In recent decades the history of literacy has engaged the interests of many Western scholars, particularly those concerned with applying the techniques and approaches of the social sciences to the broad issues of educational history. The simplistic notion that links higher rates of literacy with progress, rationality, modernity, and other benign abstractions, has been challenged by a group of Western historians intent on probing the complex social determinants of literacy in Europe and North America. Eschewing simple quantitative estimates of literacy, they have sought to analyze the quality and meaning of its possession, investigating the revealing problems of who was literate, what was the kind of literacy, when did literacy exist, and for what reasons. Their findings have been provocative, and their research continues to stimulate controversy as well as new insights.

In sharp contrast to the lively debates provoked by several articles and a major monograph in the 1970s, the history of literacy, narrowly conceived, has attracted relatively little attention from Canadian scholars in the 1980s. Much of the work which has been done is preoccupied with questions of sources and methodology.

“Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the waves; Britons, never, never, never, shall be slaves.” So ran the popular eighteenth-century, nationalistic, freedom song. The people of Britain were proud of their liberties and would fight to uphold them against the hated French enemy. But would slaves ever be Britons? Would slaves ever be free? These questions were very real because during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries hundreds of thousands of black, African slaves were transported to the British West Indian colonies, where the majority labored on sugar plantations.