The North Atlantic slave-trading empire, dominated by the British by the late eighteenth century, was quite suddenly brought to its knees in the space of twenty years, between 1787 and 1807. Precisely how that happened has puzzled historians for decades and has spawned a remarkably rich and varied historiography. In recent years, older interpretations (concentrating on the shift in religious sensibility) have been nudged aside by explanations which rely more on economic causation and change. In the process, it has become easy to overlook the degree to which contemporary critics were powerfully influenced by religious outlook: easy to forget the remarkable work (and influence) of a small handful of godly people, on both sides of the Atlantic. Maurice Jackson's marvellous book, although concentrating on one man, Anthony Benezet, will force scholars to think again about what constituted the main impulses behind transatlantic abolition. It is curious that Benezet has been so neglected by historians of abolition even though he seems, at first glance, a quirky voice in the wilderness. It is one of Jackson's achievements, via his sharp historical eye and exhaustive industry, to tease out Benezet more fully. Benezet emerges not merely as a critical thinker, and influential shaper of abolition, but here is a man with an importance which transcends abolition itself. His contemporary influence on the origins of trans-Atlantic abolitionism is beyond dispute. But Jackson helps to elevate Benezet to a much higher plane. This simple – in some respects eccentric – Quaker, born in France, raised as a Huguenot before moving to the Society of Friends, had a profound influence on shaping opinion, on both sides of the Atlantic. Moreover, his was an influence which extended far beyond the restricted world of Quakers and even of abolition. Jackson makes it clear that we need to recognise the degree to which Benezet established a new view of Africa and of Africans. In a world culturally accustomed to regarding Africans as items of trade – chattels and goods to be bartered and sold – Benezet was instrumental in helping to cast aside the old, deeply-entrenched views that Africa was the uncivilised home of African savages, themselves beyond the ken of outside, civilised people. This alone would be enough to secure Benezet's fame. But it was his mode of operation which proved incalculably influential. Benezet sifted through the literature, the accounts of sailors, merchants and adventurers who knew the African coast and its inhabitants, to produce an empirically-grounded appreciation of the human realities of Africa. And it was this method – a new methodology –which was subsequently adopted by later abolitionists, notably by Thomas Clarkson, to undermine the racial ideology which underpinned the entire Atlantic slave system. Of course Benezet is best known for his theological denunciations of slavery: for asserting that slavery was an outrage to Christianity, an evil perpetrated by Christian nations which would, inevitably provoke divine punishment. In this he was joined by his friend and correspondent Granville Sharp (the unsung hero of British abolition). It was an argument which, rooted in theological argument, appealed to that contemporary sense of providentialism which was itself so powerful a contemporary belief. Slavery was a wickedness which invited divine punishment and wrath – whatever the data of profit and loss of the slave trade might suggest. Maurice Jackson has written a fine book, of importance to all historians of late eighteenth-century transatlantic faith, and an invaluable contribution to our understanding of how the world of North Atlantic slave-trading was brought to an end.