Fermentation will be universal’: Intersections of Race and Class in Wedderburn’s Black Atlantic Discourse of Transatlantic Revolution

Abstract

This chapter will engage with the figure of ultra-radical Black Atlantic abolitionist and insurrectionary preacher Robert Wedderburn (1762-1835/6?). Born free in Jamaica as the son of an enslaved woman Rosannah and a Scottish-Jamaican slaveholder, he eked out his existence on the margins of London society and was active in the city’s radical underground. As this chapter demonstrates, in carnivalesque, blasphemous and vernacular language, Wedderburn created an avant-garde Black Atlantic discourse that inextricably interweaved race and class: simultaneously calling for slave revolution in the Caribbean and proto-proletarian revolution in Britain.