Public Opinion and the Destruction of British Colonial Slavery

Abstract

Embedded in most histories of the abolition of British imperial slavery is what one might call a downward flowing model. From Thomas Clarkson’s graphic figure of abolitionism as a converging system of leading moralists, in 1808, to David Brion Davis’s hypothesis of anti-slavery as an expression of the hegemony of the British ruling class, in 1975, the emphasis has been on how leading members of cultural, political or economic sectors of society generated and directed the force which ultimately destroyed the British slave trade and slavery. 1 In individual accounts saints are pitted against slave-driving planters and merchants, or statesmen and political economists join forces against imperial slave interests, but attention centres on leading economic interests, on clusters of intellectuals or philosophers, on lines of division in Cabinets and Parliament. When historians have introduced the larger public into the story, it is generally and briefly treated as a ‘mass sentiment’, consciously or unconsciously worked on by élites for good or ill.

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