"Britons Never Will be Slaves": National Myth, Conservatism, and the Beginnings of British Antislavery

Abstract

According to a virtual consensus in modern scholarship on the abolition of slavery, this event marked a historic victory for nonconformist, radical, or otherwise antiestablishment elements in British culture. A recent historian has connected the rise of antislavery with "Wilkite" tendencies in the British middle class, and others have located abolitionism in a "reform complex" devoted to the radical overhaul of the British political system. 1 It has been widely assumed that British slavery was generally excused by the established Anglican church and that the abolitionist movement was dominated by "Quakers, evangelicals and Rational Dissenters." 2 Some major scholars of abolitionism have acknowledged the participation of Anglicans and social conservatives in early antislavery, but even they agree in interpreting abolition as a social revolution instigated by intellectual and economic upheaval, as argued by David Brion Davis and Roger Antsey, or by the alienation of workers in nascent industrial capitalism, as maintained by Seymour Drescher. 3