Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism Book

A deep dive into the foundations of the abolition of slavery as state-sanctioned trade policy, brilliantly supporting the author's own thesis that the emancipation of African slaves, far from being the inevitable result of cultural progress (e.g. growing public and media literacy, bourgeois humanitarianism, Christian revival movements) and economic progress (growing wealth, growth of free market trading and international competition, technology), the emancipation of slaves was actually the most radical form of abolition to have even been proposed by opponents of the slave trade prior to the American War of Independence and was the unlikely result of the institutional reforms driven by highly zealous elites (in addition to broader cultural and economic changes)

This relatively impartial and comprehensively researched historiography explains how early transatlantic critiques of institutional slavery by a zealous global literary elite, buoyed by growing public awareness of severe human rights abuses, culminated in institutional reforms of politically-influential societies in America and Britain and, later, to volte-faces in American state and British trade policy - all catalysed by the moral paroxysms which brought on and resulted from the American war of independence of 1775-1783.