People and Parliament: The Rhetoric of the British Slave Trade

Abstract

People and Parliament: The Rhetoric of the British Slave Trade In sharp contrast to a tradition which prevailed for more than a century after the abolition of the British slave system, its historiography has become increasingly rooted in a socioeconomic view of the historical process. The most striking evidence of this shift is to be found in the accelerated outpouring of books and essays which seek, in one way or another, to relate the termination of the British slave trade and slavery to emerging economic forces or economic ideology in the century after 1750, the era of emergent industrial capitalism.1 The first systematic attempt at an economically oriented history of abolition was Williams' Capitalism and Slavery. If subsequent scholarship sapped many of the empirical and theoretical underpinnings of his study, it was nevertheless supremely successful in making economic arguments a principal cause of the success of abolition. But, if there was no direct link between a change in the economic performance of slavery and the rise of