Quaker Rhetoric and Transatlantic Antislavery, 1657-1761

Lead Research Organisation: Kingston University
Department Name: Sch of Humanities


As the national conversation that took place in 2007 to mark the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the British slave trade revealed, there is widespread public interest in both the history and the culture of slavery and abolition. That conversation also refreshed and invigorated the scholarly study of slavery and abolition and placed it firmly at the centre of British intellectual life. Nevertheless, while much recent public discourse has focused on the outcome of the eighteenth-century abolition movement, very little research has been conducted into its origins. In this context, while it is well known that the Society of Friends, or Quakers, opposed slavery from the mid eighteenth century onwards, it is not fully understood when and how they came to hold such a view or why they should choose to do so when no other major religious or national group was seriously suggesting such a radical departure from the accepted norms of the day. This study, which has the working title Quaker Rhetoric and Transatlantic Antislavery, 1657-1761, offers answers to these questions, drawing together literary, historical, and religious sources to show that Quakers, first in Barbados and later in Pennsylvania, spent a century arguing among themselves over the lawfulness of slavery in a variety of forums including meetings and debates, tracts, pamphlets, sermons, and essays. This long argument led to their developing in private a sophisticated and robust rhetoric of antislavery which they were then able to take fully-formed to the wider world after 1761, the year in which Quakers everywhere were required to have nothing to do with slavery or the slave trade, and the point at which antislavery rhetoric moved into mainstream literary discourse: a process examined in my earlier book British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760-1807 (Palgrave 2005). By studying the origins of Quaker antislavery discourse, therefore, this study also examines the origins of almost all antislavery thought and literature in both the British and American contexts. It aims thereby to provide an important new insight into the perennial scholarly debate over why the British chose to abandon first the slave trade and later slavery seemingly against their own economic best interests. This debate, one of the most important and most contested questions in British history, has been explained by both historians and literary scholars in social, economic, cultural, and religious terms. This study will weight the debate away from simple monocausal explanations to show that Quaker literary and religious culture, although rooted in their unique social and economic position in the colonies, led to their developing an antislavery rhetoric that ultimately caught the popular imagination more powerfully than any other Quaker testimony had done before, or would do again. The primary benefits of this study are, first, to bring to scholarly and public attention an overlooked but nevertheless key moment in the history of Britain's involvement in slavery and the slave trade and, second, to demonstrate the centrality of writing and rhetoric to a movement that is more often explained in terms of economic forces or individual biographies. While this will benefit both scholars and general readers seeking to understand Britain's role in the slave trade, and in the British American colonies more generally, it will also open up significant new areas of research and enquiry to literary scholars seeking to understand the development and structure of religious and humanitarian discourses in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.


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