When freedom was the "peculiar institution"

You point out in the book that, at the time, three-quarters of the world was in bondage, and, as Seymour Drescher said, "freedom, not slavery, was the peculiar institution." It seems extraordinary that there were even 12 people who were able to see beyond that and find each other in order to start this movement.

This was an extraordinary group of people. It's not that there was nobody in England who was willing to speak against slavery. There were scattered people, not just in England but in other countries as well -- a few intellectuals, a few theologians. But they were awfully scattered; there was no sense of belonging to a worldwide movement. And I think that most people would have written them off as complete crackpots. A smaller number would have said they were well-intentioned but hopelessly idealistic. The whole Atlantic economy was based on slavery. Sugar was the oil of the 18th century in terms of being the most valuable commodity and the commodity that determined the geopolitics of the day, the nature of the wars, the territory that got traded at the end of the wars, and so forth. And this was all produced by slaves. It would be as if all oil was produced by slaves today, and it required millions and millions of slaves to produce all that oil. Then I think you would find people who were opposed to slavery being considered idealistic, even worthy perhaps, but totally impractical because we could never do without oil.

One of the similarities to our own time that you point out in the book, is that in the 1700s the world was really globalized, and therefore to succeed the abolitionist movement really had to be a global, not a local, one. Which is the same difficulty we face with activist movements today.

I think that is true. The powerful argument used by the pro-slavery people was if England abolished the slave trade, other people would just get that business, especially France. And that was a very convincing argument, especially to members of Parliament who were wavering on that issue. The other thing besides sugar that dominated the 18th century was this longtime rivalry between Britain and France, who were fighting wars all the time. No one wanted to do anything that would give the advantage to French commerce and let their slave ships get the business. So that did make it very important that this be an international movement, and I think the fact that it really wasn't one was something that made it a much harder path for the British abolitionists to hoe. They had some supporters in the States, but these were almost entirely in the northern states where there were very few slaves anyway. And, of course, a lot of the northern states, right after the American Revolution, moved to abolish slavery. But that wasn't a very significant thing because there was no move to abolish slavery in the American South. And there were six other European countries with slave colonies at that time in which there was no movement to speak of at all. So, it would have gone much faster if it had been a global movement, but it didn't, and so in a way I think it makes the actions of this group of people even more remarkable.

So much of the story is one of religious dissent -- Quakers and Methodists coming up against the Church of England, for example. And the missionaries in the slave colonies taught equality in the eyes of God. But, ultimately, at the end of the book, you say that it wasn't scripture but human empathy that drove the movement. Surely we can't discount the role of religion so easily?

It's a very paradoxical situation, because in England, throughout the whole lifespan of the movement, it was a time and place where everybody was deeply religious, or thought of themselves as deeply religious. The concept of someone who was secular or atheist or agnostic, at least in a visible way, was almost nonexistent. Everybody was characterized as Quaker or Anglican or Methodist or whatever. Yet at the same time, one thing that made this movement remarkable was that it was the first major social movement where people from these different religious groups, in effect, formed a coalition to work for something. What was paradoxical was that what they were working for was an aim that was totally secular. It was freeing the slaves. There had been previous religious activism on issues of religious freedom; the Quakers had agitated about not having to pay taxes that supported the Church of England, and there were things like that. But this movement was purely secular.

I think my point about people being moved by human empathy rather than religious argument, what really convinced me of that was, if you look at the distribution records of the different abolitionist tracts, there's such a striking difference. The early tracts tended to quote extensively from the Bible, to make their arguments about God's will. They didn't find many readers. Then there began to be a series of things: John Newton wrote a pamphlet at the urging of the committee; the former slave-ship doctor Alexander Falconbridge did a pamphlet about his experiences on slave ships; a lot of Equiano's autobiography told the life experience of a slave -- these were the books and pamphlets that caught on and were able to reach a really wide audience. And then the absolute all-time bestseller of any kind of anti-slavery literature was this curious little document called "Abstract of the Evidence," which was an abridgement and summary of quotations from the various pieces of eyewitness testimony given before Parliament. And even though at least one or two compilers of this document were themselves clergymen, they never quoted from the Bible; there was no religious argument. It just quoted from West Indian laws and testimony before Parliament. And that was the thing that became an all-time bestseller. So I think inadvertently [the abolitionists] stumbled on the fact that what people responded to was not biblical argument but being confronted with the actual experience of what slavery looked like in practice.

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