Revisiting the Humanitarianism-Capitalism Nexus: Eighteenth-Century British Abolitionism in the Context of Expanding Imperial Markets

Revisiting the Humanitarianism-Capitalism Nexus: Eighteenth-Century British Abolitionism in the Context of Expanding Imperial Markets 1

Peter Stamatov This paper argues that the emergence of modern humanitarianism was deeply entangled with

moral debates on economic practices and is best understood as the institutional crystallization of

a set of ideas, practices, and institutions oriented towards a distinctive ethics: the ethics that the

most important aspect of economic (and political) activities is the consequences they have for

humans and, consequently, that activities causing systematic harm to individuals should be

changed and replaced with a different economic arrangements. My second—and related—claim

is that this emergence and crystallization was the outcome of a complex and historically

contingent dynamics that was in no way pre-determined by the structural forces of capitalism or

modernity.

To support these claims I go back to an important formative period of modern

humanitarianism: the emergence of British abolitionism, the political movement for abolition of

the British slave trade in the late eighteenth century that set the tone for subsequence

humanitarian initiatives and actions worldwide. I reconsider the connections of abolitionism

with emerging British capitalism—a long-standing preoccupation of scholars—by situating

abolitionism’s rise within wider public debates on the morality of economic activities and by

comparing the strikingly different ways in which the humanitarian consequences of economic

activity in the Western branch of imperial trade in the Atlantic, of which the trade in enslaved

Africans was an important part, and in its Eastern branch in India, were discussed and employed

as the stakes of political battles in the period.

1 Paper prepared for the STI Meeting on Humanitarianism, Barcelona, January, 2015. Many thanks to David Cook-Martín for invaluable support.

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Capitalism, Humanitarianism, Abolitionism The interest in the connection between capitalism and humanitarianism derives from the

temporal and geographical coincidence of two developments: the rise of Britain (and the larger

Anglo-American world) as the quintessential home of modern capitalism since the eighteenth

century and the emergence of modern ideas and practice of humanitarianism. Thus the question

of the relationship between the two is a question of the relationship between two important

aspects of Western modernity.

Note, however, the unequal epistemological status the two concepts are usually assigned.

Capitalism is normally understood as a deep and important feature of modernity. There is no

question about its existence and its power to effect and causally influence. Humanitarianism, on

the other hand, is of more modest epistemological stature. It is not a central concept of the social

sciences and employing the term usually requires a lot of certificatory work: is what we discuss

bona fide humanitarianism—or the surface manifestation of something “deeper”? Like, for

example, capitalism. The idea that humanitarianism is a mask or Band-Aid for the true power

relations of capitalism is a widely accepted proposition.

The assumption of the derivative status or function of humanitarianism also implies a

causal statement: that humanitarianism as we know it was deeply and strongly configured by

capitalism. Here I organize my argument as an examination of this causal statement. My

starting point is a long-standing (and more historically specific debate) on the relationship

between capitalism and the complex developments that led to the abolition of colonial slavery

and the colonial slave trade.

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The abolitionist movement that crystallized in Britain of the 1780s is a landmark in the

trajectory of modern humanitarianism.2 It was the first highly visible, enduring and influential

coupling of a humanitarian norm, the norm against slavery, with persistent institutions and

practices. And as such, British abolitionism has exercised a formative influence on the complex

phenomenon of humanitarianism. It generated recurrent campaigns against various slaveries in

British colonies and then elsewhere; it became an important international “brand” of

humanitarianism as constituencies outside of Britain mobilized for the abolition of “their”

slaveries; there is a almos unbroken continuity between the first London Abolition committee

and today’s Antislavery International; abolitionism’s rhetoric and organizational models were

adopted widely by subsequent social movements, from the campaign against “factory slavery” in

Yorkshire to the women’s movement. More generally, the first abolitionist movement was able

to gradually articulate a strict prohibitive moral regime against the slave trade and slavery and to

force states, starting with the British state, and then international organizations to accept this

regime. In many ways then, the proper understanding of modern humanitarianism and its

relationship with capitalism hinges on a proper understanding of the origins of these first

abolitionist campaigns in the 1780s.3

The bedrock of the capitalism-based explanation of abolitionism are two related axioms

of the Marxian canon: first, that economic relations of productions form the most important

2 Michael N. Barnett, Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2011). 3 On the first British abolitionist campaigns, see Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Judi Jennings, The Business of Abolishing the British Slave Trade, 1783-1807 (London: F. Cass, 1997); J. R. Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery: The Mobilisation of Public Opinion against the Slave Trade, 1787-1807 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). Summarizing the complex influences of these campaigns on subsequent developments is exceedingly difficult, yet I made a honest effort in the Conclusion of my book The Origins of Global Humanitarianism: Religion, Empires, and Advocacy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

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causal factor out of which any other social phenomenon can be derived, and, second, that each

historical configuration of relations of production creates its own “mode of oppression.” Thus in

Engels’ popularizing explanation, the state keeps “forcibly the exploited classes in the condition

of oppression corresponding with the given mode of production (slavery, serfdom, wage-

labour),” each of the three corresponding to the “ancient,” “feudal,” and “capitalist” mode of

production.” Marx, ignoring the larger question of why pre-serfdom slavery would persist in the

colonies all the way into capitalist age of wage-labor oppression, opined that “slavery cannot be

abolished without the steam engine and the mule and spinning-jenny.”4

Between Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery and David Brion Davis’s The Problem

of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, the Marxisant explanation of the connection between

capitalism and the abolition of slavery started from these axioms of the inherent incompatibility

of capitalist mode of production and the “ancient” form of oppression that slavery is.5 The task

for the scholars in this tradition was to identify the precise features of capitalism that helped it

update itself to the most appropriate mode of oppression. For Williams it was clearly the

diminishing profitability of ancient slavery; for Davis: a capitalist ideological hegemony that was

disturbed by ancient enslavement yet felt comfortable with Marx’s “wage slavery.” In another

important intervention in the debate, an intervention that clearly related abolitionism to

“humanitarian sensibility,” Haskell drew attention away from the functional fit between

capitalism and oppression techniques to argue instead that what mattered was the extensive scale

of capitalist economic transactions. Expanding markets required more sophisticated cognitive

4 Robert C. Tucker, ed. The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: Norton, 1978), 713, 169. Incidentally, on the other side of “feudalism,” there are no indications that the “slave mode of production” was the inherent oppressive regime of ancient economies. See Chris Wickham, Land and Power: Studies in Italian and European Social History, 400-1200 (London: British School at Rome, 1994). 5 Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944); David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (New York: Oxford University Press, (1975) 1999).

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reckoning to account for complex economic transactions, according the Haskell, and

humanitarian relating to distant others started to happen when people were able to transfer these

cognitive skills to non-economic areas. Hence the origin of the moral concerns with colonial

slaves.6

That Haskell should focus on transaction chain size, a feature of capitalism so distinct

from the features Williams or Davis chose, is suggestive of a general lack of appreciation of the

complexity of developments that are subsumed under the heading of “capitalism.” For

capitalism was not just the ruthless exploitation of “wage slaves” or the extension of markets. It

included also increased technological innovation, imperial expansion, an industrial revolution, a

revolution in consumption, a revolution in finances and the intensifying creation of new

organizational forms of economic activities.7 A complexity that cannot be captured by a simple

reference to changing relations of production, but is better understood for what it is: an

increasing complexity of economic transactions of all kinds, including production, exchange, and

consumption. How do we then understand the connections between this “complexification” of

the economic realm and the rise of humanitarian abolitionism in late-eighteenth century Britain?

The Empirical Morality of Markets in the Eighteenth Century There are two interrelated yet distinct ways in which the British imperial economy of the

eighteenth century with its expanding markets and consolidating capitalist features was relevant

6 Thomas Bender, ed. The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 7 Anne E. C. McCants, "Exotic Goods, Popular Consumption, and the Standard of Living: Thinking about Globalization in the Early Modern World," Journal of World History 18, no. 4 (2007); Larry Neal, The rise of financial capitalism : international capital markets in the age of reason, Studies in monetary and financial history (Cambridge England ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Patrick K. O'Brien, "Inseparable Connections: Trade, Economy, Fiscal State, and the Expansion of Empire, 1688-1815," in The Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol. 2: The Eighteenth Century, ed. P. J. Marshall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Jacob M. Price, "Transaction Costs: A Note on Merchant Credit and the Organization of Private Trade," in The Political Economy of Merchant Empires, ed. James D. Tracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

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to colonial slavery and trade in slaves, as well as the emerging humanitarian attack on the latter.

First, the historically specific economic configuration was an important part of the general

structural context within which humanitarian critics of the slave trade and its defenders operated.

And second, the economy was the object of on ongoing and inherently political public moral

debate of which abolitionism, since the 1780s, became an important and influential strand.

If we consider the contemporary imperial economy as the structural “container” within

which abolitionism took shape, the most remarkable fact is the snug functional fit between the

institution of slavery and the commercial trading in enslaved Africans, on the one hand, and

increasingly “capitalist” circuits of production, exchange, and consumption, on the other.8 The

slave trade, the target of British abolitionism, was neatly integrated in Atlantic commercial

circuits and chains culminating in the delivery and re-export of highly demanded tropical

products such as the slave-produced sugar from the Caribbean. It was based on a sophisticated

financial machinery such as bills of exchange and the West India brokerage houses in London

that underwrote commercial transactions. It was lucrative for domestic investors, bringing them

normally a stable return of slightly below ten percent. Indirectly, the trade provided employment

for thousands producers throughout England.9 In sum, the slave trade was nicely integrated in

the processes of capitalist development and intensifying economic complexity. In Seymour

8 Philip D. Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Seymour Drescher, Econocide : British slavery in the era of abolition, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). 9 Roger Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760-1810 (London: Macmillan, 1975); S. G. Checkland, "Finance for the West Indies, 1780–1815," The Economic History Review 10, no. 3 (1958); Herbert S. Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); McCants, "Exotic Goods, Popular Consumption, and the Standard of Living: Thinking about Globalization in the Early Modern World."; Kenneth Morgan, Slavery and the British empire: From Africa to America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Dale H. Porter, The Abolition of the Slave Trade in England, 1784-1807 (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1970); James A. Rawley, The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A History, Rev. ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005); David Richardson, "The British Empire and the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1660-1807," in The Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol. 2: The Eighteenth Century, ed. P. J. Marshall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

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Drescher’s words, “capitalism provided the principal motives and the ideological underpinnings

of British Atlantic slavery.”10 There is no indication that the forces of capitalism necessitated or

provoked the demise of slavery in order to install the more appropriate “wage slavery” of

nominally free people.

What provided the opening for a humanitarian critique of the slave trade was rather the

other aspect of the economy: the relatively autonomous domain of moral and political struggles

over economic issues. Consolidating British capitalism, as a social formation, was not only a

distinctive configuration of economic relations, but also a set of heterogeneous and often

contentious set of moral discourses, arguments, and ideologies. The Marxian paradigm on

slavery and abolition considers slavery as incompatible with capitalism and humanitarianism as

an ideological support of continuous capitalist exploitation. Yet it is more appropriate to reverse

these assumptions: while slavery could be economically compatible with capitalism

humanitarianism was part of a larger, polyphonic, and historically contingent debate over the

economy that was not ultimately determined by the economic “base” and did not serve simply to

hegemonically justify capitalism.

Relations of production (and of exchange and consumption) were, in other words,

constantly subjected to public critical reflection. This public engagement with the economy, like

today, occurred in three distinct moral registers: that of “business ethics,” of “economic rights”

and of an “ethics of effects.” When employing the register of “business ethics,” the claimants

spoke about the fairness of economic practices: that is, whether economic actors played by the

established rules or engaged in devious behaviors like embezzlement and corruption. The

“economic rights” talk—often in parallel with the related discourse on political rights and

10 Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, 20.

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liberties—referred to the inherent rights of economic actors to engage in economic practices and

to not be prevented unfairly from doing so. Like the related political rights register, the target of

this register was often the government and parliament, the authorities that set the rules of the

economic game. It was often employed in the rhetorical struggles between independent

merchants and chartered trading companies—who despite the phenomenal economic success and

corporate modernity of the East India Company, for example—were the early modern inheritors

of medieval trading structures.11 Yet not unlike contemporary corporations’ cash-backed

pretentions to rights of political “free speech,” the men of the East India Company also used

effectively economic rights talk. According to a propagandist of the slave trade, to refuse

compensation for the African Company’s expenses for maintenance of trading forts in West

Africa was a violation of rights that “would savour so barefacedly of the Tyranny and

Oppression of the most slavish Countries.”12 Finally, in the register of “effects” claimants spoke

about the inherent effects of economic activities on direct or indirect participants—how specific

economic practices affected positively or negatively the occupants of the various institutional

roles within expanding and diversifying economic networks: producers, retailers, investors, or

consumers. One example of such economic ethics of effects was the critical discourse on the

“Nabobs”: the Britons who amassed fortunes (through less than honorable means from the point

of view of the business ethics register) in India and—corrupted by the unethical economic

transactions in which they participated—spread “Oriental” corruption into British society and

politics.13

11 E. Lipson, The Economic History of England, 5th ed., 3 vols., vol. II. The Age of Mercantilism (London: A. & C. Black, 1931). 12 Malachy Postlethwayt, The African Trade, the Great Pillar and Support of the British Plantation Trade in America (London: J. Robinson, 1745). 13 Philip Lawson and Jim Phillips, "'Our Execrable Banditti': Perceptions of Nabobs in Mid-Eighteenth Century Britain," Albion 16, no. 3 (1984). See, also, more generally James Raven, "Defending Conduct and Property: The

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When David Brion Davis and Howard Temperley introduced in the 1970s a distinctly

ideological dimension to explain how capitalism produced abolitionism and antislavery they

were particularly attracted by segments of contemporary ideological production that, in their

view, proved the functional fit between a moral and political aversion to slavery and ideological

support for emerging capitalism.14 They started from the assumption of the exclusively

hegemonic function of ideas to justify ideologically specific economic arrangements. In their

view, the attraction of the antislavery attack on slavery arose from its inherent connection with a

distinctly “capitalist” ideology that legitimized wage labor (or Marx and Engels’ “wage

slavery”). By pointing to the widespread public debates on the morality of the economy I want

to draw attention to what the ideology-as-hegemony explanation missed: that ideas are not just

the cultural support for certain economic arrangements that happen to benefit the ruling

economic class du jour.

It is impossible to miss certain widely held assumptions in eighteenth-century economic

debates that gave direct support to consolidating British capitalism. For example, no one

doubted that extensive foreign trade often coupled with the imperial expansion of “plantations”

overseas in competition with other trading and colonizing European states was beneficial for the

nation and the state. This hegemonic “layer” of economic ideology supported capitalism by

valorizing extensive market operations and legitimizing the various institutional innovations in

finance, shipping and insurance that reduced transaction costs and made such market expansion

possible.15 Yet this does not mean that “relations of production” or, more generally, economic

London Press and the Luxury Debate," in Early Modern Conceptions of Property, ed. John Brewer and Susan Staves (London: Routledge, 1995). 14 Davis, Age of Revolution; Howard Temperley, "Capitalism, Slavery and Ideology," Past and Present, no. 75 (1977). 15 Price, "Merchant Empires."

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arrangements were somehow impervious to moral reflection that in important ways influenced

economic policies and practices. The concrete shape of capitalism—as it unfolded—was

configured not just by pre-existing economic relations justified by hegemonic ideologies but also

by the oftentimes vigorous moral debates in the three distinct registers I have identified—and by

the political struggles of which these moral debates were an integral part.

Particularly relevant for the genesis of abolitionism is the subset of moral debates over

the overlapping issue domains of British foreign trade and economically oriented and justified

imperial expansion. The shape of eighteenth-century capitalism was defined in important ways

by the increasing trans-territorialization of market relations as the expanding scale of economic

interactions and increasing complexity and innovation formed a mutually reinforcing

relationship. More specifically, British abolitionism was an attack on a specific branch of the

larger imperial economic complex: the trade slave operated by British merchants that consisted

in the purchase of enslaved individuals in West Africa and their sale in British and Spanish

colonial possessions in America and the Caribbean. This focus on the slave trade, a constituent

part of the larger moral complex of human enslavement in the colonies, arose out of historically

contingent reasons. First, the antislavery project that emerged in colonial Pennsylvania in the

1760s quickly confronted the reality of British mercantilist trade policies which led to the

realization that a systematic abolition of slavery in the North American colonies was simply

impossible without cessation of the human cargo delivered by British traders protected by

imperial authorities in London who routinely overrode even minimal anti-slavery economic

gestures likes increased import duties for slaves.16 Second, from a British perspective the slave

trade (as opposed to slavery in the colonies) was the more, if not the most direct, connection

16 Stamatov, Global Humanitarianism.

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between the institution of slavery and the inhabitants of a political and cultural unit that officially

did not tolerate enslavement on its territory who nevertheless acted as merchants and investors of

a trade of enslaved individuals.

Colonial slavery as institution itself had important economic aspects. Yet the historically

contingent focus on the slave trade in the first abolitionist campaigns situates these economic

aspects, more narrowly, within the specific context of similarly historically contingent moral and

political debates on British imperial and trans-territorial trading activities. Such debates

configured, for example, the specific organizational regimes that trading with specific

geographical regions took shape. Exchange with India and the East was the monopoly of a joint-

stock company, trade with Africa was conducted under the umbrella of a “regulated” company

that did not pool capital and had less stringent requirement for membership, whereas trade with

America was completely “free” and open to small merchants. These differing institutional

arrangements were the concrete outcomes of political struggles between various factions of

domestic economic constituencies employing moral arguments to defend their positions. And

the specific outcomes in each case was contingent upon the ability of various factions to get the

state listen to them. More generally, moral polemics in the public sphere and in parliament

constructed the perceived “value” of specific branches of the trade competing for the state and

parliament’s attention and resources. This politically constructed value of the trade was

increasingly important in an increasingly complex economic environment where ascertaining

how profitable (and for whom) foreign trading activities were was an increasingly complex

enterprise.17 In other words, the harmonic hegemony of a strongly valorized foreign trade

17 For the general context of these debates, see H. V. Bowen, Revenue and Reform: The Indian Problem in British Politics, 1757-1773 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); The Business of Empire: The East India Company and Imperial Britain, 1756-1833 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Christopher L. Brown, "The British Government and the Slave Trade: Early Parliamentary Enquiries, 1713–83," Parliamentary History

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interweaved with the cacophony of claims of competing economic groups resulting in a complex

and contentious moral environment in which political battles over how economic activities

should be organized infused parliamentary politics and the public sphere.

Economic Connections and Ultimate Values The rhetoric of British abolitionism has been traditionally understood as part and parcel of the

eighteenth-century culture of sentiment, sensibility, and sympathy: ostensibly a culture removed

from the hard realities of economic transactions.18 Yet considered in the context of the moral

debates on the economic and capitalism, the humanitarian discourse of abolitionism that

consolidated towards the end of the eighteenth century is better seen as a distinctive sub-variety

of the effects ethics register of economic moral debate. Its general claim—in contrast to those

who defended the British slave trade in, for example, the register of economic rights—was that

the slave trade had inherent negative effects on the individuals involved: most notably the

Africans who, contrary to their inherent humanity, were treated as “cargo” and “goods,” but also

the various direct and indirect participants in the trade. In abolitionist discourse, the inherent

inhumanity of the trade affected the metropolitan consumer of tropical products like sugar who

ultimately derived pleasure from the suffering of the enslaved producers for, as a 1788

publication suggesting abolitionist topics for tea-time conversations noted, slavery depended “on

the consumption of the produce of its labour for its support”.19 The slave trade was not a

26(2007); Dennis Stephen Klinge, "The African Company in British Politics, 1748-1783" (Ph.D. Dissertation, Cornell University, 1973); Lipson, The Economic History of England, II. The Age of Mercantilism; Jeremy Osborn, "India and the East India Company in the Public Sphere of Eighteenth-Century Britain," in The Worlds of the East India Company, ed. H. V. Bowen, Margarette Lincoln, and Nigel Rigby (Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2002); Rawley, Slave Trade; Lucy Sutherland, The East India Company in Eighteenth-Century Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952); Frank Daigh Van Aalst, "The British View of India, 1750 to 1785" (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1970). 18 Brycchan Carey, British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 19 A Subject for Conversation and Reflection at the Table, (London: M. Gurney, 1788).

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“nursery of seamen” that trained sailors for the defense of the nation but rather a ghastly

unhygienic environment that killed young men like flies. More generally, the trade left an

indelible moral stain on the nation, its government and parliament that were complicit in such

inhumane and morally indefensible economic activity. As an early abolitionist pamphlet put it,

“the revenue of the government, the profits of the merchants, and the luxury of the people have

involved the whole nation as participes criminis” in the maintenance of colonial slavery. “As

Englishmen, the blood of the murdered African is upon us, and upon our children,” exclaimed

later Thomas Cooper of Manchester.20

This emphasis on the moral effects of the slave trade as an institutionalized economic

activity suggests that the humanitarian discourse developed by abolitionism was not just about

sensitivity to and alleviation of suffering. Within the general register of effects-centered

economic ethics it made two related moral and political claims that formed what Max Weber

would have called the “ultimate values” of emerging humanitarianism. First, considerations of

suffering and harm anywhere along the economic chain of production, exchange, and

consumption, even in its “lowest” links, trump considerations of economic profitability and

utility. And second, such considerations of suffering and harm trump considerations of business

ethics and economic rights. As Charles James Fox argued in the first parliamentary debate on

the abolition of the slave trade in 1789, to compromise and just regulate the trade instead of fully

abolishing it would be the equivalent of “regulation of robbery and restriction of murder.”21 To

treat human beings as the objects of commercial transactions was so inherently harmful that to

20 Joseph Woods, Thoughts on the Slavery of the Negroes (London: James Phillips, 1784), 22-23; Thomas Cooper, Letters on the Slave Trade: First Published in Wheeler's Manchester Chronicle and Since Reprinted with Additions and Alterations (Manchester: C. Wheeler, 1787), 28. 21 Parliamentary register, p. 194 [GET REFERENCE]

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just regulate these transactions according to sub-humanitarian ethical standards would be like

allowing robbing or killing under specified circumstances.

Thus abolitionism, an early manifestation of modern humanitarianism with important

economic overtones and determinants, can be seen as consisting of two related “moves”: an

attention to the entirety of complex economic linkages and chains forming the transactional

skeleton of a consolidating capitalism and the insertion of a distinctly moral and effects-oriented

perspective through which these linkages and chains are interpreted.22 This is, for example, how

a 1792 pamphlet urging the abstention from slave-produced sugar described the moral content of

imperial economic chains, along with the assignation of humanitarian responsibility and

complicity:

The traffic slaves forms a series of transactions, more marked by rapine and cruelty than any other which history records. For what purpose then is this traffic carried on, which, on one hand, produces such a sum of misery; and, on the other, such an accumulation of guilt? To cultivate our West-Indian plantations. And why are our plantations cultivated? To supply the European market with sugar. And why is sugar brought into the European market? Because we buy and consume it. It is then the buyer and consumer who form the first spring which sets in action the several engines of injustice and oppression, which annually destroy several hundred thousands of our fellow-creatures. These engines are more immediately directed by the Slave Merchant and the West-Indian purchaser, and more remotely by the consumer; both are parties in the crime. In this manner it is, that we, unthinkingly, sacrifice whole crowds of human beings every year to a paltry gratification.23

The Broken Moral Linkages of the African Market

To what extent was—as Haskell has argued—this moral valorization and responsibility

assignation within extended economic chains the outcome of the expanding scale and complexity

of these very same chains? Did individuals “submerged” in the structurally growing scale of

22 In Marx’s terms, one outcome of this process was the de-fetishization of the commodity through consideration of the concrete economic chains that produced—or rather its humanitarian “re-fetishization” through which now a commodity like sugar stood as a symbol of moral evil. 23 An Address to Her Royal Highness the Dutchess [sic] of York, Against the Use of Sugar, (s.l.: s.n., 1792), 12-13.

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economic transactions became sensitive to distant others’ suffering because extending market

taught them more complex cognitive schemes of relationships, cause and effect? Did extending

markets, in other words, created more complex cognitive habits, which in turn made possible for

people to engage in more complex moral calculations?

The first fact to consider is the lag of more of a century between the onset of British

economic and imperial expansion and the true articulation of the abolitionist complex moral

calculus. Abolitionist ideas, among them the idea of complicity and connectedness linking

enslaved Africans and British consumers along an economic chain of production, exchange, and

consumption, did not take a firm hold in the public debate until the five years between 1783 and

1787, preparing the “take-off” of the first abolitionist campaign in 1788.24

Nor can one discern a steadily growing humanitarian groundswell of sentiment that

organically burst the dams to erupt in the 1780s abolitionism. There was a tradition in moral

philosophy that problematized enslavement as an unnatural and unjust state, a position stated

strongly and influentially in Montesquieu’s 1748 Spirit of the Laws. It appears that by the 1760s

there was a general public awareness and sensitivity in Britain to the suffering of the slave.25

Yet such considerations never entered the periodical struggles over the organization of the

“African trade” in parliament and the public spheres

The question of the proper organization of the trade became topic of parliamentary and

public discussion, often initiated by “reformers” who sought to reorganize the institutional

pattern of the trade with West Africa and aired instances of abuses and corruption. Yet the

debate was conducted exclusively in the registers of business ethics and economic rights. Thus

24 Anstey, Atlantic Slave Trade; Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery. 25 Anstey, Atlantic Slave Trade; C. Duncan Rice, "Literary Sources and the Revolution in British Attitudes to Slavery," in Anti-slavery, Religion, and Reform: Essays in Memory of Roger Anstey, ed. Christine Bolt and Seymour Drescher (Folkestone: Dawson, 1980).

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the critics argued that the African Company’s corrupt practices harmed the public purse. The

wording of a 1777 petition of London traders to parliament is indicative of this one-sided moral

language. They accused the Committee of the African Company of encouraging “unjust

practices of certain individuals” who entering “into unwarranted connections with … Africa”

undermined “the trade for Negroes to that part of the coast where the best Negroes for the

laborious work of cultivating the Sugar Cane, and making it into Sugar, are mostly to be got.”26

The defenders of the status quo framed their arguments in the very same moral registers,

those of business ethics and economic rights. Paradoxically, the most vocal parliamentary

champion of the African Company and of the African trade in its existing configuration in the

Commons in the 1770s and 1780s was Edmund Burke who would later fulminate against the

mistreatment of Indians by the East India Company and would even cultivate a public reputation

as abolitionist with tirades against the slave trade.27 Burke defended the Company with his

typical zeal (and more energetically than the otherwise divided and inefficient Committee of the

Company) for both ideological and pragmatic reasons. His defense was an ideological statement

about the sacredness of the rights bestowed on trading companies by charter against unwarranted

government intervention—a position that made him a defender of the East India Company, too,

before his conversion into the Company’s most vociferous critic. He was also had personal

connections with African traders, both as MP for Bristol, one of the center of the slave trade,

between 1774 and 1780 and as a close friend of a distant relative, John Bourke, who sat on the

African Committee. So in 1772, the future champion of the oppressed multitudes of the East

cited the increased “volume” of slave transports as a proof of the economic vibrancy of the trade

under the African Company. How can the Company be accused of mismanagement, Burke

26 Quoted in Klinge, "African Company," 361. 27 Note on Burke’s strategic embrace of abolitionism and indications that he was not sincere [evidence]

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asked the Commons, when before its reorganization in 1750 “only 19,000 negroes [sic] were

imported” and now their number was 50,000?28

Both the merchants’ petition and Burke’s argument foreground purely economic indexes

of the slave trade: the quality of the “merchandise” and its “volume.” When they let moral

considerations enter their claims they focus on the fairness of economic practices and the rights

of the various trading factions (the Company and the independent traders). Consideration of the

suffering and harm caused to enslaved Africans is remarkable by its absence. And that applies to

the general moral debate on the African trade in the eighteenth-century. Conducted in the

registers of business ethics and economic rights, it remained remarkably isolated from

contemporary sensibilities of the evils of slavery and was almost never infused with

humanitarian values and meanings. The general awareness of the complex economic links

connecting Britain and Africa remained strangely impervious to the general moral sensibility of

slavery as moral problem.

The link between the two was occasionally made and the troubling humanitarian

implications of the slave trade were recognized. As early as 1709, a pamphlet attributed to the

pen of a Jamaican merchant exposed the “Iniquity” of the slave trade. In an effort to influence

the impending parliamentary debate on the organization of trade with Africa it made a direct

connection between the trade and the inhumane treatment to which slaves were subjected in the

28 Quoted in Dennis Stephen Klinge, "Edmund Burke, Economical Reform, and the Board of Trade, 1777-1780," The Journal of Modern History 51, no. 3 (1979): D1192. [find original citation?]. On Burke’s defense of the slave trade before his abolitionist phase, see also Benedict Der, "Edmund Burke and Africa, 1772-1792," Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana 11(1970); P. T. Underdown, "Edmund Burke, the Commissary of his Bristol Constituents, 1774–1780," The English Historical Review LXXIII, no. 287 (1958). In 1772, before he became the leading critic of the East India Company, Burke refused to engage the humanitarian concern for Indians voiced by the supporters of the proposed parliamentary committee. In his intervention in the debate he tried to limit the investigation of Company servants, arguing that that people who brings millions to the Exchequer should not be punished. See Bowen, Revenue and Reform, 97; Holden Furber, "Edmund Burke and India," Bengal, Past and Present 76(1957): 13.

17

Caribbean.29 In the midst of the parliamentary proceedings that established a new regime of the

trade under the auspices of a regulated company in 1750, Horace Walpole, then in the Commons,

commented passionately—yet in private—on the moral absurdity of these proceedings:

We have been sitting this fortnight on the African Company: we, the British Senate, the temple of Liberty, and bulwark of Protestant Christianity, have this fortnight been pondering methods to make more effectual that horrid traffic of selling negroes [sic]. It has appeared to use that six and forty thousand of these wretches are sold every year to our plantations alone!--It chills one's blood--30

In 1762, a pseudonymous Philo Britannia found on the pages of the London Chronicle that even

the “ridiculous and pernicious” trade with Asia is less “bad in its consequences” than the trade

“to the coast of Africa; where whole nations, from their own bad policy, are decoyed, enslaved,

and carried to our plantations, in order to plant sugar.”31 Both Walpole and Philo Britannia

explicitly referenced Montesquieu’s critique of slavery, thus creating the conceptual link

between the spreading ideas of the ethical repugnance of slavery and British economic activities

in Africa. Yet instances of such conceptual linkage, arising out of the recognition of the

contradictions between metropolitan moral norms and the treatment of enslaved Africans in the

British Atlantic, remained scarce before the 1780s when the abolitionist movement disseminated

its humanitarian argument and constructed a general, taken-for-granted common-sense

knowledge of the serious moral effects of the slave trade.

29 A Letter from a Merchant at Jamaica to a Member of Parliament in London, Touching the African Trade, (London: A. Baldwin, 1709). 30 W. S. Lewis, Warren Hunting Smith, and George L. Lam, eds., Horace Walpole's Correspondence with Sir Horace Mann, vol. IV (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), 126. He continues: “I would not have to say that I voted in it, for the continent of America! The destruction of the miserable inhabitants by the Spaniards, was but a momentary misfortune, that flowed from the discovery of the new world, compared to this lasting havoc, which it brought upon Africa. We reproach Spain; and yet do not even pretend the nonsense of butchering these poor creatures for the good of their souls!” 31 London Chronicle, August 19-21, 1762, p. 180

18

The Humanitarian Concern for India This isolation of moral debates from humanitarian concerns is particularly striking when

compared with similar debates on the other main circuit of the imperial economy, that of India

and the larger Indian ocean area, where consideration of the harmful effects of British activities

was a constant presence, especially (as Philo Britannia’s references suggests) from the 1760s on.

On the background of financial crises and British military defeats, the trade with India and the

East India Company was the target during that period of three cycles of parliamentary

investigation resulting in new legislation and prosecution of Company officials: in 1766-7, 1772-

3, and 1781-4, the last round resulting in Burke’s near Jarndycean impeachment of Warren

Hastings, the former Governor General of Bengal between 1786 and 1795. Driven by complex

calculations, punctuated by unexpected turns, and fought by unlikely alliances, these

parliamentary struggles maintained India as a high-stake issue of the political game—and

focused the attention of politicians and publics alike on a long list of abuses and problems

generated by the British presence on the subcontinent.

Thus in 1772 two widely read books publicized the East India Company's abuses and the

suffering they caused for Indians. Willem Bolts, a Dutch trader who had been expelled from

Bengal after frictions with the Company over some unsavory commercial transactions, published

his Considerations on Indian Affairs as part of his campaign to recoup his losses with attacks on

Company officials. He did not miss, however, sounding the high-minded theme of British

injustice and disregard for the concerns of “the British subjects in the East Indies.” In the third

volume of his History of Hindostan published the same year, Alexander Dow, an officer in the

Company army, described company servants as petty tyrants who now oppressed Indians and

ruined the land worse than their previous “despotic rulers” and showed that the Bengal famine

19

was the result of the rice shortages created by greedy British merchants.32

The humanitarian aspect was present in parliamentary rhetoric, too. In 1772 John

Burgoyne moved in the Commons for the appointment of select committee to investigate “most

atrocious abuses” in India the speakers in the ensuing debate reflected at length on the injurious

consequences of British rule on Indians. When the Commons widened the scope of inquiries in

1781, it authorized the sitting Select Committee to establish, among other things, “by what

means the happiness of native inhabitants may be best promoted.”33 The wider public was

similarly sensitive to the humanitarian issues coming from Indian, for example when evdence of

widespread corruption was presented by witnesses to the Select Committee in 1772. Horace

Walpole could report then to Horace Mann in Tuscany “no public news, but new horrors coming

out every day against our East India Company and their servants.” In February the following

year, Jonathan Shipley, Bishop of St. Asaph, entreated his audience to join him in endeavoring

“to wipe away the tears from the poor oppressed natives of India” in a sermon preached for the

Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, the missionary organization of the Church of

England.34

Small wonder, then, that the humanitarian implications of British economic and political

activities in India formed a consistent focus of parliamentary engagement with India affairs

between 1781 and 1794, a period coinciding with the first articulation of abolitionist discourse

32 On Bolts and Dow, see Nicholas B. Dirks, The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 248-54; Robert Travers, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth Century India: The British in Bengal (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 63-64; Van Aalst, "The British View of India, 1750 to 1785," 235-38, 316. 33 REFERENCES 34 W. S. Lewis, Warren Hunting Smith, and George L. Lam, eds., Horace Walpole's Correspondence with Sir Horace Mann, vol. VII (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 451; Jonathan Shipley, A Sermon Preached before the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts; at their anniversary meeting in the parish church of St. Mary-le-Bow, on Friday February 19, 1773 (London: T. Harrison and S. Brooke, 1773). By contrast, the SPG annual sermons usually called for evangelization of the slaves in America and the Caribbean.

20

and politics. Dominated and instigated by Edmund Burke who, after years of defending the

rights of the East India company, assumed the mantle of the opposition’s prophetic voice on

India determined to expose abuse, the voluminous output of the parliamentary inquiries and the

Warren Hastings’ impeachment included numerous printed Committee reports and widely

reported speeches by Burke and his allies (usually spread over several days in which the speaker

orated for as long as four hours at a time). A thread that run consistently through this written and

spoken corpus was the desire to convey dramatically the injustices and abuses committed

directly and indirectly by Company appointees like Hastings in India. Often in graphic detail,

prosecution’s impeachment speeches, for example, described the suffering inflicted by the British

on Indians of all ranks: from the undignified treatment of princes and princesses to the

exploitation and repression of humble peasants. Thus in 1788, Burke—in a parallel of the

abolitionist indictment of immoral economic transaction chains—exposed the suffering of Indian

peasants cultivating opium, the product that was then traded for the Chinese tea that had become

indispensable consumption item in England. The agents of the East India Company, he charged,

crushed and maimed those poor, honest, laborious hands which never had been lifted to their own mouths but with the scanty supply of the product of their own labour. These are the hands which are so treated, which have for fifteen years furnished the investment for China [opium] from which your Lordships and all this auditory and all this Country have every day for these fifteen years made that luxurious meal [English breakfast] with which we all commence the day.35 In sum, in a remarkable contrast to the absence of the humanitarian register in public

discussion of the “African trade” before the mid-1780s, cotemporaneous debates on British India

35 P. J. Marshall, ed. The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, Vol. VI: India: The Launching of the Hastings Impeachment, 1786-1788 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). See also The Impeachment of Warren Hastings (London: Oxford University Press, 1965); Richard Speer, "The Rhetoric of Burke's Select Committee Reports," Quarterly Journal of Speech 57, no. 3 (1971); Frederick G. Whelan, Edmund Burke and India: Political Morality and Empire (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996).

21

routinely acknowledged the disturbing humanitarian implications of the complex economic

transactions from which the British profited in the imperial “East.” Thus along and despite a

growing awareness of the morally problematic nature of slavery, all the way until the emergence

of organized abolitionism in the 1780s, public discussion of the slave trade in Britain failed to

make an explicit connection between the expanded circuits of production and commerce in the

Atlantic and their disturbing humanitarian implications. The ongoing normative debate on how

to organize these circuits disattended the humanitarian dimensions. Instead, the focus was on the

profitability of these economic activities and their alignment with the national interest. Morality

entered such debates only in the registers of business ethics and economic rights. And this lack

of a humanitarian perspective on the slave trade formed a clear contrast to the readiness with

which the humanitarian implications of British economic and political activities were invoked.

Expanding Markets and Moral Calculus This lack of a distinctively humanitarian perspective on the slave trade appears to us as

something counterintuitive—but only because our intuitions today are deeply informed by the

humanitarian assumptions that successful movements like abolitionism have been able to ingrain

into what phenomenologist sociology calls a “a common stock of knowledge.” Before the rise of

abolitionism, however, there were several overlapping factors that conspired to make the slave

trade isolated from humanitarian concerns even in heated political debates. A centuries-old

tradition originating from the Near East singled out “black” people from sub-Saharan Africa as

the enslavable kind of people par excellence—unlike Indians who were, after all, free inhabitants

of their lands. Unlike the Iberian “pioneers” of the slave trade, Britain did not have a local

tradition of black slavery, which thus made slavery in the colonial a distant “exotic” issue.

Slavery itself was regulated by the individual legislatures of the colonies were enslaved Africans

22

cultivated profitable and in-demand tropical crops, not by London which, unlike Madrid or Paris,

did not have central statutes governing enslavement. Hence the prosperity of the colonies

demanded that commercial law, in harmony with colonial law, treat “Negroe labourers” as

“merely a commodity.”36 In a vicious circle reinforced by colonial demand, his “commodity,”

eagerly supplied by West African merchants, became the dominating and most lucrative good in

the African exchange circuit, with the “African trade” standing as a euphemism for the trade in

slaves. Internationally, all trading rivals of Britain were deeply invested in the slave trade, thus

not only presenting collective choice dilemmas for abolitionists, but also normalizing the

“commodity” of the trade: if the French or the Dutch were profiting from the slave trade, what’s

the harm for the Brits to do so? And finally, while the ideology of the importance of foreign

trade legitimized the slave trade as a national priority, the government and parliament were not

as interested in the African trade or its minutiae as they were in India that promised to be an easy

and guaranteed source of state revenue after the Moghul Emperor granted in 1765 British East

India Company the diwani, the privilege to collect taxes in Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa.37

Expansion of economic (and political) transaction chains in the period clearly provided

“food” for humanitarianism as they necessarily embraced within their purview distant

individuals exploited and treated in ways contrary to the moral norms prevalent in Britain at the

time. Yet if we consider these expanding markets in their historical specificity and correlate

them with the moral meanings created about these markets in contemporary debates, there is no

indication that the increase of economic scale in itself produced the conditions for humanitarian

36 Edward Long, Candid Reflections upon the Judgment Lately Awarded by the Court of King's Bench, in Westminster-Hall, on What is Commonly Called the Negroe-Cause (London: T. Lowndes,, 1772). 37 Brown, Moral Capital, ???; Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, ??????; Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade; Sutherland, East India Company; James H. Sweet, "The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought," The William and Mary Quarterly 54, no. 1 (1997); Bowen, Revenue and Reform.

23

sentiment and action. Both in the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, trade occurred on a remarkably

extensive scale. It targeted a distant locations to acquire goods unavailable “closer” home and in

both cases economic activities were inserted in even wider networks of exchange, as when

Indian goods were re-exported and traded for slaves in West Africa. Juxtaposing, however, pre-

abolitionist debates on British economic activities in Africa and Asia, we can see that the

distinctly different moral valorization of these activities were structured not by expanding

markets but a variety of historically contingent factors. For example, disgruntled East India

Company employees who aired their grievances in England employed liberally the humanitarian

argument about abuses of indigenous people. Internal critics of the African Company, on the

other hand, did not evoke the humanitarian register because doing so would have undermined the

rationale of an “African trade” based on the inhumane treatment of humans.

In fact, the apologists of the African slave trade were keenly aware of the complex

economic chains that connected consumers in England with enslaved Africans. “But is it not

notorious to the whole World,” asked one

that the Business of Planting in our British Colonies, as well as in the French, is carried on by the Labour of Negroes, imported thither from Africa? Are we not indebted to those valuable People, the Africans, for our Sugars, Tobaccoes, Rice, Rum, and all other Plantation Produce? And the greater the Number of Negroes imported to our Colonies, from Africa, will not the Exportation of British Manufactures among the Africans be in Proportion; they being paid for in such Commodities only? The more likewise our Plantations abound in Negroes, will not more Land become cultivated, and both better and greater Variety of Plantation Commodities be produced?

That is, what mattered was not the awareness of the complex economic links, but rather the

moral valence in which these links were framed. The defenders of the slave trade argued that the

welfare of Englishmen were impossible without the cheap and abundant supply of slaves to the

colonies: the exact mirror image of the humanitarian argument that the harm caused to enslaved

Africans tainted every single link of the extended economic chain. In other words, what

24

abolitionism accomplished discursively was a moral reversal of an established cognitive frame

that based British welfare on a prospering trade in slaves. It infused it with a distinctly

humanitarian meaning and claimed exactly the opposite: consumer comfort was based on the

suffering of distant humans.

A Socially Engineered Moral Reversal If abolitionism reversed thus the moral valence of the received wisdom on the economy, what

were the sources of this reversal and why did people in Britain in 1780s adopted this new

framing of the slave trade? Recent re-examination of British abolitionism has pointed out its

trans-Atlantic origins.38 More specifically, the British campaigns in the 1780s were the offshoot

of an antislavery political program first articulated by reformers in 1760s Pennsylvania. It was

these reformers who first forced the antislavery norm on their organization and then sought allies

for the further political implementation of this program. And it was these reformers who first

articulated an uncompromisingly distinctly humanitarian framing of the economics of trading in

slaves where the “original sin” of enslavement tainted individuals along the chain of economic

transactions. In John Woolman’s word, “he who with view to self-interest buys a slave made so

by violence, and only on the strength of such purchase holds him a slave, thereby joins hands

with those who committed that violence and in the nature of things becomes chargeable with the

guilt”39 Quakers in London, at the urging of their American co-religionists, finally adopted

officially the abolitionist program in the 1780s and an informal committee began systematically

inserting a rotating set of antislavery articles in newspapers in London and the country.40 This is

38 Brown, Moral Capital; Stamatov, Global Humanitarianism. 39 John Woolman, "Considerations on Keeping Negroes Recommended to the Professors of Christianity of Every Denomination, Part Second," in The Journal and Major Essays of John Woolman, ed. Phillips P. Moulton (New York: Oxford University Press, (1762) 1971), 233. 40 Jennings, Business of Abolishing, 25.

25

how the new framing of the slave trade entered the public debate: carefully distributed

abolitionist propaganda among at least twelve newspapers suddenly created the impression of a

pre-existing reservoir of abolitionist sentiments among the reading public.

This was in effect the engineering of a self-fulfilling abolitionist prophecy: if the

newspapers carry constantly several antislavery items provided by us, our antislavery opinion

must be representative of the opinion of the majority—a majority who, by that point, might have

sympathized with suffering slaves but had been blissfully uninterested in the problematic origins

of their sugar. The tactics was in line with what Kirsten Sword has called the “strategic

deception” of early American antislavery reformers: attracting allies by giving them the false

credit of having discovered the antislavery cause themselves.41 But by highlighting these

“socially engineered” aspects of early British abolitionist I want to make a more general point:

humanitarian sensibility did not follow markets and their extension; rather moral ideas were

spread deliberately to make people the moral implications of market behavior.

In this way, the abolitionist humanitarian stance was at a significant remove from the

structural and ideological determinants of the capitalism of its time. Why a wide segment of the

British population joined the Quaker-pioneered abolitionist movement is a complex question.

Yet there are no indications that the bourgeoisie or its vanguard joined because the abolition of

slavery was directly aligned with either their narrowly construed economic interests or with their

more general ideological interest in instilling a more appropriate wage-based mode of

oppression. In Britain, industrialists and merchants—outside of those in the slave trading

outports of Bristol, Liverpool, and London—flocked under the abolitionist banner. Yet their

counterparts in contemporary France or late-nineteenth-century Catalonia did the exactly the

41 Kirsten Sword, "Remembering Dinah Nevil: Strategic Deceptions in Eighteenth-Century Antislavery," The Journal of American History 97, no. 2 (2010).

26

opposite: aligning themselves firmly with the pro-slavery camp.42 That is, there was no

universal force that pushed the agents of capitalism into abolitionism. On the other hand, before

joining abolitionism politically active British capitalists had already engaged in organized

protests in two economic policies of William Pitt’s government: the introduction of the “fustian”

tax on textile products and the removal of protectionist tariffs in the trade with Ireland.43 In this

light, it is more appropriate to understand their embrace of abolitionism and of abolitionism’s

humanitarian “ultimate values” as distinctly political intervention in the larger and historically

contingent moral debate on the expanding economy.

Conclusion What can we learn about the origins of modern humanitarianism by situating its earliest most

influential manifestation, British abolitionism, in the context of contemporary moral debates on

the economy? Most generally, abolitionism was not simply a “revolution in sentiment,” but a

radical reorientation of economic ethics that occurred in close entanglement with institutional

spheres of the economy and politics. From this point of view, humanitarianism can be seen as

emerging institutional field that was not simply formed by the field of economics, as the various

argument about the formative influence of capitalism suggest, but in turn exercise important

autonomous influences on the other two fields it was entangled with. In other words, it is useful

42 Josep M. Fradera, "Limitaciones históricas del abolicionismo catalán," in Esclavitud y derechos humanos: La lucha por la libertad del negro en el siglo XIX, ed. Francisco de Solano and Agustín Guimerá Ravina (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1990); Florence Gauthier, L'aristocratie de l'épiderme: Le combat de la Société des citoyens de couleur, 1789-1791 (Paris: CNRS, 2007); Jordi Maluquer de Motes, "Abolicionismo y resistencia a la abolición en la España del siglo XIX," Anuario de Estudios Americanos 43(1986); Valerie Quinney, "The Problem of Civil Rights for Free Men of Color in the Early French Revolution," French Historical Studies 7, no. 4 (1972); "Decisions on Slavery, the Slave-Trade and Civil Rights for Negroes in the Early French Revolution," Journal of Negro History 55, no. 2 (1970). 43 Witt Bowden, "The Influence of the Manufacturers on Some of the Early Policies of William Pitt," The American Historical Review 29, no. 4 (1924); Paul Kelly, "British and Irish Politics in 1785," The English Historical Review 90, no. 356 (1975); J. M. Norris, "Samuel Garbett and the Early Development of Industrial Lobbying in Great Britain," The Economic History Review 10, no. 3 (1958).

27

to think of the humanitarian field as a causal actor of its own, and not simply as the manifestation

of ideological impulses emanating from the reigning relations of production. The field of the

economy, the field of politics, and the emerging field of humanitarianism were co-constitutive of

each other.

This discussion also suggests that it is misleading to think of the emergence of

humanitarianism as the aggregation of changing individual sensibilities. Britons in the late

eighteen century did not become humanitarian because they imbibed the moral values of

Montesquieu or Burke from reading books and listening to speeches. Nor did they become more

“sensitive” to suffering because of invisible structural forces, whether the expansion of distance

markets or hegemonic ideologies of capitalism. Rather abolitionism as a political project created

abolitionists and humanitarians by infusing new moral meanings into existing ideas and

discourses about the economy. Humanitarianism thus created humanitarians, often by devious

means, by making it possible for people to express their “inherent” humanitarianism.

28

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