It is increasingly apparent that, whilst market forces were pivotal to the growth of transatlantic slavery in the post-Columbus Americas, the dismemberment of slave societies in the Western Hemisphere was rarely, if ever, dictated by their economic inefficiency. Slavery in French Saint-Domingue, probably the richest slave colony in the world in 1790, disintegrated, as C. L. R. James noted three-quarters of a century ago, in the face of slave insurrection in 1791–1804. The decision by parliament to outlaw British involvement in slave carrying in 1807 and then to end slavery in the British Caribbean after 1833 occurred despite the fact that both the slave trade and slave ownership remained profitable until parliamentary intervention. In the southern United States, home to the largest single number of slaves in the Americas in 1860, it was civil war and federal political intervention, rather than economic inefficiency, which formally ended slavery by 1865. Notwithstanding efforts by some historians to continue to try to breathe life into claims that slavery was inherently inefficient as a labour institution, factors other than economic ones primarily seem to have determined the shift from enslaved to less coerced forms of labour in the Atlantic world in the century after 1790.Footnote ² As an institution, slavery became increasingly unacceptable, morally and politically, in the course of the nineteenth century. This revulsion against slavery was to become a global phenomenon in the twentieth century, though the emancipation movement still has unfinished business even today.

The international redefinition of slavery as socially unacceptable was just one of the cultural parameters that shaped the history of transatlantic slavery. The racial nature of transatlantic slavery was seemingly predicated on western European views about who might and might not be enslaved, with whites falling into the latter category and Africans into the former.Footnote ³ At the same time, the growth of slave exports from Africa to the Americas hinged upon the development of cross-cultural trade, in which gendered patterns of European demand for labour helped determine a male dominance among slave exports to the Americas and local African political arrangements and social institutions shaped long-run trends in the scale of slave exports from different localities. To write histories of transatlantic slavery without acknowledging the cultural and political parameters within which economic behaviour or market exchange took place is now inconceivable. Such parameters were among ‘the necessities of their environment’ that shaped the boundaries of behaviour of human agents to which James alluded in the citation noted in the epigraph to this article. James still claimed, however, that agents were able to ‘make history’, and went on to suggest that the ‘business of historians’ is to ‘portray the limits of … necessities and the realization, complete or partial, of all possibilities’. Precisely what James meant by ‘the limits of necessities’ is unclear, but it seems likely that what he had in mind was the cultural, moral, and political framework within which human agency could operate and shape social change. By emphasizing that agents can make history, however, James also left open the possibility that agents could reshape the boundaries of socially acceptable behaviour, thereby permitting interplay between agency and culture in determining social change. This, in turn, brings into focus issues relating to the distribution of power in society and the relative capacity of different agents to influence the codes affecting behaviour. For James, agency, culture, power, and social change were inextricably intertwined.

James advanced his arguments in the context of a study of the Haitian Revolution and Toussaint L'Ouverture, seen by its author as one of ‘the great men of history’ and a critical figure in articulating and defending the principles of the French Revolution in France's former slave colony. James's study embodied a determination to shift attention from the then established heroes of antislavery such as Granville Sharp, Thomas Clarkson, and William Wilberforce towards those who, like L'Ouverture, fought valiantly and successfully against slavery from the inside.Footnote ⁴ In highlighting L'Ouverture's contribution, James differed from fellow West Indian scholars, such as Eric Williams, who chose to emphasize economic change as the critical factor dictating the course of antislavery activity.Footnote ⁵ James reminds us, too, that, just as the enslavement process commonly involved violence, so the route to slave emancipation was by no means universally peaceful. James's work may be seen, therefore, as a plea for a reassessment of antislavery that takes account of both internal and external opposition to slavery as well as of the boundary between ‘where the social forces end and the impress of personality begins’.Footnote ⁶ The reassessment of the interplay between agency and culture for which James called continues, seventy years after Black Jacobins was published. It now also extends well beyond antislavery itself and encompasses both the mechanics of slave societies and their historical legacies. Urging historians to explore the interaction between agency and culture in shaping history, James advanced, then, an approach to historical research that is now commonplace among researchers of transatlantic slavery and its abolition.

The subject matter and approaches of the books reviewed here vary widely, ranging from biography and narrative history to investigations of social capital and the cultural context of slavery and ideological and political change. The collective chronological span of the books is equally broad, ranging from the early seventeenth to the early twentieth century, a span of time that witnessed massive changes politically and socially throughout the Atlantic world, not all directly related to the rise and fall of slavery. The geographical worlds in which the books are located include Australia, Brazil, Britain, Canada, France, the Middle East, the USA, West Africa, and the West Indies, as well as the Atlantic Basin more generally. They thus encompass spaces across which the cultural context of human activity and incidence of political and social change varied considerably. A common thread of these books, however, is that they each deal with an issue relating to the history of transatlantic or other forms of slavery and, more specifically, to the interplay between agency, culture, and power upon which James placed so much weight. To illustrate and evaluate how these elements interacted in shaping the rise and fall of transatlantic slavery between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries – our principal concern here – we shall focus on three issues on which the books in question shed light. The first is the institutional and cultural foundations of transatlantic trade, including the slave trade; the second is the incidence and patterns of slave resistance and their impact on abolitionism; and the third is the relationship between social capital, politics, and ideology in determining the outcome of abolitionism in Britain and the USA.

In the history of colonialism and slavery in the English-speaking world, Barbados holds a special place. First claimed by the English in 1625, Barbados quickly came to be seen, according to Larry Gragg, in his study of transplanted Englishmen, as ‘the most remarkable place in the English empire’ (p. 28). It soon emerged as the site for an intense struggle for land and influence among rival political factions at the court of Charles I. In this respect, political tensions in England helped shape the island's early history under English rule. Even more importantly, however, Barbados became the epicentre in the 1640s of a ‘sugar revolution’ that, notwithstanding the arrival of slavery in Brazil a century earlier, was to transform the island into the first true American slave-plantation society. Not only was this a society gripped by near monoculture but by 1660 one in which enslaved Africans vastly outnumbered white settlers. In undergoing this transformation, Barbados became the jewel in the English seventeenth-century empire and arguably the richest colony anywhere in the world at that time. Barbados was the prototype for slave societies throughout the Caribbean world and even parts of mainland North America, notably South Carolina. Moreover, given its continuing demand for enslaved Africans – who failed to reproduce from the beginning – it provoked a surge in enthusiasm for slave trading among London merchants and at the English court that soon matched that in any other European country. Within a generation of Barbados's sugar revolution the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading into Africa, founded in 1663, and its successor the Royal African Company, chartered in 1672, had established a strong English slave-trading presence at the Gambia, the Gold Coast, and the Slave Coast. The ending of the Royal African Company's monopoly of English trade to Africa in 1698 prompted new merchant groups to extend ties with other regions in Africa. Just 166 square miles in size, Barbados was the American hub of the British Atlantic Empire in the second half of the seventeenth century. Furthermore, it was to continue to exert a powerful influence, economically and politically, over the empire's history throughout the eighteenth century.

Taking their lead from Adam Smith, historians have long recognized that the slave-based sugar revolution in Barbados and its extension to other colonies within and outside the English-speaking Caribbean required not just land and enslaved African labour, but also finance and credit. Building plantations consumed large amounts of capital investment in slaves, land, and equipment. The movement of sugar to markets in England and the return flows of consumer and capital goods that this permitted were lubricated by credit, as was the continuing purchase of enslaved Africans by sugar planters. What happened in Barbados foreshadowed what was to happen elsewhere, as sugar planters grew rich, but also accumulated substantial debts. How the initial sugar revolution was financed has been a source of debate. Traditional arguments that emphasize the contribution of the Dutch have recently been challenged.Footnote ⁷ Gragg reinforces such challenges with reviews of the pre-revolution activities of settlers and of the personal histories of planters. These lead him to claim that English merchants played ‘a key role in financing the island's transition to sugar cultivation’ (p. 132). This finding is consistent with the subsequent history of the island, explored by Simon Smith in his important study of the Lascelles family and its commercial and financial connections with the Atlantic world, especially Barbados. Smith's study shows that, as in the initial phase of Barbados's colonial history, London capital continued to underpin Barbados's economy in its subsequent years.

For both Gragg and Smith, however, the confidence with which British merchants and sugar houses invested in Barbados – or indeed other British plantation colonies in the Americas – is as important an issue as the scale of their financial underwriting of sugar production and trading itself. Gragg's response is to highlight the disintegration of the indigenous population, together with its values and institutions, in the face of external invasion and their replacement by English political ideas and social and cultural institutions by the charter generation of new settlers. In effect, Barbados became an island outpost of English society in the Caribbean. In time, this would change as the arrival of slaves brought an African imprint to Barbados society, but the early transplanting of English values to Barbados helped, in Gragg's view, to ‘create a more predictable environment for investment’ in the colony (p. 87).Footnote ⁸ For Smith, dealing with a later period of Barbadian history, the answer seems to lie primarily in social capital and commercial networks, together with an acknowledgement that institutional adjustments in financing slave sales after the sugar depression of the 1730s reinforced the trust nurtured by networking. The history of the Lascelles family and its connections offer powerful support for such arguments. So, too, does Madge Dresser's study of the eighteenth-century slave merchants of Bristol, where she shows that, like the Lascelles, Bristolians established family connections with the islands in order to try to protect themselves against malfeasance on the part of debtors. In the long run, this proved insufficient to prevent Bristol merchants from losing their national standing within British colonial trade. Nevertheless, without such ties, the level of investment by the British in the colonies would evidently have been much lower, thereby slowing growth. Political connections and institutions, social capital and networking were thus vital props in supporting personal enterprise in the creation and growth of slave societies in the British Caribbean, which became the economic crucible of the British colonial system through 1776.

If the collapse of indigenous populations and cultures allowed Europeans to impose their values and forms of governance in much of the Americas, the same could not be said of their relations with Africa. Africa was, of course, the largest single source of involuntary migrants to the Americas before 1850 and their labour was fundamental to the exploitation of American land resources by European adventurers. Overall, between 1500 and 1867, some 12.5 million enslaved Africans were taken to the Americas by carriers of European descent, no less than 6 million in the eighteenth century alone. Up to two-thirds were male, the temporal pattern and scale of slave exports being largely dictated by conditions external to Africa. But while demand for slaves was largely determined by the need for labour in European colonies in the Americas, it is important to bear in mind that slave trafficking was not imposed on Africa by Europeans. On the contrary, enslaved Africans, as both Michael Bush and William Gervase Clarence-Smith both remind us, had been trafficked within Africa, as well as from Africa to other parts of the world for centuries before European contact with Atlantic Africa by sea. Moreover, whilst Europeans sometimes attempted to kidnap Africans into slavery, the movement of the vast majority of enslaved Africans to the Americas was the outcome of commercial dealings between African slave suppliers and overseas buyers. Behind these dealings were processes of slave recruitment that typically involved violence, notably warfare, raiding, and kidnapping. The consequences for Africa of the forced removal of millions of its people into slavery outside the continent continue to be hotly debated.

Insights into how Afro-European commercial encounters were conducted are provided by Robert Harms's study of the voyage of the Diligent from Vannes in Brittany to Ouidah in the Bight of Benin in 1731; by Randy Sparkes's narrative of two sons of a leading trading family of Old Calabar seized in 1767 during a notorious local massacre involving British captains; and by Bruce Mouser's edited version of the logbook of the voyage of the Sandown of London to Sierra Leone in 1793–4. The shifting geographical location of these three events was symptomatic of a wider reorientation of European activity in Africa between 1730 and 1800. This involved an increase in trade at the Bight of Biafra and Upper Guinea relative to that at the Gold Coast and Bight of Benin, where Europeans had earlier established forts and factories on shore. No such establishments existed in the Bight of Biafra and, relative to the establishments at the Gold Coast, the European factories at Sierra Leone were modest in scale. As Harms shows, these differences in the intensity of the European presence underline the kaleidoscopic nature of slaving activities in Africa, with their ‘diverse national and local endeavors’ (p. xiv). Other factors affecting such diversity were socio-ecological and epidemiological conditions, preferences for imported trade goods, and local power structures. The last were particularly important, for whether trade was conducted on board ship or ashore, it was commonly mediated through local political leaders, respect for whose status and authority was paramount. Without their support, transactions might have been impossible. In some cases, local intervention extended to contract enforcement between private parties, notably in transactions involving credit and where no European residents were available to settle disputes. As in the Americas, trust was a critical factor in European dealings in Africa. Unlike the Americas, however, where indigenous populations often collapsed on contact with Europeans, in Africa, Europeans were required to work with local merchants, respect local political authorities, and even adapt local credit institutions in their pursuit of cross-cultural trade. Often built up through iterative exchange, social capital was an important feature of Afro-European trade in the era of the export slave trade, but it is evident that the rules shaping the environment in Africa within which slave carriers operated were primarily local rather than European. This situation was to change only in the context of moves by external powers, notably Britain after 1815, to suppress the export slave trade to the Americas.

The rates of return that slave owners and shippers gained from their activities has been much contested, as has the contribution of such returns to the financing of economic change in western Europe and the USA. As noted earlier, throughout the Atlantic Basin slave carrying and slave ownership remained profitable activities as long as they were legally permitted. Moreover, whatever the aggregate returns from slavery-related activities, it is incontestable that considerable fortunes could be accrued from them. As Smith shows, the Lascelles were one British family to prosper on the backs of slaves, but they were not alone, either in Britain or elsewhere. On the contrary, slavery enriched governors of the Bank of England and presidents of the United States, including several of the Founding Fathers. As these two examples show, wealth from slavery insinuated itself throughout all levels of transatlantic societies. In the case of Britain, on which the studies here focus most attention, profits from the slave trade and sugar plantations helped build Harewood House, near Leeds. They also contributed, considerably in Dresser's opinion, to the urban renaissance of Bristol in the 1720s and 1730s and, according to Iain Whyte's study, to the building or remodelling of houses and estates by Scots ‘in their native land’ (p. 46). Profits from the slave trade financed the expansion of ports, such as Liverpool, and, in the view of some, gave birth to key elements of change in British manufacturing production.Footnote ⁹ These last claims are debatable, but wealth generated from slavery undeniably infiltrated British political life in the eighteenth century in much the same way – though to a lesser extent – that it did in the plantation colonies of European powers in the Americas or in states involved in slave supply in Africa. In the case of eighteenth-century Britain, the insinuation of slavery-based wealth into politics was fostered by absentee sugar planters, some of whom bought representation in parliament and thereby association, and even friendship, with some of the political leaders of their day. Friendships forged in this way sometimes helped to change attitudes towards slavery. Such friendships also sometimes transcended attitudes to slavery and the slave trade, indicating that, as elsewhere in the Atlantic world, social capital alone was not necessarily a determinant of economic success or political change. The very fact, however, that wealth from slavery became so deeply embedded in Britain's social and political fabric makes all the more remarkable the decision by Britain first to outlaw the slave trade in 1807 and then slavery in the British empire in 1833. The fact, too, that Britain did so by legislation passed by a property-owning parliament also raises questions about the route to slave emancipation followed by other nations, notably those such as the United States with long and continuing cultural connections with Britain.

The successful revolt of the slaves of Saint-Domingue against their masters, which preceded Britain's abolition of its slave trade, has helped focus attention among historians on how far the enslaved themselves contributed to their own emancipation in the Americas. This remains a complex and contentious issue. The uprising in Saint-Domingue was itself, of course, a vital moment; it alone liberated close to half a million enslaved Africans out of a total slave population in the Caribbean region of 1.4 million in 1790, making it one of the greatest acts of self-emancipation of enslaved people in history.Footnote ¹⁰ It was, however, only the most dramatic example of an endemic resistance by the enslaved to their condition that occurred in every sphere of transatlantic slavery. Such resistance took a multitude of forms in a wide variety of contexts. Sandra Lauderdale Graham's fascinating story of Caetano, a Brazilian slave who, in 1836–40, successfully fought her master's attempt to force her to accept an unattractive marriage to a fellow slave, highlights a highly personalized form of resistance that relied on the law to achieve its goal. Caetano was not alone in using the law in this way.Footnote ¹¹ Her personal struggle against her master was one that occurred in countless ways and situations throughout the slave-owning parts of the Americas. As Betty Wood reminds us, the family was ‘one of the major battlefields between owners and enslaved people’ in the Americas (p. 41). The fight extended, however, beyond the individual and the family. George and Willene Hendrick's reconstruction of the slave revolt on board the ship Creole in 1841, bound from Richmond to New Orleans, is reflective of collective resistance in the intra-American traffic in slaves, of which the uprising on the Amistad in 1839 is another famous example. This, in turn, was just one element within a much bigger picture of shipboard slave revolts that occurred on thousands of transatlantic voyages between 1500 and 1867.Footnote ¹² Specific reports of actual or potential uprisings in such voyages appear in the records of the Diligent and Sandown, noted earlier, while possible explanations of such revolts, including African fears of cannibalism by whites, are offered by Alan Rice in his study of Black narratives (pp. 125–6). Revolts also occurred as an element within resistance after slaves disembarked ship in the Americas. As the collection of essays edited by Kenneth Greenberg on a celebrated revolt in August 1831 in Virginia led by Nat Turner emphasizes, such revolts were complex events. They often included American-born as well as African-born slaves. They quickly gave rise to folklore and collective memories within slave communities. Like their shipboard counterparts, revolts such as Turner's were part of a long catalogue of attempts by slaves to redefine their status by asserting their humanity. This included no less than three major rebellions by enslaved Africans in British mainland North America before 1776, each documented by Wood (pp. 60–9), as well as three others in the last two decades of British West Indian slavery. The last of these – in Jamaica in 1831 – occurred just months after Nat Turner's revolt in Virginia.

What contribution, however, did resistance, violent or non-violent, by the enslaved make towards their emancipation? This question is particularly relevant to the British case, where, unlike Saint-Domingue and the United States, slaves gained freedom through legislative processes rather than war. Agency by slaves in Saint-Domingue between 1791 and 1804 cast a long shadow over subsequent abolitionism. The huge destruction of life and property that accompanied the war of liberation was widely reported in Britain and elsewhere. The colony's economic decay after 1804 also created an unhappy image of a post-slave society. Certainly, self-emancipation in Saint-Domingue put British abolitionism on the back foot. Recent reappraisals of other rebellions, as well as other forms of violence endemic to slavery have, nevertheless, reminded us of how slave resistance – and, equally importantly, of slave owners' reactions to it – could affect stereotypes of Africans and planters, thereby changing the nature of the political discourse surrounding abolitionism. In this respect, Rice's claim that Africans became ‘agents in their own history, even during the most extreme periods of repression’ seems to have real substance. To see, however, shipboard revolts and ‘shipboard slave narratives’ as ‘key indicators of an autonomous African impulse’, as Rice argues (p. 25), may be too narrow a window through which to view the contribution of the enslaved to their own emancipation.

Reports and investigations of the treatment of slaves by their owners did little before 1833 to dispel one contemporary depiction of planters as ‘a cruel and barbarous set of people’.Footnote ¹³ On the contrary, such reports probably reinforced such impressions. As Dresser observes, the trial of a Bristol slave ship captain, John Kimber, accused and acquitted of murdering on board ship a young African woman who refused his sexual advances, attracted many column inches of reporting in the press in 1791–2. This was at the very time when the Saint-Domingue rebellion was in its initial stages. Such reports were acknowledged even by slave traders as providing fertile recruiting ground for abolitionist sentiment. Robert Gudmestad's A troublesome commerce forcibly reminds us of such an outcome when evangelicals in the southern United States began to identify interstate slave trafficking and speculation in slaves with the destruction of black families. Acceptance of the practice threatened, according to Gudmestad, to ‘seduce church members into worshipping money rather than God’ (p. 134). Efforts by planters to suppress rebellion in the British colonies were equally corrosive of a reputation already known for insensitivity and inhumanity. Living under the shadow of Saint-Domingue and under constant fear of what David Brion Davis has called ‘nuclear retribution’ by their chattels, planters typically reacted with great ferocity to rebellions, mobilizing large contingents of militia and organizing show trials and mass executions.Footnote ¹⁴ In this respect, British West Indian planters differed little from those who defeated Nat Turner's revolt in 1831. In the process, however, they created martyrs and folk heroes, exposed the corrupting effect of unfettered power on human behaviour, and highlighted the high social cost of keeping order in West Indian slave communities. The last may have been an important consideration for parliamentarians pondering the relative merits of retaining or ending slavery in the West Indies after the Jamaica revolt of 1831.

Greenberg's edited collection of essays on Nat Turner shows that, as in Saint-Domingue, slave rebellion frequently prompted heavy loss of life and property. In Turner's revolt, the death toll came to over sixty whites and around twenty slaves, including Turner himself. This revolt was one of a series of uprisings or conspiracies that convulsed slave societies in the two decades after 1815. It included rebellions in Barbados in 1816, Demerara in 1823, and Jamaica in 1831, the Denmark Vesey conspiracy of 1822 in the southern United States, and a major uprising in Bahia in Brazil in 1835.Footnote ¹⁵ As with Saint-Domingue, where rebellion in 1791 seems to have been inspired by the French Revolution, rebellions elsewhere in the Americas were commonly linked to or shaped by external events.Footnote ¹⁶ Links to external events are perhaps most clearly identified in the case of the Muslim-led Male revolt in Bahia in 1835, which seems to have been related to internal conflicts within Yorubaland in West Africa.Footnote ¹⁷ Other linkages between revolts and external events have also been detected, notably by Davis in relation to rebellions in the British West Indies between 1816 and 1831. According to Davis, despite the large numbers of slaves involved, few whites were killed in these rebellions compared to Turner's 1831 revolt or those of the eighteenth-century Caribbean. Davis attributes this modest death toll to restraint and discipline among rebel leaders, who were ‘aware of a growing and powerful antislavery sentiment’ in Britain, and were apparently keen to avoid de-railing abolitionist efforts to free them by over-zealous destruction of human life.Footnote ¹⁸ The penetration of British West Indian slave communities by Christianity in the early nineteenth century, commonly in the face of planter opposition, may have been one important factor in shaping slave behaviour during revolts. The political awareness among slaves to which Davis alludes, however, was more than just a post-1815 phenomenon. It was evident at the very start of the British abolitionist campaign in the 1780s and thus before the Saint-Domingue uprising created consternation.Footnote ¹⁹ This suggests that a high level of political intelligence informed African resistance to enslavement throughout the abolitionist era, enabling both the enslaved and ultimately their abolitionist allies to go some way towards countermanding claims, based on events in Saint-Domingue, that a successful antislavery campaign would necessarily cause social and economic chaos and destruction of property in the British colonies.Footnote ²⁰

The political intelligence displayed by enslaved Africans in Britain's colonies in the age of abolitionism may be seen as one manifestation of what Steven Hahn in A nation under our feet has described as an Atlantic-wide political and cultural ‘contact zone’ of commerce that created spaces in which enslaved Africans might intermingle with working people from Europe and North America (p. 52). It may also be seen as manifesting a more broadly based re-education of both political leaders and the wider public regarding the humanity of Africans in some parts of the Atlantic world, notably Britain and the northern United States. British pro-slavery forces consistently invoked negative images of Africa and Africans to legitimize racially based slavery. Such arguments retained political currency within and outside Britain well into the nineteenth century. They evidently informed the British publication of Robert Adams's narrative in 1816, as well as the worldview of antebellum southern planters who, as Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese show, thought that ‘without the strong hand of a white master, the blacks would relapse into barbarism’ (p. 38). Elsewhere, such views, as Cassandra Pybus and Hamish Maxwell-Stewart reveal (p. 127), informed the understanding of their penal conditions by American patriots transported by the British to Australia for their part in an attempted invasion of Upper Canada in 1838. Antidotes to such racist views, however, were provided by a growing community of people of African descent in late eighteenth-century Britain. This community included God-fearing, socially well-connected, and enterprising African authors such as Phillis Wheatley, Ignatius Sancho, John Marrant, Ottobah Cugoano, and Olaudah Equiano. The writings of these Afro-Britons attained a wide circulation in Britain. Equiano's narrative published in 1789 alone enjoying no less than nine editions by 1794. As these multiple editions suggest, readership of Equiano's narrative was wide, with an unauthorized version being published in New York as early as 1791.Footnote ²¹ How far Equiano's narrative circulated among free Africans in North America is unknown, but, as a businessman and supporter of abolitionism, Equiano certainly had counterparts in mainland North America. Among them were James Forten, born in Philadelphia in 1766 to a family of African descent, and the subject of Julie Winch's excellent biography. As Winch shows, Forten built an impressive shipbuilding business in Philadelphia and became a writer and fervent supporter of the transatlantic abolitionist cause. In the process, Forten befriended William Lloyd Garrison, among other American abolitionists, as well as prominent figures in the British antislavery movement. Though they never met, the lives of Equiano and Forten thus became symbolically intertwined, providing living proof of African humanity, personal achievement, and successful business acumen. In a comment made in 1841, Winch reminds us (p. 323), the British Quaker Joseph Sturge emphasized the importance of Forten's life as ‘a practical demonstration of the absurdity, as well as injustice, of that prejudice which would stamp the mark of intellectual inferiority on his complexion and race’. Like Equiano, Forten was just one of many of African descent to underline Sturge's point.

If enslaved and free Africans contributed through collective resistance and individual achievement to redefining contemporary attitudes towards their humanity and intellectual capabilities, the rate at which this transformation in attitudes proceeded varied across space. It barely changed in the antebellum south or even for some time after, as Fox-Genovese and Genovese and Hahn remind us. It evidently made more progress in Britain and the northern United States where whites and blacks sometimes joined forces in the early nineteenth century in opposing slavery. Nevertheless, even in Britain, which is commonly seen as having been in the vanguard of abolitionism, the impulse towards slave emancipation took root in the decade before the first decisive act of African agency against slavery in Saint-Domingue in 1791. Moreover, according to Christopher Brown and Iain Whyte, this impulse embodied an antislavery ethic that had become well entrenched in intellectual circles and in other parts of British society by the 1770s. It also extended beyond the ranks of the Quakers, the archetypal opponents of slavery in the north Atlantic world. Indeed, as Whyte shows (pp. 32–3), the Scottish judiciary turned against slavery as early as 1778, when in the case of Knight v. Wedderburn, slavery was declared incompatible with Scottish law. Such antislavery impulses were reinforced by an emerging, albeit still cautious, questioning of slavery on economic grounds, encapsulated, as Seymour Drescher observes in his Mighty experiment, in Adam Smith's tentative, but ultimately politically valuable, economic indictment of the institution in his Wealth of nations (1776). This ethic sat alongside various early schemes for slave emancipation, that, in Brown's opinion, collectively marked ‘a transitional moment, a qualitative shift, a conceptual leap in British antislavery thought’ that looked beyond condemnation of slavery to alternatives (p. 231). An antislavery sentiment was thus embedded within widening sections of Christian thinking, philosophical ideas, and political economy in Britain before either the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions, or indeed the British Industrial Revolution, shifted the socio-political landscape within which antislavery was evolving. A key issue for historians is to explain how this sentiment – an ‘antislavery without abolitionism’, in Brown's terminology – crystallized into a potent political movement. This was a movement, moreover, that, within fifty years, and ostensibly on humanitarian or moral grounds, succeeded in ingraining into the world's first industrial nation what Drescher terms a ‘commitment to antislavery as a matter of national honor’ (p. 236).

For the last half-century the work of Eric Williams, one of James's fellow West Indian scholars, has cast a long shadow over the historiography of British antislavery and specifically the role of agency and religion in shaping the movement that reformed Britain's relationship with its imperial possessions.Footnote ²² Dismissing the so-called ‘Clapham saints’, with their religiously inspired humanitarianism, Williams reduced the rise and outcome of antislavery in Britain to a political calculus of national economic self-interest. In this calculus, the harmful consequences of the American Revolution for British mercantilism and for the economic prospects of the British West Indies are held, in tandem with broader changes in British capitalism, to have induced parliament to embrace abolitionism and free trade. In making this argument, Williams very largely airbrushed the abolitionists – white and black – out of the antislavery story, relegating those who fought against slavery, whether from inside or outside the system, to the role of bystanders in a drama primarily dictated by impersonal economic forces. Articulated over fifty years ago and widely criticized ever since, Williams's interpretation of the ending of British Caribbean slavery nevertheless still continues to attract favour among some historians.Footnote ²³

Whereas Williams and his followers have tended to marginalize human agency in explaining British antislavery, Whyte, Brown, and Drescher reassert its centrality. Each focuses on different periods or aspects of British antislavery: Whyte on its Scottish dimension, Brown on the formative years of British abolitionism, and Drescher on its later stages. Whyte emphasizes that whilst the Scots gained disproportionately from the growth of Britain's slave-based empire, they also had a powerful influence in shaping the mobilization of popular opposition to slavery in Britain. He places particular emphasis on the role of the Church of Scotland and civic organizations north of the border in mobilizing ‘a truly national campaign’ (p. 101) and in generating a disproportionate number of petitions against the slave trade in 1788–92. He also highlights the prominent role of Scots, such as Henry Brougham, William Dickson, Zachary Macaulay, and James Ramsey, or those born of Scots parents, such as James Stephen, in London-centred abolitionism through the 1830s. All received a Scottish education and three – Dickson, Ramsey, and Stephen – were students or associates at Aberdeen of the antislavery philosopher, James Beattie. Except for Brougham, all had lived in the West Indies and had thus been ‘close to the reality of its slave system’ (p. 107). Whyte reminds us, therefore, that if social capital and networking underpinned the growth of transatlantic slavery, their role in nurturing antislavery activity demands equal attention.

Social capital and human agency also figure prominently in Brown's book, which seeks to position early abolitionism within wider concerns over British imperial relations and institutions in the aftermath of defeat in mainland North America in 1783. Prompted by various studies, notably the writings of the Scottish-born former resident of St Kitts, James Ramsay, such concerns coalesced around the interlinked issues of reform of slavery and the local state of Anglicanism. In Brown's view, however, two events helped transform these concerns into a parliamentary and extra-parliamentary movement to abolish the slave trade. One was the emergence by 1786 of a circle of devout Anglicans who met regularly at Barham Court in Teston, south of Clapham. The circle included Ramsey, Thomas Clarkson, Hannah More, and William Wilberforce among its members, and, Brown emphasizes, preceded the more famous multi-faith ‘Clapham sect’. The other event was the willingness of such individuals to confront the social stigma attached to ‘fervid piety’ and to create ‘a space for godliness in public life’, inside as well as outside parliament (p. 384). As Lawrence Jennings's study of the court-based French abolitionist movement and Stanley Harrold's reader on American abolitionists demonstrate, this extra-parliamentary campaigning marked out British abolitionism from its counterparts elsewhere. Moreover, it allowed a small coterie of Anglican evangelicals to become, in Brown's words, ‘the progenitors of a cultural movement’ (p. 389).

If Brown's interpretation of abolitionism helps to restore the reputation of Britain's white abolitionists, Drescher's book reminds us that antislavery involved a contest of ideas in which the realities of slave-based economies competed with theories of social science and notions of human progress to shape the parliamentary decision to end British West Indian slavery. In many respects, Drescher's Mighty experiment is a natural corollary to his earlier work, which highlighted the resilience of sugar economies wherever slave imports remained open, the decline of slave populations in the British West Indies after imports ended after 1807, and the mobilization of free labour in Britain in support of abolitionism.Footnote ²⁴ Drescher's latest book is premised on an awareness of the rising ‘cultural status of science’ in the eighteenth century (p. 6) and seeks to show how morally driven abolitionists tried to appropriate models of experimental practice, counterfactuals, and demographic and economic projection to validate antislavery arguments. This attempt to introduce social science – and its growing authority – into the politics of slavery was part of a wider intrusion of science into British political discourse in the age of abolitionism. As Drescher observes, however, projections of how slave societies or Britain's relations with Africa might evolve after abolition often proved indecisive, or even counterproductive, weapons in the service of the emancipation cause. In some cases, indeed, such as the abolitionist-inspired free labour colony of Sierra Leone, they proved embarrassing, encouraging abolitionists to make strategic adjustments in their political deployment of scientific evidence. Nevertheless, the invocation of scientific method set the tone for British abolitionism from its earliest days, and ultimately determined the measured process by which emancipation of slaves in the British West Indies was intended to proceed. As Drescher acknowledges, the timing of the abolition act in 1833 was influenced by factors such as the orchestrated mass petitions to parliament of 1830–1 and 1833, the slave uprising in Jamaica in 1831, and the strengthening of abolitionist representation in parliament under the first elections after the Reform Act of 1832. Described by its architect, the colonial secretary, Edward Stanley, as a ‘mighty experiment’, the Act combined staged emancipation with compensation for slave owners derived from higher sugar import duties in Britain. British consumers, as well as the enslaved themselves, thus paid for emancipation. The terms of the legislation nevertheless allowed parliamentarians, in Drescher's words, ‘to demonstrate that they were in charge, legislating emancipation as a rational choice for controlled social change’ (p. 145).

The abolition act of 1833 did not end all British links with slavery or with slave-based economies. Slave-grown sugar from Cuba and Brazil continued to reach Britain. So, too, did slave-produced palm oil from West Africa and slave-grown cotton from the United States for Britain's textile mills. Moreover, Britain continued to endorse other forms of servitude as labour substitutes for slaves or, as Pybus and Maxwell-Stewart highlight, as judicial punishment. Nevertheless, the liberation of around 800,000 slaves in the British West Indies under the 1833 Act may be seen as a critical step in what Davis has recently called the ‘willed moral achievement’ that contributed to the international dismantling of transatlantic slavery by the end of the nineteenth century.Footnote ²⁵ In other parts of the Americas slave emancipation commonly occurred without compensating slaves, though sometimes with compensation and usually at minimum cost to slave owners.Footnote ²⁶ Emancipation in most cases occurred, too, without the huge loss of life that disfigured the process in Saint-Domingue. The notable exception, of course, was the United States, where, despite efforts by some abolitionists to achieve emancipation through peaceful means, formal emancipation was declared by the Federal government in the middle of the Civil War and effectively realized by the Union army's victory in 1865. The product of a war which President Lincoln claimed ‘the original disturbing cause’ to be slavery,Footnote ²⁷ the formal freeing of slaves in the United States was the most costly, though largest, single emancipation exercise in the history of the Americas, if not the world. The civil war alone cost over 600,000 lives and caused the Confederate states alone to lose by 1865 up to two-thirds of their pre-war wealth. This was several times the cost of emancipating the slaves by more peaceful means.Footnote ²⁸ On the positive side, the war also liberated close to 4 million enslaved people of African descent, all but a tiny minority of them born in the United States.Footnote ²⁹ The number liberated by the war was over ten times the 368,000 slaves living in Cuba in 1862 and 2.3 times the 1.715 million in Brazil in 1864.Footnote ³⁰ It was also about five times the number of slaves liberated in the British West Indies after 1833. We should not, of course, underestimate the importance of the British abolition act, both to those immediately freed and those who still looked for freedom after 1833. Nor should we overlook the consequences for post-slave societies of the means by which slaves were formally freed. We should acknowledge, nevertheless, that more slaves were liberated through war in the United States between 1861 and 1865 than in the British, French, and Dutch West Indies, Cuba, and Brazil combined between 1833 and 1888. Inclusion of the half million slaves freed in Saint-Domingue between 1791 and 1804 raises even higher the proportion of slaves liberated through war in the century after 1790. On this reckoning, war, an instrument of policy abhorrent to many abolitionists, was a critical ally of morality in the achievement of slave emancipation in the nineteenth century.Footnote ³¹

The fact that slave emancipation in the United States occurred through war does not mean that abolitionists were unimportant in determining the course of events that culminated in Lincoln's proclamation freeing slaves in the Confederacy in 1863. American abolitionists drew strength, of course, from correspondence and personal interaction with their British counterparts, as well from their successes. The social capital that helped nurture American abolitionism also sustained the movement across generations, as illustrated by Harriet Hyman Alonso's study of the children of William Lloyd Garrison, dubbed by Stanley Harrold ‘the greatest of the American abolitionists’ (p. 31).Footnote ³² Drawing strength and inspiration from religion, from memories of the Haitian Revolution, and from alliances with African-Americans who openly fought against slavery, American abolitionists developed a persistent multi-institutional presence that, whilst failing to deliver peaceful emancipation or to develop a mass protest movement on the scale of that in Britain, ensured that antislavery remained an important political issue in the United States. It is, however, also evident that American abolitionism experienced greater factionalism in terms of philosophy, organization, and tactics compared to Britain. In particular, whilst commonly advocating peaceful emancipation and encouraging the Underground Railroad as a route to freedom, some elements within American abolitionism came to embrace their country's revolutionary and violent heritage in pursuit of their goals. Harrold insists, moreover, that this was part of the movement not only in the tumultuous pre-war decade of ‘bleeding Kansas’ and Harper's Ferry, but ‘from its beginnings’. Some abolitionists openly sympathized with slave revolts and supported ‘defensive violence’ in response to attacks against themselves (pp. 9, 73, 120–1). Where British abolitionists mostly sought to distance themselves from violence and to promote peaceful extra-parliamentary support, in the United States the philosophy and actions of some individuals and groups ensured that abolitionism itself became part of a story of escalating violence associated with sectionalism and slave emancipation in the mid-nineteenth century.

The contradictions within American abolitionism were symptomatic of more fundamental divisions within the United States dating from the revolutionary era that placed slavery at the heart of constitution-making in the new republic. As Wood observes, slavery was pivotal to wealth creation in colonial North America, but it was rarely a major political issue before 1776. The Revolution changed the situation. Appeals to liberty and equality, led in part by slaveholders, brought into political focus the relationship between the individual and the state and the moral dilemma of slavery. Slavery gave impetus to debates over land use and civil society, crystallized in Jeffersonian thinking on landownership, family farming, and democracy. As Roger Kennedy observes in Mr Jefferson's lost cause, if Washington was ‘the father of our country’, Jefferson was ‘the father of the family farm’ and of the concept that there are not only powers of the earth but ‘powers in the earth’ (p. 42). The discomfort among some slave owners about slavery – noted, among other things, by Jefferson in his Notes on the state of Virginia (1781) – was reinforced by slave and free black contributions to the war effort. As Henry Wiencek argues in his study of George Washington, this contribution was critical at the decisive battle of Yorktown in 1781. Wiencek laments that this contribution to the American victory is often overlooked, but claims that it ensured an African-American presence at the birth of the new nation (pp. 243–7). Moral unease about slavery prompted some emergent states outside the south to free slaves or to end slave imports. This, however, did not stop slave owners and slavery-related issues from becoming vital elements in post-war constitution-making in the United States. Prolonged, heated, and often inconclusive debate has surrounded the writing of the United States constitution ever since Charles Beard advanced his economic interpretation of it a century ago. There is, nevertheless, evidence that slaveholders had a strong influence on the writing and ratification of the constitution upon which Washington, a slave owner, was elected the nation's first president.Footnote ³³ They helped to ensure a twenty-year moratorium on ending the foreign slave trade of the United States, effectively postponing a federal ban on foreign slave trading by Americans until 1808. They gained an inflated representation, under the three-fifths rule for enslaved people, of slave states in the newly formed House of Representatives, as well as the Electoral College that determined the outcome of presidential elections. They helped win protection of states rights against federalism. The ‘slave power’ thus insinuated itself into the structures of governance of the United States from the moment of their birth. Unlike Britain, where, Brown argues, defeat in 1783 encouraged the rise of abolitionism as part of a reform of imperial relations, in the United States slave owners were among the principal beneficiaries politically of the American Revolution. Moreover, the post-war settlement ensured that subsequent attempts to challenge slavery had the potential to provoke constitutional and, given the geography of slave ownership, sectional conflict. It thus created long-run obstacles to peaceful emancipation of slaves in the United States.

In time, a number of factors brought ideological contradictions inherent in the United States's revolutionary beginnings into sharper focus and political engagement. One factor was the rise and success of abolitionism outside the United States, particularly the emboldening effect of British abolitionism on its transatlantic counterpart. Another factor was the vitality and expansionism of American slavery itself as an economic system. Compared to the British West Indies, where slave populations rarely grew naturally, reproduction drove the five-fold increase in slave population in the United States between 1783 and 1860. In tandem with rises in labour productivity, such increase in slave numbers underpinned the rise in output of raw cotton for external markets, notably in Britain, as well as New England.Footnote ³⁴ Slave-grown cotton accounted for close to half of all United States' export earnings between 1815 and 1860. It dictated the pace of frontier resettlement, land purchase, and state formation in the American south.Footnote ³⁵ Slavery thus showed no signs of economic sclerosis on the eve of the Civil War. On the contrary, as Gudmestad shows, there emerged a highly organized internal traffic in slaves from the Old South to the Deep South after 1815. Slavery's on-going productivity and contribution to the nation's overseas trade thus presented formidable challenges to American abolitionists. At the same time, its geographical expansionism helped ensure that the borderlands between southern slavery and mid-western free labour would become sites of increasingly violent and ultimately irreconcilable ideological and constitutional conflict over the entry of new states into the union as slave-owning states sought to protect the balance of representation and power established by the revolutionary settlement. In no other place in the Atlantic world did ideological tensions at the interface between slavery and free labour become so acutely – and tragically – internalized, polarized, and politically explosive, as in the United States, the largest slave-owning nation in the history of the Americas.

The tensions inherent in this deepening and unbridgeable ideological divide surface in various ways in several of the books under review. They are most obvious in the mindset of southern planters as analysed by Fox-Genovese and Genovese. Though linked as cotton suppliers to the capitalist, free labour nexus of the British and New England textile-mill owners, the southern ruling class evolved a world view that, in the words of Fox-Genovese and Genovese, identified ‘the individual's standing and sense of self’ with concepts of ‘family, clan and community’ rooted in antiquity, medieval history, notions of chivalry, and Christianity. In short, southern planters saw themselves as ‘heir to a world that took unfree labor, including slavery, for granted’ and envisaged the dismantling of slavery as an invitation to the chaos associated with the French and Haitian Revolutions and unrestrained individualism (p. 4). Ideological tensions also surface in the life histories of the ‘great men’ of the south. Such tensions appear in Wiencek's study of Washington, which focuses on the general's decision to free his own slaves at the time of his death but not to disclose the contents of his will to family or fellow slave holders before he died. They are equally evident in the political career of Jefferson. Warning his fellow planters about ‘the unhappy influence’ of slavery ‘on the manners of our people’ (quoted by Fox-Genovese and Genovese, p. 79) and dreaming of the creation of a land-owning democracy in the United States, Jefferson nevertheless stood by whilst the ‘choicest portions’ of the vast tract of land known as the Louisiana Purchase acquired during his presidency were engrossed in his lifetime by plantations worked by slaves. In Kennedy's view, this was Jefferson's lost cause. He argues that it was also a national tragedy as from the time of the Missouri crisis of 1819–20 the lands of the Mississippi valley became the epicentre of the increasingly bitter and divisive constitutional and sectional crisis that gripped the United States on ‘its decline into civil war’ (p. 2). The lives of two of America's greatest heroes – Washington and Jefferson – thus betray the ideological tensions and constitutional and economic barriers facing those who might have turned personal choices and concerns about slavery into enlightened public policies for eradicating the ‘peculiar’ institution between 1783 and 1860.

Whilst transatlantic slavery has been widely seen by historians as rooted in violence and in the dehumanization of the individual, its formal eradication in the century after 1789 has commonly been considered as a triumph of religiously and philosophically inspired humanitarianism over economic self-interest. This triumph assumes even greater significance when, as now seems to be largely agreed, slavery everywhere in the Atlantic world remained a viable and in some cases expansive system of labour until the moment of its abolition. At the centre of this humanitarian interpretation of antislavery is the story of British abolitionism. Under the leadership of William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson, Thomas Fowell Buxton, and others, British antislavery is seen as having achieved remarkable victories over Britain's slave interests in 1807 and 1833. It also persuaded successive British governments from 1815 onwards to commit British naval and diplomatic resources to an international effort to suppress transatlantic slave trafficking. The latter goal was finally accomplished in 1867.

The bicentenary of the abolition of the British slave trade will doubtless stimulate further reflection on the relationship between agency and change and on the impact of British abolitionism nationally and internationally. In acknowledging Britain's commitment to antislavery from 1807 onwards, we need to remind ourselves of the complexities of the processes involved. We need to acknowledge the importance of resistance against slavery from within. We need to recognize that, whatever impact British antislavery had on the dismantling of transatlantic slavery as a whole, more enslaved people were freed after 1790 through rebellion and war than through largely peaceful means. In this respect, the British route to slave emancipation is as notable for its exceptional character as for its international significance. The slaves in French Saint-Domingue, the world's richest slave colony in 1790, freed themselves before Britain abolished its slave trade in 1807. And for all the efforts of British abolitionists to support their American counterparts in the fight against slavery in the United States, it was war rather than abolitionism that freed four million slaves there and, in doing so, had a major impact on the subsequent history of slave emancipation in Cuba and Brazil. The fact that Britain's method of slave emancipation was not universally or even widely imitated should not, of course, lead us to deny the remarkable achievements of British abolitionism. Recognizing the limitations of British abolitionism, however, should encourage us to explore more thoroughly, and in comparative ways, the differences in national governance and cultural, ideological, and political landscapes within which slave emancipation occurred. In short, we need to understand how, in C. L. R. James's words, the ‘necessities of the environment’ shaped the inter-relationship between agency and culture and between economic, political, and social factors in determining the process of slave emancipation. Only then will we begin to understand why bloodshed and violence were essential factors not only in the rise and expansion of transatlantic slavery, but also in its ending.