The old-fashioned political historian William Best Hesseltine once wrote that doing intellectual history was ‘like trying to nail jelly to a wall’. While the precise meaning of his statement is unclear, Hesseltine was probably referring to the difficulty of connecting the behaviour of individuals or groups to their expressed ideas or identifying an idea or cluster of ideas as the cause of an event or process. Nowhere does the complexity of this issue come more strikingly into focus than in the study of the origins of British abolition.

In what follows I will offer a brief sketch of how historical writing on early British abolitionism has evolved in the last century. That sketch will pay particular attention to the work of Eric Williams, Roger Anstey, and David Brion Davis as well as the controversy that erupted between Davis and Thomas Haskell in the late 1980s. It will conclude with an examination of the most recent work on the subject, Christopher Leslie Brown's Moral capital, and suggest an alternative approach to understanding the role of ideology in the creation of early British abolitionism.

The enslavement of Africans in British colonies in North America and the Caribbean dated back to the early 1600s. But slavery and the slave trade did not immediately become burning moral issues. While there were occasional objections raised against them, notably by John Locke and several American Quakers, there was no concerted movement to abolish the slave system until the 1780s. For most people, the slave system was an issue of moral indifference. From Plato and Aristotle to the early Christian fathers to Luther and Calvin, few doubted that some people were born to be free and others were born to be slaves.Footnote ¹

During the 1770s, however, a series of largely disconnected legal decisions, pamphlets, and tracts drew attention to the many evils connected with the system. Over the next decade a more organized and formidable movement emerged, and its leaders began conducting a campaign against, first, the slave trade, and, later, against slavery itself. The spread of anti-slavery fervour was remarkable. In 1792 more Britons signed petitions to parliament against the slave trade than were eligible to vote, and, in the same year, more than 300,000 people refused to buy West Indian sugar. An issue of moral indifference had been transformed for many into a moral imperative.Footnote ²

As historians looked to establish the intellectual origins of this transformation, they found an embarrassment of riches. Anti-slavery appeared to be only one part of a larger commitment in the second half of the eighteenth century to a variety of humanitarian concerns, including campaigns to reduce cruelty to animals, end judicial torture, improve conditions in prisons, reform education, and deal with primitive peoples, to name a few. In addition several of the most conspicuous intellectual movements of the time, including the Enlightenment, natural rights theories, and the emergence of Evangelical religion, could all be seen to have ideas antithetical to slavery.

At first, historians tended to stress the religious motivation on the part of the reformers. The most prominent leaders of anti-slavery, particularly Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce, were Evangelicals, who claimed to be inspired by biblical precepts. The earliest historians of English abolitionism treated Clarkson and Wilberforce as saints, selfless humanitarians who doggedly pursued the cause of abolition for over three decades even in the face of bitter recrimination and personal assault. In 1933 when the centennial of Wilberforce's death was celebrated in his hometown of Hull, it resembled the funeral of a great Norse warrior, complete with parades, wreath layings, memorial lectures, church services, trumpet fanfares, and the unfurling of nearly fifty flags from foreign countries. The saintly reputation of the early leaders of English abolitionism was not entirely undeserved. Clarkson and Wilberforce seemed to be examples of those rare individuals who were able to see beyond the constraints imposed by tradition and convention, and succeed in smashing the moral boundaries of their time. Anti-slavery appeared to be a brief, shining moment where history went beyond Gibbon's grim ‘register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind’, to reveal some of the better angels of humanity.Footnote ³

However, in 1944, Eric Williams published Capitalism and slavery, a book that completely redirected the study of anti-slavery by pointing out the highly selective nature and limitations of early English abolitionism. Williams, a native of Trinidad, who read history at Oxford in the 1930s, criticized the saints for allowing other palpable evils to continue unabated while congratulating themselves for their moral virtue on slavery. Wilberforce, he wrote, ‘was familiar with everything that went on in the hold of a slave ship, but ignored what went on at the bottom of a mineshaft’. And the Evangelicals generally, he continued, ‘offered the English worker Bibles instead of bread and Wesleyan capitalists exhibited open contempt for the working class’.Footnote ⁴ In some ways, Williams had not discovered anything new; he was simply repeating criticisms made against Wilberforce and ‘the Saints’ by other contemporary critics, including Gilbert Francklyn, Jesse Foote, William Cobbett, and Francis Burdett.Footnote ⁵

But, more boldly, Williams further contended that the slave system was attacked only because it was becoming increasingly unprofitable. While he did not take up the issue of the origins of anti-slavery sentiment directly, his work had striking implications for it. It came not, Williams contended, from any humanitarian impulse, but arose simply from the economic needs of the planters and the economic health of the nation. For some time, there existed increasing evidence that the profits from Caribbean sugar plantations were declining. When the slave system was no longer profitable, it could be attacked and abolished, while permitting its attackers to pretend they were acting upon humanitarian principles.

Williams's interpretation reflected the most advanced historical thinking of his time. Historians of his generation largely distrusted the professed motivations of political actors of any age, seeing their speeches and writing, in the manner of Marx and Weber, largely as camouflage for economic and class interest. The job of the historian was to explore beneath the surface of the historical record to locate the true motivation of historical actors.Footnote ⁶ And that motivation would most often be found by connecting their behaviour with their class and economic interests. Capitalism and slavery, along with the various articles that comprised Gentry Controversy in Stuart history, may have been the foremost exemplars of this kind of work. In Williams's case, he believed that he had exposed the real reasons for why anti-slavery vaulted so suddenly and dramatically into the public consciousness; its appearance coincided with economic necessity.

Subsequent historians, unfortunately, have not sustained Williams's conclusions. Seymour Drescher in particular demonstrated that the slave-fuelled, English economy was still expanding when the slave trade was abolished in 1807.Footnote ⁷ Yet Williams, who later became president of his native Trinidad, established the direction by which much of the future work on abolition would proceed. Following his lead, most historians, similarly sceptical of the professed motivations of the reformers, continued to seek the underlying reasons for their behaviour.

There were exceptions. One of them, Roger Anstey, insisted that, with certain limitations, the humanitarian reformers were still saints. He was in many ways Eric Williams's antithesis, as his greatest book, The Atlantic slave trade and British abolition (1975), challenged most of Williams's arguments. First, Anstey noted that there was no group in parliament self-consciously claiming to represent those with an interest in developing economic forces. Second, he observed that in 1796 a bill for the immediate abolition of slavery nearly passed the House of Commons at the height of the sugar boom. Perhaps Anstey's most intriguing point was his contention that while the abolitionists were genuine humanitarians, they actually went out of their way to disguise their humanitarian motives. Instead of attacking the slave trade on humanitarian grounds, Anstey observed, they appealed to self-interest, claiming that ending the trade would benefit everyone economically.Footnote ⁸

The origins of British abolitionism erupted into controversy in the 1980s. In the 1960s, David Brion Davis began publishing a series of books designed to explore western attitudes and values toward slavery. The first volume, published in 1966 and which won a Pulitzer Prize, considered the problem of slavery from the ancient world up to about 1770. The second volume, which won a National Book Award and other prizes, took up the story in 1770 and carried it through 1823.Footnote ⁹

The range and erudition of Davis's work was breathtaking. Most historians worked in decades; in his first volume Davis worked in millennia. By taking the story back to antiquity and covering a wide range of trans-Atlantic opinion, he ventured, like Marlow in Joseph Conrad's short story, Youth, far beyond the normal boundaries of historical aspiration. In an age where most historians tended to confine themselves to clearly marked, little postage stamps of specialization, he seemed to have read everything written in the western world about slavery from ancient times to the early nineteenth century and thought about it deeply.

There were, however, some unexpected bumps in the road. Davis's second volume, The problem of slavery in the age of revolution (1975), was much different from the first. The first volume was a fairly straightforward summary of western attitudes about slavery. The second was far more complex and interpretive as Davis tried to explain the emergence of British abolitionism after centuries of indifference. In a short passage, only a few pages in a 570-page book, he suggested that some of the early British reformers may have turned to abolitionism, not to correct the obvious injustice of slavery, but because it served their ideological needs. In this case, he thought several of them used anti-slavery to lay the groundwork for defending factory labour. Complaints about barbaric conditions in factories and coal mines were already surfacing and Davis believed that many of those who attacked slavery as harsh and unfree did so in order to defend industrial labour on the grounds that, whatever its defects, it was at least free labour.Footnote ¹⁰

Davis's strongest evidence came from Quaker capitalists, such as William Dillwyn and David Barclay, who played a critical role in transforming anti-slavery into a broader humanitarian movement. These Quaker elites were often owners or investors in factories, and, according to Davis, seem to have been seeking tools by which they could instil a deeper level of workplace discipline and social control. Abolitionism suited the needs of Quaker capitalists because it pronounced the superiority of wage to slave labour and enabled the Quaker capitalists to forge alliances with other, more highly placed, political groups.

In addition to the example of Quaker capitalists, Davis also sought to support his case with theory. While working on the manuscript of The problem of slavery in the age of revolution at the Stanford Humanities Center, he encountered Eugene Genovese, who was also a fellow there. Genovese introduced Davis to the ideas of the Italian socialist Antonio Gramsci and in particular to Gramsci's concept of hegemony. By hegemony, Gramsci meant the non-coercive methods used by ruling elites to indoctrinate, even unconsciously, the working classes with such desirable values as obedience to authority, hard work, and the willingness to accept their subordinate status. Ruling-class dominance, Gramsci contended, was never easy or automatic. It required many devices and strategies not only to pacify the working class, but also to convince them to accept upper-class dominance. Evangelical religion, with its message of accepting God's higher purpose, was one example. By its legitimization of free labour as a moral imperative, Davis thought abolitionism was another.Footnote ¹¹

In this regard, Davis rescued the early abolitionists from the charges of outright hypocrisy levelled by Eric Williams. Ideological hegemony, he contended, did not necessarily involve a conscious choice. Following Peter Berger, Davis denied that hegemony necessarily involved insincerity or deliberate intention. For him, ideology involves the shifting patterns of thought and values which focus attention on new problems, at the same time camouflaging others, but which define new conceptions of social reality. Ideology can, however, involve self-deception. The people who supported abolition may have believed they were inspired by genuine humanitarian conviction, without realizing the extent to which that conviction reinforced the new values they wished to see established.

It was this component of Davis's work that drew criticism from Thomas Haskell. While Haskell's initial critique ranged over a number of points, his main criticism concerned Davis's contention that some of the early abolitionists were acting upon their own unconscious hegemonic needs rather than reacting to genuine humanitarian concerns. Demanding proof, Haskell denied that it was possible for historians to prove unconscious motivation. Without concrete evidence, the idea that the Quaker capitalists or any other historical group were moved by some unconscious motivation and were deceiving themselves is useless. ‘To say that a person is moved by class interest’, Haskell concluded, ‘is to say that he intends to further the interest of his class, or it is to say nothing at all.’Footnote ¹²

Haskell then offered his own explanation of the connection between capitalism and anti-slavery. Capitalist expansion, he contended, entailed a ‘widening of causal horizons’, by which he meant a heightened awareness of the consequences of one's actions and inactions. The market placed a priority on forethought, planning, delayed gratification, and the duty to uphold contractual obligation, which, in turn, provided a new perceptual and cognitive framework that enabled people to expand their sense of moral responsibility. The expansion of overseas trade revealed the injustices of slavery, convincing some of their responsibility for it and the moral obligation to intervene. In this sense, the new world of the market provided a clear perceptual path to anti-slavery.Footnote ¹³

Haskell's views were subjected to close criticism in the pages of the American Historical Review, by Davis and another historian, John Ashworth. Among other points, Ashworth observed that Haskell had only one real example, the Quaker John Woolman, of a person who followed the cognitive path to humanitarian enlightenment he described. And Ashworth further noted that Haskell followed his discussion of Woolman with another example, that of Daniel Defoe, that appeared to contradict the first. In his critique of Haskell, Davis noted that capitalism existed before the eighteenth century and that other periods of capitalist expansion occurred from the High Middle Ages to the antebellum South, without producing comparable changes in moral perception.Footnote ¹⁴

Thus, Haskell's explanation for why humanitarian reform erupted in the second half of the eighteenth century proved unsatisfactory. But he clearly raised important questions about the role of ideology in history generally and in the emergence of humanitarian sentiment specifically. In the remainder of this article, I would like to explore some additional perspectives on the role of ideology, conscious or otherwise, in early British abolitionism.

The time seems appropriate to do so with the publication of Christopher Leslie Brown's new book on the subject, Moral capital: foundations of British abolitionism (2006).Footnote ¹⁵ I propose using Brown's book as a point of departure for several reasons. It provides its own critique of existing historiography, offers shrewd and thoughtful commentary on many of the issues discussed here, and advances its own explanation for the emergence of an organized abolitionist movement in Great Britain between 1783 and 1788. His explanation, in turn, raises a number of intriguing questions about the role of ideology generally, which deserve serious consideration.

There are many ways to describe historians. One of the most revealing is the distinction between those historians who require direct, incontrovertible evidence before they can be convinced and those for whom less compelling, more circumstantial proofs will suffice. Christopher Brown is clearly a historian of the first sort, as he finds much to dislike about current historical writing on the origins of British abolitionism.

His principal complaint is that the usual suspects for the reform impulse, the Enlightenment, the proliferation of rights theories, and Evangelical religion, are, in Brown's view, too diverse and contradictory to have caused such a movement. More seriously, he believes that employing them as part of an explanatory framework suggests a kind of inevitability to the emergence of the movement, which he contends is misleading, and finds that it is often hard to connect the ideas in these movements to particular individuals in the abolitionist movement.Footnote ¹⁶ He observes that there were several different types of anti-slavery agitation in the 1760s and 1770s that fell short of abolitionism. The views of anti-slavery Quakers, for example, in Brown's estimation, were more about preserving the Quakers' sense of their own purity than about ending slavery. Granville Sharp, a central figure in the Somerset case of 1772, failed to establish an organized anti-slavery movement.

If we wish to seek a direct and traceable cause, according to Brown, we need look no further than the impact of the loss of the American colonies. The loss of the American colonies compelled a reconsideration of the meaning of empire and of the moral health of the British nation, which eventually led to a reconsideration of slavery.Footnote ¹⁷ In their disputes with defenders of American colonies, British pamphleteers enjoyed pointing out the hypocrisy of the colonists' anger at the imagined injustice of British policy toward them while at the same time they failed to recognize the injustice of their owning slaves. As Dr Johnson famously remarked, ‘how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of the Negroes?’ Brown contends that the emergence of abolitionism in Britain coincides closely with the loss of American colonies and the debate over the national identity that followed.

Such a brief summary does not do justice to the force and erudition with which Brown presents his case. Like David Davis, he has read widely and thoughtfully, and he tells his story skilfully. In several instances, we can see directly the influence that the debate over empire has on the views of certain individuals. Granville Sharp, as Brown demonstrates, was not just an antiquarian with an eye for legal detail, but was intensely interested in the implications of slavery for the empire.

I agree with Brown that an analysis of the immediate context in which ideas emerge is always important and that in Moral capital he has seized upon one, the American Revolution, which appears to be an important part of the process by which British abolitionism emerged. But I also contend that his view, which appears to focus only on immediate causation, is intrinsically too narrow. Historical events, as Lawrence Stone once noted, are likely to have long-term causes as well as immediate triggers.Footnote ¹⁸ An examination of the immediate circumstances, ideological or otherwise, is an important, but insufficient part of an explanatory framework. Moreover, looking for ideological causation is often not so much a matter of finding which immediate circumstances ignite a movement as much as it is discovering how individual actors determined the selection of which existing ideologies would be deployed to justify it.

If we take one example of a famous historical document which held within it powerful implications, Luther's 95 Theses, we can perhaps see this point more clearly. The 95 Theses, for example, are mainly about the evils of indulgences. It would not be hard for a historian to connect the appearance of the 95 Theses in 1517 to their increasing use in the south of Germany at that time, especially after Albrecht, archbishop of Mainz issued a new indulgence to bail himself out of financial difficulty.

But such an analysis would only tell a part of the story. Luther's critique of indulgences was laced with dynamite in the sense that it implied that not only were indulgences false, but that a church that utilized them was also false. While no word of humanism was mentioned in the 95 Theses, Luther was clearly expanding upon the Erasmian critique of late medieval Catholicism, which stressed the tendency of high church officials to be more interested in wealth and power than in the spiritual care of their flock. To suggest that Luther only came to his understanding of the evils of indulgence, which, like slavery, had a long history, only by immediate circumstances, would be highly misleading. Their proliferation in Germany in the early sixteenth century may have triggered his decision to write about them, but he had been conditioned by earlier ideas to see the indulgence in a specific way.

There is also considerable evidence that Luther's ideas emerged in the context of long-standing conflicts between the leaders of territorial states and those of traditionally self-governing small towns. To a great many sixteenth-century Germans, the church was just another body wanting their money. When Luther preached the gospel of salvation by faith and attacked the church as corrupt and greedy, his listeners, conditioned by decades of dispute and governmental greed, heard a message of political and economic liberation as well as that of religious freedom.Footnote ¹⁹

Connecting the appearance of organized abolitionism with the debate over the meaning of empire poses similar difficulties. The debate over empire did not just arise in the course of the Revolution; it had long-term antecedents, in British political debates over sovereignty, natural rights, and the meaning of consent, which had been raging long before the colonies were lost. These debates would condition observers to see developments in a certain way by setting up new standards for how events in the colonies should be viewed.

The English Civil War of the 1640s in particular raised issues upon which British commentators debated for the next century and a half. While the full range of Civil War debates is impossible to rehearse here, perhaps the most significant strain in them was that supporters of the parliamentary cause came to believe that Charles I and his ministers were engaged in a conspiracy to take away their liberties as Englishmen. When in 1774 the American pamphleteer John Dickinson wrote that the British government intended to make the colonists slaves, he was echoing an idea used repeatedly by parliamentarians in the 1640s. Regarding Charles's attempt to collect Ship Money without parliamentary approval, Oliver St John, who pled against the crown in the case, declared that if the recent manner of levying Ship Money was legal, ‘then all our birthright, our ancestral right, our condition of living as free citizens is lost, that of late there has been an endeavor to reduce us to the state of villeinage, nay, to a lower’.Footnote ²⁰

The theme of a British people held in bondage by arbitrary rule was of course a theme driven much further by the various radical groups and writers that appeared after the end of the first Civil War in 1646. In his Remonstrance of many thousand citizens, Richard Overton declared that, since the Norman Conquest, tyrannical kings and arbitrary laws had contrived to ‘hold the nation in bondage all along ever since’. Even the Magna Carta could be dismissed, as Overton did, as a ‘beggarly thing containing many marks of intolerable bondage’.Footnote ²¹ The various radical writers spoke for those who believed that the Civil War had been fought for liberty of conscience and the equality of all before the law. By the end of the first Civil War, they discovered the law afforded them no protection; it was simply another tool for enslavement.

This concept was also the basis for the thought of the ‘English Commonwealthmen’, especially John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, who watched as the early eighteenth-century British government expanded exponentially in size and power. The ‘Commonwealthmen’ believed that the so-called balanced government of Britain, widely admired by continental observers, was merely a guise for a new and even more insidious governmental tyranny. By this, they meant the multiplying horde of bureaucrats, officials, tax collectors, and excise men who swarmed like locusts through the streets and countryside ready to assess and tax any item of property they could find. And if the tyranny of taxation were not bad enough, in its wake corruption would inevitably follow. The South Sea Bubble was only one example of what would happen as those in power seized the opportunity to appropriate government and its resources for their own benefit. The ‘Commonwealth Men’ were somewhat vague about the exact rights being violated; they mainly confined themselves to citing evidence of the great plot unfolding to take them away.Footnote ²²

The ideas of conspiracy, enslavement, corruption, and the insidious growth of governmental power were central to the debate over empire and were appropriated by colonial pamphleteers, sometimes word for word. And many of these pamphleteers were quite willing to specify the rights being violated. One of the rights they often cited was the natural rights of human beings. The idea that all human beings possessed natural rights could be dated back to Grotius and, if Brian Tierney is to be believed, back to the Middle Ages.Footnote ²³ The ideas of governmental conspiracy combined with ideas about natural rights to serve first as a standard for evaluating British policy, but also for the colonists to evaluate their own.

We can observe this process in the thought of several of the early opponents of slavery. As much as anyone, James Otis took these themes and transformed them into an anti-slavery mantra. He was first of all an opponent of Francis Bernard, the governor of Massachusetts whom Otis regarded as corrupt. In The rights of the British colonies asserted and proved, however, Otis launched yet a deeper indictment of British behaviour, beginning with the idea that parliamentary law could not violate natural law. Otis quoted Locke to the effect that when laws violating natural law are passed, they reduce subjects ‘to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience’.

Otis also took a crucial step in the development of anti-slavery by his recognition that making natural law the basis of a critique of British tyranny held risks, as long as the colonists were themselves slave owners. He therefore sought to establish natural rights as a new standard for evaluating behaviour, a standard to which the colonists must themselves adhere. ‘The colonists are’, Otis declared, ‘by the law of nature free born, as indeed all men are, white or black … Does it follow that it is right to enslave a man because he is black?’ Otis clearly saw the contradiction between the colonial claim that their rights were violated and their continuing involvement in the slave system. ‘Slave trading and slave keeping’, said Otis, have ‘a direct tendency to diminish the idea of the inestimable value of liberty and makes every dealer in it a tyrant.’Footnote ²⁴

Otis was not the only writer to take up these ideas. Benjamin Rush and Samuel Cooke made similar connections. More importantly, so did Anthony Benezet, well known as a writer who influenced many of the early British abolitionists. When Thomas Clarkson decided to write his prize-winning essay on whether or not it was legal for one man to enslave another, he turned to Benezet's works for information and inspiration. A recent article by David L. Crosby demonstrates that while Benezet provided much information about the slave trade and perceived himself to be an heir to the Quaker tradition of opposition to slavery, he was also immersed in the ideas of contemporary philosophy. In particular, Benezet saw the importance for anti-slavery of the emerging philosophical consensus for freedom and against political tyranny emanating from eighteenth-century thought. Benezet's true contribution to anti-slavery, writes Crosby, ‘was the discovery of a rhetorical formula for wedding his Quaker passion for justice with prevailing ideas about the nature of man's freedom’. In so doing, Crosby continues, Benezet gave ‘a powerful new charge to typical Enlightenment abstractions about freedom that were otherwise weak and could too easily be set aside in the name of economic self-interest or so-called “rational” order’.Footnote ²⁵

What is important here is what Bernard Bailyn has called ‘the contagion of liberty’, by which he means that concepts of representation, freedom, rights, sovereignty, and consent which were central to the colonial critique of British policy also possessed the ability to enter into unexpected terrains, including slavery.Footnote ²⁶ Slavery was first defined in a political sense, as a condition by which a free man loses control over his life and property. Various commentators could differ about whether the enemy was the king, parliament, governmental bureaucracy, or all of the above, but they all agreed that tyrannical government could turn free men into slaves. But new information about the slave trade and new ideas concerning natural rights exposed problems and contradictions within the construct that required broader definitions. As American and British observers proclaimed their love of liberty and the importance of rights, it became more difficult to evade the hypocrisy posed by the existence of bondage within the empire. As Samuel Cooke pointed out, ‘by tolerating Negro slavery, we, the patrons of society, have dishonored the Christian name’.Footnote ²⁷

In this sense, then, the various theories of rights and governmental tyranny provided a new standard by which governments, their agents, and their critics could be judged. When colonial critics of British policy chose to base their critiques on these ideas, it was an easy step for writers on both sides of the Atlantic to recognize the contradiction between arguments based on tyranny and rights and colonial practices on slavery. Ideas about rights and enslavement which had originally been conceived to protect the dominance of ruling elites could now be applied to African slaves.

Thus, Brown is not incorrect to suggest that a debate over the meaning of empire following the loss of the American colonies triggered the beginning of organized anti-slavery in Britain. I agree with him about the Revolution's importance. But his view is too narrow, almost like suggesting that the Second World War was caused by Hitler's invasion of Poland. The debate over the meaning of empire had been going on for almost a quarter century. As it progressed, it involved a variety of controversial ideas, none of which meaningfully could be separated from the other. Most importantly, it posed a new standard for evaluating government and society, by which slavery could not stand, and it created a number of ideologies from which opponents of slavery in Britain could choose as a basis for their opposition.

One of the problems with abolitionist historiography is that, as historians, we tend to seek the one explanatory framework that will best explain the behaviour of as many individuals and groups as possible. But a better approach might come from the realization that we may need different explanations for different groups. Well before the 1780s, a series of intellectual scud missiles had been launched against slavery. By the 1780s, those missiles were far more sophisticated and powerful than earlier ones because events and circumstances compelled observers to redefine the meaning of slavery against, among other things, natural rights, and to receive those discussions in different ways. I have outlined one of the most powerful missiles, as has Dr Brown. But there were others. For some, the path to anti-slavery lay in an Evangelical religion that regarded all human beings as equal in the eyes of God. For others, the path lay in the conviction that English law, whatever its defects, prevented enslavement. Understanding the motivation of each group may require a different explanatory framework. But in any event, it will have to be one that goes farther back than the immediate circumstances.