Abolition was not a ‘eureka’ moment

Last week, I asked what should happen after a country apologises for its historic role in the transatlantic slave trade. One reader called for community-led education, so people could recognise and understand the harm caused to enslaved communities and the wealth generated by slavery. Others called for a historical inquiry to reveal the impact of slavery on the nation. Another said the descendants of enslaved communities should determine what the next steps should be. “It is not for the ‘country’ to determine what reparation should be or who should benefit from it – for the ‘enslavers’ to dictate what the ‘enslaved’ need or is appropriate would be to continue the ‘imperial’ mindset,” they wrote.

Why ask? After all, Britain and many other former colonial powers have shown little indication that they will follow in the footsteps of the Dutch. Still, it is worth exploring these questions and the stories we tell about the future we want. To effectively fight for a world that you want, you have to be able to envision what it looks like.

This week we’re focusing on a fascinating interview by the Guardian’s head of special projects, Jonathan Shainin. He speaks to Christopher L Brown, a professor of history at Columbia University and the author of Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism, on the conventional story of abolition we tell ourselves – and how it defines the answer to a 250-year debate on the question of whether we are innocent or guilty.

But first, a quick note. Next week’s Cotton Capital newsletter will be the last for a while. Thank you for joining us on this journey so far – I’ve loved writing for this newsletter and hearing your thoughts.

When I began working with Maya Wolfe-Robinson on Cotton Capital early last year, our starting point was the academic research into the founders of the Manchester Guardian. The reports showed that the paper’s founding editor, John Edward Taylor – and nearly all of his original backers – had links to transatlantic slavery, largely through the cotton trade. But this was only the beginning of the project: our task was to translate these findings into a more expansive work of journalism, one that would tell a wider story about the Guardian’s origins, and explore the way that slavery had shaped both Manchester and modern Britain.

Any piece of journalism proceeds from an assumption about what readers already know and what will be “news” – and, by extension, some idea about how this new information might change our previous understanding of the subject. For Cotton Capital, this meant asking how a closer examination of the links between Manchester’s cotton merchants and the labour of enslaved Africans might revise our ideas about the city’s history. We also wanted to see how this new perspective on Manchester might in turn alter our sense of how profoundly the wealth generated by colonial slavery had shaped the whole country.

In this way, looking at Manchester, cotton, and the founding of the Guardian shifts our attention away from the traditional story about Britain’s involvement in slavery, which usually ends, decisively, with the triumph of the abolitionist campaign against the slave trade in 1807.

It is not hard to imagine why the heroic story of the anti-slavery movement overshadowed the more unpleasant reality of what David Olusoga describes in his essay for the series as “Britain’s long, and messy, complicity in the slave economy” – which did not end with the abolition of the slave trade. What is more remarkable, I think, is the extent to which an inspiring narrative of abolition still dominates public conversations about the history of slavery, and political debates about the meaning of that history.

To understand more about how that story was originally constructed – and why it still figures so prominently – I spoke to Christopher L Brown, a professor of history at Columbia University and the author of Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism, now regarded as one of the definitive accounts of the origins of the abolitionist campaign.

The traditional narrative, Brown says, “is one of enlightenment, and then redemption.” According to this “deceptively simple tale”, a sudden shift in moral perception, beginning in the early 1780s, sparked a national campaign led by Quakers and Evangelicals. This campaign almost immediately won over public opinion, and then steadily overcame resistance in Parliament – ending, within 20 years, a pillar of British wealth and power more than a century in the making.

What is too simple about this story, Brown says, is the way it presumes that the movement for abolition emerged naturally from newly “enlightened sensibilities” about the immorality of slavery. “It can be easy to forget what most of us know from our own lives: that professed values do not always determine the choices we make, that sometimes we decide against what we believe to be right, that we often accept questionable practices because they seem necessary to the world we know,” he writes in the book’s introduction.

“I’ve often thought that it doesn’t take a great deal of moral insight to see the inhumanity, the injustice and the cruelty of slavery,” he tells me. “You know, this was not a new discovery of the last half of the 18th century.” The question is why and how this moral feeling lent itself to action, and why the actors felt it might succeed at this moment in time.

The conventional story of abolition – with its emphasis on the inevitable awakening of a national conscience – was originally written by the abolitionists themselves. Thomas Clarkson, one of the first organisers of the movement, was also its first historian, and Brown credits him with establishing the narrative that still dominates today, in which it is abolition (rather than slavery) that reveals the national character. “Clarkson was the first to characterise the campaign,” Brown writes, “as the elaboration of principles essential to British Protestantism, as the expression of a distinctively British devotion to liberty and the rule of law.”

For the abolitionists, “this an exercise in reclaiming who we are, who we’ve always been,” Brown tells me. “They are not in denial about the extent of Britain’s predominance in the slave trade, but they are saying, ‘this is not who we are’. They are confessing sins, and then renouncing them.”

It’s not hard to see how this moral drama – in which slavery, or its abolition, reflects something essential about the British national character – still haunts contemporary debates about this history. In fact, Brown says, “one of the innovations of the abolitionists is to create the notion of a national moral responsibility – there is an openness, and even sometimes a desire, to claim responsibility for what the imperial state does, as a reflection on the nation.”

Over the next century, however, this narrative of the antislavery movement, “with its emphasis on [Britain’s] providential mission rather than human calculation,” Brown writes, meshed effortlessly with imperial historians seeking to defend the modern empire against anti-colonial movements abroad and at home. “There are a large number of new writings in 1933 that accompany the centenary of emancipation,” Brown tells me, “where the purpose is to tell the public, ‘this is how we ended slavery’, but very much with an eye to the present and the critiques of empire that are emerging. It’s a moment to say, this is a history to be proud of.”

The ensuing attack on this “humanitarian” narrative in the 20th century, most famously by Caribbean historian Eric Williams, set off a long-running controversy that Brown describes as “one of the most complex in modern historical scholarship”. Williams argued that the abolitionists succeeded because changes in the colonial economy had made emancipation politically convenient, and that the heroic narrative of Christian altruism disguised a more cynical economic and nationalist self-interest. For Brown, the more important question is not whether the abolitionists were self-interested, but why and how their self-interest led them to act. “A few, to varying degrees, did take a genuine interest in the welfare of the enslaved,” he writes. “But many more wanted, above all, to be free of slavery, and thus free from danger or free from corruption or free from guilt.”

“The question ‘are we innocent or are we guilty?’ is a 250-year discussion,” Brown tells me. “This political debate is nothing new. In fact, the roots of anti-slavery are around this question, ‘Should we feel guilty or not?’”. What Eric Williams saw, Brown adds, “was that there are no innocent people in this history. “You could not exist in this world and not be complicit, or enlisted, or victimised by it,” he says. “There wasn’t a space outside of it.” Jonathan Shainin