In Moral Commerce, Julie L. Holcomb provides an excellent assessment of the development of the abstention or free produce movement from the late seventeenth century to the American Civil War. Comparing its history in North America and Great Britain, she convincingly argues that the boycott of goods produced by enslaved people added significantly to the abolitionist cause. While previous studies have marked the free produce movement as a failure because activists faced severe obstacles in obtaining sugar and cotton produced by free laborers, Holcomb builds on recent work linking slavery to the transatlantic capitalist economy. “The rhetoric of abstention and free produce,” she concludes, “emphasized consumers' complicity in slavery and called on men and women to reject the immoral commerce in slaves and slave-labor goods” (193). By requiring consumers to make moral decisions while shopping and to consider the far-reaching tentacles of slavery throughout the United States and Britain, the free produce activists “made it impossible to remain fully neutral in the slavery debate” (193).

Holcomb adds importantly to the growing body of scholarship that emphasizes the role of Quakers, women, and African Americans in the abolitionist movement, beginning in the late seventeenth century. In the first of eight well-written and well-organized chapters, she locates the origins of free produce in Quaker opposition to slavery and the slave trade based on the Golden Rule, peace testimony, and biblical proscription of man stealing. In belief and practice, antislavery Friends developed their witness against slave-produced goods along with opposition to the swelling consumer market. John Hepburn and Ralph Sandiford denounced slavery as theft of human labor, permitting owners and their families to enjoy luxury goods and ease. Benjamin Lay practiced abstention, even crushing some of his wife Sarah's china because of its association with slave-produced sugar. John Woolman closely connected slave goods with the growing Atlantic consumer economy, rejecting both. In a comprehensive critique, he urged Friends to avoid all merchandise unnecessary for a godly life and to labor for themselves. Goods produced with slave labor—sugar, rum, and cloth dyes—were superfluous because of the injustice of slavery and the deleterious effects of lavishness on one's spiritual life. Both slavery and the luxury consumer market must be destroyed.

While Woolman convinced many Friends in North America and Great Britain of the need to boycott slave produce, nineteenth-century activists abandoned his testimony against the consumer economy. Holcomb neatly traces abstention advocacy among Friends as they split first in the Hicksite separation and then further divided among Wilburite Orthodox, Gurneyite Orthodox, Hicksites, and Progressives. Free produce and abolitionism played some role in the schisms, yet all four groups had members who boycotted slave goods and those who did not. By the mid-nineteenth century, Quakers and other abolitionists who advocated free produce argued two, often opposing, positions. One group, for whom Lucretia Mott was a spokesperson, supported abstention as a moral commitment that increased one's empathy with enslaved people. Other supporters of free produce hoped to undermine the market for slave goods by using economic power. Many political and moral abolitionists, including William Lloyd Garrison, opposed abstention as impossible to implement and thus a diversion from what they considered more promising strategies, such as networking, publication, lectures, and politics. The Unitarian minister Samuel J. May characterized free produce as trying to bail “out the Atlantic with a spoon” because of the difficulty of distinguishing slave produce from the larger economy, much of which depended on Southern cotton by 1850 (170).

Holcomb's focus on the work of women and black abolitionists in the free produce movement further elucidates the complexity and scope of the transatlantic boycott. Whereas American women led and participated in integrated and separate abolitionist societies—and were sorely disappointed when excluded from London's World Anti-Slavery Convention in 1840—British women joined successful sugar boycotts in the 1790s and 1820s. British opponents of the transatlantic slave trade and West Indies slavery recruited hundreds of thousands to the sugar boycott in large part by publicizing links between women's tea tables and slavery.

Though Holcomb has fewer sources for black abolitionists in the abstention movement than for white activists, the importance of African Americans to antislavery remains clear. Enslaved and free black women and men had restricted access to pen and paper in early America, yet their demands for freedom ring through petitions and the writings of white abolitionists. As Holcomb shows, African Americans could provide a reality check to whites who became enmeshed in debates over political, economic, moral, and free produce strategies.

Moral Commerce is a welcome contribution to the broadening literature on abolitionism, employing ample primary sources and a wide range of classic and recent secondary works. In tracing the complex, protean nature of free produce ideology and practice, Holcomb reminds us of the great variety of ways in which abolitionism developed over two centuries, correctly underscoring the contributions of Quakers, women, and black abolitionists over the long term.