British Proslavery Arguments and the Bible, 1823–1833

Abstract

When Britain's Anti-Slavery Society inaugurated its campaign for colonial slave emancipation in 1823, the British West Indian interest orchestrated a counter-campaign in defence of colonial slavery. Prevailing scholarly opinion holds that British proslavery agents did not use religious or scriptural arguments in their fight against emancipation. This article overturns that assumption by demonstrating that the Bible and Christianity were in fact central to British proslavery discourse: the West Indians and their agents mined both Old and New Testaments, reassembling exegeses on divine punishment, Hebrew servitude, Pauline teaching and social hierarchies into a proslavery iteration of Christianity which, they argued, removed the imperative to emancipate slaves on religious grounds.