Principles and Agents: The British Slave Trade and Its Abolition by David Richardson

Abstract

For forty years, Richardson has worked on the British slave trade, producing pioneering documentation of the Bristol slave traders, playing a key role in the collaborative wonder that is the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, and co-founding the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation (wise) in Hull. He began analyzing and demonstrating the economic significance of the British slave trade in an era when the received wisdom was that slavery had no role in Britain’s Industrial Revolution, and the focus of British historians and of the British popular imagination was on abolition, not on the slave trade or slavery per se.Richardson is therefore perfectly placed to provide what British history has long required, a synthesis between two competing explanations for Britain’s abolition of the slave trade in 1807—broadly characterized as a “humanitarian” tradition, as represented by Clarkson, Lecky, Coupland, and Drescher, and as a “materialist” tradition, as initiated by Williams.1 The humanitarian version argued that the abolition in 1807 was the product of a sea change in mentalities, both elite and popular, that reached critical mass in the late 1780s; the materialist version argued that that abolition occurred largely because the old colonial system had become an obstacle to a newly industrializing Britain, which was developing a strong commitment to free trade by necessity. These debates unfolded between the late 1970s and the early 1990s, before getting bogged down in sterile binaries of economics versus morality and of self-interest versus altruism. The 2007 bicentenary of the slave trade’s abolition, when Richardson was Director of wise in Hull, re-ignited earlier debates about the fundamental nature of abolition, stimulating work by a new generation of scholars—notably Brown and Ryden—that raised fresh possibilities and pointed the way toward a potential synthesis, without themselves establishing it.2 Hence the opening for Richardson.The new volume, however, does not deliver fully on its potential. Organized in three sections—”Trade,” “Opinions,” and “Politics”—it proceeds from a brilliant summary of the slave trade to a survey of antislavery ideas in the eighteenth century and then to an account of the Parliamentary and extra-Parliamentary campaigns from 1788 to 1807. It thus spans economic, intellectual, cultural, and political history in an unusual way that balances accounts of the slave trade with accounts of abolition. It recognizes that the economic and political structure of Britain in 1807 was different from that of 1707 or 1757, revealing how antislavery was intertwined with urbanization and the emergence of the professional and manufacturing middle class that redistributed political power. It effectively registers the role of Black resistance to the slave trade by both captive and free Africans. But, in the end, its treatment of abolition remains firmly within the humanitarian tradition, viewing abolition as the victory of decent ordinary people over powerful entrenched interests—an uncomplicated early mass movement for social justice and human rights. Moreover, its treatment of individuals reflects an earlier uncritical tradition. In the brief introduction, for example, Richardson characterizes Clarkson as working “tirelessly” for fifty years, overlooking his withdrawal from the struggle in the late 1790s and early 1800s, his marginalization both in 1807 and 1834, and his final demoralizing conflict with Wilberforce’s sons over the roles and responsibilities of the early abolitionists.The book falls short of the much-needed synthesis for three reasons. First, rather than seeking to understand Williams’ scholarship, it oddly rejects it from the outset as “narrow-minded cynicism,” an extraordinary position to adopt in a book published in 2022. Second, given that the book has its origins in lectures given in 2007, it references subsequent works but does not fully absorb them into the argument. Third, the book tends to treat the abolition of the slave trade as the end of the process, leaving only its final three pages to deal with the abolition of slavery itself thirty years later (for which the humanitarian and materialist explanations largely converge). Future scholars will need to build on Richardson’s new book and to draw from his life’s work in order to complete the task at hand.