ENGLISH

Principles and Agents: The British Slave Trade and Its Abolition

By David Richardson

Book information

Publisher
Yale University Press
Year
2022
ISBN
0300250436, 9780300250435
Language
english
Format
EPUB
Filesize
7 MB (6923869 bytes)
Series
The David Brion Davis Series
Pages
384\0
Topic
History
Time added
2022-01-23 11:36:03

Description

A new history of the abolition of the British slave trade Parliament’s decision in 1807 to outlaw British slaving was a key moment in modern world history. In this magisterial work, historian David Richardson challenges claims that this event was largely due to the actions of particular individuals and emphasizes instead that abolition of the British slave trade relied on the power of ordinary people to change the world. British slaving and opposition to it grew in parallel through the 1760s and then increasingly came into conflict both in the public imagination and in political discourse. Looking at the ideological tensions between Britons’ sense of themselves as free people and their willingness to enslave Africans abroad, Richardson shows that from the 1770s those simmering tensions became politicized even as British slaving activities reached unprecedented levels, mobilizing public opinion to coerce Parliament to confront and begin to resolve the issue between 1788 and 1807.

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