'“States of Injury”: Josephine Butler on Slavery, Citizenship, and the Boer War’, in Ian Christopher Fletcher, Laura F. Nym Mayhall and Philippa Levine (eds), Women’s Suffrage in the British Empire: Citizenship, Nation and Race, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 18–32

At this juncture it is important to underscore that women’s anti-slavery efforts, like the British anti-slavery movement as a whole, did not directly threaten the colonial enterprise, but shored it up instead by making the putatively “free labor” of emancipated blacks and the indentured labor of colonial subjects the basis of post-emancipation imperial economy - thus re­ attaching the capitalist state to a more just (if entirely self-interested) imperial mission now purged of an institution which had become the cultural embodiment of evil and corruption for an influential stratum of the metropolitan middle class.7 At stake here is not, therefore, Butler’s resistance to colonialism but her defense of it - and, more particularly, her recurrent use of the rhetoric of abolition, more than half a century after formal emancipation, to make her case for an imperial war.