ABSTRACT
The transatlantic slave trade, the economic and financial structures under which it flourished, and the political relations which enabled it to evade for so long all the abolitionists’ attempts to end it, are increasingly regarded as having played an integral part in the formation of modernity, rather than being aberrations, or relics of a less enlightened age. The view that nineteenth-century reforms eventually purged modern commodity capitalism of the stain thrown upon it by 250 years of slave trading has been seriously questioned, and seems to be in retreat.1 An important aspect of this more critical stance toward the era has been the questioning of abolitionist rhetoric and assumptions, particularly of the ways in which the abolitionist movement itself-though strenuously opposed to slavery and the slave trade-relied upon a language of economic and cultural dominance that continued to foster new kinds of colonialism. This essay traces the course of one element of that language, a key rhetorical figure adopted by eighteenthcentury abolitionist writers: the assertion that the very air of Great Britain was inimical to slavery.
