Half a century ago, the historiography of antislavery remained comfortably within the frame of reference set by the first abolitionist account written immediately after the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807. For a century and half thereafter the history of antislavery was largely the history of the dramatic triumph and expansion of the movement launched by small bands of abolitionists in America and Britain in the 1770s and 1780s. After millennia of the acceptance of slavery as a global institution, Britain was among the first nations to permanently ban its own slave trade (1807), and to emancipate its colonial slaves (1834). It was thereafter the principal agent in securing the ending of the transoceanic slave trades of the world. As late as the centennial of British emancipation in 1933 the British role in the process was celebrated as a story of humanity’s ascent to a higher moral plane. It was evoked as a selfless action that legitimized Britain’s imperial stewardship over millions of people in the Caribbean, Africa and Asia, who were still deemed to be too weak to speak for or protect themselves. In the economically depressed world of 1933 and in the face of expanding despotism and brutalization the story of abolition offered dramatic evidence of the reality of moral progress in history. Amidst the ominous news of intensively coercive regimes emanating from Germany and the Soviet Union, the long march of antislavery was hailed as the supreme example of groups with religious ideals and motivations who were able to mobilize public opinion and political will to outlaw an institution accepted throughout the world for millennia. To explain the origins of this triumphal process, historiographical attention naturally focused on the initiative of gallant individuals or small bands of heroes in Britain, the Americas, and Europe who galvanized the moral conscience of the West. Historians continued to draw upon Thomas Clarkson’s classical history of the convergence of individuals whose voices finally produced a great public tide in the affairs of men and brothers that swept abolition on to victory in the name of providence and humanity.Reference Oldfield1, Reference Drescher2
There were, of course, counter-currents to this tradition throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. Initially, the dominant driving force was tied to the economic and imperial power of Pax Britannica. In the 19th-century, the United States’ South, continental Europe, and Latin America critics of the abolitionist crusade questioned Britain’s motives. They insisted that claims of humanitarians and reformers were fronts for British policies with economic or even revolutionary aims. They lacked any motivation to investigate the history of antislavery on a continental or global scale. They invariably interpreted British abolition cynically, emphasizing economic or imperialistic motives rather than humanitarian or idealistic ones.Reference Hochstetter3 The moral meta-narrative remained dominant for a century and a half after the abolition of the Anglo-American transatlantic slave trades in 1807.
By the time of the sesquicentennial of British slave emancipation in 1983, however, the old interpretative frame of reference was in retreat. The mass annihilations and coerced labor systems of the Second World War had eroded the meta-narrative of Western history as a secular civilizing process. Decolonization struggles and ‘third world’ migrants in Britain called for increased attention to the experience of enslaved Africans as victims, martyrs and resisters. A new generation of African and West Indian historians emerged. They viewed the abolitionist process with far more cynicism than their British predecessors.
The change of mood was epitomized in the sesquicentennial conference at the University of Hull in 1983. The opening speaker observed that even in the birthplace of William Wilberforce, the old leading actors in the historiography of abolitionism had virtually vanished from the agenda. There were no panels devoted specifically to British abolitionism, nor to its statesmen, nor to its ‘Saints’ – not even a single paper on Hull’s hometown hero, William Wilberforce himself. The speaker was reminded of an English radical’s observation when he was forced to leave England in 1817 at the height of Wilberforce’s sanctification. Highest on Cobbett’s little list of things that he would not miss was: ‘No Wilberforces. Think of that! No Wilberforces!’Reference Drescher4
As though to symbolize the new trend, the keynote speaker of the conference, was C. L. R. James, a radical Trinidadian writer, famous for having made the Saint-Domingue Revolution, not British abolition, the pivot of Africa’s long march from chattel slavery to political independence. James was appropriately introduced by a descendant of Wilberforce.Reference James5
It was Eric Williams, however, another Trinidadian of slave descent, who in 1944 framed the postwar historiographical challenge to the traditional narrative. A student at Oxford in the 1930s and by then a professor at Howard University in Washington, DC, Williams launched a frontal attack on the earlier view that the British had transcended self-interest in abolishing the transoceanic slave trades and colonial slavery. His Capitalism and Slavery was republished (with far greater impact) in the mid-1960s, after he had become the first Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago. Williams set out to devalue the entire idealistic pedigree of British antislavery. When one looked for causality in history, politics and morals were merely rationalizations for or against the thing attacked or defended. The real object of the struggle was always measurable ‘in pounds sterling or pounds avoirdupois, in dollars and cents, yards, feet and inches.’Reference Williams6
The history of slavery flowed directly from the ebb and flow of capitalism, the principal economic system of modern times. In phase one (mercantilism) the profits from the expanding slave trade and slavery provided the wealth that financed the British industrial revolution. In a second phase, beginning with the American Revolution and the shift to free trade capitalism, irreversible, continuous decline of the British slave system made it an encumbrance to the emergent British economy. The erstwhile ‘disinterested’ forces of abolition were thus revealed as the ideological cover for the more powerful force of industrial capitalism. The implications of this rise and decline theory of slavery were vast. Britain was not only the world’s leading industrial power during the 19th century but the hub of antislavery and the lynchpin of global emancipation in the age of abolition. The rise of antislavery depended upon the prior and irreversible decline of slavery.
By the early 1970s, what one scholar coined Williams’s ‘decline thesis’ of abolition had gained currency even among scholars who objected to his uncompromising historical materialism in principle, and his dismissal of the abolitionists’ significance in particular.Reference Drescher7 In a 1977 monograph, Econocide, I systematically challenged both the decline thesis of British slavery and that the ending of the slave trade should be viewed as a response to that development. Systematically analyzing both Williams’s favored data set and others that had not yet been examined, Econocide showed that the rise of British abolitionism in the 1780s and the subsequent slave trade abolition act of 1807 came when the British Afro-Caribbean slave system was expanding, not declining. Abolition came precisely when Britain led the world in the production of sugar and coffee. It also came at a moment when naval supremacy and colonial expansion enabled Britain to exponentially expand its tropical slave frontier. With the seizure of new territories in the Caribbean, in South America and in Africa the British were in a position to increase their transatlantic slave trade indefinitely and to dominate that trade for generations to come.Reference Drescher8
One historian has continued to challenge Econocide’s refutation of the economic decline thesis and another has argued for a truncated temporal version of Williams’s argument. On the whole, however, ‘most other historians take the opposite view, discounting any overall case for serious economic decline in the British Caribbean by 1807.’Reference Carrington9 Summing up the overall consensus David Richardson concludes: ‘Contrary to the assumptions of some historians, therefore, British abolitionism came against a background of economic growth and prosperity, not stagnation, decline or crisis in Britain’s slave colonies, with slave owners enjoying lifestyles unimaginable to the huge majority of Britons.’Reference Morgan10
A decade after Econocide’s publication, David Eltis made another major contribution to the debate. His Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (1987) extended the story to the termination of the transatlantic branch of that massive forced migration of Africans in the 1860s. Eltis mobilized elegant analytic arguments and massive empirical evidence to demonstrate that the British sacrificed substantial economic, fiscal, diplomatic and consumer benefits, not only in abolishing their own slave trade, but in acting as the major catalyst in suppressing the entire transatlantic system. The tension between economic growth and abolition remained as patent at the end of the abolitionist process as at the beginning. Eltis’s leadership in the compilation of the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database during the two decades following the publication of Economic Growth further confirmed the finding that the transatlantic slave trade remained a massive, viable and profitable enterprise for nearly half a century after British abolition. Only British-led naval and diplomatic pressures brought it to an end.Reference Eltis11
Ironically, even historians who focus on validating Williams’s claims for decisive contributions of ‘rising’ slavery to the British Industrial Revolution before 1775 sometimes inadvertently lend support to the Drescher/Eltis refutation of the decline theory of abolition. The most massive recent compilation of data in favor of the decisive contribution of Atlantic slavery to British economic development is Joseph E. Inikori’s Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England (2002). Inikori’s own tables indicated that the total value of commodities imported by Britain from the slave-labor zones of the Americas increased from the pre-abolitionist era to the outbreak of the American Civil War. His own sources also indicate that the British Caribbean share of this trade dropped only after the abolition of the British slave trade and slavery.Reference Inikori12
The reassessment of the vitality of British slavery at the moment of the abolitionist turn had implications for the relation of economic development to the ending of slavery far beyond Britain and the transatlantic slave trade. The authors of Econocide and Economic Growth offered evidence against another deeply embedded concept in the historiography of slavery and abolition. Both Williams and the historians whom he challenged all accepted the proposition that slavery, a backward and inefficient mode of production, was rendered uncompetitive by free labor. Given this premise it could be argued that the obsolescence of the British slave system had actually been postponed by imperial protection. Slave owners, Williams had concluded, became Rip Van Winkles. ‘Drugged by the potion of mercantilism….[they] had gone to sleep for a hundred years’ before 1776 (Ref. Reference Williams6, p. 125).
The rediscovery of British slavery’s continued vitality now converged with a major historiographical breakthrough on the other side of the Atlantic. Three years before Econocide the idea of slave labor’s inefficiency was dramatically challenged by Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman’s Time on the Cross (1974).Reference Fogel and Engerman13 Using systematic econometric methods and an abundance of new data they demonstrated the remarkable efficiency, profitability and competitiveness of antebellum slavery in the United States’ South. The authors’ principal focus was the economics of slavery, but they ultimately confronted the long dominant ‘free labor ideology’ in American historiography. That historiography rested on the implicit assumption that slavery’s inherent immorality, brutality and hyper-exploitation bred attitudes that entailed excessive soil exhaustion, general indebtedness, disincentives to industry, high levels of poverty, illiteracy, and lethargy in all facets of civil society. Such arguments relied upon Adam Smith’s dictum declaring the inherent superiority of free labor, on enlightenment or socialist theories of historical progress, and on the abolitionist axiom that no good could come of evil.
Slavery’s putative inefficiency was often equally attractive to anti-abolitionist historians. They could argue that slaveholders had actually sacrificed efficiency to the mission of civilizing slaves. In this perspective, slaveholders had assumed a ‘white man’s burden,’ sustaining an unprofitable economic system that Christianized and educated African savages. In this scenario abolitionist fanaticism was the catalyst for the most blood-drenched path to emancipation in the history of the Americas.Reference Fogel14
The discovery of slavery’s dynamism and profitability therefore opened a whole new perspective on the fate of the institution. What was violently or non-violently ended was not an anachronistic institution somehow briefly surviving amidst modernizing capitalism. It was an integral part of Western economic growth and processes. It had to be destroyed despite its continued economic contribution to capitalism. Once historians entertained this new paradigm, they could more easily explain the economic incentives that induced one Atlantic European society after another to ship masses of slaves for three centuries to areas of low population and to produce highly desired commodities for European production and consumption.
Historians working on a wide range of New World societies could now consider the Atlantic world in a new light. For nearly 300 years before 1830 four out of every five migrants brought to the New World came as involuntary African slaves. Robert Fogel, Stanley Engerman, David Eltis, Rebecca Scott, Herbert Klein, Laird Bergad and many others illustrated the ways in which colonial slave societies continued to produce consumer goods and raw materials for a rapidly expanding European economy into the late 19th century.Reference Eltis15 Slaveholders also produced considerable wealth for themselves as well. A succession of plantation societies ranked among the most productive and, per capita, the wealthiest zones on the planet: Brazil, Barbados, Jamaica, Saint-Domingue and Cuba. On the eve of the American Civil War, the monetary value of Southern US slaves was equal to 80% of the annual Gross National Product of the United States – equivalent to what today would be $9.75 trillion. As David Brion Davis notes, ‘there were good reasons why, in 1860, two-thirds of the richest Americans lived in the slaveholding south.Reference Davis16
One result of these two paradigm shifts – the challenges to the decline theory of abolition and to the free labor ideology seems clear. There is now a greater appreciation of the profound incompatibility between economic self-interest and antislavery policy.Reference Davis16 This was true not only for Great Britain and the United States but for all of the major New World Slave systems and some of those in the Old World as well. In the French empire the first abolitionist attack was launched at the very moment that France possessed the most productive and valuable slave colony in the Americas. Similarly, in the Spanish and Portuguese Americas, both internal agitation and external pressure for slave trade abolition and slave emancipation began immediately after British slave trade abolition. The universal perception by both rulers and merchants was that ‘the south Atlantic system and colonial political economies did depend on the survival of slavery.’Reference Adelman17
Moreover, when the slave systems of the Old World began to come under pressure, in the late 19th century, emancipation began in many areas that had just undergone a surge of growth in their slave and slave trade systems. Indeed, the caution exercised by European imperialists in dismantling slave labor systems in Afro-Asia often involved a conviction of the failure of the free labor ideology in the New World. This was only reinforced by imperialist difficulties in recruiting Africans for voluntary wage labor. Increasingly, historians of slavery and abolition have realized that explanations for the turn against slavery have to come to terms with the notion that modern capitalism proved to be ‘supremely agnostic and pluralistic in its ability to coexist, and to thrive, with a whole range of labor systems right through the abolitionist century after 1780.’ And, as David Davis has added: ‘One should now extend that period to the very present’ (Ref. Reference Eltis11, p. 15; Ref. Reference Drescher8, p. 186)
Thus, the assumption that free labor was inherently superior to slave labor was never a consensual ideology in the West at any time during the age of abolition and emancipation. Abolitionists, of course, invoked a series of brief quotations from very eminent writers of the 18th and 19th centuries in order to bolster this perspective. They quoted Montesquieu, Franklin, Adam Smith, Tocqueville and others. Some historians also treated these disparate quotes as a consensual Western perspective throughout the age of abolition. Further research has since demonstrated that no such consensus existed regarding overseas slavery. Indeed, during the course of their respective abolitions, policy makers in most countries were deeply skeptical about the applicability of the free labor ideology to the problem of emancipation. This applied as much to Old World imperial emancipations at the beginning of the 20th century as to the New World colonies at the beginning of the 19th.Reference Fogel and Engerman18
Alternatives
If systematic investigation of economic development and the political economy seems to reveal as many obstacles as encouragement for explanations of antislavery and the ending of slavery, how can one account for the near globalization and victories of antislavery during the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries? In the 1960s, David Brion Davis already posed the question in his Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1965). He explored Western writings on slavery stretching over two millennia, and brought the story to the brink of the emergence of abolitionism in the 1770s.Reference Davis19
The key issue, however, still remained to be addressed. How could one explain the transformation of isolated examples of writers’ unease or even occasional denunciations of its barbarity into full-fledged political attack, and into their triumph of abolition over entrenched and rapidly expanding overseas slave systems?Reference Drescher20 How could one explain the paradox that New World slavery was complementary to an expanding Western free labor capitalist system? One way to attack the problem was to give a new twist to the old actors in the humanitarian narrative. In 1975, Roger Anstey rooted the emergence of abolition in an extension of late 18th-century British religious doctrine to overseas slaves. Nevertheless he attributed the first major triumph in 1806 to deft abolitionist political manipulation of ‘national interest’.Reference Anstey21 In 1806, an abolitionist Bill was presented to Parliament as a blow against foreign plantations conquered by the British in the conflict against Napoleon. It prevented British slavers from supplying Africans to these colonies in wartime. The abolitionist’s strategy was to effect a humanitarian outcome in a Machiavellian disguise. Abolition’s triumph was to dress a humanitarian sheep in wolf’s clothing.Reference Davis22
In the same year (1975) David Brion Davis offered another explanation of British abolitionism’s victory as another kind of triumph of class morality in disguise. In Davis’s scenario the emergence of British abolition was reconfigured as an elite displacement of the intensification of class exploitation and dislocation created by British capitalist industrialization. In this sense, abolition functioned as it had for many early 19th-century British radicals, as a diversion from domestic exploitation. In Davis’s subtle psychological perspective, however, the abolitionists were no more engaging in a conscious Machiavellian maneuver for metropolitan capitalism in 1807 than were Anstey’s abolitionists in 1805, prohibiting British capitalists from investing in non-British plantations. In short, for Davis, the abolitionist impulse was an unconscious reaction to disturbing discontents closer to home.Reference Davis22 What both Anstey and Davis shared was an acknowledgement of the limits of offering moral idealism alone in explaining the victory of abolitionism over a deeply entrenched institution and its related economic interests.
Many historians continued to invoke Davis’s early interpretation of abolition as a ruling class diversion after he himself eased away from it. Others dissented. The first challenger, Thomas L. Haskell, relocated the origins of abolition not in the emergence of unconscious class tensions generated by the Industrial Revolution, but in the activities and ‘cognitive style’ generated among long distance vendors. For Haskell, immersion in the international market accounted for the unprecedented ‘wave of humanitarianism reform sentiment’ [and movements that] ‘swept through the societies of Western Europe, England and North America in the hundred years following 1750.’ Haskell’s hypothesis dismissed any need for an ‘unconscious dimension’, or even an unconscious capitalist displacement of class interest in abolitionism. The market itself was the medium of expanding moral perception and political action.Reference Haskell, Davis and Ashworth23
This was the opening salvo in a series of exchanges about class consciousness and antislavery between Haskell, David Davis and John Ashworth, in what was ultimately published in a volume entitled, The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation (1992) (Ref Reference Davis25, see also Ref. Reference Drescher4, p. 11). There it became clear that one of the major difficulties in Haskell’s argument derives from the fact that it posits for the entire West what could hardly be found anywhere on the European continent in the century after 1750. There was no wave of abolitionist reform sentiment and virtually no abolitionist movement in most Western societies, least of all any that could be connected to international commercial capitalism. In other words what happened in one part of Anglo-America was simply ascribed to Europe as a whole. As David Eltis later showed (1999), Haskell’s correlation between the market and antislavery could be better used to invert Haskell’s own equation: The same traits designated by Haskell to be ‘embodied in market behavior, could have had almost exactly the opposite effect … [leading] to moral restrictions [against] enslaving one’s … fellow Europeans but not [against] the purchase of a non-European who was already a slave …’.24
The other, perhaps more significant, change from Davis’s initial focus on abolitionist elites in his Age of Revolution was a turn towards investigating the behavior of broader publics in the abolition process. One thing that Williams, Anstey, Davis and Haskell all shared was their attraction to the most articulate members of metropolitan societies, whether in business, politics, religion, or culture.Reference Davis25 An upsurge of historiographical interest in alternative agents in the ending of slavery also began in the 1970s. It looked more closely at the mass mobilizations that led to the containment or expansion of slavery after the 1780s. One set of historians turned their attention towards slaves themselves as the key agents in the overthrow of slavery. The model for this historiographical reorientation had already appeared in 1938. As is evident from its title, C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins Reference James5 aimed at integrating the story of the largest and most successful slave uprising in world history into the larger history of the Age of Revolution after 1776.
Only in the late 1970s, however, did historians of slavery begin to argue systematically in favor of the Saint-Domingue Revolution’s central position in the history of antislavery. Robin Blackburn’s history The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (1988),Reference Drescher27 pivots on his chapter, ‘Revolutionary emancipation and the birth of Haiti.’ His narrative weaves the history of antislavery through the series of political upheavals and military conflicts that crisscrossed the Atlantic world, from the successive revolutions in the British, French and Spanish empires. Even British abolition in 1807 is reinterpreted primarily as a response to a class crisis posing a revolutionary threat.Reference Blackburn26
Haiti’s was the largest and the only successful slave revolution in history. Before and after it, however, the revolutionary wars of independence in North and South America offered ample recruitment opportunities for slaves desiring to attain freedom and for stimulating emancipation legislation that incorporated slaves into free civil status either gradually or immediately. Later New World emancipations, in the French (1848) and Spanish (1878) empires and in the United States (1865), all came in the wake of revolutions or armed conflicts. Those in the Old World’s European empires usually originated in imperial decrees from the metropole. They came in the wake of Europe’s transformation from empires of slavery to empires of antislavery. Some of these Old World emancipations were accompanied by mass flights of enslaved populations in the wake of such decrees.Reference Drescher27
Renewed interest in the agency of slaves in the history of emancipation was also driven by a concern to diligently accumulate the evidence of slave resistance, whether successful or unsuccessful, as a means of registering the broadening consciousness of the enslaved. Some historians have recently suggested that, by resisting slavery, slaves were the primary agents in achieving their own freedom. This of course, not only diminishes the role of the heroic leaders. Most historians of antislavery imagine its long history from below as a more complex process than slave self-liberation.Reference Behrendt, Eltis and Richardson28
This brings us to the historiography of that other rank-and-file of abolitionism – the free populations of republics and empires. Significantly, these were the last cohorts of antislavery actors to receive systematic and comparative attention in the 1980s. One reason was that in both the Old and New World’s societies with slaves there was little collective civil activism against slavery to discuss. Most abolitionist legislation came in the wake of revolutionary decrees or external economic or military pressures. From the first attempts at comparative studies of abolitionist movements, however, it was apparent that there were two contrasting variants of abolitionism. Mass abolitionism, best exemplified in the Anglo-American and Brazilian cases, developed distinguishing characteristics of mass social movements. They used the public sphere to bring pressure to bear upon (often reluctant) politicians and economic interests. They used mass propaganda, public gatherings, lawsuits, boycotts and mass petitions. They usually aimed at expanding participation welcoming groups otherwise excluded (by sex, religion, class, race, legal status or locality) from the existing political process. In Europe, Britain was the outstanding 19th-century example. France and Spain briefly attempted to imitate this model. Only toward the end of the 19th century was the British example replicated on the European continent. In the Western hemisphere, the northern United States and Brazil most closely approached the model first inaugurated in British society.Reference Drescher29
The fact that late-eighteenth-century Anglo-Americans possessed the world’s most highly developed and autonomous public spheres allowed the British to become the pioneer organizers of a long-term national social movement against slavery. Thus, between 1788 and 1815 an unprecedented proportion of Britain’s people not only took decisive steps in forming a national opinion against the slave trade, but decisive steps towards creating national lecture tours, giant petition drives, vast coordinated public petition meetings and the formation of special-purpose associations of all kinds. Thereafter, Britain became an example for civil society abolitionism in the United States (1830s) and Brazil (1880s). In the United States, northern abolitionist popular mobilization provoked a counter-mobilization that resulted in the bloodiest and most costly of the New World emancipations. In Brazil, popular mobilization produced an abolitionism that achieved emancipation almost despite the national government.Reference Fogel30
In another great surge of slavery scholarship during the past generation, societies with lesser abolitionist movements or societies without slavery have found their historians. They never generated mass abolitionist movements. These variants of abolitionism were usually confined to local or cultural elites. They were often imitators or even satellites of the British movement, limited both in duration and ambition. They rarely lasted beyond the demise of their own society’s or empire’s slave system. Historians identify a second surge of antislavery mobilization toward the end of the 19th century. In 1889, after a century of relative quiescence, Catholic societies were invited to become institutionally involved in a crusade against the slave trade and Muslim slavers in newly imperialized Africa. These societies have not yet elicited systematic and comparative historical analysis. Nor have the religiously-based societies in Afro-Asia. To the extent that this second wave was active it appears to have played far less of a role in the global emancipation process than its early 19th-century predecessor.Reference Pétré-Grenouilleau31
New paths and reconsiderations
What is the state of the historiography of slavery and antislavery after half a century of dynamic development? One must first note the quantitative explosion in research and scholarship, whose annual bibliographical listing alone now requires 200 pages of the journal Slavery and Abolition. The historiography has become far more global with a dramatic surge of research on slavery and emancipation beyond the Atlantic world.Reference Pétré-Grenouilleau32 Increased attention is being devoted to integrating the history of coerced labor and servitude in Europe. The advent of the Gulag in the 20th-century Soviet Union and the vast system of slave labor in Nazi Europe offer new areas of slavery for research and comparison. They amply demonstrate that the history of slavery and antislavery is not a linear one from bondage to freedom. There were, in fact, more slaves toiling in the heart of Europe in the 1940s than there had been in all of the Americas a century earlier. Nor does the history of servitude end with the 20th century. The search for ‘slave-like’ conditions in many parts of the world continues to remind us that success is never final.Reference Drescher33 New fields of inquiry have been expanded on themes of race, class and gender, of representation, memorialization and reparation.Reference Engerman34
The major debates on slavery and abolition during the last half century now seem to have produced a second shift. At the beginning of this essay I remarked that there was a withdrawal from the moral dimension of slavery and abolition in the historiography of the 1960s and 1970s. In that age of decolonization, historians’ wariness of ascribing change to morality was reflected in Eric Williams’s devaluation of the abolitionist’s role. It was also reflected in historians’ propensity to ground the motives of actors within the boundaries of class and class conflict.
If we compare the bicentennial commemoration triggered by the Anglo-American slave trade abolitions of 2007 with the sesquicentennial of British slave emancipation in 1983, a change of tone seems evident. In 2007, there was certainly no return to the humanitarian triumphalism of 1933. Eric Williams had seen to that. However, there was a clear sense that the materialistic overtones that had so much intuitive assent in the 1960s and 1970s had simply left too many questions unaddressed. In contrast to the 1970s and early 1980s, the approach of the commemoration saw the publication of a book on the origins of British Abolitionism, Christopher Brown’s Moral Capital (2006).Reference Brown35 At the same moment, David Brion Davis’s most recent work, Inhuman Bondage (2006),Reference Davis16 traced the rise and fall of New World slavery. Davis boldly opened his chapter on ‘Explanations of British Abolitionism’ with the observation that this baffling subject raised the issue of ‘moral progress in history.’ Historian Philip Morgan began an essay on abolition noting that his aim was ‘emphatically not to devalue the abolitionist achievement’ or to reduce the significance of the ‘moral revolution’ identified by Davis four decades earlier.Reference Morgan36
Robert Fogel, looking back over his own decades of intense involvement in the ‘slavery debates’ in the United StatesReference Fogel37 noted that his subsequent major venture into the rise and fall of American slavery had attempted to rectify a significant lacuna in the earlier book that he authored with Stanley Engerman. That lacuna was a systematic consideration of the ‘Moral Problem of Slavery,’ and of its significance in the ideological and political campaign against slavery. None of these distinguished historians would have ventured to return to the traditional historiography of pure idealism, encapsulated in Lecky’s epitome of the British crusade ‘as probably … among the three or four perfectly virtuous acts recorded in the history of nations.’ Yet all of these historians explicitly acknowledged the role of moral arguments in explaining abolition. They all referred to the language of morality rather than of ideology. The discourse of morality was treated as an appeal to inclusiveness and universal norms. Even Robin Blackburn, writing in the radical tradition and focused on explaining the revolutionary significance of Haitian slaves’ violent destruction of the institution, noted that historians have begun to study that great revolution ‘as an event in the history of the moral imagination as well as a dramatic episode …’.Reference Blackburn38
However different their approaches, the work of these historians hints at yet another shift in historiographical perspective. In any event, the tendency to ground that momentous change within a single overarching stage of capitalist development appears to have considerably diminished.
Acknowledgements
I extend my thanks to Stanley L. Engerman and Pieter Emmer for their helpful suggestions and comments.
Seymour Drescher is Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh and a long-time student of the slave trade across the Atlantic, the history of colonial slavery and of abolition, on which he has published several books and numerous articles. His best-known work is Econocide, British Slavery in the Era of Abolition in which he questions the economic rationale behind the abolition of the British slave trade.
