Reading Comprehension

The movement to abolish chattel slavery in the Atlantic world has, with reason, been celebrated as one of the great moral revolutions of the modern period. Within a span of decades whose brevity, by historical standards, was unusual, the institution went from a defended commonplace of imperial economy to a thing whose defenders had to disguise their defence. The shift involved sermons, pamphlets, newspaper campaigns, petitions, boycotts, and finally legislation — an arsenal of methods whose subsequent use in other reform movements has, if anything, increased over time. The achievement is real, and to talk down its scale would be a disservice both to the people enslaved and to those whose labour ended their enslavement.

The achievement, however, is more textured than the standard narrative allows. The British movement that achieved formal abolition in the empire in 1833 included, in its leadership, persons of unimpeachable moral conviction who were also, in their other beliefs, casual racial supremacists, certain of the cultural superiority of European civilisation and unbothered by the colonial settlements that supplied much of the violence on which abolition itself rested. Compensation paid at emancipation went almost entirely to former owners; ex-slaves received apprenticeship terms whose conditions, in many islands, differed only modestly from the institution they replaced. The arc bent, but it bent within a wider order of imperial assumptions whose own undoing would take another century at least.

None of this diminishes the people whose voices most insistently pressed for abolition — many of them, importantly, formerly enslaved themselves — or the changes their pressure produced. What it does insist on is a distinction between the moral case for an end to chattel slavery, which the movement made with great force, and the broader moral case against racial hierarchy and colonial extraction, which the same movement made only weakly, intermittently, or not at all. To celebrate the first without noticing the second is to misread the history, and to underrate the difficulty that followed.

To say this is not to reproach the abolitionists for being people of their own time. It is to ask their successors not to imagine that the work was complete with the closing of the slave markets, or that the moral apparatus by which abolition was won was thereby validated in every other application. Movements, like institutions, accumulate inheritances; some they should keep, some they should reckon with. The careful reading of the abolitionist achievement involves both.