The Poor Always with You: Poverty in an Age of Emancipation, 1833-1879

Poverty and slavery are monumental problems – but today we assume they are separate problems. In the mid-nineteenth century, however, American and British observers struggled to distinguish the poor from the slave. Tracing a key shift in the moral imagination, my dissertation explores how the boundaries of poverty and slavery blurred during the so-called “age of emancipation.” I ask: how did poverty and slavery, as political categories and social conditions, entangle with one another in locations spanning the United States and the British Empire?