The Recent Historiography of British Abolitionism: Academic Scholarship, Popular History, and the Broader Reading Public

Abstract

22 Historically Speaking July/August 2007 The Recent Historiography of British Abolitionism: Academic Scholarship, Popular History, and the Broader Reading Public Eric Arnesen The worlds of academic scholarship and popular understandings of the past are two distinct if sometimes related phenomena. In the best of circumstances, the work of professional scholars, based on years of painstaking research and conceptualization, finds its way into the hands of those outside the academy. Ideally, academic research and arguments inform or define not just what our students might think but what the broader public does as well. But the "best of circumstances " is one of those phrases that might be misleading , for the occasions when academic scholarship decisively shapes larger interpretations and understandings occur far too rarely. Under more commonly prevailing circumstances, academic historians ' work forms a kind of backdrop against which historical popularizers, with access to larger reading markets, can paint their own distinct pictures ; to mix metaphors, academic work constitutes building blocks that can be selectively arranged to suit the popularizers' purposes. Academic historians —and I must confess, I am one—may be indispensable to the enterprise, but they don't have much of a say in determining the uses to which their findings and arguments get put. To put the matter in these terms, it can be argued , does a genuine disservice to the popularizers on several grounds. First, unlike academic scholars, popular historians fill a market niche and meet a genuine demand among members of the public for readable works of history. In contrast, academic scholars often make little effort to reach audiences outside of their peers. Admittedly, academic writing is frequendy dense and inaccessible and often of limited interest to those who have not spent their lives thinking about the issues academics address. And, for the most part, academics write intentionally for a specific audience—other scholars and students of history. For better or worse, academics are specialists whose thematic obsessions, styles of writing , and modes of arguing may be considered appropriate to the academy but inappropriate beyond its walls. Because the work academics produce is not intended for broader audiences, it should not be surprising when it does not find its way into the hands of the larger public. In contrast, popular historians reject scholarly jargon, disregard academic obsessions and (usually) analyses, and ignore historiographical hair splitting. Instead, they aim at producing compelling and dramatic narratives that will hold the interest of non-professional readers. This requires them to pay much greater attention to the art of storytelling than most academic scholars are willing to devote (or are even capable of devoting). Local color, biographical detail, action, dramatic tension , and bold (in some cases, exaggerated) claims dominate dieir accounts. The results are often fastpaced and readable books that the public can enjoy but that professional historians often ignore. The issue I want to address here is a straightforward one: To what extent do academic historians' findings make theirway into popular understandings of the past via trade books? This is a big question, and there are no easy answers. Here I explore the relationship between academic and popular history by focusing on a specific subject: slavery and abolition in the 18th- and 19th-century Adantic world. Last year, academic historian Christopher Leslie Brown productively and provocatively revisited the subject of abolitionism's emergence as both a perspective and a set of political programs. "Although the story" of the rise of early British abolitionism is "well known," he argues in MoralCapital, "it remains poorly understood."1 Tackling the "deceptively simple tale of origins," he contends that abolitionism "did not follow inevitably from enlightened sensibilities , social change, or a shift in economic interests. Nor did it spring forth spontaneously, as an uncaused cause free from circumstance or context." A movement against the slave trade "did not have to happen in Britain," he suggests (21 1). Its emergence was highly contingent, its beginnings tentative. Moral sensibilities did not automatically translate into practice or program, for a "wide gulf" divides "mere perception of a moral wrong from decisions to seek a remedy." Ideological frameworks are "conditions, not causes. If they predisposed, they did not dispose ." The grand backdrop of grand concepts— capitalism's...