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This article examines Samuel Ringgold Ward's anti-slavery labours in Canada, the United Kingdom and Jamaica between 1851 and 1866. It demonstrates the ways in which Ward transformed himself into an imperial subject through the pursuit of personal and race-based liberty. This transformation is explained in four ways: Ward's physical relocation from unfree to free soil; his advocacy of legal equality for all people regardless of racial origin; his calls for emigration to the British Empire; and his commitment to the spread of pan-African evangelical Christianity. The article's central concern is to reveal the contradictions between liberty and empire.

Throughout the colonial and antebellum periods, Virginia's tobacco producers exploited slave labor to ensure the profitability of their agricultural enterprises. In the wake of the Civil War, however, the abolition of slavery, combined with changed market conditions, sparked a breakdown of traditional tobacco culture. Focusing on the transformation of social relations between former slaves and former masters, Jeffrey Kerr-Ritchie traces the trajectory of this breakdown from the advent of emancipation to the stirrings of African American migration at the turn of the twentieth century.

Drawing upon a rich array of sources, Kerr-Ritchie situates the struggles of newly freed people within …