Revising Escape: Frederick Douglass’s Civic Promise of Free Trade and Amitav Ghosh’s Global Geography of Commercial Imperialism

Abstract

The essay considers Frederick Douglass's struggle for authorship, beginning from his Narrative of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) through My Bondage, Me Freedom (1855), and finally to Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881). Given his expansive career as an author, lecturer, newspaper editor, civil rights activist, and diplomat, it is particularly insightful to consider how and why he revised his autobiographical accounts over the decades on the international stage. This essay considers the geographical reach of free trade ideals that permeate Douglass’s writings, particularly in his representations of escaping slavery, of building transatlantic alliances with laborers in the United Kingdom and Ireland, and of defending the civil right to work in the era of Reconstruction and Chinese Exclusion. Expanding the geographical reach of Douglass’s writings to Asia sheds light on the recent allusions that novelist Amitav Ghosh makes to him in the Ibis Trilogy: Sea of Poppies (2008), River of Smoke (2011), and Flood of Fire (2015).