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Abstract What can a volume from George Washington’s library say about his opinion of slavery or about abolitionism more generally in the late eighteenth century? A great deal, it turns out. Understood both as an intellectual and material artifact and approached from the entangled perspectives of the history of the book and transatlantic abolition, one single bound pamphlet volume brings a new Washington into focus. It locates him in the context of an international debate about slavery connecting British pamphleteers, Parisian salons, and transatlantic friendships; follows European travelers as they disseminated books and pamphlets and carried on conversations on both sides of the Atlantic; and leads eventually to the broader contexts of imperial rivalry and international abolitionism. Set in this context, Washington emerges as a thinker well within the broad mainstream of European opinion about abolition. But even more this new view of Washington helps elucidate the international networks of abolitionist writing and activism that shaped the movement during the age of Atlantic revolutions. Web supplement: http://oieahc.wm.edu/wmq/Apr11/furstenberg.html

Publisher: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture