British Abolition Research Articles

Altruism and self-interest in constitutional reform: the case of the British abolition of slavery and the slave trade

AbstractWas the British abolition of slavery and the slave trade a triumph of altruism over pecuniary self-interest? Analysis of qualitative data reveals the importance of self-interested motives underlying this ostensibly other-regarding reform. The abolitionists worked to alleviate the suffering of enslaved Africans, but their campaign faced a collective action problem that was solved by the supply of the private benefits of status, esteem, and possible religious salvation to the leading figures. Abolition was also consistent with the desire of many ordinary Britons to eradicate the remnants of feudal society and move to a more liberal order. The payment of compensation to slaveowners on abolition also made reform consistent with their interests, and the interests of the individuals and financial institutions that processed and invested the payments. This analysis coheres with aspects of Eric Williams’ thesis that abolition took place because it benefited Britain’s ruling elite, although more Britons gained from abolition than Williams supposed. It is concluded that constitutional reform to remove oppressive and exploitative institutions does not follow from a sudden outpouring of societal altruism but requires the supply of private benefits to constitutional entrepreneurs able to make change consistent with the interests of the wider population and powerful groups who would otherwise lose from liberalization.

Constructing an Antislavery Hero: The Portrayal of Toussaint Louverture in British Abolitionist Texts, 1803–1863

ABSTRACT Shortly after Toussaint Louverture died in 1803, a literary tradition emerged in British abolitionist texts which portrayed the character of Toussaint in heroic terms. This article takes five texts written between 1803–1863 to demonstrate how Toussaint was constructed as an antislavery hero and what the motivations were behind this construction. The hero can be understood as a lens through which Toussaint’s character, and the character of the whole Haitian Revolution, was flattened. The hero was a frame that made him knowable and understandable to European audiences, but that also erased both the mass of enslaved people that formed the grassroots of the revolution in Haiti, as well as the many aspects of Toussaint himself that were not deemed to fit the hero narrative. This literary tradition arose because the mainstream of the nineteenth-century British antislavery movement opposed and feared rebellions led by enslaved people, believing on racist grounds that they were violent, uncontrolled, and anarchic, and at odds with the new liberal vision of empire that most British abolitionists wanted to create.

Bound to be Free? Manumission in Cape Town, 1825–34

ABSTRACT As in other slave societies, manumission existed in the Cape Colony from the introduction of slavery by the Dutch East India Company in the 1650s until British abolition in the 1830s. This article focuses on manumissions in Cape Town between 1825 and de jure Emancipation in 1834, during which time changing manumission regulations loosened slaveowners’ grip over the process. One thousand two hundred and sixty-six enslaved people were manumitted in Cape Town and recorded in the ‘Return of Manumissions’. Among them were more enslaved women and girls than men and boys, a pattern consistent with earlier periods at the Cape and other slave societies. The most common reason for manumission was purchase constituting 38% of the manumissions. This shifts the focus away from slaveowners granting manumission towards enslaved people achieving it. Using specific cases, this article explores wages, inheritance and loans as possible means of acquiring funds to purchase manumission, and suggests that conditions attached to manumission, while uncommon, were sometimes repayment arrangements. In this analysis, the importance of work both in slavery and life after slavery comes to the fore, and it opens questions about the financial lives of the enslaved for future research.

Well Fed but ‘at the Same Time, Well Beaten’: Amelioration in the Seychelles

ABSTRACT In the years prior to legal emancipation, British officials enacted a series of laws intended to ameliorate the condition of those held in slavery in their colonies. This article investigates the impact of amelioration on the islands of the Seychelles immediately prior to emancipation. While the legal changes, including the dispatch of a Protector of Slaves to the Seychelles, were limited in terms of effectiveness, their implementation offered people new avenues to protest mistreatment and engage directly with the language of abolition. Reports filed by the protector highlight people’s uncertainty and isolation during the years leading up to emancipation. While there is evidence of resistance through uprisings, desertions, and the filing of formal complaints, people in the Seychelles faced significant challenges as owners used the islands’ distance from colonial oversight to maintain control through violence and patriarchal structures of domination. As remote ‘island laboratories’, however, the islands offer unique insights into the ways in which people managed to leverage British abolitionism to their advantage even on such isolated islands.

Exploring African Abolitionism: Fante Perspectives on Domestic Slavery in the Nineteenth-Century Gold Coast

AbstractThis article draws on a variety of primary sources to first illustrate the rise of African abolitionism in the Fante region in the mid-nineteenth century and then situate local abolitionists in the context of colonial legal abolition in the Gold Coast. When the British abolished slavery in 1874, various Fante groups had been developing local anti-slavery views and strategies closely connected to the evolution of a Fante ethnic identity fashioned against the “barbaric” Asante. Tensions arose between the Fante intelligentsia, which spearheaded local abolitionism, and British colonial elites. The article examines the rise of local abolitionism among the coastal Fante through specific ideas, individuals, and events, and discusses subsequent dynamics in the “first age” (1874–1900) of colonial abolitionism in the Gold Coast. It shows that the 1874 abolition was opposed by members of the Fante anti-slavery movement not—as has been argued—because Fante intellectuals were pro-slavery or opposed to the idea of abolition, but because they held different visions of emancipation and were critical of British abolition laws that, unlike in the West Indies, did not compensate slaveowners.

“Flaming Madras handkerchiefs and calico blazing with crimson and scarlet flowers”: Antebellum World Systems in Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative

Abstract Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative (ca. 1853–61) is the earliest known work of fiction written by a Black woman in the United States. Its distinctiveness lies in the internationalism through which the labor regimes of the southern plantation are shown to be intimately bound to global sites of colonial dispossession. Besides unpacking the entangled strands of British and American imperialisms, the author-narrator critically emulates conventions of the nineteenth-century transatlantic literary marketplace, evincing an understanding of both her embodied self and her intellectual labor as commodities in a world system built with racialized labor. Crafts’s novel revises the notion of chattel slavery as provincial, situating it instead within the Atlantic World’s expansive flows of capital and commodities. It presents not a geographically and socially demarcated institution but a plantation empire that goes far beyond the contours of the American South or, indeed, the continental United States, creating a remarkably nuanced conception of Black positionality, one informed not only by race but also by global capital. As part of a broader field-based inquiry, this article probes the affordances of thinking about antebellum Black Atlantic political subjectivity as positioned between two imperialist projects: British abolitionism and American plantocratic expansionism.

Along and Against the Grain: Close reading The History of Mary Prince

Due to the highly mediated conditions of its production, The History of Mary Prince presents a challenge to New Critical methods of reading that are frequently taught in undergraduate literature classrooms. Without questioning the British abolitionists’ textual representation of Prince’s experiences, readers unfamiliar with the historical conditions for slave narratives may attribute the publication’s sentimentalism and representations of violence as direct expressions of Prince. This essay mobilizes close reading towards contrary ends: I throw the editor’s (Thomas Pringle’s) paratextual material, particularly the Preface, under scrutiny by close reading its insistence on transparency and symmetry between the first-person narrative and Prince as the narrative's univocal source. Using the Preface as an apparatus for close reading The History, I emphasize the dissonance between, on the one hand, the British abolitionists’ textual representation of freedom and, on the other, Prince’s speech as a practice of freedom. Drawing on the methods developed by Marisa Fuentes and Ann Laura Stoler, I offer historical and geographical contexts that can be layered onto close readings exercises for The History – particularly around repeated tropes of salt and allusions to sugar – that destabilize Thomas Pringle’s, and by extension the London Antislavery Society’s, representation of Prince’s public image. I argue how the paratextual materials of The History can help instructors foreground the contradictions and asymmetries of power embedded in subaltern representations.

Chained to History: Slavery and U.S. Foreign Relations to 1865 by Steven J. Brady

Reviewed by: Chained to History: Slavery and U.S. Foreign Relations to 1865 by Steven J. Brady Ann L. Tucker Chained to History: Slavery and U.S. Foreign Relations to 1865. By Steven J. Brady. (Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 2022. Pp. viii, 232. $39.95, ISBN 978-1-5017-6105-8.) Slavery constituted one of the most critical issues in U.S. domestic politics from the founding through emancipation. In Chained to History: Slavery and U.S. Foreign Relations to 1865, Steven J. Brady follows in the footsteps of historians such as Matthew Karp by positioning slavery as a critical issue shaping U.S. foreign policy as well. Using the records and words of leading American statesmen, Brady argues that slavery influenced American foreign policy goals, actions, successes, and failures from the American Revolution through the Civil War, continually complicating and challenging efforts to advance U.S. interests at home and abroad. Chained to Slavery traces the influence of slavery on American foreign policy through a series of critical events in U.S. history. Brady reveals the key role slavery played in these well-known incidents and highlights the influence of foreign policy considerations on well-known American actions related to slavery. Slavery complicated efforts to resolve ongoing conflict with Britain during the early republic and shaped American reactions to the Haitian Revolution. International disagreements over slavery limited efforts to police the Atlantic slave trade and helped thwart American attempts to promote Black colonization in Africa. Slavery drove American expansionism, despite the risks of harming U.S. relations with European powers, and hindered the [End Page 360] Abraham Lincoln administration’s diplomatic efforts during the Civil War. Throughout these events, slavery and international relations were inextricably intertwined, shaping American actions and historical outcomes. As Brady reveals, a major reason why slavery was so woven into every element of U.S. diplomacy was that leaders frequently equated the promotion and protection of slavery with national interests and even national security. Yet despite this prioritization of slavery, American statesmen continually struggled to define domestic and international legal precedents and obligations regarding the institution, and therefore the obligations of domestic and international parties toward each other. This dynamic shaped decades-long debates with Britain over compensation for the owners of self-emancipated enslaved people and over the British enforcement of the prohibition of the Atlantic slave trade. Further complicating matters, the connection between slavery and foreign policy was not always straightforward, and other concerns often intervened. For example, a desire to promote commerce led the United States to continue trade with Haiti, a nation founded in part by a slave revolt, and the ideas of American unilateralism continually clashed with the defense of slavery’s tendency to draw its proponents into the larger international world. In this analysis, Brady shows how influential American leaders, and their foreign counterparts, were repeatedly snared, thwarted, and redirected by the issue of slavery as they debated and negotiated America’s place in the world. One theme that emerges throughout the book was the particular challenge that the United States’ generally proslavery foreign policy posed to its relationship with abolitionist Great Britain. This tension began with long-lasting conflict over compensation for the owners of enslaved persons who had self-emancipated across British lines during the American Revolution, and it continued with American refusals to acquiesce to British visions for an alliance against the Atlantic slave trade. Throughout the nineteenth century the United States and Great Britain repeatedly found themselves at odds over the issue of slavery. This dynamic was intensified even by seemingly unrelated events, such as the U.S. annexation of Texas (which Britain opposed because it advanced slavery), as well as ongoing fears about British abolitionist influence in Spanish Cuba, and the expansion of British power generally. Brady’s emphasis on the role slavery played in shaping the United States’ relationship with Britain is one of the strengths of the work. The relationship between slavery and foreign relations that Brady depicts was multidirectional, with varied results for American leaders and their goals. Nonetheless, with clear use of evidence and strong organization, Brady compellingly demonstrates that slavery and international relations were inextricably...

Enslaved by African angels: Swedenborg on African superiority, evangelization, and slavery

ABSTRACT This article provides the first extensive study of Emanuel Swedenborg’s (1688–1772) views on Africans and slavery. Although significant scholarship has been devoted to Swedenborg’s influence on the British abolitionist movement in the 1780s-1790s, comparably little has been written on the ideas and context which inspired this influence in the first place. This article explores Swedenborg’s ties to networks and debates about African evangelization, colonization, and slavery during the neglected period of the Swedish Age of Liberty (1719–1772). It shows that Swedenborg was the first Swede to condemn slavery, as early as 1741, explains why he regarded slavery as a divine punishment in the afterlife for European missionaries, and why he presented sub-Saharan Africans as superior, in contrast to the dominant dismissive views of Linnaeus, Bäck, Kant, or Buffon. Like most Lutherans of his time, Swedenborg did not advocate the abolition of slavery, yet within a generation his provocative views about African superiority and spiritual emancipation were used by his followers to articulate their abolitionist agenda. Swedenborg’s millenarian doctrines more broadly re-harnessed biblical traditions about Africa and tropes about the bon sauvage, in a counter-example to narratives about the trope’s decline in the second half of the eighteenth century.

The Nightmare Island: Representations of St. Barthélemy in Swedish Novels

The Nightmare Island: Representations of St. Barthélemy in Swedish Novels

In the Blood of Our Brothers; Abolitionism and the End of the Slave Trade in Spain’s Atlantic Empire, 1800–1870 by Jesus Sanjurjo

Reviewed by: In the Blood of Our Brothers; Abolitionism and the End of the Slave Trade in Spain’s Atlantic Empire, 1800–1870 by Jesus Sanjurjo Ricardo Raùl Salazar Rey In the Blood of Our Brothers; Abolitionism and the End of the Slave Trade in Spain’s Atlantic Empire, 1800–1870. By Jesus Sanjurjo. Tuscaloosa: University Alabama Press, 2021. This economically crafted monograph recounts more of the history behind the shape and intensity of the Atlantic slave trade from the Age of Revolutions to its end. Jesús Sanjurjo centers the “ever loyal,” if widely entangled, island of Cuba, as the wealth of its plantocracy became the lodestar of the reduced nineteenth-century Spanish Empire. He weaves the words of the protagonists with his analysis into a compelling narrative that connects the sudden and seemingly unstoppable growth of the Atlantic slave trade into the Spanish Empire in the first half of the nineteenth century and its sudden and dramatic end in the 1860s. Focusing on the colonies that remained under the control of Spain, he illuminates what has been overshadowed by the drama of mainland IberoAmerican independence and its aftermath; Sanjurjo connects his work with the historiographies of imperialism, Atlantic slavery and Iberian history, creating links throughout the chapters. The book opens in 1811 with the Spanish metropolis occupied and the Empire buckling under the relentless pressure of Revolutionary and Napoleonic France. From the beginning of European hostilities in 1792, the Spanish government had moved between unwilling alliance with, and active resistance to, French demands. After fifteen years of continuous efforts, not the least of which resulted in the annihilation of the combined fleet at Trafalgar, the Spanish monarchy pushed against French power. With disdain and disappointment Napoleon gambled, invading Iberia and dethroning Ferdinand VII “el deseado,” setting off the Peninsular War (1807–1814) also known as his “Spanish ulcer.” The unfolding crisis rippled outwards, straining imperial bonds that had held for 300 years. Starting in the lead up to the Constitution of 1812, Sanjurjo recurrently features a young liberal deputy named Agustín de Argüelles (1776–1844) who, in alliance and admiration of British abolitionists, led the efforts to suppress the Atlantic slave trade through the Constitution of 1812. His failure to persuade the Cortes comes despite regulation of slavery being a core competency of the Spanish empire. During the centuries that Spain controlled vast mainland American provinces, slavery and the slave trade were taxed and regulated to throttle their full potential. Further strengthening Argüelles’ arguments, the bloody but triumphant rebellion of enslaved and freed people that consumed the murderous prosperity of Saint Domingue and gave birth to Haiti, stalked the nightmares of the powerful. Nevertheless, the Spanish Cortes chose to continue the unlimited Atlantic slave trade into what was left of the empire. Furthermore, in the Constitution they stripped the franchise from Afro-Iberians. Argüelles and the moderates failed despite the moving descriptions, quoted by Sanjurjo, of the evils they were committing and limiting their goal to ending the Atlantic slave trade, not the institution of slavery. The creative destruction of the Age of Revolutions in the Atlantic created glittering business opportunities that a preponderance of elites across the Spanish Empire chose to prioritize. In a telling echo of the current practice of multinationals moving wherever regulation is weakest, the British abolition of the Atlantic slave trade in 1807, followed by the USA in 1808, did not disarticulate the human, material or financial infrastructure that had developed over the last 350 years to enable the Atlantic slave trade to keep the plantation complex fed. Concurrently, Spain lost all of its mainland provinces and this caused a change of guard amidst Spanish imperial officials. Liberalism, including the right to dispose of property in the form of people without restraints from state or church, increasingly became the new ideal. Between 1800 and 1870 the Atlantic slave traders, blocked from their usual outlets, poured approximately 700,000 African people into Cuba. Ill prepared to rule and weakened by Napoleonic trauma, Ferdinand VII freed himself from the Constitution of 1812 while keeping the UK on side by capitulating to the anti-slave trade Treaty of 1817. This treaty...

Structural Transformation and Value Change: The British Abolitionist Movement

Structural Transformation and Value Change: The British Abolitionist Movement

Structural Transformation and Value Change: The British Abolitionist Movement

Structural Transformation and Value Change: The British Abolitionist Movement

Calculating a life: classification, valuation and compensation in the British abolition of slavery

PurposeThis paper examines the calculative practices used by the Slave Compensation Commission to value a slave for the purposes of compensating slave owners on the abolishment of slavery across the British colonies in 1833. It contributes to accounting research in the field of valuation, particularly to understanding the practices of valuing human life.Design/methodology/approachThe methodology is primarily archival and draws on the records of the Slave Compensation Commission held at the British National Archives (Kew).FindingsThe paper makes two contributions to the literature. Firstly, it contributes to the valuation studies literature by suggesting the significance of understanding the practice of valuation as a product of the dynamics of strategic action fields (Fligstein and McAdam, 2012). Secondly, it contributes to the theory of strategic action fields by revealing the role of calculative technologies in supporting the organizational apparatus of valuation within the Slave Compensation Commission, and therefore suggests the powerful role of accounting in stabilizing a strategic action field.Originality/valueThe paper provides novel insights into the monetary commensuration of life and the role of calculative technologies in that valuation process.

In the Blood of Our Brothers: Abolitionism and the End of the Slave Trade in Spain's Atlantic Empire, 1800–1870

Jesús Sanjurjo posits that the end of the slave trade to the Spanish empire was largely the result of “international political negotiations that excluded the Spanish authorities and ignored Spanish political actors”—an argument that echoes older, Anglocentric scholarship on the topic and fails to engage with the literature's recent focus on the role that the enslaved themselves played in pushing for abolition (p. 2). (White) Spanish anti–slave trade activists, he sustains, contributed only in terms of turning public sentiment against the slave trade. In so doing, they worked concurrently with the growth of liberalism in the Spanish empire, which Sanjurjo rightly points out looks different in the Spanish context. In Spanish liberalism, liberal political actors privileged preserving what was left of the empire, safeguarding the wealth of Cuba, and generally placating the Cuban elite. This argument about the ties between slavery and Spanish liberalism is intriguing, but it remains unclear whether the book's research, writing, and analysis do it justice.Chapter 1 treats the familiar early Spanish anti–slave trade activists: the statesman Agustín de Argüelles, law student Isidoro de Antillón, and expatriate journalist José Blanco White. With just a few allies, these men singlehandedly initiated public discussion about outlawing the slave trade and slavery itself in Spain—an essential aspect of the author's argument that they “contributed to building the public consensus” against the slave trade (p. 2). But strangely, Sanjurjo barely references—much less analyzes with any thoughtfulness—the body of work that they produced. This is a curious choice because their speeches and publications not only evince deep engagement with the broader abolitionist movements throughout the Atlantic world but also present uniquely Spanish arguments and proposals that merit attention.The next chapter outlines the British diplomatic pressure that resulted in the deeply flawed—and unenforced—Treaty of 1817, by which Madrid agreed to a plan to end the slave trade to the Spanish territories. Here, Sanjurjo references the related 1816 Council of the Indies report that recommended the abolition of the slave trade. He refers to it as “extraordinarily important”—even though it was a dead letter—but does so while attacking other scholars who have written on this topic for downplaying it, misinterpreting it, or failing to mention it altogether (p. 29). Unfortunately, such ruthless attacks against existing scholarship mar much of the book.Chapter 3 has some useful aspects, as it explains the “necessary evil” argument that Spanish elites forged in response to British abolitionist pressure. Sanjurjo shows how instead of attempting to directly counter British arguments about the immorality of the slave trade, proslavery Spanish and Spanish American elites argued that it was a “necessary evil” that would preserve the Cuban economy—and by extension, the economy of the entire empire. Its proponents, Francisco Arango y Parreño among them, framed British abolitionist pressure in terms of nationalistic discourse, suggesting that to be Spanish and Cuban would mean to push back against foreign interlopers who sought to harm Spanish interests under the guise of abolitionism.Chapter 4 examines Cuban historian and politician José Antonio Saco, who is sometimes considered as having contributed to antislavery sentiment. Sanjurjo rightly characterizes Saco as arguing against the slave trade not because he believed it was wrong but because he was convinced that the island's sugar industry and white population would be better off without it. But here again, when given an opportunity to execute original research with new archival sources that could have shed light on such important concepts, the author fails to do so, instead relying on just a few well-known published sources and secondary literature. Throughout the book, in fact, there is a notable lack of substantive engagement with archival sources in England, Spain, and Spanish America. The final chapter—the book is quite short, at only 123 pages of body text—outlines the rise of the Spanish Abolitionist Society in Madrid but strangely fails to engage with Christopher Schmidt-Nowara's groundbreaking work on the topic or the archives he used, instead delivering a basic outline of historical events largely based on secondary sources.The epilogue offers a thesis that frames antislavery and anti–slave trade thinking as “contradictory and complementary . . . Liberal and absolutist, progressive and conservative, egalitarian and racist” (p. 121). While in theory this gesture toward the confounding complexity of Spanish political sentiment regarding the slave trade is suggestive, the book is simply not up to the task of illustrating such historical nuance. It is hampered by an excessively combative approach to the existing literature and an impoverished understanding of the relevant archival documentation. Throughout, its organization is difficult to follow, and the argumentation is both scant and unclear. The book will be of interest to scholars who work on antislavery and abolition in the Spanish empire, but it brings little new to their table.

‘I was an Eye-witness’: John Newton, Anthony Benezet, and the Confession of a Liverpool Slave Trader

ABSTRACT This article investigates a forgotten moment in the pre-history of British abolitionism: the publication of an anonymous ‘Relation’ written by a penitent Liverpool slave trader and printed in Anthony Benezet’s A Short Account (1762). The article suggests that the Philadelphia Quaker acquired the Liverpool ‘Relation’ via the London Dissenting publishers of Two Dialogues on the Man-Trade (1760). Identifying close parallels between events described in the ‘Relation’ and the voyage of the Brownlow in 1748-49, it builds a cumulative case argument that identifies the author as the Brownlow’s first mate, John Newton, subsequently famous as an Anglican divine, abolitionist, and author of ‘Amazing Grace’. The conclusion considers potential implications for our understanding of Newton’s career and the origins of British abolitionism.

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

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.

Emancipation in the Gold Coast: The Abolitionist Views of James Hutton Brew

ABSTRACT This article deals with the abolitionist views of James Hutton Brew who argued against the British emancipation model in the Gold Coast. Brew was the proprietor and editor of the Gold Coast Times and discussed the British abolition process in its editorial pages. These articles revealed his thinking on abolition. Brew not only opposed the emancipation process set out by the British, which he felt was contradictory and disconnected from the Gold Coast context, but also argued for an alternative model that involved paying compensation to slave owners and creating a program to accommodate freed slaves. The British Governor portrayed some of the arguments of African abolitionists like Brew as those of slave owners trying to retain their positions. In discussing the ideas of James Hutton Brew, this article contributes to the literature on the historiography of slavery and abolition in Africa.

Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield's Mid-to-Late Career, Philanthropy, and Activism in Nineteenth-Century America

Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield's Mid-to-Late Career, Philanthropy, and Activism in Nineteenth-Century America

Black Futures Not Yet Lost

This essay explores how the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement’s public visibility during the summer of 2020 opened critical space to reconsider and critique entrenched narratives of British abolitionism that render the fate of post-emancipation Black futures inconsequential. It highlights some of the contestations within a British historiographical tradition that has co-opted abolitionism as a means to engender and fortify mythologies of a liberal and progressive white nation to the detriment of even conceiving of Black freedom as a requisite to emancipation. Black political thinkers from the period of enslavement to the present have continually spoken back to these abridged and romanticized histories of British abolitionism calling into view the limits of white abolitionist projects. This article outlines some of the intellectual currents that have shaped a history of Black abolitionist praxis in Britain as a political posture rooted in an acknowledgment of abolition’s unfinished work and its import in the present in anticipation of free Black futures yet to come.