"The key question I’ll look at is whether slavery’s abolition was primarily the result of economic changes or changes in moral attitudes (though, of course, both were relevant). People often think that slavery’s abolition was primarily an economic matter: Europe and its colonies were industrialising, which made slavery progressively less profitable; its abolition was just putting an end to an already- dying institution. This idea ultimately stems from the 1944 book Capitalism and Slavery by Eric Williams, an impressive scholar who later became the first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago.
Williams’s argument was a hugely important contribution, but it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, as demonstrated most convincingly by historian Seymour Drescher in his 1977 book Econocide. As Christopher Leslie Brown commented, “Since the publication of Econocide, few historians have continued to adhere to the economic interpretation of British abolition.” In correspondence, leading historians of abolition Manisha Sinha, Adam Hochschild, Michael Taylor, David Richardson, and Seymour Drescher himself said they broadly agreed with this claim.
There are a few reasons for this. First, at the time of abolition slavery was enormously profitable for the British. In the years leading up to abolition, British colonies produced more sugar than the rest of the world combined, and Britain consumed the most sugar of any country. When slavery was abolished, the shelf price of sugar increased by about 50 percent, costing the British public £21 million over seven years—about 5 percent of British expenditure at the time. Indeed, the slave trade was booming rather than declining: even though Britain had abolished its slave trade in 1807, more Africans were taken in the transatlantic slave trade between 1821 and 1830 than in any other decade except the 1780s. The British government paid off British slave owners in order to pass the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act, which gradually freed the enslaved across most of the British Empire. This cost the British government £20 million, amounting to 40 percent of the Treasury’s annual expenditure at the time. To finance the payments, the British government took out a £15 million loan, which was not fully paid back until 2015.
The economic interpretation of abolition also struggles to explain the activist approach that Britain took to the slave trade after 1807. Britain made treaties, and sometimes bribes, to pressure other European powers to end their involvement in the trade and used the Royal Navy’s West African Squadron to enforce those treaties. Britain had some economic incentive here to prevent their rivals from selling slave-produced goods at lower prices than they could. But the scale of their activism doesn’t seem worth it: from 1807 to 1867, enforcing abolition cost Britain almost 2 percent of its annual national income, several times what Britain spends today on foreign aid; political scientists Robert Pape and Chaim Kaufman described this campaign as “the most expensive international moral effort in modern history.” If the economic interpretation were correct, such activity would have been unnecessary because the slave trade would have been on its way out anyway.
But might economic changes have made the end of slavery inevitable, at some later date, even if they were not the reason why the British Parliament abolished the slave trade? One could argue that as economies become increasingly mechanised, the value of slave labour decreases: the kinds of jobs which enslaved people were typically given—unpleasant work with easily measurable outputs—also seem like the kinds of jobs that are most likely to be automated.
This could give us some reason to think that the global proportion of enslaved people would have decreased over time, but it doesn’t give us reason for thinking that slavery would have been entirely abolished. First, an enormous amount of labour is still unpleasant, low-skilled, and unmechanised, from fruit picking in the United States to mining and farming in lower-income countries. Sugarcane and cotton cultivation especially were very slow to be mechanised, even after US emancipation; mechanised harvesting became widespread in the South only after World War II. Second, historically, many enslaved people were in roles not threatened by industrialisation, such as sex slaves and domestic servants. Finally, enslaved people have historically been employed in difficult-to-monitor work. In ancient Greece, for example, enslaved people often worked in skilled trades like metalworking and carpentry, in the civil service, in banking, and even in management positions in workshops or on large estates.
Taking this evidence all together, we should conclude that slavery’s end was not the inevitable result of economic factors; rather, it came about, in significant part, because of changing moral attitudes. Given this, we can ask how contingent it was for those changes in moral attitudes, and their enshrinement into law, to occur. This is difficult to ascertain because abolition essentially happened only once, in a single wave that swept the globe; we don’t have access to independent historical experiments to see how things might have turned out. Is there just a single peak on the cultural fitness landscape, or are there many? Is the abolition of slavery more like the use of electricity—a more or less inevitable development once the idea was there? Or is it more like the wearing of neckties: a cultural contingency that became nearly universal globally but which could quite easily have been different?
The optimistic view is that the moral changes that brought about slavery’s end were more or less inevitable, part of the onward march of moral progress. But it’s hard to give strong support for this view. In particular, even if you think that the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice, that arc might still be very long. Perhaps in reruns of history, it takes a very long time at our current level of technological development for slavery to be abolished. If so, we might expect abolition to be contingent on the scale of centuries or even millennia.
Indeed, the history of the twentieth century, especially the rise of Nazism and Stalinism, shows how easy it is for moral regress to occur, including on the issue of free labour. During the Second World War, Nazi Germany used about eleven million forced labourers, 75 percent of whom were civilians; at its peak, forced labour accounted for about 25 percent of the country’s workforce. Similarly, the USSR under Stalin made widespread use of forced labour in gulag camps between 1930 and the 1950s, peaking at six million people, or 8 percent of the working population, in 1946.
You might think that the progressive trend towards free labour in northwestern Europe supports the “march of moral progress” view and that the regresses in Nazi Germany and the USSR under Stalin were just blips. Slavery had died out in France and England by the end of the twelfth century, replaced by serfdom. Serfs generally had more freedoms than enslaved people, and they typically could not be bought or sold, though they and their children were bound to a particular plot of land which they could not leave, and they were required to work for the land’s owner. Following the Black Death in the fourteenth century, serfdom was soon replaced by free labour throughout Western Europe. Abolition might seem, therefore, to be the inevitable next step of this progressive trend.
However, the full historical picture is much more complicated. One enormous complication is the transatlantic slave trade itself: despite the domestic trend towards free labour, the European powers enslaved people on a massive scale; this alone makes the claim about a morally driven trend unclear at best. Second, we see no similar trend in other parts of the world. In parts of Eastern Europe, serfdom intensified after the Black Death rather than declined. In China, slavery waxed and waned over time. Slavery may have existed during the ancient Shang dynasty, which was founded before 1500 BC, and there is clear evidence of slavery during the Han dynasty (202 BC– AD 220). De facto slavery continued in China in one form or another until the twentieth century. Several leaders attempted to reform or abolish slavery, often as part of political power struggles, but slavery repeatedly resurged when new dynasties came to power. In the Liaodong province in 1626, for example, it was estimated that fully one-third of the population was enslaved by the Qing, and after the Manchu invasion and establishment of the Qing dynasty in 1636, slavery resurged for a time in other areas of China as well. Slavery in China was abolished for good only in 1909. Globally, it’s hard to see abolitionism as part of even a stuttering historical trend towards moral progress on forced labour.
A more moderate view does not rely on the idea of moral progress but suggests that abolition was at least made very likely by a general tide of thought towards liberalism and free-market ideology in northwestern Europe. This is a position held by historian David Eltis. In this view, once the idea took hold that people had equal rights, including the right to noncoercion by the state, logical consistency put pressure in favour of antislavery and abolitionist sentiment.
The independent emergence of antislavery currents among different groups of liberal intellectuals would, in my view, be strong evidence for this position. And there were seeds of abolitionist sentiment in countries other than Britain in the late eighteenth century. The most notable example is France. Several French thinkers, including Condorcet and Montesquieu, denounced slavery, and the French government made a half-hearted attempt to abolish it in 1794. However, while abolitionist sentiment had emerged in France, the campaign to make it a legal reality grew out of British abolition. In fact, Jacques Pierre Brissot, founder of France’s abolitionist group the Société des Amis des Noirs, was directly inspired by visiting London and meeting Thomas Clarkson. Furthermore, the abolition law was repealed by Napoleon just eight years later, and France only abolished slavery permanently in 1848.
It is also undoubtedly true that abolitionist sentiment was part of a wider package of more liberal thought, and a view that championed individual liberty yet endorsed slave owning should be, and often was, regarded as deeply morally inconsistent. But we shouldn’t think it obvious that liberal thought would lead to abolition. As historian Manisha Sinha has noted, “The heritage of the Enlightenment was a mixed blessing for Africans, giving a powerful impetus to antislavery but also containing elements that justified their enslavement. . . . No ‘contagion of liberty’ flowed inexorably according to its own logic to slaves.” The key question is how long inconsistencies in a moral worldview can persist.
Though logical inconsistency does seem to exert some pressure to change by giving advocates stronger arguments in favour of their views, there are many ways in which modern moral views have tolerated inconsistency for long periods of time. For example, tobacco and alcohol are legal and more or less socially acceptable in most countries around the world, whereas other drugs are illegal and their use is stigmatised. The abuse of dogs and cats can spark public outrage, while every year billions of animals suffer and are killed in factory farms. Corporal punishment is considered a human rights violation, but ask yourself whether you would prefer to spend several years of your life behind bars or be flogged. I’m not claiming that any of these are genuine moral inconsistencies: in each case you can give explanations to dissolve the seeming tension between these views and practices. But it certainly seems like our moral views host at least some deep inconsistencies, and that these inconsistencies can be remarkably persistent.
Crucially, these moral inconsistencies concern forced labour, too. Some forms of forced labour have persisted and sat more or less comfortably alongside liberalism. One example is conscription, which was used as late as the 1970s by the United States to force almost two million men to risk their lives in the war in Vietnam. Another is penal labour. Consider, for example, the Mississippi State Penitentiary, better known as Parchman Farm. Beginning in 1901, the then governor of Mississippi, James K. Vardaman, ordered the building of a new prison that would operate as a profitable institution for the state. The result resembled “an antebellum plantation in every way, except that convicts replaced slave laborers.” The state government purchased nearly twenty thousand acres of land, racially segregated the inmates, and set them to work farming or picking cotton, often in intense heat and under threat of being whipped. The penitentiary was highly profitable, making $26 million in today’s money over 1912 and 1913. These horrors might seem distant to us now. But Parchman stopped its most egregious practices only in the 1970s, and only under legal pressure. And even today, thousands of prisoners in the United States work for the meagre wage of about one dollar per hour. In some cases, they are not compensated at all. This is legal because the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution abolished slavery and banned involuntary servitude, “except as a punishment for crime.”
Taking the possibility of such long-lasting inconsistency seriously, you might think that, were it not for the particular abolitionist campaign that did occur, then slavery might well have persisted even to this day. If so, then slavery’s abolition was highly contingent. This is the view of Christopher Leslie Brown. In his book Moral Capital, he claims that “antislavery organizing was odd rather than inevitable, a peculiar institution rather than the inevitable outcome of moral and cultural progress. . . . In key respects the British antislavery movement was a historical accident, a contingent event that just as easily might never have occurred.”
Given how striking a view this is, there’s more going for it than you might think. The key point is that the abolition movement was helped by many surprising or contingent factors. Brown emphasises the US War of Independence in particular. If the United States had instead remained part of the British Empire, Britain might have been more reluctant to jeopardise its uneasy relationship with the United States by taking a divisive action like abolishing the slave trade. The plantation lobby would also have been bigger in a still-united empire. Finally, Brown notes that abolitionists in France struggled because they lacked the opportunities and status of those in England. Because abolitionist thought grew in France around the same time as the French and Haitian revolutions, abolitionist thought, Brown argues, became linked with violence and strife.
According to Brown, in early nineteenth-century Britain, abolitionist action became a way to demonstrate virtue; in France, it did not. In this view, the abolitionist campaign occurred at a moment of plasticity, with multiple moral equilibria. Had things gone a different way over the course of a few crucial decades, antiabolition sentiment could have prevailed and then been further maintained by the plantation lobby.
Moreover, even once the slave trade was abolished, the abolition of slavery itself was not a foregone conclusion. As historian Michael Taylor argues, British emancipation in 1833 could well have taken many decades longer to achieve than it did: “The ensuing, belated campaign for slave emancipation was no mere coda to the campaign against the slave trade. . . . There was absolutely nothing inevitable about its success.” Contingent events that helped the campaign for emancipation included parliamentary reforms in 1829 and 1832 that led to a largely abolitionist Parliament and the Jamaican Christmas Rebellion of 1831–1832, which brought more attention to colonial slavery and helped convince members of Parliament that slavery posed a threat to the British colonies. Taylor also notes that two of the most important campaigners for emancipation, William Wilberforce and Zachary Macaulay, died between 1833 and 1838. If emancipation had not been achieved by 1838, he suggests, it could therefore have stalled altogether. The difficulty of achieving emancipation was appreciated by campaigners at the time: in 1824, leading abolitionist Fowell Buxton reportedly would have been satisfied if slavery had been abolished within the next seventy years.
Finally, even after Britain’s abolition of slavery, it seems non- inevitable that emancipation would be achieved globally. Despite Britain’s activist efforts, and despite the dominance of liberal ideas, global abolition still took over a century. Even into the 1930s, an estimated 20 percent of the population of Ethiopia was enslaved. Slavery there was abolished only in 1942. Saudi Arabia and Yemen were even later, abolishing slavery only in 1962. There were still thousands of enslaved people in Saudi Arabia at the time. Mauritania abolished slavery only in 1980 and only made owning people a criminal offense in 2007. If there had been less effort to promote abolition globally, slavery could plausibly have persisted in some countries for even longer.
Putting this all together, we should be open to the striking idea that abolition was a contingent event. The view that abolition was more or less inevitable on economic grounds is not plausible. Regarding the question whether abolition was ultimately very likely, given the broader trend towards liberalism, or whether it was highly dependent on the success of the particular abolitionist campaign that was run, both answers have merit. On the latter view, abolition was brought about by the actions of a remarkably small number of people; on the former, it was the collective output of the many thousands who pushed French and British policy makers in the direction of a worldview that made slavery unacceptable. But either way, it was the actions of thinkers, writers, politicians, formerly enslaved activists, and enslaved rebels who together brought about the end of slavery. On either of these views, abolition was not preordained, and had history gone differently, the modern world could be one with widespread, legally permitted slavery."
--- What We Owe the Future / William MacAskill
Of course, this won't stop the (anti-)racists from continuing to bash the UK for its involvement in slavery and pretending that it/'white' countries are uniquely responsible for it.