Free-Trade Ideology and Transatlantic Abolitionism: A Historiography

Abstract

This essay seeks to trace the many-and often conflicting-economic ideological interpretations of the transatlantic abolitionist impulse. In particular, it explores the contested relationship between free-trade ideology and transatlantic abolitionism, and highlights the understudied influence of Victorian free-trade ideology within the American abolitionist movement. By bringing together historiographical controversies from the American and British side, the essay calls into question long-standing conceptions regarding the relationship between free trade and abolitionism, and suggests new avenues for research.Contradictions continue to surround the historical intersection of Anglo-American capitalism and slavery. The contested relationship between free-trade ideology and transatlantic abolitionism sits high among them. This historiographical essay seeks to ideas. For example, while granting that antebellum abolitionists "generally adhered to free trade economic ideas, sometimes radically so," James L. Huston has argued that "abolitionists possessed a biblical political economy, not a classical liberal one," a moral impulse that became diluted from the 1830s to the 1850s (2000, p. 488; 1990, p. 614). 2Paul Goodman has similarly portrayed American abolitionism as an oppositional religious response to the era's relatively unregulated capitalist marketplace: "Abolition was a struggle to impose on social and economic relations the moral principles that were rooted in Christian teachings" (1998, pp. xiv, 140). The typical evangelical historiographical tradition goes even further than these interpretations in suggesting that 1 For the wide variation in interpretations, see also Huston (2000 and 1990).2 K. R. M. Short, examining the English intersection of Christianity and antislavery, has drawn similar conclusions; British free trade was "firmly wed to anti-slavery," and contained "a decidedly religious imprimatur" (1965-66, p. 313). 3American abolitionists were Christian reformers whose evangelical morality was in inherent opposition to market capitalism. Barnes (1933, pp. 3-16), andRandall (1940). 4 See, for instance, Ashworth (1995, pp. 131-181), Davis (1987), Davis (1975, pp. 45-47), Temperley (1980. 5 See also Ashworth (1987). This interpretation bears some similarity to that of Seymour Drescher concerning the British marketplace. Although granting laissez-faire capitalism and abolitionism were 4 predominantly middle-class abolitionists in the United States subscribed to an economic individualism and anti-institutionalism that at times bordered upon anarchism (Perry 1973; Elkins 1958, pp. 147-157; Forster 2014 England, but also suggested that declining profits from the transatlantic slave system, not humanitarianism, brought about the end of the British slave trade and Caribbean slavery in the early nineteenth century. This humanitarianism-in-decline motif remains a point of closely connected, Drescher has contended that the market per se did not create the abolitionist humanitarian impulse; working-class soci...

7. Transimperial Roots of American Anti-Imperialism: The Transatlantic Radicalism of Free Trade, 1846–1920

“…These American Cobdenites were involved in myriad transatlantic reform movements throughout the mid nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including the closely related international peace, anti-imperialist, and abolitionist movements. 19 Cobden's American free-trade disciples included abolitionists from Boston and New York City like William Lloyd Garrison, Charles Sumner, William Cullen Bryant, and Henry Ward Beecher. For these abolitionists, free trade was thought to be the next peaceful and prosperous step in the emancipation of mankind, whereas protectionism shackled consumers and laborers to the dictates of special interests, fostering in the process monopolies and geopolitical tensions that too often led to militarism and war.…”

The "Conspiracy" of Free Trade: The Anglo-American Struggle over Empire and Economic Globalization, 1846-1896

“…For transatlantic Cobdenites, free trade and free labor were far from disparate goals. 41 Yet recent work has focused instead on the willingness of the ACLL to work with the slaveholding South for reciprocal tariffs: that by the mid-1840s the middle-class leaders of the ACLL had "subverted anti-slavery's moral authority." So, too, did leading Southerners encourage this perceived connection between transatlantic trade liberalization and the decline of antislavery sentiment.…”