What caused the rise of British antislavery? Were abolitionists moved to act by pure altruism, or did they and those who sympathised with them have other motivations?
We will look at how historians have interpreted the rise and success of the abolition movement. How should we explain this unique and dynamic political force? Why did it emerge so strongly in the 1780s and not, say, a hundred years earlier or later? What motivated abolitionists and enabled them to succeed—was it economic change, social shifts, religious or cultural transformations? How important was the defining event in British and imperial history at the end of the eighteenth-century—the American Revolution?
The work of Eric Williams has helped define these debates. He argued that abolitionist success was aided by the economic decline of the sugar economy of the Caribbean. Seymour Drescher has argued against that thesis, maintaining that the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 was an ‘econocide’—the killing-off of an economically healthy system. Recent work by Christopher Brown has outlined a new line of interpretation—arguing that the American Revolution transformed how Britons viewed themselves and their colonies, turning them against slaveholding and in favour of wholesale imperial reform (and see also Colley, below, on this).
Some suggested reading:
Brown, C. L. Moral Capital: The Foundations of British Abolitionism (epilogue).
Colley, L. Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (1992), 350-60.
Drescher, S. ‘The Shocking Birth of British Abolitionism’, Slavery and Abolition 33/4 (2012).
Williams, E. Capitalism and Slavery (1944) (especially chapters 6, 7 and 11).