Principles and Agents by David Richardson

Author:David Richardson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

NINE

Finding “a Pathway for the Humanities”

The Politics of Slave Trade Abolition, 1791–1807

IN HIS Address to the People of Great Britain, on the Propriety of Refraining from the Use of West India Sugar and Rum, published in 1791, the radical dissenter and bookseller William Fox accused the nation’s consumers of British Caribbean sugar of being complicit in slavery and, given sugar production’s costs in terms of African life, in supporting the nation’s slave trade. The Address is widely seen as the most influential of the many and various pamphlets Fox wrote and published in his lifetime. It rapidly went through multiple editions and, though estimates vary, may have sold between seventy thousand and two hundred thousand copies in Britain and the Americas. It is credited with helping to stimulate the sugar boycott that occurred in Britain in 1792 as one element of the extraparliamentary campaign to end the slave trade that peaked in that year. Even as he sought, however, to challenge people to change their behavior, Fox recognized that getting them to do so would not be easy, noting in the pamphlet’s conclusion that “hardened by habit, the mind is with difficulty accessible to the convictions of guilt.” He went on to observe how “actions are not easily influenced by the force of moral principle, when counteracted by custom” and when “the greatest violations of duty may be practiced by the conduct of our associates.” In effect, tensions within individuals or groups could exist in reconciling actual behavior, rooted in habits or customs, with doing what was morally right. For Fox, change represented “the test of our virtue,” requiring individuals “to investigate [their] conduct with the most anxious solicitude.”1

Viewed through a society-wide rather than an individual lens, Fox’s remarks take on fresh significance in the politics of abolitionism. Metaphorically, they are a reminder that the anti–slave trade campaign, driven by its religious attendants or feelings of guilt, was confronted, even at a time of revolutionary domestic industrial and social change, by powerful conservative, even reactionary, forces deeply committed to what Fox labeled prevailing customs and associations, whether in defense of an established identity, an ideological outlook, or a vested interest. Those invested in Britain and in the West Indies in slavery were the most obvious parties to oppose abolitionism. Tensions between the two opposing groups were sometimes exposed when abolitionist campaigners lived in or visited Bristol and Liverpool, which had continuing strong connections with transatlantic slavery and its products. Understanding the strength and representation of slave power in late eighteenth-century British society, with its historic sense of connectivity and identity with that society, is important therefore if we are to examine the contested politics of abolitionism after 1790. By itself, however, it is not enough. For, just as from the 1780s the anti–slave trade campaign attracted support from various social groups or classes, so those who, for reasons of identity and vested interest, resisted calls in Parliament for abolition found support during the 1790s among other legislators unwilling to countenance

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.