These are strange times for scholars of the struggle to end slavery and the slave trade in the Atlantic world. On the one hand, chattel slavery and its abolition have captured the interest of increasing numbers of historians – since 2006 new works from Christopher Brown, John Oldfield, David Ryden, Claudius Fergus, Robin Blackburn, Padraic X. Scanlan, David Richardson, and two each from David Brion Davis and Seymour Drescher have appeared, together with a much greater number of essays.Footnote ¹ On the other hand governments, nongovernmental organizations, international organizations, and social commentators are raising the profile of modern trafficking and modern slavery. Most countries in recent years have signed up to the United Nations Trafficking Protocol. The Walk-Free Foundation (an anti-slavery charity) has calculated that 28.9 million slaves live around the globe. The International Labor Organization, cited on anti-slavery.org (website of the British successor to two early nineteenth-century anti-slavery societies), estimates a lower number of 20.9 million. Kevin Bales, easily the most cited writer on this subject, now argues for 38.7 million, at least two-thirds of whom live in the Indian sub-continent or Southeast Asia in debt-bondage. He posits that more slaves live in today’s world than at any point in global history, though passes over the point that the population today is eight times what it was in 1800.Footnote ² In the century between the St. Domingue Rebellion of 1791 and Brazilian abolition in 1888 some 8 million people gained their freedom in the Americas, and many millions more followed suit thereafter as every nation made slavery illegal. How do we reconcile these two trends? How is it possible that so many people remain enslaved in the modern world?

At one level Orlando Patterson resolves the contradiction.Footnote ³ What most people today consider to be slave trading and slavery is not the same as the institutions that were suppressed in the Atlantic world after 1791. Patterson recognizes that “forms of forced labour and servitude in the world today may share some slave-like properties and are no doubt as pernicious in their victimization and exploitation,” but, he argues, “they are not slavery.” Patterson does see many forms of modern prostitution resulting in the “social death” of an individual (normally an ethnically distinct female), but most types of “human domination and forced labour” – as described by Bales – do not. The crucial underlying point in this exchange is that what was defined as slavery before, say, the mid twentieth century is not the same as what is defined as slavery today. And, as Patterson emphasizes, if it were the same, then the history of the world would also be the history of slavery.Footnote ⁴ Such a position is consistent with what observers from Jean Bodin through to Adam Smith and Arthur Young believed – that only 5 percent of the world’s population was at that time free, mostly living in Western Europe.Footnote ⁵ Peasants owing obligations to landlords, state servitude – often in the form of mita labor – dependents of gerontocratic kin-groups, and indentured servitude were only some of the forms of unfreedom under which the great mass of people around the globe labored. But these forms of exploitation did not comprise slavery. Though neither author refers to it, the exchange between Patterson and Bales is a reprise of the tensions in the 1840s and 1850s between Black abolitionists on the one side and White labor reformers and women’s rights activists on the other. Frederick Douglass took strong exception to the attempts of the latter to use the word “slavery” to describe workers in factories, and women in marriage. On the former, Douglass and William Wells Brown frequently invited White workers to apply for the job vacancy created by their own respective escapes from the slave South.Footnote ⁶

Stretching definitions of slavery to include other forms of labor exploitation is not the only approach that effectively downgrades the significance of nineteenth-century abolition. For post-colonial and subaltern studies scholars, the nature of oppression – whether slavery, indentured servitude, or racism – is of less interest than is its continuity and the responses it evokes. A post-colonial study of abolition is indeed almost a contradiction in terms. One recent book on Trinidad in the first decade after British occupation in 1797 has close discussions of imperial mayhem, racism, and the competing visions for the development of the newly conquered island, including the viewpoint of then contemporary political radicals. Yet the question of why Trinidad was not immediately opened to the slave trade like the fifteen other Caribbean Island that the British acquired after 1650 is not even broached.Footnote ⁷ For many historians, abolition is unimportant because the slave trade was quickly replaced by an equally obnoxious transoceanic traffic in contract laborers that brought 2 million Asians to the plantation colonies of the Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific oceans. This was one of “many middle passages” that formed the modern world. As for abolition of slavery itself, Padraic Scanlan ignores the more than 50 percent drop in sugar production in Jamaica (from 1824–1833 to 1839–1846), and the withdrawal of women and children from plantation labor forces over the same period, to argue that captivity – albeit a “new kind” – simply continued unabated in the British Caribbean.Footnote ⁸ He has also pointed to the payments that abolitionists such as Zachary Macaulay and colonial officials in Sierra Leone received as part of the attempts to suppress the slave trade to suggest that the whole abolitionist enterprise was just another case of economic self-interest, surely not the most insightful way to deal with complex historical realities.Footnote ⁹

A further oddity of the slavery and abolition field is that there has not been much movement in the major interpretations of abolition in recent decades. Most of the books cited at the beginning of this chapter provide abundant new detail and documentation but not much in the way of original overarching frameworks, even though most of the chief protagonists have modified their positions over the years. What has changed is the tone of the debate. Scholars now tend to cite others only when they agree with them. Publications aimed at demolishing the positions of those holding differing viewpoints have disappeared. Nothing published in the last decade or so has the cut and thrust of Eric Williams’ British Historians and the West Indies (London, 1957), Paul David et al.’s, Reckoning with Slavery: A Critical Study in the Quantitative History of American Negro Slavery (New York, 1976) or Seymour Drescher’s Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (Pittsburgh, PA, 1977).

Interpretations of abolition usually hinge on the writer’s view of slavery. Thus, Bales’ conception of slavery, along with older categorizations of “wage slavery,” has the effect of downgrading the importance of abolition. Eric Williams saw the West Indian slave system as in decline by 1800 and famously argued in his 1944 book Capitalism and Slavery that while the profits of that system had first made industrialization possible, by the early nineteenth century the British economy had outgrown its need for a slave empire and the protective tariffs that supported it. Williams saw abolition as part of the British drive for free trade, wider markets, and more attractive investment options.Footnote ¹⁰ David Ryden rejects the decline thesis but nevertheless offers an economic explanation for abolition of the slave trade. He centers his work on what he sees as the overproduction of sugar in the few years before 1807, and attributes abolition of the slave trade to a “changing economic context that allowed abolition to be construed as having a positive effect on the colonial interest,” by which he means mostly Jamaica. His study provides new information on the power of the Jamaican planter lobby and the war-induced disruption of trade patterns that made the Jamaican slave interest more amenable to abolition. But while Jamaica was easily Britain’s most important slave colony, it was not the frontier or the future of British slavery by the time that Trinidad, Demerara, and Berbice came under British control in the 1790s.Footnote ¹¹ To generalize about the relationship between British slavery and abolition on the basis of the Jamaican experience is rather like examining the prospects for slavery in the US in the 1790s by close inspection of Virginia and the Carolinas, or those in Brazil by looking only at Pernambuco and Bahia in the 1810s. The British invaded St. Domingue in the 1790s not to free slaves but to protect their own slave colonies. They had no doubt about the sustainability of New World slave systems.Footnote ¹²

These new British possessions present a strong argument against seeing abolition as a response to either the overproduction of sugar or the economic decline of the British sugar complex. Together, they contained approximately the same amount of land suitable for sugar cultivation as did Cuba, though as late as 1750 none of them exported much sugar (again, like Cuba). Between 1745 and 1806 the three received 106,112 African captives direct from Africa. In the same period Cuba imported a comparable 108,647 slaves.Footnote ¹³ After 1806, by contrast, only 8,600 Africans arrived in the British areas – almost all of them in 1807 and 1808, while Cuba brought in an estimated 660,000. Once British Guiana (the name given to the combined territories of Berbice, Essequibo and Demerara in 1833) and Trinidad gained access to labor in the form of Asian indentured workers from 1838, their sugar output expanded rapidly once more to reach 40 percent of Cuban output by mid-century. This was at a time when Cuba was accounting for almost half of global production. Obviously, abolition of the slave trade, together with a ban on the movement of slaves between British slave colonies, had a major impact on the ability of the British planters to compete with their Spanish counterparts.

Most modern British abolition clearly stimulated Cuban growth. holars (as well as then contemporary slave owners) have accepted the continued viability of slave labor as abolition approached. Robin Blackburn recognizes slavery’s long presence in human history and its future potential in, say, 1790, but he also sees the institution reaching a climax in the New World, where it displayed major differences even from its Roman and Greek predecessors, not least because the trade and profits that it generated enabled industrialization. Where Ryden gives a modern (and more thoroughly evidence-based) depiction of the second part of the Capitalism and Slavery thesis, Blackburn rejects any direct economic impulse toward abolition, but fully embraces Capitalism and Slavery’s first hypothesis – that without the slave Americas there could have been no British industrialization. On abolition, he sees “popular” expressions of anti-slavery occurring well before 1780 though Blackburn is not much interested in why abolition emerged. His chief focus is on the circumstances that allowed it to become such a major force for change. The implication of his work is that the abolitionist impulse was always there, but needed the specific circumstances of the 1780s and 1790s to become a mass movement. For him, chief among these fortuitous and contingent events were the French Revolution and the St. Domingue Rebellion, even though four decades later the enslaved population of the Americas had more than doubled and the slave trade had just reached its all-time peak. Apart from these awkward facts, identifying contingencies does seem to be the easy part of the analysis. The much more interesting and difficult question is why, after three millennia, a universally accepted human practice should suddenly be called into question. Moreover, the inception of British slavery in the mid seventeenth-century Caribbean occasioned no public discourse whatsoever, even among political radicals.Footnote ¹⁴ Whereas the destruction of the system less than two centuries later occurred in the context of massive public agitation for abolition.

In contrast to Blackburn, Davis and Drescher stress the continuities of slavery over the very long haul without perceiving a climax or crisis: Drescher’s first chapter is entitled “A Perennial Institution.” Both accept Orlando Patterson’s perspective, according to which the devastating impact of slavery on personhood and perception of self are apparent in most historic societies. Their view of abolition does not require that slavery in the Americas was intensifying and expanding in the second half of the eighteenth century (even though it clearly was). Together with Christopher Brown, who eschews the very long-run perspective on slavery’s growth, they largely avoid the class dialectic as incorporated into Marxist interpretations. They still center abolition as an epoch-making event.Footnote ¹⁵

Blackburn’s interpretation raises three questions about evidence. First, his section on “Popular Anti-Slavery and the Birth of Abolitionism” does not penetrate very far down the social scale. He very quickly gets into a discussion of middle-class attitudes to cruelty and the reading of novels, plays, and poetry. Neither he nor Brown have systematically used the online British Newspaper Archive’s rich collection of early English newspapers that report on crowd activity and slavery.Footnote ¹⁶ Second, the term, “Slavery’s New World Climax” is never precisely explained.Footnote ¹⁷ At no point between 1492 and 1888 did anything like the majority of the Earth’s slaves live in the Americas, and between 1750 and 1830, a period straddling the American, French, Haitian, and Industrial revolutions, the number of New World slaves alone almost tripled in size. Moreover, in 1829 the transatlantic slave trade reached its highest annual total ever (310 slave vessels carrying off 118,000 captives). The Haitian Revolution may have struck fear in the hearts of slaveholders, but it had no apparent impact on their willingness to buy more enslaved people. Prices of slaves in the Atlantic slave trade surged to all-time highs in the fifteen years after August 22, 1791, when the rebellion began.Footnote ¹⁸ We can see slavery’s foes massing in this era, but to portray any of the above upheavals as “a challenge it [the system of New World slavery] could not suppress” is a much bigger challenge.Footnote ¹⁹ Third, the largest export economy in the Americas by value remained Spanish, not British, through to the early nineteenth century. As well as the most valuable exports, the Spanish colonial Americas had larger cities, a much bigger population and labor force, and a much larger consumer market than did their British counterpart, both before and after 1776.Footnote ²⁰

Where Blackburn’s view of abolition has changed little over the last four decades, other major contributors have shifted positions. Two works by David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1966) and The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (2014), mostly bookend the historiography of the last half-century. They are part of a trilogy, the pages of which sparkle with paradoxes and insights and give more sheer pleasure than any other publication in the field. The first volume barely broached the era of politically active anti-slavery, but, reflecting the dominant views of mid 1960s, it did suggest that slave systems “helped prevent the growth of a balanced and healthy economy” and were in decline, at least in the British Caribbean, after 1750. This contributed to a broader and long-run shift in Western thinking (to which the book was devoted) that “undermined traditional religious and philosophical justifications of slavery.”Footnote ²¹ Later, however, when Davis investigated the abolitionist era more closely, he came to recognize that the institution of slavery was economically efficient and durable. To resolve the paradox of an economically powerful country suppressing a legal and profitable activity he explored possible links between abolitionism and industrialization. Davis acknowledged the mass support for ending the slave trade in the late 1780s and against slavery itself after 1823. But he was especially interested in the fact that the country’s elite abolished the slave trade, imposed a slave registration system on the colonies, and instituted measures to ameliorate slavery in the 1820s without much popular pressure. He argues that these were the only major social reforms implemented in a period when domestic exploitation of labor in factory environments was intensifying and class tensions were high. For Davis, “the colonial plantation system served as a projective screen or experimental theater for testing ideas of liberation, paternalism and controlled social change.” Abolition was a cause that all classes could support and one that would have a minimal impact on British society. It also allowed elites to “demonstrate their commitment to decency and justice.”Footnote ²²

In his final work, industrialization – indeed economic factors in general – are no longer central. Davis sees economic growth expanding demand for slave-supplied commodities and encouraging the glorification of free labor, but its restructuring effect on class relations as a major element in the ending of slavery is scarcely mentioned. Davis now defines his trilogy’s thesis as a shift in moral perceptions triggered by the tension between Aristotle’s ideal of a slave as a tool – a physical extension of their owners – and Hegel’s observation that the master had a psychological need for the slave to recognize the master’s status.Footnote ²³ Davis noted “the truth of the master’s independent consciousness lies in the dependent and supposedly unessential consciousness of the slave … the obsequious servant might also be a domestic enemy.” This master–slave tension that Davis first brought to center stage in 1966 was to underpin Genovese’s Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made and indeed the two generations of scholarship on slave cultures thereafter.Footnote ²⁴ In Davis’ third volume industrialization and abolition are linked only in that both celebrated free labor, a system unique to Western Europe and its offshoots at the time. Davis’ last words on abolition focused on racism as much as slavery and the damaging psychological effects of both on African Americans. Haiti, Liberia, and Black abolitionists are discussed extensively in terms of their value in counteracting this malignancy. The message of the Haitian Revolution “was as important for self-doubting blacks as for arrogant and self-deluding whites.” Except on Haiti the Black elite’s responses were hardly united, but Blacks were key members of a particularly fissiparous abolitionist movement in the US, ensuring the acceptance of immediatism and, ultimately, a critical erosion of support for the American Colonization Society. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation is not the first to recount Black resistance to attempts of US Whites to animalize Blacks and remove them to Africa, but it is the first to argue that without such resistance Blacks would not have become full citizens of the US, briefly between 1865 and 1877, and permanently much later. Yet the book avoids central counterfactual questions: Would abolition have occurred when it did without Black abolitionists? Did Blacks become abolitionists before Whites, or were both affected at the same time?

Drescher’s position on slavery has not shifted since he entered the field with a game-changing and dramatically entitled book, Econocide – arguing for the continuing vitality of slavery through to the forced ending of the institution.Footnote ²⁵ His interpretation of abolition is, however, less settled. Whereas Blackburn and volume 2 of the Davis trilogy see industrialization as a key component in the ending of slavery, Drescher distances himself from revolutions of any kind.Footnote ²⁶ In the 1980s Drescher attributed the sudden shift to activism in the late 1780s to the political mobilization of the new class of industrial artisans in the northern factory towns. Abolition was thus in one sense a cross-class alliance with the abolitionist sympathies of skilled workers in the north of England shaped by their exposure to exploitation in the early industrial factory,Footnote ²⁷ but in his 2009 volume this explanation disappears.Footnote ²⁸ “Manchester’s workers” receive a single mention in its 462 pages. The narrative of abolition is laid out elegantly and insights abound, but counterpunching predominates. Factory workers as a source of the abolitionist impulse reappear in Drescher’s latest work but are no longer the mainsprings and the reader who wonders why abolition happened when it did will continue to wonder.

For Christopher Brown the critical event is a different revolution. British failure to suppress the American Revolution meant that Britons attempted to reburnish their tarnished claim as the home and beacon of liberty. “Moral capital,” the title of the book, was real enough and the British drew on it fully in their nineteenth-century imperial policies.Footnote ²⁹ Eric Williams famously wrote, “British historians wrote almost as if Britain had introduced slavery solely for the satisfaction of abolishing it.”Footnote ³⁰ For Brown, the British appear to have invented abolition solely to gain the moral high ground and restore national esteem. Despite the superb research and the counterfactual exercises in the epilogue there remains a certain lack of clarity about the core argument. Was the American Revolution sufficient by itself to induce the onset of abolition or was it merely one of several prerequisites? Brown hunts down early anti-slavery attitudes in Britain more thoroughly than any other scholar but argues that turning scattered expressions into political action would not have been possible without the national trauma of the loss of the thirteen colonies.

The central problem here, as Seymour Drescher has argued, is lack of hard evidence of this trauma in the aftermath of defeat. For Drescher, electronic searching of thousands of 1780s British newspapers reveals only growing prosperity and a national self-esteem that required no bolstering.Footnote ³¹ Establishing motives for behavior – in this case abolition – is of course impossible, but given the thrust of his argument, Brown’s discussion of post-war US independence Britain is surprisingly limited. His focus is very much on small numbers of abolitionists (Evangelicals and Quakers) and free Blacks who came within British purview during and after the conflict. And he makes no mention of the preceding decades-long commitment of Quakers to slavery, nor to the many thousands of free Blacks who, especially in the Portuguese Atlantic world, helped finance hundreds of slave voyages to Brazil.Footnote ³² None of these scholars move out of the English-speaking world for very long.

A separate and increasing number of historians maintain that slaves freed themselves, as indeed Thomas Jefferson had predicted was inevitable. Violent slave resistance is certainly difficult to discount. C.L.R. James’ book on St. Domingue first gave it prominence and Richard Hart’s study of slave revolts in Jamaica extended its geographic range (though stripped of any discussion of James’ ideology). In the US case, Herbert Aptheker simply stated that “the social system itself” caused rebellion. Steve Hahn has revived a different aspect of this argument in the context of the US Civil War, though in his case the violence that enabled slaves to escape was between largely White armies rather than between Black slaves and White authorities.Footnote ³³ For the recent historiography, captives’ resistance to enslavement sprang from one of the most basic of human instincts and was a constant. Yet one must ask how chattel slavery could have endured for millennia without a credible threat from the enslaved before succumbing rather suddenly in the Atlantic world of the nineteenth century. Slave resistance by itself and as conventionally interpreted was certainly a necessary prerequisite to such an event, but it cannot have been sufficient to explain a renouncement of slave labor beginning in 1777, the year Vermont’s new constitution made slavery illegal.Footnote ³⁴ Why did “the only successful slave revolt in history,” in C.L.R. James’ words, begin in 1791 and not centuries earlier?Footnote ³⁵ James answered the question by drawing on a Marxist framework that cast St. Domingue slaves as hyper-exploited workers. More recently, Claudius Fergus and Simon Newman have made resistance central to their own interpretations of abolition in the British Caribbean.Footnote ³⁶ But hyper-exploitation was not new in the late eighteenth century. Indeed, some scholars have argued that Enlightenment views had begun to ameliorate slave owners’ treatment of captives in the late eighteenth-century British Caribbean.Footnote ³⁷ Slave resistance may have been a vital element in the process of abolition as argued below, but it could not have been sufficient by itself to trigger an abolition movement.

Between 1787 and 1792, 1.7 million Britons signed petitions in favor of abolition of the traffic.Footnote ³⁸ Suddenly, the attitudes of the British public toward the slave trade, as opposed to those of Europe’s intellectuals become plain to see. The striking feature of this development is that it constituted a rather stunning reversal. The active support for and participation in the slave trade is described in Chapter 3. The Liverpool riots in favor of the slave trade as late as 1775, caused Gomer Williams, the late nineteenth century historian of the Liverpool slave trade, to comment “[w]ith the exception of the [1745 Jacobite] rebellion and the Gordon Riots, the annals of the eighteenth century cannot mention a more extraordinary and formidable popular outbreak in England than these riots.”Footnote ³⁹ Ringleaders were transported to the Americas in the aftermath of these disturbances. Most of them had no doubt crewed slave ships. Now shackled in the hold of a transatlantic voyage, they, too, were able to experience some of the horrors of the Africans they had formerly controlled. It is not likely that many of the rioters were among the 1.7 million signatories that flooded the House of Commons at the end of the following decade.

It is therefore surely undeniable that a dramatic change in British popular perceptions of the slave trade had occurred over the course of the eighteenth century, and more particularly in the last quarter of the century. Moreover, if this relatively sudden emergence of hostility to the traffic had anything to do with the rebellious activities of slaves, such resistance was more likely to have taken place on board slave ships than in the slave colonies. Tacky’s Rebellion in Jamaica in 1760, the center of Fergus’ analysis, was certainly reported, but no newspaper linked the event to abolition. Until St. Domingue erupted, English newspapers focused on African shipboard resistance to the slave trade rather than the natural desire of the enslaved to overthrow the slavocracy. The abolition movement was well established before the St. Domingue conflagration.

It follows that to understand abolition we must account for the relatively sudden value shift in the second half of eighteenth-century Britain. With the advent of the British Newspaper Archive this is now easier to do. Richardson’s contribution identifies the growing uneasiness with slavery among intellectuals and tracks a growing concern with personal rights in the literary world as represented in novels, poetry, and the theatre.Footnote ⁴⁰ But it is the incorporation of newspaper content that distinguishes his contribution and is carried further below. Richardson’s book is very much in the David Brion Davis tradition, but is able to get closer to accounting for the dramatic U-turn in British popular opinion.Footnote ⁴¹ Indeed, the British content in what follows below is essentially a supplement to Richardson’s analysis.

All recent major contributors to the debate agree that after 1780 popular anti-slavery sentiments quickly crossed class lines (including the formerly enslaved and eventually all enslaved persons). There was no shortage of social issues that demanded attention during the Industrial Revolution, all of them closer to hand than the international slave trade. Just two years into the campaign a piece of doggerel verse in one of the larger circulation London newspapers asked why abolition of the slave trade had become so popular rather than some abuse closer to home?

The author went on to invoke the wage slavery hypothesis and to make a plea for ending exploitation at home before attacking African slavery:

The striking feature of the verse is how little response it evoked. Other newspapers of the time ignored it, and while radical leaders prosecuted by the British government in the 1790s tried to propagate this line of reasoning there is little evidence of working-class support. It was perhaps thirty years ahead of its time but even when Robert Wedderburn and later, William Cobbett and the Chartist leaders began to make similar arguments after 1820, these radical luminaries had little effect initially in diverting working-class support from abolition to social issues closer to home. But by the mid nineteenth century this had changed.Footnote ⁴³ The emergence of first an awareness and second an abhorrence of slavery across the eighteenth-century social spectrum is indeed remarkable.

The shift in moral perspectives tracked by Davis and Richardson is undoubtedly accurate and is in a sense shared by all scholars who have written on abolition, except that they differ on what is responsible. Davis begins with a fundamental tension in Western thought and describes how Blacks were eventually able to take advantage of this, first violently in what became Haiti, and then within the US abolitionist movement. For others, class struggle and violent resistance by themselves give birth to a new value system. It is as though the non-elite, especially the enslaved, had always been abolitionist (as opposed to wanting to be personally free) – abundant evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, especially in the Portuguese case. From this perspective the St. Domingue Revolution was necessary to make these values dominant or at least force the ruling class to accept them.

Violence would certainly appear to have a role in the disappearance of New World slavery. The two bloodiest conflicts ever fought in the Americas – one at the beginning of the abolition process in what became Haiti and the second in the US toward the end – were about slavery. But from a global perspective and given the widespread distribution of slavery over time and space, this does not seem adequate. Why would the abolitionist impulse emerge only in the Atlantic world? The conflict between the slave as an extension of the master and the master’s need for recognition of his own status on the part of the slave (the Hegelian paradox) could not have been confined to the West. Written sources for Judaic, Islamic, early Christian, and several oriental cultures touched on in Chapter 1 indicate the ancient origins of slavery and the problems it generated.Footnote ⁴⁴ It cannot have been only slaveholders in the Americas that crumbled in the face of the Hegelian paradox.

Some of the most recent contributions treat both Britain’s creation of a slave empire and then later its abolition of the slave trade and slavery as one seamless method of extracting wealth from overseas possessions. They therefore constitute a return to Eric Williams’ simple materialist approach. The slave systems (more precisely in Williams’ case, the slave trade) powered the first Industrial Revolution, while abolition of slavery along with destruction of a protected market for British sugar accelerated the growth of a free-trade world in which British industry could thrive. For Padraic Scanlan and Bronwen Everill, an economy built on slavery became, in the nineteenth century, an empire enabled, sustained, and expanded by anti-slavery, especially in Africa.Footnote ⁴⁵ As noted in Chapter 3, eighty years after the publication of Capitalism and Slavery, it seems most historians, as well as a large segment of social media and news outlets, accept that economic self-interest explain all.

The evidence against this position presented above is compelling yet largely ignored. First, as noted earlier, the preeminence of the value of the Iberian slavery and the slave trade throughout the colonial period is clear enough. Bahia and Rio de Janeiro both dispatched more slave vessels to Africa than Liverpool. Both ports had vast plantation or mining hinterlands surpassing those of the British Americas. Major slave systems long predated contact with the Americas; how is it possible that much larger slave systems than the British failed to trigger “prosperity and rise to global power” in the Iberian Atlantic? Moreover, but for abolition Britain could have continued to embrace the slave trade as well as moving to free trade, without ruining its own slave colonies. Second, it is now widely accepted that slavery and the slave trade remained highly profitable throughout the abolitionist era. Third, continuing British involvement in the traffic after 1807 would have seen the country quickly replacing Portugal as the premier slave-trading nation of the world, and if British Guiana and Trinidad had remained open to the transatlantic traffic, the British Empire would have remained the world’s leading producer of tropical produce, except for cotton. Moreover, continuing support of slavery would have allowed the British to avoid the large direct costs of abolition: compensating slave owners for the loss of their human property in 1833 (£20 million), as well as an expensive and largely futile attempt to suppress the slave trade between 1808 and 1867 (£12.4 million).Footnote ⁴⁶ The materialistic explanation for both a foreign trade-driven industrialization and an economically motivated abolition is unsustainable in the face of such arguments.

It is much easier to define and track the conundrum of the British switch from an unthinking but enthusiastic endorsement of the slave trade to equally enthusiastic abhorrence over the course of a few decades than to explain it. We need to recognize that even though the emergence of hostility to slavery is among the more startling and well-documented case studies, convincing explanations of shifts in widely held norms of morality will likely always lie beyond reach of historians. At the very least, such explanations will be easier to criticize than defend. In the Atlantic world, during the era 1787–1862, a period of seventy-five years, the slave trade passed from an activity no different from any other kind of business in the public mind to something beyond the pale. For modern parallels in the shift of public attitudes, think of how views of slavery and colonialism espoused by Caribbean and African American intellectuals like George Padmore and W. E. B. Du Bois in the 1940s have today become mainstream over a similar period. On June 6, 2013, the British government announced an historic settlement when they offered “sincere regret” for crimes perpetrated against Mau Mau detainees in the 1950s, including hundreds of executions. They paid nearly £20 million in reparations. In different arenas the change in sexual mores, normative family structures, and children’s rights over the same period is even more astonishing. Alan Turing, the computer scientist, was posthumously pardoned in 2013 for his 1952 conviction for homosexuality. Seventy years after the publication of the photo of the US sailor kissing a nurse on VJ day in Times Square, Time magazine commented “many people view the photo as little more than the documentation of a very public sexual assault, and not something to be celebrated.”Footnote ⁴⁷ As discussed further in Chapter 7, Britain has also apologized for dispatching thousands of child migrants overseas without the consent of the child or the parent, a practice that continued into the 1970s.Footnote ⁴⁸

In all these cases, as with abolitionists in the mid nineteenth century, the public, as well as many scholars, see the changes as “right” and assume, too, that the new standards are immutable and should be used to judge past behavior.Footnote ⁴⁹ Since the mid twentieth century a wide range of past evils has become the subject of apologies by the perpetrators (or their descendants), and in some cases the latter have paid reparations.Footnote ⁵⁰ Today, a shift in values may be so rapid that certain long-lived individuals find themselves held to account in old age for offenses committed decades previously when their actions, while harmful to others, did not result in legal proceedings.Footnote ⁵¹

Changes in moral values are no easier to explain than changes in taste. Consider the much simpler case of the clothes we wear or the way we cut our hair. One might think oneself totally indifferent to fashion, but a photograph of ourselves with others from thirty years ago would reveal immediately how we conformed to fashion then, and how much we have changed since. We would be utterly incapable of explaining why we dress or wear our hair differently today. Less trivially, but also a half century ago, no one in the West could envisage same-sex marriage, much less that the US constitution could be invoked to support the institution, and that it would be accepted by an overwhelming majority of the electorate. How much more difficult it is to account for the profound shift in attitudes toward violence, or child abuse, or maltreatment of animals, or – between 1780 and 1807 – the slave trade. To presume to explain such changes whether via revolution (Brown, Blackburn), religion (Anstey), tectonic shifts in the economy (Williams, 1944; Eltis, 1987; Davis, 1975, 2006), or overproduction of sugar (Carrington, 2002; Ryden, 2009) is to trivialize the profound and poorly understood process of how and why shifts in social psychology and moral values occur over time.Footnote ⁵² We will likely never be able to do more than to group abolition with these other social issues and eschew simplistic explanations such as profit maximization. Nevertheless, here I suggest some potentially helpful parallels, and ultimately an alternative hypothesis, which will no doubt prove as ephemeral as all the others discussed here.

As the rash of state apologies on a wide range of topics over the opening decades of the twenty-first century suggests, any broad-based shift in norms of morality is going to manifest itself in more than one public issue. The focus of scholars on abolition of the slave trade is understandable in the light of the mass activism it elicited. But that focus also reduces context and emphasizes discontinuity. David Brion Davis has described abolition of the slave trade and then of slavery itself as reforms that “taught many Englishmen to recognize forms of systematic oppression … closer to home.” Yet significant social reforms occurred both before and during attempts to end the slave trade. Europeans had long linked slaves with three other subordinated categories – serfs, children, and domesticated animals.Footnote ⁵³ Protection of animals first emerged only in the nineteenth century, but rights for the enserfed and protection of children were live issues well before the late eighteenth century. Here, too, however, long before 1800 serfs in mainland Europe were increasingly able to make decisions about the land on which they worked as well as their labor, with remuneration in cash gradually replacing seignorial obligations.Footnote ⁵⁴ They were also, of course, far more numerous than the enslaved population of the Americas. In the British case, the so-called “second serfdom” that saw thousands of Scottish colliers bound to and sold along with their place of work was formally ended in 1775 by parliamentary legislation, an initiative that has received a tiny fraction of the scholarly attention paid to abolition of the slave trade.Footnote ⁵⁵

For children, particularly girls, the key decision was perhaps the ending of the global practice of exposing newborns for which parents could not or would not take responsibility. The Christian and Islamic establishments were officially opposed, but the practice of exposure remained widespread and, under the term “oblation,” formed one recruitment stream for monasteries in medieval and early modern Europe. Exposure could result in death or a life of exploitation. Secular charitable child-care institutions were slow to appear in the aftermath of the dissolution of the monasteries in newly Protestant countries.Footnote ⁵⁶ Online sources such as the Old Bailey records and the early English newspapers report a steady stream of executions of young women for infanticide (comprising 25 percent of all capital offences, according to one estimate), but very few references to foundlings and the institutions that dealt with them.Footnote ⁵⁷ In England, orphaned and destitute children became the responsibility of the parish authorities, and farming out child indigents to local families (until age 21 for males and 25 for females) one of the major tasks of eighteenth-century local government.Footnote ⁵⁸ The incidence of charity schools and hospitals increased in the mid eighteenth century, and the period also saw both state and voluntary associations begin to define as well as protect childhood. A letter in the London Public Advertiser on child chimney sweeps in 1760 saw Jonas Hanway, the founder of the Marine Society for boys, trigger a long campaign to abolish the practice. After an outbreak of fever in a textile factory in 1784, Manchester magistrates resolved not to apprentice out parish children to cotton mills that required night labor or more than ten hours work per day. Such initiatives would have been inconceivable a century earlier.Footnote ⁵⁹

Protection of children and the weakening of feudal ties emerged at roughly the same time as questioning slavery. Spanish and later other Europeans’ exclusions of Native Americans from the pool of people considered eligible for heritable chattel status began in the early sixteenth century, but this had nothing to do with abolition. Narrowing the eligibility pool meant that even more sub-Saharan Africans were pulled into the slave traffic to replace the now off-limits Indigenous people. In the English case historians have located anti-slavery voices and even abolitionist campaign tactics in the two centuries before the slave trade reached its peak. But they appear significant only from a much later perspective. The very earliest expression of doubts about slavery were strongly linked to the Black Legend of Spain generated by the English and Dutch as they both fought the most powerful nation in the Atlantic world. Post-1660 critiques of slave owners from a Christian perspective were usually associated with a concern for the souls of the enslaved or with how slaves were acquired, rather than attacking slavery. Scattered individual voices questioning slavery can be heard even as slavery became institutionalized in the Americas, but these do not constitute a discourse.Footnote ⁶⁰ While the first attempts to suppress the slave trade emerge in Massachusetts in the mid 1760s, the first tangible move on the British side occurred with the British East India Company’s regulation against the traffic in the East in 1774, before either the American Revolution or any parliamentary initiative.Footnote ⁶¹

But to put this in context, 1774 was also the year when a complete set of accounts for a small Bristol slave ship have survived. They identify the outset costs of the venture as well the names of the eight owners, the thirty-one crew, the thirty-seven skilled workers that prepared the vessel for sea and the thirty-one merchants and manufacturers that supplied the merchandise to be exchanged for captives, each of the latter group providing employment for numerous others at sites inland. Across British ports in that year at least 182 other slave vessels set out for Africa. Outset costs amounted to well over £1 million and the livelihoods of at least å35,000 people were at stake. In addition, the British navy had no problem with at least nine of its warships carrying slaves from Africa to the British Caribbean on behalf of British slave merchants between 1738 and 1763. Any serious questioning of the business was a remote prospect.Footnote ⁶² Attitudes to slavery and other social issues discussed here span many decades and range over a wide spectrum of human behavior. But most are manifestations of a gradual dissociation of physical compulsion from the terms of labor and a steady decrease in socially acceptable levels of violence over several decades.

We may not agree with Steve Pinker that “[t]he decline of violence may be the most significant and least appreciated development in the history of our species” or with his two-chapter explanation of changes in the brain as to why it happened, but we cannot dismiss the pattern he describes. The devastation of two world wars and the killing grounds of central Europe notwithstanding, the twentieth century witnessed a continuation in the very long-run fall in the incidence of violence perpetrated by states and individuals alike. More important, the “moral commonplaces of our age, such as that slavery, war, and torture are wrong, would have been seen as saccharine sentimentality” in earlier centuries.Footnote ⁶³ Historians have yet to link this profound change in human behavior with the rise and fall of the transatlantic slave system even though extreme violence permeated both the institution itself and the efforts of captives themselves to break free of it. European expansion into the Atlantic from the Iberian conquests to the establishment of Western Europeans in the major Antilles coincided with the expulsion of Islam from the peninsula and two centuries of bloody conflict between Catholics and Protestants. The bullion and produce from the Atlantic islands and the Americas that began to flow into Europe always came from labor that was violently coerced, if not formally enslaved.

When the European slave colonies in the Americas were created no one in metropolitan society questioned the brutality necessary to maintain the colonial system. State-inflicted violence on slaves seemed unremarkable. But by 1800 this was no longer the case. Writing at the end of both the Thirty Years’ War and the English Civil War, and just prior to Cromwell’s horrific engagement with the Irish, Thomas Hobbes thought he had witnessed a reversion to the state of savage nature that only the submission of the individual to the state could temper. As Orlando Patterson has pointed out, the true Hobbesian state of nature is to be found in eighteenth-century Jamaica.Footnote ⁶⁴ As discussed more fully below, late eighteenth-century Britain no longer treated their convicts the way masters treated their slaves. Physical chastisement of servants by masters remained on the statute books but was no longer practiced, serfdom in Scottish coalmines was abolished, women were no longer burnt at the stake for killing their husbands or practicing witchcraft. We can plot this change by a systematic examination of newspapers.

Between 1650 and 1800, English awareness of the transoceanic world as reflected in references in newspapers increased to a far greater extent than did the value of long-distance trade. The information revolution, still largely undocumented, outran the well-recorded contemporaneous expansion in global flows of merchandise.Footnote ⁶⁵ The Burney Collection of Early English Newspapers enables a preliminary gauge of the concerns and public interests of literate English people (largely Londoners) over 150 years. For the years 1637–1786, when England built up its first slave-based overseas empire, it is possible to track the use of certain key terms in this source across six quarter-century periods. The approach is crude but reveals three unexpected patterns that together give us a fresh perspective on slavery and the beginning of attempts to get rid of the institution in the Americas. First, the London public was not much engaged with the establishment of British slave colonies until well into the eighteenth century, despite the anchoring role of the city in the establishment of the English slave Atlantic. Second, even though violent street crime remained endemic in the eighteenth century, the English gradually came to perceive extreme violence as something that happened overseas. There is also evidence that London itself became less violent over this period. Third, violence in the slave colonies and on slave ships, on the part of both slaves and those charged with controlling them, continued unabated and was increasingly likely to be reported as the century wore on.

On the first of these patterns, a search of the Burney collection between 1637 and 1661 (a total of forty-seven titles) turned up just fifteen references to “Africa” (or sub-Saharan Africa – North Africa usually being described as “Barbary,” “Algiers,” or “Tripoli” which received sixty references), and eight to “negroes.” This unawareness of matters overseas was not confined to Africa and Africans. “China” yielded just twelve hits and a valuable and understudied long-distance commodity, “whales,” received just six mentions before 1662.Footnote ⁶⁶ Prior to 1680 much of the Burney collection comprises broadsides and pamphlets. Religion in the form of sectarian disputes predominates, along with associated conflicts within England and between England and the Celtic fringe. Perhaps the most salient English overseas initiative in the mid seventeenth century was Barbados. Beginning as a producer of low-grade tobacco using European indentured servants, the island was transformed from the early 1640s into the most successful sugar-producing colony that the world had ever seen.Footnote ⁶⁷ In the fifteen years or so down to 1661, as England emerged from a civil conflict fought over the nature of state authority, the relationship of the individual to the state, and religious freedom, the labor force of this colony came to be made up almost entirely of chattel slaves. More peculiarly still from the perspective of the long history of slavery, almost all captives were of African descent, and originated in a continent whose Mediterranean fringe, to the outrage of most European observers, contained at least 35,000 white slaves in the mid seventeenth century.Footnote ⁶⁸

Before 1700, then, the London reading public was no more aware of the slave trade than it was of the whaling business. The use of enslaved Africans had occasioned no discussion – if not an “unthinking decision,” certainly one made without public debate. And such blindness would certainly make the violence that underpinned and sustained slavery pass unnoticed. Not only had slavery under English jurisdiction revived without public discussion but as shown below, for eighty years thereafter English newspapers scarcely mentioned Black slaves. This was the case even though there must have been around 200,000 African captives under British jurisdiction by 1720 compared to no more than a few thousand English captives in North Africa. The same point emerges startlingly with two reports a few days apart in the same newspaper as described in Chapter 3 when a slave ship in the sheltered anchorage of the Downs, was moored beside one carrying redeemed Britons from North Africa. The irony passed unnoticed, or at least without recorded comment. The “unthinking decision” to use Black slaves continued not to be thought about as late as the 1720s.

We can also measure the dramatic change in awareness of the overseas world 150 years later by comparing references in the first quarter-century of this period (1637–1661) to those in the last of six quarter-centuries (1762–1786). In this last quarter century Africa gets 18,299 references as opposed to just fifteen prior to 1662; references to “negro” jump from eight to 8,957 over the same period, China from twelve to 45,515; “whales” from six to 8,631. Comparing the decades 1651–1660 and 1791–1800, eleven references to “America” grew to 31,242 between 1791 and 1800, while mentions of “India” went from seventy-one to 85,341 over the same period. The growth curves are similar for all these terms – as with many others with overseas geographic and cultural connotations. Of course, there were hundreds of overseas projects sponsored by many thousands of London-based investors before 1637 – most of them failures – but few involved Black slaves or Africa. Such projects did not bring either topic into the foreground of English consciousness. What happened between 1637 and 1786 (more than a century and a half after Columbian contact) thus amounts to a revolution of perceptions of an overseas world, and more especially the role of coerced labor in that world.

A second pattern to emerge from the Burney collection was the growth in English perceptions of violence as being an overseas phenomenon. Following the path of Phillipe Rosenberg’s study of violence in seventeenth-century England it is possible to chart the use of three adjectives, “bloody,” “cruel,” and “inhumane” for the same years, 1637–1786, except when the English were engaged in international conflict (including 1776–1777). Such words were reserved for incidents seen as out of step with or beyond the norms of acceptable violence. They were not used to describe violence that had the support of the community. Rosenberg has found that such terms were used most frequently in relation to three topics in the pamphlet literature between 1640 and 1700 (he did not use the Burney collection). These three were the Civil War, rebellion in Ireland, and sectarian conflict between Protestants and Catholics.Footnote ⁶⁹ The incidents to which they were applied occurred mostly within the British Islands, with Europe and the Islamic world accounting for almost all the rest. The Burney collection confirms this. Indeed, on the evidence of pamphlets, broadsides, and newspapers, “beyond the line” meant not so much an area to which a different code of conflict applied, but rather an area to be ignored except perhaps for Spanish atrocities in the Americas.

By the early eighteenth century sectarian religious disputes and, of course, civil conflict (except for Jacobean rebellions), are associated with these three terms much less frequently. Generally, reports of wars, particularly ones in which Britain was involved, see a marked rise in their employment. We can control for this, as already noted, by omitting years when the British state was formally at war. The pattern that emerges after the 1720s, quite different from the previous century, usually locates unacceptable levels of violence overseas. Whereas only one-quarter of the usages of “bloody,” “cruel” and “inhumane” were applied to events outside the British Isles in the 1720s, by the period 1784–1790 that ratio had risen to 61 percent. The slave colony/slave ship share of all these foreign or overseas incidents was not large – just 15 percent in the 1780s. Most of the reported incidents outside Britain came from Europe and the Ottoman Empire. But the more fundamental point is that despite the enormous prevalence of street crime, home invasions, child molestation, and a violent judicial structure (all within Britain) the outcomes of which crowded the pages of a burgeoning press, extreme violence was increasingly associated with events that did not happen within England.

While community notions of acceptable violence shifted, so also did the reality of violence.Footnote ⁷⁰ Whipping in the armed forces of Britain and the US continued until the mid nineteenth century (and birching in the Isle of Man prison until the 1970s). Nevertheless, despite the large number of offenses subject to capital punishment, Britain, like most European countries, was a less violent country in 1790 than it had been when the first English plantation owners established themselves in the Caribbean. Rules of war had evolved within Europe to the point where prisoners of war were released without ransom after the treaty of Westphalia, and dedicated prisoner-of-war camps were established during the Napoleonic Wars. The practice of the well-to-do visiting asylums for entertainment died out well before the relatively humane Hanwell institution opened in 1831.

Physical chastisement as a penalty for criminal offenses declined during the eighteenth century. The last recorded burning of a woman for murdering her husband (carried out in the London street opposite the house where the murder occurred) was in 1737; the last witch was similarly dispatched in Scotland a decade earlier. Mutilations of offenders became post-execution rituals and were then abandoned. Hanging, drawing, and quartering of servants for murdering their masters remained part of the criminal code until the mid eighteenth century, but do not appear to have been carried out after the seventeenth century. In fact, the broad pattern of change seems to have been one in which public attitudes to judicial violence moderated first, in response to which courts were less likely to apply such sentences, while formal abolition of the penalties occurred several decades later. The Master-Servant Act providing for whipping of recalcitrant servants was not repealed until 1875, but imprisonment had replaced whipping in the eighteenth century. Civil conflicts became less frequent and when they occurred, they were less bloody. While no one has made the comparison, the depredations of the Duke of Cumberland in the Scottish Highlands in 1746, much less the violence associated with the American Revolution, both pale in comparison to what Cromwell sanctioned in Ireland in the mid seventeenth century. The 1600s was England’s century of bloodshed and revolution, patterns that fitted well with events in a continental Europe embroiled in the Thirty Years’ War. Hardly surprising then that the establishment of the slave colonies thousands of miles away occurred without debate or indeed any serious attention in the nascent press.

By contrast, notions of acceptable violence had changed much more slowly in the Caribbean by the end of the eighteenth century. Thomas Thistlewood’s diary shows that in the third quarter of the century enslaved people continued to be physically chastised, raped, and mutilated, and rebel leaders were routinely tortured to death in ways that were consistent with an earlier era in Europe.Footnote ⁷¹ However, even before the abolitionist critique of slavery began, Justin Roberts argues, planters in both the Caribbean and the slave South were trying to embrace ameliorative treatment of slaves as a way of preserving their increasingly valuable property and fostering agricultural improvement and profits. Included in this strategy was a diminished emphasis on corporal punishment amounting to “alternative visions of modernity” in which “slavery and enlightened civilization” were compatible.Footnote ⁷² Eventually, a planter and member of HM Council of Tortola, Arthur William Hodge, was hanged behind the island’s jail in 1811 for the particularly revolting murder of a slave on the basis of evidence provided by a free colored.Footnote ⁷³ Widely reported in Britain, it is difficult to imagine the trial and execution of a planter for such an offense in any earlier era of Caribbean history.

But there is no sign that efforts at “amelioration” in the slave Americas made any impression on the London newspapers. On the contrary, reports of revolts and reprisals from the Caribbean increased in the 1780s, and were particularly prominent in 1786, just prior to the political phase of abolition.Footnote ⁷⁴ The press took the later Hodge case as a sign of the depravity of the system, not that slaves were getting increased protection. The cataclysmic events in St. Domingue, beginning in 1791 and culminating in massacres preceding Haitian independence in 1804, would have made much less of an impression in say a seventeenth-century Europe emerging from the Thirty Years’ War.Footnote ⁷⁵

The third pattern relevant to a new perspective on abolition apparent in the early English press was the coverage of violence between the enslaved and their controllers. Revolts in Danish St. John, in Berbice, in Surinam, in Jamaica, and on board thousands of slave vessels (and the brutality that followed on from these events) forced the issue before the domestic populace. At the outset of the eighteenth century, shipboard rebellions warranted only single-phrase reports in the shipping lists (“slaves rose,” or “cut-off by slaves”). These were obviously intended as information for the merchants who had unluckily invested in the voyage. But by mid-century such cryptic references had developed into full-paragraph reports in the main news section of the newspaper. The incidence of slave revolts had not changed from the previous century, but the topic had found an audience beyond that of the business community. It is difficult to overestimate the long-term significance of this. Slavery and the slave trade necessary to sustain it could not exist without government sanction and the military power to enforce it. Abolitionist activism aimed first against the slave trade and eventually at slavery itself introduced the possibility of the erosion of that sanction – a circumstance that raised the prospect for the first time in the history of slave resistance of undermining the whole system.

The entry of slave revolts into the public record can be shown with some precision. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, violent incidents on slave vessels – whether within the crew, among slaves, or between crew and slaves – appear in private correspondence, logbooks, and occasionally in court records, but not generally in the nascent newspapers of the period. A slave rebellion was a misfortune of business, but not a matter of public interest. In fact, newspapers did not exist in Brazil (where most slaves arrived) until the nineteenth century, or in most ports around the Atlantic from which vessels cleared for slaving expeditions. A complete run of the Lloyd’s List shipping newspaper exists for 1702–1704, a period for which other sources tell us that five instances of slave revolts on English vessels occurred. Not one of these was reported in Lloyd’s List. By 1742, when continuous runs of the publication once more become available, such reports are frequent. In other newspapers the first references to violent resistance by slaves is in 1726 and are extremely cryptic – phrases such as “cut-off” or “slaves rose,” and little else.Footnote ⁷⁶ In the first quarter of the eighteenth century there was far more interest in the attacks of Barbary corsairs, the resulting enslavement of English sailors, and, of course at this time, violence involving pirates – including that against the enslaved.Footnote ⁷⁷ Sources other than the newspapers make it clear that the resistance of captives was taking its toll of slaving ventures in these years, yet the incidents are not seen as worthy of publication.

Beginning in the late 1720s, public interest apparently increased, and more detail is provided on the incidents themselves. A typical report reads:

In 1731, the dramatic story of the Rhode Island sloop, the Little George, attracted wide attention on both sides of the Atlantic and has frequently been reported by several historians from different sources. The ninety-six captives gained control of the small vessel six days after leaving the Banana Islands south of Sierra Leone. The captain, three crew, and a boy were trapped in the cabin under the quarterdeck in a stand-off while the captives managed to sail the sloop back to the coast, run the vessel ashore, and make their escape. The account was dramatic, filled with incident and, as with many of these early reports, written by a survivor. The Daily Post Boy devoted more than a column of its four pages to the story. The depth of coverage here and in other newspapers constitutes a watershed.Footnote ⁷⁹ For land-based incidents the rebellion on St. John in the Danish West Indies in 1733, when slaves took control of the whole island, was given similar coverage in the London press. Thereafter, slave revolts, but particularly those on slave ships, are reported systematically in the English-language press on both sides of the Atlantic. The vessels concerned were mainly English, but what we know of rebellions on French, Dutch, and Danish vessels is also often carried by such newspapers.Footnote ⁸⁰

The tone of such reports was matter of fact, though the rebels were occasionally termed “barbarous.” The content recalls notices of public executions or disasters or street crimes. There is a strong sense of placing the reader at the scene and being involved in the horrors of the events. A sense of sharing is the same as making the reader feel what those present must have felt, and while the captives are sometimes cast as the villains, this is not always the case. Later in the eighteenth century newspapers reported these events in more detail. There were no parallels in the non-human commodity trade of the Atlantic by this time – natural disasters and war apart.Footnote ⁸¹ In 1749, the Scipio suffered a similar fate to the New Britannia described in Chapter 3, but had no survivors.Footnote ⁸² Slave vessels found floating in the Atlantic with only a few captives on board and no crew fascinated the reading public. In one instance the facts became known because one of the crew had survived long enough to maintain a logbook during and after the slave uprising, but when the vessel was recaptured all the crew were dead. The fifty-four recaptured slaves were taken into Charleston to be sold.Footnote ⁸³

For decades there is no hint of anti-slave trade sentiment, or links to issues of rights. Eric Slauter has tracked mentions of “natural rights,” “rights of man,” “human rights,” and the “slave trade” in three major electronic collections of eighteenth-century publications – the Goldsmith-Kress Library of Economic Literature (for 1750–1849), Eighteenth Century Collections Online, and American Imprints, 1700–1819. “Human rights” comes into use slowly only in the nineteenth century, and prior to the late 1780s, as we might expect, usage of “rights of man” is rare.Footnote ⁸⁴ An upward trend in mentions of “natural rights,” however, is apparent from the 1720s, well before a modest increase in the trend line for mentions of the slave trade begins in the 1760s. Unfortunately, the collections Slauter consulted did not include any newspapers. While newspapers never link the topics of natural rights and the slave trade before the second half of the eighteenth century, it is suggestive that awareness of both topics apparently increases at about the same time.Footnote ⁸⁵ By the 1760s and 1770s, when reports of slave revolts in newspapers are at their most frequent (and the incidence of revolts in the slave colonies is relatively low), references to “natural rights” are already at half or more of the level of usage attained between 1780 and 1808.

Equally important in separating Europe from the slave Americas was the emergence, in England at least, of checks on the abuse of power by people in authority. Legal historians have made little of this, probably because it required no new legislation, but rather changes in the application of existing laws. Ships’ captains were increasingly brought to account for violence against their crew.Footnote ⁸⁶ One poem that has appeared in anthologies of anti-slavery poetry turns out to have been written against the captain’s abuse of his crew, not his slaves.Footnote ⁸⁷ It was composed at a time when several high-profile cases had ended in the conviction of captains for killing crewmen at sea. It is unlikely that such abuses were occurring for the first time in the 1720s, but the Burney collection provides no earlier cases that resulted in conviction.Footnote ⁸⁸ In the same decade sheriff’s officers were convicted of using excessive force while making an arrest, again a new phenomenon in the early newspaper reports.Footnote ⁸⁹ Eventually cruelty to the shipboard enslaved made it to the courts. Prosecutions of captains for abuse of slaves do not appear until 1764, when John Burton of Bristol was charged with the murder of two “Negroes, on the High Seas, on board the Royal Charlotte, wherof he was master.”Footnote ⁹⁰ He was not convicted, and neither were those in three similar subsequent cases for which records have survived, but as the judge in the last of these in 1802 – also involving the murder of two slaves – commented, despite the acquittal “it was necessary that the affair should have been sifted to the bottom. When the Admiralty heard a charge made … they were bound to institute an enquiry.”Footnote ⁹¹ The appearance of slaves as murder victims in British courts may be seen as reflecting new community values, and could be grouped with the Somerset decision of 1772, the case of the slave ship Zong, involving the murder of 130 Africans, and the series of acts at the end of the eighteenth century regulating the slave trade (beginning in 1788).Footnote ⁹² They represent the beginning of recognition, in England at least, that the enslaved could be protected by law as well as punished.

But if colonial and domestic norms of acceptable violence diverged in the eighteenth century, British awareness, recognition of, and engagement with Africans and their descendants followed quite a different path. The most compelling way of tracking this awareness is again via the press. The number of references to the word “slaves” in the Burney collection rises from forty-four in the decade 1641–1650 to 2,382 in the decade 1781 to 1790. This is as one would expect in the press of the capital of a country that in 1640 had no slave colonies and by 1790 controlled both the second largest enslaved population in the Caribbean, as well as the largest fleet of ships that supplied slaves to the New World. The unexpected point is demonstrated in Figure 6.1 which is based on the question to what kind of the enslaved do these many thousands of references refer. Many are to “slaves” in the figurative sense as in slaves to vice, or slaves to Rome, or slaves to the tyrannical powers of a political party that the author found not to his taste. Other references are to ancient slavery. When we limit the search to actual instances of slavery in existence at the time of writing, we find that from 1641 to 1700 – the period when the British rose to plantation preeminence in the New World, the Black enslaved are hardly ever mentioned.

Figure 6.1 References to “slaves” in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century newspapers by decade distributed according to whether the slaves were European (“White”) or African (“Black”)

Legend: Unshaded area = share of references to White slaves Shaded area = share of references to Black slaves Source: British Library, Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Burney Collection of Newspapers

So who were the enslaved preoccupying the early English press? Surprisingly, the answer is the mainly White galley slaves held in the Mediterranean by various Islamic polities. A simple chart illustrates the dramatic shift in awareness of Black slavery. Figure 6.1 plots the ratio of references to the enslaved who were White against the enslaved who were Black. Not only was the quite sudden revival of full chattel slavery under English jurisdiction in the mid seventeenth-century Caribbean carried out without public discussion, but as already noted, for eighty years thereafter English newspapers scarcely made any reference to enslaved Blacks.Footnote ⁹³ The 1720s and 1730s thus saw newspapers begin to report violent incidents on slave vessels and on plantations more fully but these decades are also the period when the term “slaves” begins to mean people of African descent. However, not until mid-century did most references to “slaves” mean Black people in the Atlantic world. Even in the 1740s, when the British controlled the largest and most productive slave empire in the world, and when in the course of the previous century they had carried well over a million enslaved people across the Atlantic, the word “slaves” was used more often in relation to White captives than to Black, despite the fact that the latter had made possible the rapidly expanding British Empire in the New World. And as late as the 1770s and 1780s, as the prerequisites of the activist phase of abolition of the African slave trade emerged, references to White slaves in North Africa could easily be found in London newspapers. Indeed, one of the key prerequisites of an abolition movement was precisely that sufficient people did begin to be aware of Black slaves as well as white.

A trade in human beings can take place only if buyers and sellers can agree on a set of criteria that separate out those eligible for enslavement from those who are not. Apart from certain age, gender, and health requirements the basic criteria for European slave traders on what was called the Guinea Coast was that the person be African or of African descent and be offered for sale. References to and discussion of Black slaves in English newspapers to the point where these first appear beside and then begin to outnumber equivalent references to White slaves in the Mediterranean is the beginning of the erosion of Black skin as a key eligibility criterion.

A quite different reflection of the same phenomenon may be discerned rather paradoxically from the naming patterns of the vessels sent to Africa to obtain slaves.Footnote ⁹⁴ Two developments are noteworthy. In the earlier period many of the names underscore the obliviousness of slave-ship owners to the existence of Africans as sensate beings – to put it differently, they show the status of Africans in European eyes as outsiders. Owners gave the names of favorite family members to their slave vessels, or for three centuries in the Portuguese case, the names of the holy family or saints – an attempt to invoke divine intervention to secure the success of the voyage. As noted earlier, one of the first New England slave ships, sent out from Boston in 1650 about the time that the colonial government was closest to being a theocracy was the Gift of God. There is no clearer demonstration of the accepted nature of the slave trade and the cultural remoteness of Africans to Europeans. In the early eighteenth century the Negroes Nest made several voyages from London and a few years later vessels named the Black Joke made several voyages from Liverpool and London. In the 1760s and 1770s Liberty was popular, followed by, in the Revolutionary era, French slavers (and two English slavers as well) named Citoyen, Fraternité, Egalité, or Liberté without hints of either irony or any appreciation of incongruity. After US independence, the Fourth of July made a pair of voyages. To the modern observer, the contrast between the abstract principles embodied in the name of the ship and the condition of its human cargo is astonishing, but the more important point is the obliviousness to which such names point. Less than a century later, however, in the last years of the slave trade (1850–1867), names that appear incongruous to the modern observer had disappeared completely. By then a consciousness of Africans as human beings meant that such names could only have been used ironically.

A second development in ships’ naming patterns is the appearance of individual African names in the European record. For three centuries after ocean-born contact with sub-Saharan Africa, Africans in the European Atlantic world, whether enslaved or free, were either anonymous or known by Europeanized names.Footnote ⁹⁵ In the English slave Americas African names survived, albeit often in Europeanized form, to a much greater degree than has been appreciated.Footnote ⁹⁶ Nevertheless, renaming, or in the Iberian worlds, formal christening was certainly the norm. Africans who received recognition or acceptance in European society did so under European names. African names emerge only in the 1780s when Ottobah Cugoano (baptized John Steuart in 1772) and Olaudah Equiano (Gustavus Vasa) reverted to their former (or what they claimed were former) names.Footnote ⁹⁷ And in the next chapter we take up the post-1807 recording of African names of those found on board captured slave vessels. Outside the slave Americas, at least, this is indicative of a cultural recognition that would not have been possible a century earlier. Slave-ship names incorporating African references show a clear progression over two centuries from the general to the particular. Ships called the Negro or Negro Merchant or Black Boy, Blackamoor etc. in the seventeenth century are replaced in the following century with vessels named after particular peoples (“Fanteen” or Fanti), and after 1720, individual Africans. The King Amboe, was named after an eighty-year old Obong or “mayor” of Old Calabar and head of the most powerful ward in the community prior to the evolution of the Ekpe society. The Roi Guinguin assumed the title of the king of Badagry (1764–1766). The name of the King Pepple (ten voyages, 1786–1799) deriving from the head of the Anna Pepple house in Bonny are just three of many eighteenth-century examples. Clearly a small but growing number of Africans had come to hold a different status for Europeans. Overall, these naming patterns indicate some slight erosion of epidermal racism as the central separator of insider from outsider.Footnote ⁹⁸

More conventional indications of erosion of cultural separation between colonies and metropolis come from sermons, reports from the slave colonies, and anecdotes invoking the golden rule. As Michael Greenberg pointed out, the annual sermons preached before the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge over the course of the eighteenth century provides a fascinating way of tracking what might be called a shift in the equivalency or the golden rule index in mid-century.Footnote ⁹⁹ Governor Dunsmore’s offer of freedom to Virginian slaves who escaped from their rebellious masters received favorable attention in the London press and triggered a series of anti-slavery articles.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ At the end of the 1770s Jonas Hanway wrote to the Public Advertiser, perhaps a little prematurely, that he knew many “eminent” merchants “whose Minds revolt against the slave trade; and indeed the wonder is that the love of gain should ever have so prevailed in the Hearts of Men in the most civilized parts of Europe, that the same principle which they condemn in others, whom they call barbarous, should be adopted by them.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ And in the 1780s newspapers began printing more overtly abolitionist material, well before the public and parliamentary campaigns began.Footnote ¹⁰² The absence of aggressive support for the trade after the widely cited mid-century statements of Malachy Postlethwaite are also striking. And Postlethwaite himself came to change his position on the traffic. Any defenses of the slave traffic were usually directly sponsored by the West India interest.Footnote ¹⁰³

Nevertheless, abolitionism was not a campaign for a multiracial society. Attitudes to Blacks normally associated with the West India interest are easily identified in the broader English society. Granville Sharp’s activities, according to the St James Chronicle were visiting “grievous injury … upon this nation, by making it universally known that England is an asylum for those of the darker Colour to enjoy Liberty and Idleness,” and that given that one in twenty in London were Black, “within a century there would be black judges, peers and peeresses, and members of parliament” (it actually took two centuries).Footnote ¹⁰⁴ One of the two transports that brought free Blacks to Sierra Leone, in 1787 – to establish a “Province of Freedom” – purchased slaves on the African coast after disembarking its surviving emigrants, and subsequently sold them on the Musquito shore in Honduras – a voyage that appears nowhere in the extensive literature on the founding of Freetown.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Though the outcome of the voyage was reported in the newspapers, no one picked up the irony.

As developed further in the next chapter, elite leaders of the campaign to abolish the slave trade such as William Wilberforce and Zachary Macaulay believed that Africans were uncivilized and not ready for a free labor market.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Abolitionist and future Lord Chancellor Henry Brougham’s commentary on the work habits of Africans in both Africa and the Americas, written in 1802, is indistinguishable in tone from Thomas Carlyle’s anti-Black tirades in the late 1840s.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ As the campaign to abolish slavery itself gathered strength in 1826, a London impresario staged the first known production of Othello with a distinguished African American, Ira Aldridge, in the title role. It closed within days, with the Times reporting “owing to the shape of his lips it is utterly impossible for him to pronounce English,” and another newspaper describing Aldridge as “an unseemly nigger.” As the abolition campaign reached its successful peak in 1833, with record numbers of petitions pouring into Parliament, a further production at the Covent Garden Theatre, also starring Aldridge, closed after just two performances, with the Atheneum objecting to “Desdemona [actress Ellen Tree] being pawed about the stage by a black man.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ No one should doubt that an underlying sense of racial distance was present in British society throughout the push for abolition of the slave trade and slavery from 1780 the mid nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

As this chapter stresses, abolition of the slave trade was one of many legislative changes that affected violent behavior and practices. Perhaps the traditional thinking of historians about the activist phase of abolition may owe something to one of the tyrannies of the French Revolution that Edmund Burke failed to anticipate, that of its impact on the historiography of the Atlantic world. One of the lingering central tenets in the field of coerced labor, from C.L.R. James to Laurent Dubois, is that significant reform was not possible until the ancien régime was destroyed, and when reform did occur, it was, of course, because of the Revolution. For French slave societies, this is undoubtedly the case, but even then, the position can be defended only by ignoring the transatlantic differentials in attitudes toward labor and violence that had developed during the eighteenth century. The shift in humanitarian sensibility – whether presented in terms of a growing awareness of others (Hunt, Richardson), or changing identities (as argued here) – was well underway by 1775.Footnote ¹¹⁰ A greater sensitization toward violence is apparent among eighteenth-century Europeans despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that Europe was one of the most violent regions in the world.Footnote ¹¹¹ And to carry the argument forward and into the post-emancipation Caribbean, when ex-slaves left the sugar plantations, planters resorted to indirect means (taxation and Asian contract labor) rather than violence to secure a labor supply (the violent suppression of Black dissent at Morant Bay, Jamaica, in 1865 notwithstanding), a strategy much more in tune with the twenty-first century than the seventeenth. Rather than interpreting condemnation of the slave trade as a side effect of the American, French, Latin American, and Saint Domingue revolutions, we should see these as related phenomena, stemming from the same deep shift in values that began in the seventeenth century, at least as far as religious violence was concerned. The same phenomenon started to affect perceptions of slavery in England in the 1720s and 1730s. The central point is that these shifts did not occur or were much less apparent in the slave colonies.

The divergence in norms of violence between the slave colonies and domestic metropolitan centers, and the increasing ability of some Europeans to think of extending the golden rule to West Africa and the plantation Americas, points most obviously to the fact that slave owners no longer had the unthinking support of the societies and power centers from which, in the English case, their ancestors had launched their slave initiatives. It was a support, moreover, upon which the slave system ultimately depended, as the revolts in both St. John and St. Domingue demonstrated. Small numbers of Whites could not prevail over large numbers of Blacks without at least the threat of outside imperial military intervention, and it was European navies that ultimately held the slaves in place. Clearly, doubts about the legitimacy of first the slave trade and then slavery itself did not mean the sudden withdrawal of the underpinning of imperial force on which the slave system depended. But it did provide opportunities for resistance from the enslaved, either in terms of violence or running away, to be more effective.

Abolitionist sympathies therefore constituted a split in the power structure that held slaves in subjection. Perhaps calling on his younger days when he and Eugene Genovese worked as communist organizers in New York City, Robert Fogel pointed out in relation to the US Civil War, “a revolution cannot be made at will. It requires a crisis within the ruling class.”Footnote ¹¹² For slaveholders around the Atlantic world, abolition was such a crisis. Violence and escape could be and were brutally repressed (except, ultimately for Haiti), but the repression inevitably had the effect of further widening the split in the imperial power structure. It did so by underlining the differing community norms of violence that had emerged in the eighteenth century between slaveholding and non-freeholding societies, continued racism in the latter notwithstanding. But if both resistance of slaves and ruling-class splits were necessary, perhaps neither by itself was sufficient to end slavery and the slave trade. And we should also note that the process played out rather differently in Africa than it did in the Americas. Rather than abolition eroding the underpinnings of the slave system, as happened in the Americas, in Africa it was a case of imperial governments eventually intervening in a system of slavery that never depended on them for its enforcement in the first place.

None of this means that abolition of the slave trade should be seen as a humanitarian initiative on the part of the British government. The success of the abolitionists – James Stephen, Henry Brougham, William Wilberforce, and others – hinged on their ability to persuade majorities in both Houses of Parliament that abolition was in the best economic and strategic interests of Britain, especially British slave owners in the Americas. Abolition was implemented in stages between 1805 and 1807 with an Order in Council and three laws.Footnote ¹¹³ These progressively limited the traffic first to the newly occupied foreign colonies like Guiana and Trinidad that in 1806 might still be returned to their original Dutch and Spanish owners in a subsequent peace treaty. A second measure restricted the traffic to ships that were already engaged in the business, while the third applied an outright ban on the business with almost immediate effect. And here, the declaration of Haitian independence on January 1, 1804, played an important role. The major impulse behind these measures was the need to address the demographic imbalance between Blacks and Whites in the Caribbean that was seen as the root cause of the St. Domingue Rebellion. As noted below, events in St. Domingue horrified Brougham in particular. Thus, as Richardson points out and as the debates clearly show, the package of legislation that ended the British slave trade was aimed primarily at the long-run preservation of the Caribbean colonies, a matter of state policy rather than a reflection of humanitarian sensibilities.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Despite the massive popular support for the measure, the British Parliament passed abolition primarily for reasons of state, and only secondarily alleviate the suffering of the enslaved.

The US did not have the same Black–White population imbalance as the British Caribbean colonies. In addition, anti-slavery societies in the northern colonies of North America predated those in Britain. Indeed, in 1776 they were likely world leaders in the anti-slavery movement, given that Vermont freed its slaves in 1777, albeit with a twelve-year “apprenticeship” of unpaid labor to their former masters. Faced with Southern resistance, there was more room for the humanitarian impulse in the various US legislative initiatives on the slave trade beginning in 1794.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Nevertheless, secessionism in the US, ending with a particularly bloody and costly war, does in a sense confirm the importance of the “reasons of state” that underpinned the British government’s decision to proceed with abolition. In the aftermath of the US conflict and the vast costs of that conflict, the British solution of compensating the slave owners for emancipating their human property looks distinctly preferable.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Dismantling slavery in the rest of the Atlantic world followed the British rather than the US model. Compensation to slave owners was the norm and, worse, that compensation was paid for in part by the enslaved themselves in the form of free womb laws and working without compensation for their former owners.Footnote ¹¹⁷

Finally, given our inability to explain why these major value shifts occur, let us consider a broader implication. It might be argued that the single great issue for the English in the late eighteenth century and, for the Western Hemisphere, in the nineteenth, was the abolition of the slave trade and slavery; that in the twentieth, the great question was totalitarianism; and that in the twenty-first it may well be the treatment of women given that, except for sub-Saharan Africa, Japan, the state of Kerala in India and the Western world, census data suggest – in Amartya Sen’s memorable title – “More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ Societies that distribute their resources so that a female ratio of 105 to 100 at birth becomes 80 or less to 100 in adulthood have long flourished – no doubt since the Neolithic revolution. The number of premature female deaths must always have greatly exceeded the number of enslaved people at any point in history. What form will the demands for reform take? Will the statues of politicians who opposed women’s suffrage be demolished? Or perhaps animal rights will take center stage and the meat-eaters of today will assume the same status as the slave-owners of yesterday. If this happens our current society can expect to be written about as disparagingly as the slave Americas are today. What on earth were those people thinking?

More fundamentally, what is it that makes one or another of such issues dominate the “public sphere”? Why does one issue take precedence? On this neither historians nor sociologists have begun to scratch the surface. The literature on shifts in moral attitudes is so thin, that it makes no sense to single out, say, the abolition of slavery and then look for economic, national, imperial, or class interests to explain all. Attempts to account for our history and deal with its consequences must surely be more complex than that.

Conclusion

The discussion here attempts to explain why one form of cruelty – the slave trade – received public attention and not another.Footnote ¹¹⁹ We can at least say that the emergence of abolition as a public issue cannot be understood by itself. It must be seen as part of the broad-based decline in violence that is easy to track across the Atlantic world from the fifteenth century to the present, the horrors of the twentieth century notwithstanding. Penal punishments, treatment of prisoners of war, care of abandoned children both before and after their employment, blood sports, and serfdom are just some of the issues that emerged at about the same time as an awareness of Black enslavement in the colonies. But increasing concern with cruelty was unevenly distributed geographically in that it occurred at a glacial pace in the slave- and serf-holding regions compared to the slave- and serf-free areas. Values that were shared by metropolitan centers and colonies on the issue of slavery that were apparent in 1700 were no longer shared by 1800. But why would reform of slavery seem to require the most urgent attention and why in England and the northern US and not in some other Atlantic country?

It is surely relevant that in the eighteenth century the English-speaking world developed the most vibrant newspaper and periodical culture on the planet and one with the fewest censorship restrictions. Literacy rates were also among the highest in the world. But the key explanatory factor was the steady stream of reports of violence on slave-trading vessels and slave colonies described above. None of the other cruelties inflicted on children, women, prisoners, convicts, and animals received anything like the same attention, perhaps because these victim groups could not organize and violently resist. The French and St. Domingue revolutions may have split the metropolitan and colonial ruling class on the issue of slavery, as Fogel argued, and thus put an end to it in the Americas. But the more important and less dramatic cause of that split lies in the constant press reports of African resistance on slave ships and plantations, in 1720–1830, at a time when Britain itself had left behind the violent norms of the seventeenth century.Footnote ¹²⁰ Despite the role of Haiti in the British decision to abolish the traffic in 1804–1807, those who wish to argue that slaves freed themselves should study these earlier decades, rather than focusing exclusively on events in St. Domingue after August 1791. They also need to account for the huge increase in slaveholdings across the Americas after the St. Domingue and French revolutions. Value shifts in Britain and the northern US are an essential part of the explanation.