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THE MORAL GEOGRAPHY OF BRITISH ANTI-SLAVERY RESPONSIBILITIES*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 December 2012

Richard Huzzey
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Abstract

By examining British anti-slavery debates across a longue durée – before and after West Indian emancipation – the basis of moral responsibility for political action may be reassessed. Recent interest in humanitarian or transnational compassion may have underappreciated the geographical limitations of the moral responsibility Britons assumed for slavery and the slave trade. The notion of national complicity was crucial in mobilising individual Britons to petition, abstain from slave-grown produce or otherwise pressure parliament. While the peculiar aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars created a British responsibility for other nations’ slave trading, there was little comparable appetite for the internationalising responsibility for the slave-labour origins of traded goods. This meant that transnational obligations to police the slave trade did not translate into concern about the slave production behind overseas trade. By tracing these national debates over time, it is possible to discern the dominant and recessive arguments for how and when moral revulsion should translate into political action by Britons and the British state. This suggests a need to revisit scholarly conclusions about abolitionist campaigning, the basis of moral responsibility for slavery, and the antecedents of modern consumer responsibility.

Type
The Alexander Prize Essay
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 22 , December 2012 , pp. 111 - 139
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 2012

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Footnotes

*

Thanks must go to Seymour Drescher, Margot Finn and Jay Sexton for their comments on the argument advanced here, though they are blameless for any remaining infelicities.

References

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2 The 1845 speech is reproduced in Thomas Babington Macaulay, Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Corrected by Himself (1866), 169.

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