Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (review)

The year 2007 marked the bicentenary of the abolition of the British Atlantic slave trade, sparking a plethora of events and discussion about our contemporary understanding of the meanings of that moment. Which individuals really mattered, what sort of movement precipitated parliamentary legislation, what was the significance of the act, and why does it matter now? Moral Capital makes an important contribution to these debates; it asks why the British antislavery movement happened when it did. Its key argument, one that bypasses the traditional emphases on economic or humanitarian motivations, is that the American Revolution shifted understandings of both nation and empire and made antislavery an appealing issue for key individuals and groups. It became a source of moral capital.

Brown sees contingency as critical to the emergence of a movement in Britain in the 1780s: Antislavery sentiment had been around in both the American colonies and Britain for a long time. In 1783, the coalescence of Anglican evangelical and Quaker concerns made possible a campaign against the slave trade, though success was hardly inevitable. Contrary to Thomas Clarkson, who saw the rise of the movement as an inexorable expression of British notions of liberty, Brown argues that particular people came to believe that they could change something because of the dynamic of transatlantic politics.

This transatlantic history, which moves between Britain and the American colonies, is structured in four parts. The first deals with antislavery sentiment on both sides during a period when there was no prospect of a movement. The second concerns the gradual realization of the salience of slavery to the political struggles of the 1770s. Although some American abolitionists critiqued British complicity, Britons identified colonial slavery as someone else's problem. Granville Sharp, however, came to see that it was indeed a British problem, at the same time that Edmund Burke was leading a campaign to clean up another part of empire. Part 3 looks at some of the schemes developed in the 1770s to tackle the issue, including the novel concept of an empire without slavery. Meanwhile, one effect of the American Revolution was to enable Africans to make claims as subjects of the empire. By the 1780s, black people in Britain had a public voice. Part 4 sees the conflict "resolved," as Anglican evangelicals took up the cause of Caribbean slavery and Quakers petitioned Parliament about the slave trade. Clarkson is granted a key role as the individual who was prepared to devote his life to abolitionism. To be against slavery became an identity with deep appeal for varied groups who understood this political aim differently but could be collectively mobilized against the trade.

Brown's work is rooted in archival sources and conversant with the huge secondary literature on these questions. His starting points are his argument with Clarkson's teleology and his insistence on a more contingent understanding of why things happened when and how they did. The loss of the American colonies and the crisis of empire that it engendered inspired new visions of a cleaner, more moral nation. Patriotism and antislavery came to be closely associated in Britain.

Brown makes little reference to interdisciplinary approaches, though at points he draws briefly on contemporary sociological theories; one of his fundamental concerns is the relation between cultural prescription and individual action. The concept missing from the book, to my mind, is the Gramscian notion of conjuncture—the intersection of heterogeneous forces that come together in a distinctive moment.¹ The early 1780s was one such moment.