Principles and Agents: The British Slave Trade and Its Abolition
Principles and Agents: The British Slave Trade and Its Abolition
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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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Front Matter
- Introduction: Interpreting British Slave Trade Abolition
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Part One Trade
David Richardson -
Part Two Opinions
David Richardson- Four “Vulgar Error”: Questioning Transatlantic Slavery in the Age of Locke
- Five Contrary to “the Laws of God, and the Rights of Man”: The Intellectual Roots of the BritishAnti–Slave Trade Movement
- Six “Tumults of Imagination”: Literature and British Anti–Slave Trade Sentiment
- Seven Reaching “the Common People”: Newspapers, African Voices, and Politicizingthe Slave Trade
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Part Three Politics
David Richardson- Eight “To Interest Men of Every Description in the Abolition of the Traffic”: Mobilization and the “Take Off” of Abolitionism
- Nine Finding “a Pathway for the Humanities”: The Politics of Slave Trade Abolition, 1791–1807
- Ten On the “Heroism of Principle”: Reflecting on the British Slave Trade and Its Abolition
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End Matter
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