Debates surrounding slavery and abolition remain relatively underexplored within the specialized literature on the history of economic thought. Simona Pisanelli’s concise yet comprehensive book addresses this scholarly gap. Across four chapters, she endeavors “to reconstruct the debate on the abolition of slavery that developed in France and Great Britain from the 18th century to the late 1830s” (p. 11). The focus on France and Great Britain is justified not only due to their political and economic prominence during that period but also because of the pioneering abolitionist debates that emerged within these empires from the eighteenth century onward.

The first two chapters examine the ways in which French and Scottish Enlightenment thinkers contributed to the development of a discourse that connected slavery to economic backwardness. Although this interpretation has been previously proposed by historians of abolitionism—notably David Brion Davis in The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1966)—Pisanelli provides new insights by examining the issue through the lens of the history of economic thought. This approach is particularly true in chapter 1, which explores how prominent French intellectuals of the eighteenth century addressed the issue of slavery, ranging from Montesquieu’s canonical critique to the perspectives of Victor Mirabeau, Dupont de Nemours, Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, the Marquis de Condorcet, and the challenges faced by Pierre-Paul Le Mercier de la Rivière and Pierre Poivre in reconciling their theoretical opposition to slavery with their roles as colonial officials. Consequently, from the outset, Pisanelli illustrates how the abolitionist commitment of several intellectuals was leveraged against the demands of realpolitik.

The second chapter focuses on the theoretical critique of slavery articulated by Scottish Enlightenment intellectuals such as Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, and John Millar, as well as the perspectives of Edmund Burke and James Steuart concerning the matter. Pisanelli recognizes that these intellectuals—apart from, perhaps, John Millar and Edmund Burke—were not actively involved in political debates concerning abolition, unlike many of their French counterparts. Nevertheless, she contends that they contributed to shaping a political stance that regards slavery as incompatible with modern society.

The subsequent chapters expand the analysis into the nineteenth century, convincingly arguing that an abolitionist commitment was not incompatible with the defense of colonialism and imperialism. Chapter 3 investigates French authors who addressed issues of slavery and colonization within the post-revolutionary context. Pisanelli examines writings by Abbé Grégoire, Jean-Baptiste Say, Charles Comte, Jean Charles Léonard Simonde de Sismondi, and Alexis de Tocqueville, demonstrating that some of these political economists analyzed the problems associated with slavery and abolition from a theoretical perspective, while others proposed concrete measures to address the challenges of imperial building. The author underscores that some of the most “practical” abolitionists—like Sismondi and Tocqueville—supported the project to colonize (or “civilize”) African territories, as advocated in the French campaign to invade Algeria, as a solution to the socio-economic difficulties faced by the empire.

The fourth chapter shifts back to Britain, where the abolitionist debate was also closely intertwined with considerations about national and imperial prosperity. Through the analysis of writings by Henry Brougham, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Carlyle, and John Elliott Cairnes, Pisanelli incorporates debates that occurred after the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies. Once again, she illustrates how the abolitionist commitments of political economists such as John Stuart Mill could be accompanied by the support of colonial policies and imperial expansion. In the British context, emigration and the colonization of “free lands” in continental North America were perceived as solutions to the domestic challenges stemming from the Industrial Revolution.

Political economists in France and Britain during this period, Pisanelli contends, were concerned about the costs and benefits of colonization to their respective nations. Their theoretical reflections about slavery and practical proposals for abolition addressed this broader issue. A prevailing theme in the debate, both in France and Britain, was the comparative cost and productivity of free versus slave labor. Pisanelli’s research elucidates that, even if unpersuasive, claims about the lower cost and higher productivity of free labor have been prevalent since the mid-eighteenth century.

The book merits praise for concisely yet thoroughly analyzing the ideas of prominent philosophers, civil servants, and political economists on the issues of slavery and colonialism. Nevertheless, the criteria used for selecting these authors are not sufficiently elucidated. It often appears that Pisanelli chose the authors primarily based on their significance within the history of economic thought rather than their relevance to the abolitionist movement. This becomes particularly evident in the second chapter, which privileges the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers to the detriment of authors whose influence in the abolitionist debate was significantly more evident, such as Malachy Postlethwayt. The absence of a section dedicated to Abbé Raynal’s (and Denis Diderot’s) Histoire des deux Indes (1770) exemplifies another shortcoming of the selection criteria, as the Histoire was highly influential among abolitionists across the Atlantic.

The abolitionist movement was, from the start, transatlantic in scope. A key network of activists and societies across Britain, France, and the United States developed since the late eighteenth century. British and French abolitionists remained in close contact, discussing strategies and exchanging publications. Abolitionist societies in both nations undertook the translation of pamphlets and essays produced elsewhere. This significant aspect of the history of transatlantic abolitionism has not been sufficiently examined in Pisanelli’s work. France and Great Britain are considered as essentially separate cases; the networks among authors are underexplored. Nevertheless, the book constitutes a valuable and much-needed contribution to the literature on the history of economic thought. Pisanelli demonstrates that reflections on political economy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries could scarcely avoid addressing issues related to slavery and colonization.