Moral Capital
Foundations of British Abolitionism
Christopher Leslie Brown asks the hard question about British abolition: why a nation gave up the slave trade at the moment it was most profitable. His answer is that anti-slavery offered moral capital, a way for Britons to recover a sense of national virtue after the humiliation of losing America. He traces how a Quaker campaign became a mass movement with millions of signatures, and why the argument took the form of honour rather than economics.
Recommended by 1 Person
Kwame Anthony Appiah
This is another beautiful piece of scholarship by an eminent historian, but you don’t have to be an academic to read it. It’s about a really interesting subject that I think would interest anybody. It’s about the abolitionist movement in England in the late 18th century and at the turn of the 19th century, with people like Wilberforce, and it tries to explain why so many Englishmen got involved in anti-slavery.
Interview · November 2012
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