So I’m taking the last of my undergrad history courses right now, and one of the books that my professor assigned us is Adam Hochschild’s Bury the Chains. We’re six chapters in, and so far, Hochschild has centered British abolitionists (primarily Thomas Clarkson) in his accounting of the outlawing of the slave trade in England (I phrase it that way because we all, I assume, know that slavery itself didn’t go anywhere after 1833).
Now, I might not be the best read Marxist, but I know enough to be skeptical of any claims of significant historical events being driven by the energy and moral force of “great” individuals rather than the ebb and flow of material reality, a claim Hochschild is definitely making here. He even quotes Emerson in saying “An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.”
Well! I couldn’t let that nonsense go unargued, and since lambasting my professor would do no good, I’m here to ask if anybody happens to know the actual reasons the slave trade was outlawed, beyond vagaries about the industrial revolution and wage slavery. Gimme the real nuts and bolts.
Others have given good reasons materially, but we shouldn’t ignore that there really was a mass anti-slavery movement in Britain with an idealist base. and that those people do deserve praise.
People do decide what to do with the restrictied material options given them, and here they chose to abolish slavery, when other, more horrible, options for resolving this contradiction existed (See US Post-Reconstruction for instance, for how to somehow manage to do it worse than England’s piecemeal, flawed, incomplete abolition of slavery.)
Slave revolts are expensive, especially in the Caribbean, also Americans took over the slave trade
While this was not the sole reason, it should be noted that English anti-slavery laws gave their navy a pretext to board and search vessels for “inspections”. With the UK quickly becoming the world’s dominant naval power, this gave them lots of power over foreign shipping and trade, especially in the Atlantic.
“inspections”? why would UK ships want to have this excuse on hand?
It allowed them to intercept ships to check if they were slave trading. While they were inspecting the ship, the British officers could use the pretext to find other things wrong, ie smuggling, piracy, desertion, ect. Then they could seize your property or arrest you in some cases. Sort of like how American cops can use a busted taillight to pull you over, then arrest you if he find drugs during that.
The navy did also free a significant number of slaves this way too so it wasn’t just an abuse of power, but it also signaled to everyone that Britain was the dominant naval power in Europe now.
