Whether the motivations for the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade by Great Britain in 1807 were primarily humanitarian or economic has been fiercely debated for the better part of the past century. David Beck Ryden’s carefully researched new book provides an important intervention into this debate. Through an examination of the records of the London Society of West Indian Planters and Merchants (the Society), the writings of both abolitionists and antiabolitionists, the records of Jamaican plantations, and the parliamentary debates over abolition, Ryden presents compelling new evidence that the economic climate in the British Empire provided the decisive push toward abolition.

The historiography on British abolitionism is so vast as to be almost unfathomable, but Ryden provides a succinct sketch of the field in his first two chapters. On the one hand, the Trinidadian historian Eric Williams, in his seminal Capitalism and Slavery (1944; repr., Chapel Hill, NC, 1994) argued that slave trade abolition was an economically rational policy because the economic strength of the West Indian plantation system declined dramatically during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, leaving West Indian planters with little political clout to defend slave labor against the rise of capitalism and free labor ideology. On the other hand, historians such as Seymour Drescher have argued to the contrary, that abolitionism was, in fact, an economically irrational policy—in Drescher’s words, an “econocide”—that was executed despite the economic vitality of the West Indies and fueled primarily by the humanitarian spirit of the age (Seymour Drescher, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition [Pittsburgh, 1977]). Drescher disputed Williams’s “decline thesis” by pointing to the expansion of sugar production right up until 1807, as well as to the significant role that the West Indies played as a trading partner in the British imperial economy, as evidence of the persistent economic health of the region. Ryden provides fresh evidence for the economic causes of abolitionism, however, by examining the financial challenges faced by absentee planters in Britain during the age of abolition. Ryden’s focus on antiabolitionism is novel in contrast to recent historiography that has focused almost exclusively on abolitionists, and Ryden discovers a wealth of evidence supporting Williams’s assertion that sugar grandees were facing a dramatic decline in fortunes during this period.

Like Williams, Ryden argues that the War of American Independence initiated an economic decline in the West Indies because it ended the long-standing provisions trade from North America, leaving West Indian plantations bereft of crucial supplies such as foodstuffs and lumber. Ryden acknowledges that, as Drescher points out, the West Indian economy enjoyed a rebound in the 1790s. The dramatic decline in sugar output from Saint Domingue after the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution left a gaping hole in the Atlantic sugar economy, particularly in Continental sugar markets, and planters in the British West Indies eagerly stepped up production in order to fill the gap. Ryden points out, however, that the prosperity of the 1790s was short-lived. In the years between 1799 and 1807, the growth of sugar production in Cuba lowered demand for British sugar on the Continent, and this drop in demand was exacerbated by disruptions to access to Continental reexport markets caused by the Napoleonic wars. As a result, there was a serious glut on the British sugar market, and sugar prices plummeted. Absentee planters with political influence in Britain were thus much more concerned in 1807 with lobbying to protect their share of European sugar markets through favorable taxation policies than they were with protecting the slave trade; ambitions to expand the plantation economy through the purchase of African laborers had waned considerably in light of the sugar glut, and access to additional labor was no longer of primary concern. Ryden thus adds new vigor to the argument that abolitionism was economically motivated, although he takes a rather different approach than Williams in making this argument. Whereas Williams argued that slave production was doomed partly by its inefficiency, Ryden argues that West Indian planters were actually rather too efficient at stepping up production during the 1790s and that the subsequent glut in the 1799–1807 period brought the wisdom of further expansion of the sugar industry (and thus the continuation of the slave trade) into question.

Because of concerns about the dangers of overproduction in 1807, Ryden points out, abolitionists were able to successfully argue that ending the Atlantic slave trade would be to the economic benefit of both West Indian planters and the British Empire. They reasoned that it would force planters to stop expanding production and taking on additional debt by purchasing slaves and instead focus on maintaining their labor force by moderating workloads and taking better care of childbearing women and children. The abolition was thus presented as an economically rational policy. This line of argument about the economic rationality of abolitionism, which was so commonly employed by British policy makers, has interesting implications for the economic and political significance of reproduction that Ryden does not fully explore. Promoters of free labor ideology, such as Adam Smith and the abolitionist James Ramsay, criticized the economic organization of the West Indian plantation system because it promoted an inefficient method of reproduction; new laborers in slave systems were, they complained, purchased instead of homegrown. The reproductive potential of Afro-Caribbean women’s bodies was thus at the core of abolitionist fantasies about the economic benefits of abolitionism, although to fully explore this would have required Ryden to write a very different book.

Ryden unearths important evidence about the ideological, as well as the economic, bind that antiabolitionists found themselves in during the decades after the American War. The members of the Society struggled to reconcile their long-standing dependence on mercantilist protections of the sugar market with the benefits that might accrue from laissez-faire policies that would allow them to trade with North America and the European continent. West Indian planters were thus caught uncomfortably in the middle, ideologically as well as economically, between mercantilism and capitalism during the age of abolition, drawing on the one and then the other as their interests demanded. Ryden also provides a chapter on the production and distribution of sugar, and another on the management of slaves, that contemplate changes in the organization of slave labor during the age of abolition, but there is little here that will be new to those well versed in the study of slave life. Instead, it is his careful analysis of the culture and ideology of antiabolitionism, together with his close attention to the economic imperatives that drove the process of abolition forward, that make this book a compelling and exciting new take on the long-debated topic of the political economy of abolitionism.