IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/sprchp/978-981-95-0958-4_6.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Slaves and Trade

In: Moral Discourses of the Economy in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Author

Listed:
  • Hye-Joon Yoon

    (Yonsei University)

Abstract

This chapter pays tribute to the moral crusade against the transatlantic slave trade and the slave labor in British West Indies. Early Abolitionists argued that slave trade and slavery were unjust in the eyes of God and God’s moral law, but purchase and ownership of African slaves were defended in the name of Britain’s national interests and as a constitutional right of free-born British subjects. Battling that stronghold of political and economic justification, therefore, called for an alignment of ethics, religion, politics, and economics. Claiming that slave trade and slavery were economically detrimental as well as morally reprehensible became the main strategy of the Abolitionists in the 1780s. The chapter also looks into the legality of considering slaves as property which was the central issue in the famous case of Somerset v. Stewart. Being the longest of all, this chapter reconstructing the language, argument, and rhetoric of the Abolitionists and their opponents is the high point of this book.

Suggested Citation

  • Hye-Joon Yoon, 2025. "Slaves and Trade," Springer Books, in: Moral Discourses of the Economy in Eighteenth-Century Britain, chapter 0, pages 201-252, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-981-95-0958-4_6
    DOI: 10.1007/978-981-95-0958-4_6
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a
    for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-981-95-0958-4_6. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.