The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation (review)

During the eighteenth century more than six million enslaved Africans survived the middle passage. Their numbers peaked during the last quarter of the century at about 90,000 per year. British traders surpassed all others in transporting them to the Americas; Britain’s colonies claimed the largest share of the total imports. Jamaica alone during these hundred years received almost one million slaves. Yet, in one of the more remarkable ironies in the making of the modern world, Great Britain, the most conspicuous beneficiary of the international slave-based plantation system, gave birth during the last quarter of the eighteenth century to the world’s first antislavery crusade. Gathering popular momentum in the years to come, it would lead in little more than a century to the extirpation of legal slavery everywhere in the hemisphere. An institution that had once seemed coeval with the history of mankind and that had enjoyed the authoritative approval of all the world’s great religions died an ignominious death as a moral outrage.

Seymour Drescher stands as one of the academy’s foremost interpreters of the history of slavery and abolition, and his Mighty Experiment can be seen as the culmination of decades of painstaking research and mature reflection on the complicated process that in the British empire forwarded the global project of human emancipation. In no small measure because of Drescher’s previous scholarship, particularly his frontal assault on the influential economic interpretation of British antislavery by Eric Williams, the notion that slavery in the British West Indies had suffered a kind of market death no longer holds sway. Indeed, the most recent scholarship would indicate that throughout the Americas slavery remained quite profitable at the moment of abolition. The extraordinary conjunction of religious and secular forces whose political expression resulted in the British Emancipation Act of 1833 proved to be in conflict with imperial economic growth, profit-conscious colonial planters, and the laws of supply and demand. In judging the “mighty experiment,” a metaphor borrowed from Colonial Secretary Edward George Stanley, who in 1833 shepherded the government’s resolution on emancipation through the House of Commons, Drescher remains in awe of the sheer audacity of the undertaking. For when all the costs are reckoned, he concludes, British antislavery “may have been the most expensive international policy based on moral action in modern history” (p. 232).

Drescher devotes about a third of thirteen chapters to the role of social science in the great debate, for both abolitionists and their opponents brought the armament of political economy, demography, epidemiology, and racial science to the floor. In carefully navigating the ever shifting and turning intellectual currents, Drescher offers abundant surprises as well as insights. Public opinion had more to do with shaping social scientific responses to the question of emancipation than the reverse. Adam Smith’s familiar indictment of slavery in the Wealth of Nations had limited staying power for the abolitionists because Smith’s rather haphazard comparisons of slave and free labor contained glaring inconsistencies and uncertainties. The French economist Jean-Baptiste Say, Smith’s continental disciple, actually published one of the more compelling arguments on the economic rationality, at least in the short run, of slaveholding planters. When he somewhat belatedly rose to condemn slavery, he did so on moral and humanitarian grounds. Thomas Malthus, although a friend of William Wilberforce, supplied ambiguous intelligence in his writings on population. While indicting slavery for its chilling effect on the ability of West Indian slaves to reproduce themselves naturally, Malthus also suggested that suppression of the Atlantic slave trade would not only fail to improve demographic performance in West Africa but would subvert West Indian prosperity by driving up labor costs. Epidemiological evidence on the superiority of black over white labor in tropical and subtropical climates mounted during the early nineteenth century; still, the abolitionist impulse intensified. James Cowles Prichard, a towering figure in British ethnology, helped confine racialist thinking in the empire to...