ABSTRACT
Recent studies by scholars, such as Duncan Rice, Iain Whyte, and Eric Graham, have established the importance of examining Scotland's role in both British West Indian chattel slavery and the abolition of it. Three prominent figures with Scottish roots that addressed the issue of slavery include Adam Smith, Frances Wright, and Robert Wedderburn. Smith's argument that wage labor is more profitable than slavery further influenced capitalists to be abolitionists. He uses the concept of métayage, a French term, to trace the gradual transition from slavery to a type of farming that involved bonded farm tenants. In Views on Society and Manners in America, Wright first records her observations on the repugnance of slavery. Wedderburn's periodical, The Axe Laid to the Root, a model of the discourse of slavery being appropriated for the working-class movement, promotes Spencean agrarian equality as the basis of social equality.
