Not Made by Slaves: Ethical Capitalism in the Age of Abolition

Abstract

In this ambitious book, Bronwen Everill considers the varied, contradictory economic arguments against slavery and the slave trade across the Atlantic World. She expands on studies of the transatlantic free produce movement (most recently, Julie Holcomb's Moral Commerce) to focus more broadly on production, consumption, and trade, or “legitimate commerce” (3). Everill illuminates African, as well as British, American, and to a lesser extent, French, perspectives on how to undermine slavery and create a more ethical global economic system. She also contributes to the scholarly literature on slavery (and antislavery) and capitalism by focusing on consumerist arguments for free labor goods. Abolitionist arguments that free labor was more efficient than slave labor, and their promise of cheaper consumer goods, Everill argues, shifted attention away from other ethical considerations, including the condition of labor.European and American arguments for a more ethical capitalism developed in conversation with their African trading partners. Across the late eighteenth-century Atlantic, political, social, and religious leaders reacted to the excesses of the slave trade by abstaining from goods produced by enslaved people. Abolitionists argued that consumer demand fueled the slave trade and slavery. As a result, boycotts turned the consumer into a moral agent, aware of their place in a global supply chain. Everill shows how abolitionists focused on consumers in Africa as well as Europe and North America. As the outcry against the slave trade increased, abolitionists searched for more acceptable (though still profitable) commodities and settled, at least initially, on guns. Though African traders wanted guns for many reasons, abolitionists ultimately redefined them as immoral because they believed that guns only encouraged the slave trade.Everill focuses on the recurring figure of Zachary Macauley, British abolitionist, governor of the Sierra Leone Company, chairman of the African Institution, and founder of the firm Macauley & Babington, to show the pitfalls of defining certain types of commerce as ethical. Abolitionists emphasized the importance of consistency of beliefs and practices in legitimate commerce, but this exposed them to charges of hypocrisy when their opponents uncovered connections to slavery. Christian and Muslim societies alike viewed usury as immoral, but abolitionists like Macauley argued that credit was necessary to establish legitimate trade. At the end of the 1820s, however, Macauley's firm was unable to call in its debts and collapsed. Similarly, abolitionists argued against tariffs that protected goods produced by enslaved people, while lobbying for their own concessions from the government. One of Macauley's opponents accused him of having a “virtual monopoly” in his control over trade in Sierra Leone (140). Abolitionists opened themselves to criticism that they had conveniently defined a certain type of trade as ethical only to reap the profits.To replace the slave trade, abolitionists wanted legitimate commerce to be lucrative, but they argued that the benefits extended to former slave traders, former slaves, free settlers, and, most importantly, consumers. As Everill points out, their assertions of the positive economic impact of legitimate commerce increasingly emphasized the consumer. When prices did not immediately decline, British abolitionists turned to cheaper, often indentured, labor from distant parts of the world. Slavery's unique evil eclipsed their concerns over other forms of unfree or unfair labor even as the formerly enslaved disappeared from the conversation as either producers or consumers. In the United States, suspicions over the authenticity of imported free labor goods as well as the desire for a domestic market for free cotton meant that abolitionists saw white farmers as the prime beneficiaries of legitimate commerce.Everill's analysis traces abolitionists’ economic thought from the end of the eighteenth century through the American Civil War, and from Muslim reformers to British free traders to Philadelphia Quakers. Despite their small numbers, abolitionists’ evolving views of ethical commerce had a lasting impact on the development of international trade and continued to shape the moral choices of consumers and producers in the global market. Her broad scope means that the experiences of many of the entrepreneurs, merchants, traders, abolitionists, and consumers who cross her pages remain unexplored. For example, the reader will only glimpse Betsey Carew, a free Hausa butcher in Sierra Leone, who supplied meat to the army and then launched a successful importing and retail business, and James Mott, a Philadelphia abolitionist who tried to trade in free cotton before turning to wool (148, 98). As Everill shows, ethical capitalism created new winners and losers, and the beneficiaries changed with abolitionists’ arguments.