Jonathan Connolly: What does freedom look like after abolition

In the early 1800s, while Great Britain continued to expand its territory across the world, it decided to end the slave trade within its empire.

The abolition of slavery in the British Empire in the 1830s came more than three decades before the United States took the same action. But what freedom meant for thousands of formerly enslaved people in Britain wasn't easily defined.

The period after Great Britain abolished slavery is a focus of Jonathan Connolly's work as an associate professor of history in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Connolly was named this year's Rising Star in the Humanities, Arts, Design and Architecture.

"An important starting point for those who work on emancipation is the fact that abolition tended to end formal slavery without defining what freedom after slavery would mean," Connolly said.

His focus, as he has written about in his book, "Worthy of Freedom: Indenture and Free Labor in the Era of Emancipation," is the British Empire's history of migration, labor, race and emancipation. Among his interests is Britain's influence on South Asia, South Africa and the Caribbean, where enslavement fueled trade.

Rather than being the end of the story, Connolly said, abolition was the start of a series of consequential conflicts over land, labor and race.

What remained after abolition "was a coercive, hierarchical labor regime that some people thought looked like slavery," he said.

A system of indentured labor after abolition in the British Empire brought workers to sugar-producing British colonies in the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean until the end of World War I, nearly a hundred years after the end of the slave trade.

Connolly has published many articles and is sought out worldwide to discuss his work, said Kevin Schultz, chair of the UIC history department, who nominated Connolly for the Rising Star award. Connolly's book won the 2025 Stansky Book Prize from the North American Conference on British Studies as the best book in the field published that year.

"For a first book to garner such an accolade is rare. For it to do so while reshaping multiple historiographical conversations is rarer still," said Schultz. "His current trajectory suggests that his most influential work still lies ahead."