Helmut Meier's study of pro- and anti-slavery texts from 1784-1825 focuses on understanding the
distinct image of Africans in the British debate on the slave trade and slavery as such.
Starting from the premise that at the threshold from the early to the late modern period the
distinct image of Africans as slaves was instrumental in universalizing a Eurocentric concept
of capitalist wage labor both at the colonial centres and margins Meier argues that by
portraying African slaves as suffering wretches especially anti-slavery texts created colonial
Others in an indistinct zone between inclusion and exclusion from humanity. The discourse on
slavery thus constructs African slaves as mimetic Others which could subsequently become the
objects of a discourse of colonial reform and 'betterment'.
