English Debates about Slavery and Race

Abstract

Abstract This chapter focuses almost exclusively on eight authors from eighteenth-century England: Edward Trelawny, Thomas Rutherforth, the anonymous author of Two Dialogues on the Man-Trade, Thomas Clarkson, Dorothy Kilner, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, Olaudah Equiano, and Mary Wollstonecraft. All these authors criticize slavery—or at least some aspects of it—but they do so in intriguingly different ways. Three themes are particularly important in the English debate about slavery: arguments for the humanity and personhood of Black people, the origins of racist beliefs or biases, and the alleged natural differences between Black and White people that, according to some proponents of slavery, make Black people natural slaves.