Iain Whyte has produced an impressively researched and comprehensively argued monograph on Scottish opinions concerning human bondage in the three generations before the final abolition of slavery in the British empire. (The terminus ad quem of the title, 1838, is a better date than 1833, the year that Parliament abolished West Indian slavery, since it was not until the latter year that the apprenticeship system that replaced, but actually perpetuated, slavery came to an end.) The strength of the book is its sensitive depiction of the three major forces in Scottish debates over slavery and the six major institutions in which those forces interacted.

Whyte's key conclusion about the sources of ideological energy is that Scottish antislavery represented a blending of moderate ethical sentiment and evangelical religious fervor. As he puts it about the ideological confluence linking segments of Scottish society that are usually regarded as antagonists, “What was distinctive was the fusion of Enlightenment thought and evangelical passion that was able to take root in a culture theologically tuned to it” (255). The Enlightenment-evangelical mixture was present already in the mid-eighteenth century, when principles of humane sentiment from Francis Hutcheson and convictions about the sinfulness of slavery from evangelical leaders flowed naturally together. This fusion gradually grew in strength over the years treated here, with the exception of the 1793–1814 period, when war with France silenced antislave agitation in Scotland as it did also in England. The book is at its best in charting the contributions, episodes, shifting economic interests, intellectual currents, and responses to parliamentary action (or inaction) of the persistent antislave thrust. Whyte's treatment of Scotland's proslavery forces is equally good, but because that position grew primarily from the deep involvement of Scottish personnel, trade, and investment in Jamaica and other West Indian slave societies, his account of it relies more on analysis of practical activity than of intellectual sources—though because this is Scotland, there was a great deal of the latter as well.

The six institutions were the churches, the courts, voluntary associations (usually abolitionist), the public press, trade associations, and (if it can be called an institution) the practice of petitioning Parliament for legal changes. Whyte's thorough research in church and church court records allows him to pinpoint the key figures and the crucial shifts in the widespread religious concern about slavery. In the first decades of the study, Church of Scotland ministers led the way, but when the Kirk turned inward to focus on its own internal conflicts (where moderate and evangelical and patronage and antipatronage differences met the stereotype of antagonism), dissenting Presbyterians and non-Presbyterians took the lead. The courts were the venue in which, after some years of uncertainty, principles of Scottish law joined humanitarian sentiment in decreeing (at last in 1778) that slavery could not exist in Scotland. Central to the uncertainty was the question of whether a slave's baptism changed the legal standing of the slave, with opinion scattered widely on this legal-religious crux. Whyte's comparisons of Scotland's 1778 decision with the 1772 Somerset decision by Lord Mansfield (himself a Scot), which ambiguously ruled that slavery could not exist in England, are well done and offer room for further comparative analysis between Britain's northern and southern kingdoms. The voluntary abolitionist associations became important after the turn of the century; they were especially crucial for offering forums for some of the era's most notable antislave speeches and also for providing women the space for public activity. Whyte's careful attention to the public press reveals that most Scottish publicity worked against slavery but also that in scattered occasional articles and in the Glasgow Courier proslavery did not lack for articulate Scottish proponents. Trade associations were natural contexts for proslavery thought because of the high percentage of Scots in the West Indian plantations and in the shipping industries that depended on sugary and slavery. Finally, Whyte's detailed tabulations of petition drives show that for most of this period Scotland pulled above its weight, by comparison with England, in using this tool of agitation on behalf of abolition.

The book could have been strengthened by broadening its comparative reach. For instance, Whyte's attention to the many ways that Scots used the Bible to both defend and attack slavery is excellent but would have benefited from a brief glance at how similar arguments developed in the United States but with very different results. Occasionally, Whyte's diligent attention to the particulars of his research threatens to obscure the book's larger points of interpretation. Yet these are minor flaws in a most helpful book. Apart from the virtues already mentioned, Whyte also provides excellent biographical treatment of several of the Scottish abolitionists who contributed greatly to the final triumph of abolition in Britain, including James Ramsay, William Dickson, James Stephen, Zachary Macaulay, Henry Brougham, Andrew Thomson, and Ralph Wardlaw (whose lectures were attended by the young David Livingstone). The book is also very useful in probing the uncertainties and ambiguities faced by Scottish church and missionary personnel in the West Indies, especially after events like the slave rebellion of 1831, which was sparked by a black Baptist convert, Sam Sharpe. Whyte, in sum, has provided an illuminating and far-ranging prequel to C. Duncan Rice's The Scots Abolitionists, 1833–1861 (Baton Rouge, LA, 1981).