Abstract
Embedded in most histories of the abolition of British imperial slavery is what one might call a downward flowing model. From Thomas Clarkson’s graphic figure of abolitionism as a converging system of leading moralists, in 1808, to David Brion Davis’s hypothesis of anti-slavery as an expression of the hegemony of the British ruling class, in 1975, the emphasis has been on how leading members of cultural, political or economic sectors of society generated and directed the force which ultimately destroyed the British slave trade and slavery.1 In individual accounts saints are pitted against slave-driving planters and merchants, or statesmen and political economists join forces against imperial slave interests, but attention centres on leading economic interests, on clusters of intellectuals or philosophers, on lines of division in Cabinets and Parliament. When historians have introduced the larger public into the story, it is generally and briefly treated as a ‘mass sentiment’, consciously or unconsciously worked on by élites for good or ill.
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Notes and References
See inter alia: Thomas Clarkson, History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-trade by the British Parliament, 2 vols (1808)
David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, 1966) and The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca, 1975).
For recent trends see Roger Anstey’s ‘The Historical Debate on the Abolition of the British Slave Trade’, in R. Anstey and P. E. H. Hair (eds) Liverpool, the African Slave Trade, and Abolition (Liverpool, 1976) pp. 157–66.
S. Drescher, ‘Capitalism and the Decline of Slavery: The British case in Comparative Perspective’ in Vera Rubin and Arthur Tuden (eds), Comparative Perspectives on Slavery in New World Plantation Societies, of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, CCXCII (1977) 132–42.
Roger Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition 1760–1810 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1975). Five very rough draft chapters to Anstey’s sequel to the above volume were completed before his untimely death. Although they are too incomplete for separate publication, they are the product of extensive research and contain important insights on a broad variety of themes relating to anti-slavery between 1823 and 1833. I will refer to them as Anstey, ‘Emancipation’ (MS.).
James Walvin, ‘The Rise of British Popular Sentiment for Abolition, 1787–1832’, in Christine Bolt and Seymour Drescher (eds), Anti-Slavery, Religion and Reform (Folkestone and Hamden, 1980) pp. 149–62; Walvin, ‘The Impact of Slavery in British Radical Politics: 1787–1838’, in Rubin and Tuden (eds), Comparative Perspectives, pp. 343–55
Howard Temperley, ‘Anti-Slavery’, in Patricia Hollis (ed.), Pressure from Without in Early Victorian England (1974) pp. 27–51
E. M. Hunt, ‘The North of England Agitation for the Abolition of the slave trade, 1780–1800’ (University of Manchester, MA thesis, 1959).
For the early period to 1807 see Anstey, Atlantic Slave Trade; for the period from then to emancipation see P. F. Dixon, ‘The Politics of Emancipation: the Movement for the Abolition of Slavery in the British West Indies, 1807–1833’ (Oxford, D. Phil., 1970); for the post-emancipation era see H. Temperley, British Antislavery 1833–1870 (1972).
On the difficulties of organising a national petition, see the account of the reform petition of 1793 in Albert Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty: The English Democratic Movement in the Age of the French Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1979) pp. 279–80.
See E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1968)
Gwyn A. Williams, Artisans and Sansculottes (1969).
On the Catholic emancipation petitions, see G. I. T. Machin, The Catholic Question in English Politics 1820 to 1830 (Oxford, 1964) pp. 144–9.
The adult male population over fifteen for each country was estimated using figures from B. R. Mitchell and P. Deane, Abstract of British Historical Statistics (Cambridge, 1962) p. 11, and B. R. Mitchell, European Historical Statistics (New York, 1975) pp. 20, 24, 35, 52 and 53.
See Peter Fraser, ‘Public Petitioning and Parliament before 1832’, History, XLVI (1961) 195–211.
Edith F. Hurwitz, Politics and the Public Conscience: Slave Emancipation and the Abolitionist Movement in Britain (1973) p. 44. Roger Anstey’s Atlantic Slave Trade emphasises the primacy of the evangelical impulse in the launching of abolitionism although he allows for a conjuncture of interests and idealism in accounting for at least one abolitionist victory, the termination of the British foreign slave trade in 1806: ibid., ch. 8.
On French working-class petitioning see Augustin Cochin, The Results of Emancipation, tr. M. L. Booth (Boston, 1863) p. 73; and Drescher, ‘Two Variants’, pp. 57 and 63n.
On the English tradition in American working-class abolitionism in the 1830s, see John B. Jentz, ‘Artisans, Evangelicals, and the City: A Social History of the Labor and Abolitionist Movements in Jacksonian New York’, (City University of New York, Ph.D., 1977) pp. 208 and 217. See also Eric Foner, ‘Abolitionism and the Labor Movement in Antebellum America’, in Bolt and Drescher (eds) Anti-slavery, pp. 254–71.
For example, Reginald Coupland, The British Anti-slavery Movement (1935, 1966) p. 111
E. M. Howse, Saints in Politics: The Clapham Sect and the Growth of Freedom (London, 1953) ch. 8, esp. p. 179; Anstey, Atlantic Slave Trade, pt 4. On Anstey’s general model of the limited scope of the popular phase, see ‘The Pattern of British Abolitionism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’ in Bolt and Drescher (eds), Anti-slavery, pp. 19–42.
G. I. T. Machin, The Catholic Question in English Politics (Oxford, 1964), pp. 144–8.
John Cannon, Parliamentary Reform, 1640–1832 (Cambridge, 1973) p. 214 n
J. T. Ward, Chartism (1973), pp. 113–17.
C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins; Augustin Cochin, L’Abolition de Vesclavage 2 vols (Paris, 1961) vol. I, ch. 1.
For the decline thesis in general, see S. Drescher, Econocide, ch. 1; for the period after 1815 see W. L. Burn, Emancipation and Apprenticeship in the British West Indies (1937, rpt 1970) pp. 51–2 and 73.
See Stanley Engerman, ‘Some Considerations Relating to Property Rights in Man’, Journal of Economic History, XXXIII (March 1973) 43–64.
In France, the cost of compensation was the principal barrier to emancipation during the July Monarchy. See S. Drescher (ed.), Tocqueville and Beaumont on Social Reform (New York, 1968) p. 172.
The productivity per capita in Britain and France was estimated from J. Marczewski, Introduction a l’histoire quantitative (Geneva, 1965) pp. 134 and 135.
See Adolphe Gueroult, De la Question coloniale en 1842. Les colonies francaises et le sucre de betterave (Paris, 1842).
Dixon (‘Politics of Emancipation’, p. 203) characterises the revolts as setbacks to abolition, except as failures. One must, however, separate the impact of a long-term series of pressures from individual events. Anstey, (‘Emancipation’, 3rd ch., 21st p.) also remarks in passing on the negative impact of the Jamaica uprising itself until the results of the repression began to be known. Other accounts treat the uprising itself as more central, the ‘decisive factor’ in the abolition process. See W. A. Green, British Slave Emancipation: The Sugar Colonies and the Great Experiment 1830–1865 (Oxford, 1976) p. 112.
Ibid., pp. 341–2. The abolitionists were themselves frequently astonished at the explosions of popular excitement during the anti-slavery campaigns. See Z. Macaulay to Lord Brougham, 13 May 1833, Private, Brougham, MSS. 10544 reprinted (but, according to Anstey, wrongly dated), in M. J. Knutsford, Life & Times of Macaulay (1900) p. 70.
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© 1982 Michael Craton, Seymour Drescher, David Eltis, Betty Fladeland, David Geggus, B. W. Higman, C. Duncan Rice, James Walvin
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Drescher, S. (1982). Public Opinion and the Destruction of British Colonial Slavery. In: Walvin, J. (eds) Slavery and British Society 1776–1846. Problems in Focus Series. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16775-3_2
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