When freedom was the "peculiar institution"

Why, once Britain passed emancipation in 1838, did it take so long to happen elsewhere?

I think there are various reasons. In the U.S., of course, I think it was because people knew it would split the country. But in England, there was not only this experience with impressment, there was something else more important. England was not a democracy, because less than 5 percent of the population could vote. Nonetheless, in much of the rest of Europe, nobody could vote at all. Even by the middle of the 18th century in England, Parliament was more important than the king. Even though most people couldn't vote, they nonetheless lived in a culture of democracy, where electoral campaigns were extremely public -- pamphleteering, parading, denunciations in the press. And there was quite a well-developed set of protections under the law -- trial by jury, free speech, absence of censorship. This also was totally unlike most of the rest of Europe.

One of the most effective activist tools you discuss was the sugar boycott, which was spearheaded by women. And the second half of the movement, the one to end not just the slave trade but slavery itself, was activated by women -- a fact that has been more or less written out of history.

This was fascinating to me, because one of the problems you face writing about history is that the most interesting stuff there are usually no records about. Women played virtually no role in British public life at this time. And then there are these little fascinating clues that they began to do so during the anti-slavery movement. One of the ones I mention was in 1788, when the movement caught on for the first time. One of the ways we know it caught on was that suddenly in the records of the topics of debates staged by the London debating societies -- which were commercial enterprises and a big form of public entertainment -- in the month of February 1788, all of a sudden, the debates on record in London are about slavery or the slave trade, whereas in previous years it had only been an occasional topic. And then in one of these debates -- and unfortunately, these damn newspapers don't give you the names -- a newspaper reported that a remarkable occurrence happened: A lady stood up and took the anti-slavery side in the debate, and this lady impressed everyone with her eloquence and force. And the following week another debate society proprietor announced that the same lady held forth on anti-slavery at his debating society. Unfortunately, we don't know who this eloquent lady was, but we know she was there. One scholar I read said she believes this was the first time on record that, outside of a church or church meeting, an English woman was on record as speaking in public. Well, I guess you also have to make an exception for Queen Elizabeth I, who had spoken in public also! Still, it was an amazing thing.

And then there was another thing that I quoted in the book, from a letter to a newspaper from an anonymous man who'd returned home from a trip and was alarmed to find that none of the women in his household had bought any sugar. And then, in the 1820s, along comes this very forceful Quaker pamphleteer, Elizabeth Heyrick, whom I really liked a great deal from reading her pamphlets. Sadly, we know nothing else about her, because there are no materials for a biography, and hardly any of her letters survived; there isn't even a picture of her. But this movement was something that I think brought women into public life, and it raised other issues. By raising the question of why should some people be enslaved and others be free, it raised the question, why should some people be allowed to vote and others not? Why should men have certain rights and women not? There's no way you can begin raising one of these questions where it doesn't rapidly go to the others.

You maintain such an optimistic tone throughout the book -- at the end, when you write about the virtual slavery that awaited emancipated slaves in the British colonies, and all the fights for labor rights and suffrage and independence still to be fought, you ask, "Could any of these battles have been fought at all if the first and greatest, against slavery, had not been won?" That's true, and yet here we are, 170 years later, and we're still fighting types of bondage -- sex slavery, child labor -- around the world.

It's especially hard to be optimistic in a United States that has just reelected George Bush. But I think one thing that doing the research for the book made me realize was that any fight worth fighting is a long-term proposition. You look at these folks who fought slavery, and they thought in five or 10 years they would get this job done. They thought within a couple of years they could get Parliament to ban the slave trade and then slavery itself would wither away quickly after that. Of course, they were wrong. From the date of that first meeting, it was 51 years before slavery was banned in the British Empire, and even then the ex-slaves were living in conditions that were not much better than slavery after that. But it was still a huge step forward, and I think that even in the grimmest moments we experience today, whether it's restrictions on civil liberties in the U.S. or the horrors of the war in Iraq or any number of things we could point to, I remind myself that little over 200 years ago more that three-quarters of the people on earth were slaves, serfs or bonded laborers of one sort or another. Even when there are moments when there's backsliding, I still think we have made some progress.

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