“Give an account of thy stewardship” : how “vital religion” forged anti-slavery and empire in the British world, 1772–1846.

This dissertation examines the religious beliefs and practices of the community of reformers around William Wilberforce known as the “Clapham Sect.” Unlike previous treatments of this group that focused on their work in Britain, this project situates the Clapham activists in a transnational context to explore how ideas of religion and race crossed borders. Imperial studies—while insightfully interrogating hierarchies of gender, class, and race—regularly underplay the religious convictions of their historical subjects of study. By doing so, these investigations miss a crucial part of the story that ultimately informs such issues of gender, race, and cultural exchange more deeply. Religion was the lens that oriented most of the Clapham group’s lives. Applying this lens, this dissertation argues that the idea of stewardship, or divine accountability—and less an emerging altruistic humanitarian ethos—primarily motivated Clapham enterprises. Through social network analysis, I show that the experiences of Clapham-associated persons in the Americas and India forged the movement by granting it urgency. Such encounters produced a theological fulcrum of suffering and fictive kinship with those of African descent, currency in personal transformation, and credibility in subverting racial stereotypes.