ABSTRACT
Three recent developments in historical and literary scholarship challenge longstanding consensus interpretations of the affective history of the British abolition movement. From Thomas Clarkson’s 1808 history of abolition to Lynn Hunt’s Inventing Human Rights, the point has been insistently repeated: from 1619 until (roughly) 1772, Britons ignored colonial slavery. But then something changed: around the time of the Somerset decision, Britons suddenly began to empathize strongly with the suffering of African slaves, and the feeling grew to such an extent that by 1787, they felt called to action.1 This outpouring of empathy took political form as the abolition movement, and slavery was no longer a matter of course, but instead the subject of heated debate and of an unprecedented outpouring of public feeling. This position, however, is strongly challenged by recent scholarly developments. The first is Christopher Brown’s recognition in Moral Capital that slavery was never simply taken for granted or viewed as morally acceptable in the British eighteenth century, but was always seen as at best distasteful;2 the change was not in feelings about, or awareness of, slavery, but in the sense of the practicality of antislavery action. The second is the contention by literary scholars-including Lynn Festa, Brycchan Carey, and myself-that sentimental depictions of slavery were not exclusively, or even primarily, abolitionist in intention, but were in fact often used to support slavery,
1 Thomas Clarkson, History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (London: Longman, 1808); Lynn Hunt, Human Rights: A History (New York: Norton, 2008). Other notable examples include Frank J. Klingberg, The Anti-Slavery Movement in England: A Study in English Humanitarianism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1926; Hamden, CT: Archon, 1968), esp. 22-58; and Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005). Notable exceptions to the consensus include Marcus Wood, Slavery, Empathy and Pornography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), and Nicholas Hudson’s critique of the whiggism of scholarly views of abolition, “‘Britons Never Will be Slaves’: National Myth, Conservatism, and the Beginnings of British Antislavery,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 34, no. 4 (2001): 559-76.
