Mathilda, and multiple volumes and journal issues, in addition to numerous articles and chapters on Romanticism and suicide, slavery and abolition, the history of psychiatry and madness, and early feminism.