The slavery debates at Cambridge did not end with the emancipation of enslaved people in the Caribbean and India in 1843. In fact, undergraduates, fellows, and professors increasingly turned their attention to enslavement in the United States of America. Cambridge-educated abolitionists, such as Edward Strutt Abdy and Alexander Crummell, sought to mobilise opinion in both America and Britain against the persistent power of the enslaver class in the Southern United States. The outbreak of the American Civil War (1861–1865) inspired growing sympathy amongst educated British elites, including those at Cambridge, towards the Confederate cause, with many comparing American enslavers to landed British gentry in order to build camaraderie between British and American elites. The Confederacy, in turn, sought to lobby university men and mobilise student opinion in their favour to further the cause of Confederate diplomatic recognition in Britain.

The growing professionalisation of the law and the natural sciences owed much to the spread of the empire – and Cambridge intellectuals would benefit more than most from these processes. Natural philosophers travelled across the empire amassing botantical, geological, and antiquarian collections and expanding scientific knowledge, with much of the credit for their findings owed to local enslavers or enslaved Africans. Britons with financial investments in slave-trading organisations also donated to found professorships. In the case of the law, experts in international law and treaty-making, particularly Sir Nathaniel Lloyd, applied their expert knowledge to cases concerning piracy, plantation holdings, and imperial companies. As with missionary organisations, the problem of enslavement continued to be a source of debate in the eighteenth century, as philosophers of natural law and rights considered the ethical justifications for racial enslavement.

Following the abolition of the slave trade, Cambridge men turned their intellectual attentions to the institution of slavery as a whole. Nevertheless, students, alumni, and fellows were torn on how best to create an empire of free labour and on the prospects for freed people of colour in post-emancipation societies. The early nineteenth century was a colorful era of experimentation as Cambridge activists sought to gradually achieve abolition without precipitating the violence and rebellion that characterized the Haitian Revolution, whilst Black and radical white abolitionists advocated for an immediate end to racial slavery. Historians have long ignored this phase of Cambridge debate on enslavement post-1807, which has resulted in a historiography of Cambridge abolitionism which overemphasizes its radical nature. In reality, a growing conservatism dominated this period of abolitionist thought at Cambridge – particularly as some Cambridge fellows and alumni continued to eschew pro-slavery rhetoric.

Following the colonisation of Ireland, North America, and the Caribbean, British society, politics, and the economy were forever transformed by the growing transatlantic empire. The University of Cambridge was intimately connected to that Atlantic world. The introduction provides context on Cambridge’s history and the long-term development of racial slavery, examining how enslavement and the plantation economy were of incredible significance to British life from the beginning of the seventeenth century through to the end of the American Civil War and beyond. More than a history of plantation owners purchasing stately homes or consumers eagerly consuming sugar, a case study of Cambridge’s town and gown communities highlights the vast spectrum of connections, ties, and interests that many Britons held to a slave empire.

Chapter 2 sets the theoretical framework for the book, which provides tools to operationalize the regime complex mechanisms of effectiveness. The chapter operationalizes the regime complex’s mechanisms of effectiveness as the utility modifier mechanism, social learning mechanism, and capacity-building mechanism to break down the major impacts of the regime complex on barriers to renewable energy development on the ground in EMDEs. This study advances novel theorizing on regime complex effectiveness by combining approaches from private governance and regime theory to conceptualize mechanisms of impact. The theoretical framework thus provides tools to guide the examination of the interaction between regime complexes and domestic political actors, and more specifically, shows how the regime complex impacts financial, regulatory, and technical barriers to renewable energy development as analyzed in the comparative case studies in Indonesia and the Philippines (Chapters 4–6).

Chapter 1 elaborates on how the assemblage of multilateral, bilateral, transnational, and private nongovernmental actors – the clean energy regime complex – interacts with domestic politics in emerging economies and developing countries (EMDEs) to foster energy transitions. The ripple effects of international norms regarding energy transitions are visible in domestic institutional change in Indonesia and the Philippines, but both cases demonstrate variable outcomes in terms of the relative impacts of the clean energy regime complex in removing barriers to geothermal development. The chapter underlines the importance of studying the interaction between the international and domestic politics in EMDEs to understand how best to catalyze energy transitions to meet global climate mitigation goals. The chapter summarizes the case study selection, research design and methods, and theoretical arguments on regime complex effectiveness mechanisms – including utility modifier, social learning, and capacity building, and their impact in overcoming domestic political lock-in. The chapter also provides a brief overview of the book.