Ezra's Bookshelf

Moral Capital

by Christopher Leslie Brown · 497 pages · ~9 hrs

HistoryPolitics & GovernmentPhilosophy

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Christopher Leslie Brown's Moral Capital asks why organized opposition to slavery emerged in Britain in the 1780s, when slavery was legal, profitable and widely accepted. His answer is surprising: the American Revolution made it possible. Brown, a historian at Columbia, rejects both older explanations, the claim that abolition followed the declining economics of slavery and the claim that it grew from a rising tide of humanitarian feeling. He notes that moral disapproval of slavery had been common for decades without producing a movement. What changed was politics. During the imperial crisis, American colonists denounced British "tyranny" while holding slaves, and Britons answered by pointing out the hypocrisy. Slavery thus became tied to arguments about liberty, empire and national virtue. After Britain's humiliating defeat in America, Brown argues, opposing the slave trade offered a way to recover a sense of national righteousness, and for its champions it offered "moral capital," a way to display virtue and gain standing. He examines the varied individuals and groups who turned scattered sentiment into action. They include Granville Sharp and the legal campaign around the Somerset case, Quakers who first built organized networks, evangelical Anglicans, and imperial reformers who imagined gradual emancipation schemes under a stronger imperial state. The story ends with the 1787 formation of the London committee that launched the campaign against the slave trade. Brown emphasizes how contingent this all was: abolitionism was not an inevitable product of progress but the result of a particular political moment and of people seeking meaning as much as justice. The book is a model of how moral change actually happens in history.

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