The Jasperware Medallion That Became the Most-Circulated Political Image of the Late 18th Century

Josiah Wedgwood (1730–1795) was the most successful English ceramics manufacturer of the 18th century, a founding member of the Lunar Society of Birmingham, and a committed Quaker-influenced political reformer. He had been involved in the early 1787 founding of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade (SAST) — the first organised English-language anti-slavery campaign group.

In October 1787 Wedgwood contributed an unusual donation: a run of black-on-yellow jasperware medallions, manufactured at his Etruria Works in Staffordshire at his own expense, depicting a kneeling chained African man with the inscription “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” above. The medallions were distributed free to anyone who would carry them.

The design

The figure was modelled by the Wedgwood family sculptor Henry Webber. The kneeling pose, the raised supplicating hands, the inscription — all were conventional 18th-century European visual rhetoric, but the combination with the mass-production technology of Wedgwood jasperware was unprecedented. The medallion was small (about 33 mm across), wearable, fashionable, and free. It functioned simultaneously as political badge, jewellery component, and conversation piece.

About 15,000 were distributed in the first two years. By 1790 the design had been reproduced as women’s brooches, hair pins, hat ornaments, snuffbox tops, cufflinks, and decorative wall plaques. It became the most-circulated political image of the 18th century — predating by approximately a century the French-Revolution iconographic explosion that conventional art-historical narrative treats as the foundational moment of modern political imagery.

What it did

Wedgwood sent the medallions to Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia in spring 1788. Franklin distributed them among the Pennsylvania abolitionist network; the American reception was enthusiastic; the iconography spread into the early American abolitionist movement of the early 19th century.

The Slave Trade Act of 1807 — abolishing the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the British Empire — was the political-legislative culmination of the twenty-year SAST campaign that the Wedgwood medallions had visually defined. The Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 — abolishing slavery itself in most of the British Empire — followed twenty-six years later.

Wedgwood did not live to see either. He died at Etruria in January 1795, aged 64. The Etruria Works continued producing the medallion through the 19th century; production wound down in the 1860s. The design remains the most-recognised visual identifier of the British abolitionist tradition.

The medallion’s kneeling-pose iconography has been retrospectively criticised in the 20th and 21st centuries on the grounds that it presents the enslaved figure as a passive supplicant requesting recognition from a presumed European-Christian moral arbiter, rather than as a political agent demanding rights. The criticism is historically anachronistic but rhetorically powerful.