Australia and the World Past and Present

The Wedgwood anti-slavery medallion was produced by the English potter Josiah Wedgwood in 1787.

Wedgwood was one of Britain’s most successful eighteenth-century potters and industrialists.

In 1787, the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was established in London. The Committee wanted an official seal and adopted an image of an enslaved African man kneeling in chains, accompanied by the question, “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?”

The inscription was an attempt to appeal to the viewer’s sense of Christian morality and common humanity.

The question was particularly powerful because it challenged one of the fundamental assumptions used to justify slavery – that Africans could be treated as fundamentally different from Europeans. Instead, the figure asks the viewer to recognise him as a fellow human being.

The imagery appeals to Christian compassion as well as Enlightenment ideas about universal humanity.

Some have drawn attention to the contradictions of the image. The enslaved man is presented as submissive and apparently pleading with his oppressors. Although this made him appear sympathetic, it also reinforced an association between Blackness and subservience.

The image doesn’t show an enslaved person resisting, organising or demanding freedom on his own terms. This has led some to argue that the medallion simultaneously challenged racial inequality and reproduced some of the racial assumptions of its period.

The medallion transformed the abolitionist cause into a simple visual symbol.

The medallions were a portable and were reproduced in large numbers. Sometimes they were worn as fashion accessories.

The medallion thus blurred the boundaries between political campaigning and fashion.

Wearing one allowed a person to make a public declaration of opposition to the slave trade without necessarily engaging in political discourse.

The medallion demonstrated an important technique of political campaigning – associating a social movement with a simple image.

In this respect, it can be regarded as an early form of the modern political badge, campaign logo or protest merchandise.

It is notable that the medallion was created just prior to the arrival of the First Fleet in Australia.

The medallion did not become a mass political symbol in Australia to the extent that it did in Britain.

Slavery had not been established in law in the Australian colonies as had been in the American colonies.

In 1807, a significant act outlawing Britain’s involvement in the slave trade was passed. A wider act was passed in 1833, banning slavery in most of the British Empire.

There were some abolitionist activities in the Australian colonies as they then were. But it was not on the scale that existed in Britain.

In the early 1800s in the Australian colonies, there was some awareness of British abolitionist debates. Snippets came in from newspapers from overseas. The period around the 1833 Act was a particularly active time for updates.

Still, coverage of the issue was sporadic.

The Wedgwood medallion remains one of the most significant objects associated with the British abolitionist movement.

It gave abolitionism a distinctive visual identity and helped carry the campaign beyond meetings and Parliament into everyday life.

The medallion illustrates how eighteenth-century abolitionists combined political organisation, consumer culture, religious sentiment and mass communication to build opposition to the slave trade.