ABSTRACT
Opening the collection Discourses of Slavery and Abolition, Brycchan Carey and Sarah Salih remark that the ‘long eighteenth century’ might be best described as ‘the age of slavery’.1 Nowhere was this more apparent than in the British West Indies, where slavery and the slave trade had been practised since the late seventeenth century.2 As the long eighteenth century wore on, West Indian slavery gained vocal critics in the British mainland, although its abolition would not arrive until the early nineteenth century.3 In Moral Capital, Christopher Brown sets out to discover the sources of abolitionism, in order to determine why it took so long for the movement to gain the political momentum necessary to end the practice of slavery. Brown remarks that ‘if anti-slavery sentiment, alone, could have caused an anti-slavery movement, the campaign against the British slave trade should have commenced at least fifty years before it did’. Indeed, he states that the slave trade ‘enjoyed what seemed like insurmountable political support before the Revolutionary era’, due in large part to the extensive lobbying of planters and slave traders.4 As a result, increasingly vocal abolitionists fought a bitterly contested battle for public opinion in Britain, seeking to redress the wrongs of slavery by appealing to both morality and sentiment.
