Eric Herschthal. The Science of Abolition: How Slaveholders Became the Enemies of Progress.

Abstract

Over the past few decades, historians have demonstrated the variety of ways in which slavery was wrapped up with modernity. From Joyce Chaplin’s An Anxious Pursuit (1993) to Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton (2014), scholars have uncovered how everything from modern science to industrial capitalism relied on the world of Atlantic slavery. In making this argument, Chaplin, Beckert, and others built on the earlier work of African American, Caribbean, and Black British scholars, most notably Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery (1944). Together, these historians challenged the consensus—which emerged over the course of the nineteenth century—that slavery was fundamentally antimodern, a relic of the past. All this left a significant and, until now, relatively unexplored question. If slavery was so obviously tied to modernity, why did anyone think it was so antiquated in the first place? How, in other words, did slavery come to be seen as the opposite of modern? Eric Herschthal gives the first detailed answer to this question in his brilliant new book, The Science of Abolition. Moving from the late eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century and covering much of the Atlantic world, Herschthal develops a sophisticated account of how the antislavery movement used science to advance its political goals. This is the “science of abolition” of the title (2). In doing so, Herschthal makes a number of important contributions to the historiographies of both science and slavery.