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Principles and Agents: The British Slave Trade and Its Abolition

Online ISBN:
9780300262902
Print ISBN:
9780300250435
Publisher:
Yale University Press
Book

Principles and Agents: The British Slave Trade and Its Abolition

David Richardson
David Richardson
University of Hull
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Published online:
19 May 2022
Published in print:
4 January 2022
Online ISBN:
9780300262902
Print ISBN:
9780300250435
Publisher:
Yale University Press

Abstract

Britain’s abolition of its slave trade in 1807 was a defining moment in modern history, yet it continues to excite controversy, in part because the nation dominated European trafficking of Africans to America in 1783–1807. Through an analysis of market conditions at the British, African, and West Indian points of the infamous triangular trade, as well as of issues of credit and of agency dilemma involved in their integration, this book seeks to explain that dominance. Though legally sanctioned and justified by contemporary mercantilist and racist ideologies, enslaving Africans was nonetheless challenged by some on grounds of humanity and national identity under the later Stuarts and the Hanoverians. Theologians and philosophers intellectually rationalized those challenges within a larger humanitarian revolution, but rather than identifying it with particular individuals, the book argues that abolition of British slaving ultimately relied on the power of ordinary people to change the world. It shows that British slaving and opposition to it, the latter manifest in imaginative literature, journals, newspapers, and pamphlets as well as in learned tracts, grew in parallel through the 1760s but then came increasingly into conflict in both public imagination and political discourse. Highlighting ideological tensions between Britons’ sense of themselves as free people and their willingness to enslave Africans abroad, the book reveals how from the 1770s such tensions became politicized, even as British slaving activities reached unprecedented levels, ultimately mobilizing public opinion to compel Parliament to confront and begin to resolve them in 1788–1807.

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