Description
Book SynopsisNot Made by Slaves describes the efforts of early-nineteenth-century businesses to end plantation slavery by promoting commerce in legitimate goods. Exploring the work of activists and businesses, Bronwen Everill adds an important dimension to the history of capitalism and its development under slavery.
Trade ReviewImpressive scholarship…[Readers] will be rewarded with greater understanding of historical developments that changed the relationship between consumers and producers in a global economy in ways that reverberate to this day. -- Marc M. Arkin * Wall Street Journal *
Everill repositions West Africa as central to the broader Atlantic story of 18th and 19th century economic morality, its relationship with commercial ethics, and the expansion of capitalism. -- Kofi Adjepong-Boateng * Financial Times *
An exceptional interpretation of how the Atlantic world envisioned social responsibility and how some people faced questions about ethical capitalism that still vex us today. -- Alessandra McLoughlin * Origins *
Offers a penetrating new perspective on abolition in the British Empire by spotlighting a particular cast of characters: the commercial abolitionists in West Africa who fashioned a consumer-focused, business-friendly antislavery ethics. These figures sought to prove the moral and economic superiority of non-slave labor while profiting from the transition away from slavery…Impressive. -- Dale Kretz * Jacobin *
[A] brisk jaunt through decades of history…This is a book that intervenes masterfully in various fields…[and] can be read profitably alongside the burgeoning scholarship that seeks to understand the rise and evolution of capitalism itself. -- Gerald Horne * Society for U.S. Intellectual History *
[An] incisive history of political economy. -- Michael Taylor * London Review of Books *
Intriguing…Armed with fresh insights from the new history of slavery and capitalism, Everill argues that scholars must launch a renewed investigation into the origins of abolitionism in the Atlantic World. If—as the new history contends—slavery was itself capitalist, then we can no longer assume that the triumph of capitalism made abolitionism inevitable…
Not Made by Slaves successfully knits together U.S. and West African history in novel ways that will make it especially useful and exciting for early Americanists looking to expand their transnational reach. -- Samantha Payne * Business History Review *
A fascinating, well-written book about abolitionists’ efforts to construct an antislavery economic island in a global capitalism system shaped by slavery-generated profit. -- Edward E. Baptist, author of
The Half Has Never Been ToldIn this deeply researched and elegantly written book, Everill follows the merchants and activists in West Africa, Europe, and the Americas who hoped to purify capitalism.
Not Made by Slaves is a surprising, searching, and thoughtful examination of an overlooked but essential problem in the history of slavery and emancipation in the Atlantic world. -- Padraic X. Scanlan, author of
Freedom’s DebtorsWhere did fair trade come from? As we learn in this innovative book, it emerged in multiple parts of the nineteenth-century Atlantic world as activists, merchants, and producers grappled with the complications of ending and replacing slavery. This is an important, truly transnational history of the fraught development of capitalism and the politics of ethical consumption that are still with us today. -- Lisa A. Lindsay, author of
Atlantic BondsA rich, exciting, and thought-provoking examination of how a global system was constructed from the bottom up. Everill demonstrates how abolitionists turned consumers into the moral compass of capitalism, a shift that obscured the other ethical dilemmas capitalism posed, from poorly paid labor to the sale of ethically dubious goods—a framework of justification whose legacies continue to this day. -- Joanna Cohen, author of
Luxurious CitizensIn an insightful and important book, Everill offers a fresh perspective on abolition by examining how abolitionists used free trade to undermine slavery and the slave trade. A real strength of the work is her focus on the central role that West African trade and radical experiments in Sierra Leone and Liberia played in shaping both Atlantic abolition and commercial reform. -- Randy J. Sparks, author of
Where the Negroes Are MastersIn this groundbreaking exploration of ethical capitalism in the age of Atlantic empire and slavery, Everill digs down into the efforts aimed at making an immoral trade just. Giving equal attention to North America, Europe, and West Africa, she carefully documents the struggle to buy, sell, and consume according to ideas of free and fair trade. With the morality of global capitalism under the microscope today, this is a book for our times. -- Emma Hart, author of
Trading Spaces
