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RATIONAL DISSENT, ENLIGHTENMENT, AND ABOLITION OF THE BRITISH SLAVE TRADE*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 July 2011

ANTHONY PAGE
ANTHONY PAGE*
Affiliation:
University of Tasmania
*
School of History and Classics, Box 1340, University of Tasmania, Launceston, TAS 7250, Australia[email protected]
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Abstract

Following British abolition of the slave trade in 1807, the origins and nature of popular abolitionism have been much debated among historians. Traditionally, religion was seen as the driving force, with an emphasis on the role of Quakers and evangelicals, whilst in the twentieth century social historians began to stress the importance of economic and social change. This article revises both interpretations by helping to recover and analyse the abolitionism of enlightened Rational Dissenters. Legal inequality and their ‘rational piety’ encouraged heterodox Dissenters to become active in a wide range of reformist causes. Owing to evangelical dominance in the nineteenth century, however, the role of Rational Dissenters was marginalized in histories of abolitionism. Recovering Rational Dissenting abolitionism underlines the importance of religion in the campaign against the slave trade. Since Rational Dissent was to a large extent a religion of the commercial classes, this article also sheds light on the hotly debated relationship between capitalism and abolition.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 54 , Issue 3 , September 2011 , pp. 741 - 772
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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Footnotes

*

Many thanks to Dr Martin Fitzpatrick (Aberystwyth), Prof. Michael Roberts (Macquarie University), Dr Damian Powell, Luke Badcock, and the journal's editor and anonymous readers for their very helpful comments on this article. I am also grateful for permission of the Trustees of Dr Williams's Library to use letters in their keeping.

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2 The classic interpretation of anti-slavery as a cause promoted by middle-class capitalists is Eric Williams, Capitalism and slavery (Chapel Hill, NC, 1944); for a depiction of Rational Dissenters as ‘bourgeois radicals’, see Isaac Kramnick, Republicanism and bourgeois radicalism: political ideology in late eighteenth-century England and America (Ithaca, NY, 1990).

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138 [Benjamin Vaughan], New and old principles of trade compared (London, 1788), pp. 28, xi.

139 Kippis, A sermon, pp. 34, 36.

140 [Belsham], An essay on the African slave trade.

141 W. Currie, ed., Memoir of the life, writings and correspondence of James Currie (2 vols., 1831), i, pp. 135–6.

142 Benjamin Vaughan to Thomas Jefferson, c. 14 June 1789, Julian P. Boyd, ed., The papers of Jefferson (36 vols. Princeton, NJ, 1958), xv, p. 182.

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148 Cobbett's Parliamentary History, xxx, p. 1446.

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153 Cited in Farrell, ‘“Contrary to the principles of justice, humanity and sound policy”’, p. 158.

154 Drescher, ‘Long goodbye: Dutch capitalism and antislavery’, pp. 57–60; for debate on the impact of slave resistance, see the essays in Seymour Drescher and Pieter C. Emmer, eds., Who abolished slavery? Slave revolts and abolitionism (New York, NY, 2010).

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161 Debates on the bill for abolition of the slave trade (1808), p. 111.

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