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Reviews of Books
Thomas C. Holt, University of Chicago
Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism. By Christopher Leslie Brown. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. 496 pages. $55.00 (cloth), $22.50 (paper).
Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery. By Deirdre Coleman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 296 pages. $85.00 (cloth).
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The critical reception of Amazing Grace, the recent movie about the life and work of William Wilberforce, suggests that the time may be propitious to once again take stock of the British abolition movement. On the one hand, the movie celebrates an era in which man's humanity to man appeared to triumph for a public apprehensive that exactly the reverse might better describe its own time. Yet the tone of even favorable reviews conveys a sense of emotional caution, holding back reflexively from fully embracing such romantic, sentimental notions of pure, transcendent human goodness. This instinctive skepticism resonates with a generation of scholarship on the abolitionists. Colonial Secretary Edward Stanley's 1833 assertion to Parliament, on presenting the law to abolish slavery in Britain's colonial empire, that the legislation merely reflected "the liberal and humane spirit of the age" would scarcely pass muster with most historians today. Few among them, however, would dispute Stanley's added observation that the spectacle of "a commercial nation, weighing commercial advantages light in the balance against justice and religion," would gain Britain substantial moral sway on the world stage for decades to come.1 |
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Christopher Leslie Brown's Moral Capital and Deirdre Coleman's Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery draw our attention to the formative moments of the antislavery impulse that culminated in Parliament's action that day in 1833. Brown suggests not only that Stanley's claims to moral authority had earlier historical roots but also, as his title signifies, that that sentiment was somehow crucial to the political viability of abolitionism. Coleman ponders the more complex tensions between these ostensibly disinterested impulses and their corrupted, imperialist results. Though Brown focuses on the precursors of the abolitionist movement in Britain (and to a lesser extent in America) and Coleman studies its outcroppings in African and Australian colonization schemes and settlements, both studies share roughly the same time frame and many of the same principal characters. Both authors are convinced that the origins of the British abolitionist movement in the 1780s cannot be accounted for by the straightforward narratives historians are wont to tell: abolition was not the inevitable outcome of a growing enlightenment, of increasingly refined sensibilities, or of shifting economic interests. |
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In search of answers, these books become, in different but complementary ways, projects of recovery of people, ideas, or historical developments that have been ignored or slighted. Each author finds that the impulse to embrace abolitionism was ultimately about something else: vindicating one's moral self-worth, recasting (and thus legitimating) the imperial project, or, indeed, revitalizing humankind. Led by Wilberforce, the Clapham Sect "Saints" sought to make religion relevant again through a campaign to abolish the slave trade, and the idiosyncratic Swedenborgians of Coleman's study sought redemption in a colony of redeemed slaves in Sierra Leone. When all is said and done, both authors are convincing about the need to disentangle ourselves from the dead-end dichotomies of earlier debates about the origins and nature of abolition, even if they fall somewhat short of plotting a clear path forward. |
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Frustrated with the conventional story line of abolition, a narrative endlessly recounted "but never well explained" (1), Brown began his search for the origins of the British abolition movement, or, more precisely, for "political choices" (2) to act against slavery. Some thirty years ago, David Brion Davis challenged vague notions of a historically transcendent humanitarianism welling up to destroy slavery.2 Brown wants to revisit the revolution in human sensibilities that made Britons hostile to slavery but disentangle it from the revolution in politics that was necessary to abolish slavery. Reminding us of our own contemporary compromises with manifest evils, he suggests that the shifts in moral vision that might allow one to recognize injustice are not the same as those that might prompt one to act to correct it. If we choose to act at all, the move from moral outrage to moral action is highly contingent, to say the least. The historian's task is to explain how people moved beyond "thinking of slavery as abhorrent" to challenge entrenched institutions in "the largest slaving empire in the world" (3). According to Brown the problem is that what he calls the "cultural prescription" for individual antislavery initiatives remains unexamined, so abolition is all too often depicted in the literature as "an uncaused cause" (2). The solution, he suggests, must be sought in studying not the movement itself but rather the many "disparate objectives and uncoordinated initiatives" (2) that preceded its sudden efflorescence in the 1780s. The task Brown sets himself, then, is to explain not abolition as such but "abolitionism." The latter preceded the abolition movement per se and followed the growth of a fairly ubiquitous "antislavery prejudice" (48) that had done little more than cordon off slavery as an evil, albeit one as necessary as it was distant. What follows, however, is a book that moves between two analytically distinct, though interrelated, discussions: one attempting to account for how the political constraints on antislavery action were weakened and another explaining how individuals and groups were inspired to action. Though logically connected, these two stories are not consistently joined in Brown's analysis, leaving that more satisfying explanation he seeks just out of reach. |
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In Brown's account the American Revolution was the critical rupture in the status quo that opened the door for political abolition. His first passages draw our attention to a significant confluence of events that followed the 1783 Peace of Paris: the Quakers' first anti–slave trade petition to Parliament, the initiation of their propaganda campaign to mobilize public opinion, the publication of two searing indictments of the trade, and the gathering at the village of Teston of a small band of Evangelical reformers determined to make the transatlantic slave trade illegal. This rapid succession of events suggests that the colonial rebellion had unhinged the status quo, bringing to the forefront issues that had hitherto stymied the move from a broadly embraced antislavery prejudice to an antislavery program of action. First, the transatlantic debate about America, in which both sides had (disingenuously) deployed antislavery rhetoric for political advantage, exposed the mother country's complicity with the slave trade and colonial slavery. The stain of slavery could no longer be confined to the colonies, slaveholders, and slave traders. Second, British military initiatives to free slaves during and after the war now furnished precedents for what had been unthinkable: state action to interdict the trade and regulate colonial labor regimes. Finally, Britain's defeat raised doubts about the structure, purpose, and morality of empire. As in Stanley's discourse half a century later, conflating the imperial mission with antislavery provided an attractive counterdiscourse. On balance this argument is elegant and persuasive, despite the fact that Brown draws mostly on contemporary pamphlets and fast-day sermons for evidence rather than the more explicitly political sources one might have expected. |
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Less elegant but still persuasive is Brown's account of the conversions of individuals and groups to the antislavery cause, which were also rooted in the postwar historical moment. Once physical and psychological distance from slavery had been eroded—in the aftermath of the 1772 Somerset case as well as the debates over the American Revolution—the antislavery prejudice gained both a realizable goal and a program of action. Some looked to colonization schemes in West Africa to model a world without slave labor, making Sierra Leone more "crucial [to] . . . the development of the antislavery movement" (262) than previously recognized. The Evangelical reformers gathered at Teston, later dubbed the Clapham Sect, followed a different trajectory, though several of them also supported the Sierra Leone project from a safe distance. Intensely troubled by their own sense of sinfulness and the failed authority of a too-worldly church establishment, these socially conservative men and women turned to antislavery as a strategic weapon of choice. Their attack on the slave trade—safely remote and requiring little actual sacrifice from Britons—could serve as "an opening wedge, a Trojan horse" (387) in "a wider campaign against nominal Christianity" (388). English Quakers took a similar route: for them abolitionism opened access to an enlarged public role while preserving their religious identity. |
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Thus did abolitionism find its origins among people "preoccupied with the character and consequences of overseas enterprise" (2), people who rethought Britain's moral place in the world in tandem with reflections on their own destiny. In their challenges to the Atlantic slave trade, they found "an opportunity to establish new identities, new self-conceptions, to create for themselves a new place within society and a new role in public life" (2). These conjunctures, Brown suggests, supplied the energy that transformed mere "moral opinion" into "moral action." Brown's formulation here oddly echoes Eric Williams's pithy statement that slavery birthed capi- talism, which in turn destroyed it. It was not that the Clapham Sect made abolitionism but that abolitionism made them. |
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In Coleman's work the antislavery impulse is also ultimately about something other than antislavery. Invoking Richard Drayton's odd metaphor that the antislavery and Evangelical movements were "only 'crests' on the larger wave of colonization," Coleman asks, "How did anti-slavery, penal reform and colonization come together to form that large wave?" (3).3 Her answer builds on a close reading of what many might consider marginal texts. Indeed her "principal subject" is the "visionary writing about new settlements" (2) in Sierra Leone and New South Wales in the decade following the American Revolution, when national defeat seems to have generated a torrent of utopian ideas and visions, many of which stoked compensatory colonial fantasies or whetted appetites for new imperial adventures. Coleman points out that Sierra Leone and New South Wales were temporal and in some ways ideo- logical soul mates. That Josiah Wedgwood, the famous abolitionist and industrial potter, struck porcelain medallions celebrating the colonial adventure from Australian clay neatly sums up the symbolic connection here. Ships bound for Botany Bay and Freetown departed at roughly the same time from the same London harbor. Their destinations, Coleman suggests, were similarly imagined as sanctuaries from growing European decadence and disorder. Former slaves bound for West Africa and English convicts bound for New South Wales were all thought of as "reborn," destined for redemption from the corruption of a former life. Soon to be free and self-possessed, they might become good wage laborers or independent freeholders. Either way, they would be productive and multiply, serving as a source of material regeneration for the homeland. Yet the projects on the ground as well as the language of rehabilitation were conflicted and internally incoherent. The tug of slavery on the freedom of colonized peoples proved unrelenting. |
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As in Brown's Moral Capital, Coleman describes abolitionist and imperialist thinking "dove-tailing" (5). For her, they came together in "the widely cherished ambition to make the transatlantic slave trade redundant by setting up free plantations in Africa" (5). The idea of destroying slavery would be made palatable by showing that one could make a profit while doing so. Thus West Africa was envisioned as a market and New South Wales as a source of raw material (flax). It was widely accepted that markets and marketing were inherently civilizing influences. More disturbing, however, were the ways in which the new colonial schemes teetered on the precipice of reenslavement. Thus the strange and quixotic entomologist Henry Smeathman, who was generously supported at various times by British abolitionists, drew on his research on termite colonies to envision how putatively free laborers might be made to work with slavelike discipline—a solution, he thought, for the African's alleged lack of drive and innate laziness. Under all its governors, the Freetown settlement's principal, unresolved conflict remained the question of whether black settlers would be hired labor on sugar plantations or independent freeholders, subordinates or equal citizens. Soon, with bitter humor, black American settlers there took to calling it "a slave town" (124). |
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Taken together, Moral Capital and Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery effectively reframe our traditional portraits of antislavery as well as humanitarian reform more generally at the turn of the eighteenth century. They show us a revolutionary world awash in intellectual and emotional currents that made plausible some contemporaries' notions that the world indeed could be made anew. Each study could have assayed a more sustained articulation of their principal themes: Brown could have specified more explicitly at some points the links between individual motivations and broad social transformations, and Coleman could have tracked more closely the contrasting fates of reborn Australian convicts and redeemed ex-slave settlers in Sierra Leone. These flaws notwithstanding, Brown and Coleman suggest the value of reengaging that protean historical moment in terms its contemporaries might have recognized. Perhaps in the process we might better understand just how moral-political choices are framed for an effective popular response, a lesson that may be of use in our own historical moment. |
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Notes
1[Edward] Stanley, speech to the House of Commons, May 14, 1833, Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, 3d ser., vol. 17 (1833), cols. 1229–30.
2David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1975).
3Richard Drayton, Nature's Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the "Improvement" of the World (New Haven, Conn., 2000), 92.
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