**"COMPETING INTERPRETATIONS: ENDING THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRAFFIC"**

*David Levering Lewis*

National Archives,

> Washington, DC

January 10, 2008

Two centuries ago, on the first day of this month, the United States of
America joined the United Kingdom of Great Britain in outlawing the
further importation of African slaves. That William Edward Burghardt Du
Bois, great grandson of African slaves should produce the first
scholarly account of the federal ban on the importation of slaves into
the United States was variously noticed with critical surprise,
satisfaction, and annoyance. *The Suppression of the African Slave Trade
to the United State, 1638-*1870 was successfully defended as a Harvard
doctoral dissertation on June 1, 1895. The 27 year-old scholar attained
the unique distinction of being selected as the initial author in
Harvard Historical Studies, one of the earliest series of
university-sponsored scholarly publications in the United States. After
he transformed "a dry historical treatise into readable prose,\" as Du
Bois put it later, the monograph was published by the firm of Longman
Green & Company the following year. (Harvard University Press was yet to
be incorporated.)

*The Suppression of the African Slave Trade* was beyond reproach in its
sweeping use of published materials and archival digging\-\--an
outstanding example of the new historiography the illustrious Albert
Bushnell Hart demanded of his students. Du Bois constructed the
evidence, document by damning document, for his thesis that the grand
constitutional achievement at Philadelphia twenty years earlier had been
fatally flawed by political expediency. At the very moment when the new
nation could have terminated the Trans-Atlantic slave traffic, the
Founders had basely compromised. The "bargain" struck between the
North's ten commercial states and the South's three agrarian states over
the closing of the Atlantic trade had created a Frankenstein's monster.
\"It is neither profitable nor in accordance with the scientific truth
to consider that whatever the constitutional fathers did was right,\"
the young professor scolded. By precluding Congress from prohibiting
"the importation of such persons as any of the States now existing shall
think proper to admit . . . prior to the year one thousand eight hundred
and eight,\"\_the new nation had granted the monster two unimpeded
decades in which to grow too large to be destroyed short of civil war.

To be sure, in Du Bois' monumental study considerably less attention was
paid to the antislavery qualms of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas
Jefferson, or to the likes of crusaders Anthony Benezet and John
Woolman, than to the realpolitik of the American oligarchy's meeting at
Philadelphia. For Du Bois, the decision to end the oceanic traffic had
less to do with humanitarian ideals than with Haitian revolutionaries.
Shock waves from the greatest racial upheaval of the 18^th^ century that
decimated invading French and British armies and threw up defiant
regimes of black Jacobins and emperors dismayed Europe and alarmed North
Americans. "It would hardly be too much to say," Du Bois insisted," that
the Haytian revolution. . . was one of the main causes that rendered the
accomplishment of this aim possible at the earliest constitutional
moment"\-\--a capital insight of his *Suppression of the African Slave
Trade.*

The unsigned *Atlantic Monthly* reviewer reproached Du Bois for
moralizing about the wages of original sin.[^1] Admittedly,
*Suppression* moralizes. Loaded phrases indict \"the cupidity and
carelessness of our ancestors.\" Kantian imperatives flash out.
\"Instead of calling the whole moral energy of the people into action,
so as gradually to crush this potential evil,\" the young Calvinist
finds only temporizing, cowardice, horsetrading, and complicity. Du Bois
doubted \"if ever before such political mistakes as the slavery
compromises of the Constitutional Convention had such serious results.\"
*Suppression* ends with an admonition which the otherwise favorable
reviewer (unsigned) in the *American Historical Review* regretted as
more characteristic of \"the advocate rather than the historian.\"
\"From this,\" Du Bois sternly declared, \"we may conclude that it
behooves nations as well as men to do things at the very moment when
they ought to be done.\"[^2]

In his magnum opus, *Black Reconstruction in America*, published four
decades later, Du Bois described the Trans-Atlantic slave trade as "the
most magnificent drama in the last thousand years." By "magnificent", Du
Bois must have meant titanic in the sense of a global repositioning of
demography and the rise of a new European economic system. The immense
numbers involved remain contested among historians\-\--steadily rising
from Philip Curtin's once authoritative 1969 census of nine million
Africans transported to the Western Hemisphere from the mid-15^th^
century to the early 19^th^. Pick a number: a definitive ten millions
for Roger Antsey and David Eltis; eleven millions for James Rawley;
twelve millions for Joseph Inikori.[^3] Increase that number by at least
1/3^rd^ to account for those who perished on the march to the coast,
expired in the holding pens, died in the Middle Passage, or succumbed
during the seasoning period in the Americas. On the low side, a total of
15 million Africans must have been captured during a 400-year
supply-and-demand transaction between African wholesalers and European
retailers.[^4] On the high side, the figure may exceed twenty million
men, women, and children.

What this long vacuuming of people meant to the cultural anthropology
and political economy of the African Subcontinent is the subject of
academic investigation and dispute yielding verdicts that range from
minimal impact (John Thornton) and reparable depletion (Hugh Thomas) to
holocaustic catastrophe (Basil Davidson, Paul Lovejoy, and Walter
Rodney). Hugh Thomas's grand Eurocentric account, *The Slave Trade*,
breezily speculates that "a fast growing population might even have
found relief from the inevitable pressure on resources through the
export of some of its members." Walter Rodney, the brilliant young West
Indian polemicist, firmly demurs and claims to calculate precisely the
scope of the holocaust. In his popular monograph, *How Europe
Underdeveloped Africa,* Rodney claims that Africa had 100 million people
in 1650; Europe numbered 103 millions, Asia 257 millions. Two centuries
later, there were still 100 million Africans; but 144 million Europeans
and 656 million Asians. Fifty years later\-\--1900\-\--Rodney's world
census yielded 120 million Africans, 423 million Europeans, and 857
million Asians\-\--disparities he attributes to no other cause but the
inhumane Atlantic slave traffic.[^5]

Much recent scholarship tends to undermine Walter Rodney's monocausal
explanation. In his interpretive tour de force, *Africa and Africans in
the Making of the Atlantic World* (1998), historian John Thornton offers
this judgment: "In the end, then," he asserts categorically, "the
European trade with Africa can scarcely be seen as disruptive in itself,
for it did not oust any line of African production, nor did it thwart
\[economic\] development. . . ."[^6] In this line of reasoning, European
participation in the slave trade was first and foremost at the
instigation of Africans. Definitive explanations still await the
historic realities of Africa's skewed sex ratios, increased polygyny,
perpetual warfare, ubiquity of internal enslavement, and regional
depopulation. The debate is far from settled, but that famous plaint in
1526 of King Afonso I of the Kongo to his brother royal, Manuel I of
Portugal, certainly appears to corroborate the catastrophists.
"Merchants are taking every day our natives, sons of the land, and our
sons of our noblemen and vassals and our relatives," protested King
Afonso. "So great, Sire, is the corruption and licentiousness that our
country is being completely depopulated."[^7]

Whether or not black Africa was irreparably damaged by four centuries of
involuntary population out-migration, the great majority of the enslaved
departed the continent in Anglo-American bottoms. By the Treaty of
Utrecht of 1713, the defeated Spanish granted the victorious British a
monopoly (*el Asiento*) on the transport and sale of slaves to their
Latin American possessions. Britain's near-monopoly on the traffic was
the 18^th^ century's equivalent of OPEC. As the canonical trade theorist
of the day, Malachy Postlethwayt, rejoiced, "the Negro trade and the
natural consequences resulting from it may be justly esteemed an
inexhaustible fund of wealth and naval power to this nation." During the
traffic's so-called "golden age" from 1700 to 1808, when 2/3rds of the
total number of chattels was shipped from Senegambia, the Windward
Coast, the Gold Coast, the Bight of Biafra, Kongo, and Angola to the
Western hemisphere, about 40 percent was unloaded from English and
American vessels.[^8] "Many thousands gone," indeed, as Ira Berlin
entitled his instant classic: with 35 percent of these bewildered
captives consumed in Brazil's fatal sugar plantations; 50 percent in the
Caribbean slaughterhouse; five percent absorbed by North America's far
less lethal tobacco, rice, and cotton plantations.

Fifty years ago, the great majority of historians (although probably not
Du Bois) would have found counter-intuitive and factually surprising the
claim that the extraordinary prosperity derived from the British
Caribbean plantations was [not]{.underline} declining at the beginning
of the 19^th^ century. Indeed, as recent massaging of the numbers
reveals, the Atlantic slave trade attained maximum size and
profitability in the very decade in which the British parliament and the
American Congress abolished the traffic. In recent calculations by
Joseph Inikori, a leading numbers man, the average rate of profit from
1765 to 1806 on some 240 Atlantic slave shipments amounted to a hefty 27
percent. Postlethwayt's pronouncements were still holding fifteen years
after the Haitian revolution. [^9] What was true before the Declaration
of Independence persisted as a crucial economic fact of life a quarter
century afterward.

Nearly sixty years after Longman Green & Company published *The
Suppression of the African Slave*, a Columbia University graduate
student surprised Du Bois with a proposal to republish the book. Du Bois
gratefully accepted Eugene Genovese's offer and agreed to write an
\"Apologia\".[^10] What *Suppression* had needed, Du Bois decided in the
"Apologia," \"was to add to my terribly conscientious search into the
facts . . . the clear concepts of Marx on the class struggle for income
and power, beneath which all considerations of right or morals were
twisted or utterly crushed.\"[^11] John Hope Franklin gently demurred
from the Apologia in his *Journal of Nero History* tribute to the second
edition, writing that the absence of a Marxist framework in the original
edition was a "most fortunate dereliction." As Franklin astutely noted,
however, Du Bois's 60 year-old monograph had recognized not only
economic considerations, but had joined them with political and moral
considerations.

If much of his 1896 monograph reduces social and political conduct to a
matter of character, numerous economic pronouncements still have a
distinctly modern, we might say proto-Marxist, ring. At bottom, Du Bois
believed the source and force of slavery in the United States to lie in
an indissoluble link between profits from unfree labor and the financing
of modern capitalism. In a paper read before the American Historical
Association while still completing his pioneering slave-trade monograph,
Du Bois had advanced an insight of considerable saliency:

If slave labor was an economic god, then the slave trade was its strong

right arm; and with Southern planters recognizing this and

Northern capital unfettered by a conscience it was almost like
legislating

against economic laws to attempt to abolish the slave trade

by statutes. Northern greed joined to Southern credulity was a

combination calculated to circumvent any law, human or divine.[^12]

\"Apologia\" would end on the moderately forgiving note that, \"at the
beginning of my career, I made no more mistakes than apparently I
did.\"[^13] Almost certainly an 87 year-old Du Bois reaching the end of
his career must have derived considerable satisfaction from the then
fairly recent turn taken by slavery and emancipation studies. Indeed, it
would have been altogether reasonable for him to believe that the
paradigm-shifting scholarship of the brilliant Trinidadian, Eric
Williams, flowed to some extent from sophisticated amplifications of
some of his own economic insights. Although I recall only generalities
pertinent to the issue of intellectual mentoring in the vast Du Bois
correspondence, one can surely speculate that these two extraordinary
intellectuals\-\--Du Bois in the sociology chair at Atlanta, Williams in
economics at Howard\-\--critically devoured each other's writings.

The 1955 edition of *Suppression* with its Marxian "Apologia" appeared
eleven years after the publication of Williams's *Capitalism and
Slavery* (1944). *Capitalism and Slavery* appeared nine years after
*Black Reconstruction in America.* That the 18^th^-century profits from
the Atlantic slave trade had financed the steel production and textile
manufacture of the British and French maritime bourgeoisies came as a
matter of logic to the author of *Suppression* as he steeped himself in
Marx to write *Black Reconstruction.* That book's opening chapter, "The
Black Worker", made the sweeping assertion that black labor "became the
foundation stone not only of the southern social structure, but of
northern manufacture and commerce, of the English factory system, of
European commerce, of buying and selling on a world-wide scale."[^14]

With a nod to Du Bois and a deep bow to economic historian Lowell
Ragatz, Williams's *Capitalism and Slavery* served up a two-pronged
thesis in which the slave-trade\-\--understood as a totality of
activities and products\-\--financed the industrial revolution, which in
turn liquidated chattel slavery as economical enterrprise. Professor
Thomas Holt served up a superlatively succinct recapitulation of Eric
Willliams's brilliant two-pronged argument in a 1986 review essay in the
*Journal of Social History,* writing that "the Atlantic slave trade had
played midwife at the birth of British capitalism, which in turn played
pallbearer to the slave trade and slavery." Williams's seminal book
documented an economy of inefficient slave labor, white population loss,
chronic indebtedness, soil exhaustion, and plantation bankruptcy on a
life support of outdated mercantilist tariffs and subsidies. With all
due credit to the abolitionist activism of Quaker, Evangelical, and Whig
elites in London and Philadelphia\-\--men and women, Britons and
Africans, who deployed one of the "greatest propaganda movements of all
time"\-\--Williams sought to demonstrate that chattel slavery succumbed
to the irrepressible advance of industrial capitalism.[^15]

In a work of remarkable revisionism, *Econocide: British Slavery in the
Era of Abolition*, historian Seymour Drescher purported thirty years ago
to demonstrate the absence of objective economic reasons for the success
of British and American abolitionism\-\--a position the cliometrician
Robet Fogel fully endorsed. "Far from declining," Fogel asserts in
*Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery*
(1989), "slave imports were higher in this period than in any previous
20-year period of U.S. history."[^16] Drescher's *Econocide* insists
that in 1790 "the metropole had little reason to regret its economic
relationship with the West Indies," in consequence of which he maintains
that Britain and the United States abolished the slave trade despite
their economic interests, not because of them. In the playbill of this
rather recent scholarship, thriving Caribbean sugar and coffee
plantations enriched the metropole to such a degree that only the
prospect of overproduction should have concerned his majesty's
exchequer. As Rutgers historian Christopher Brown reiterates in a
thoughtful article reviewing the literature in *William and Mary
Quarterly*, "most historians now reject interpretations that reduce
British abolitionism to economic motives.".[^17]

So much, then, it would seem for those historians who had embraced the
argument offered by *Capitalism and Slavery,* stipulating the relative
economic decline of the Caribbean as a major cause for abolition. Did
American and British opponents of the Atlantic slave trade somehow
persuade their people to commit an act of economic masochism or, to
employ Professor Drescher's neologism, econocide? Does acceptance of the
disconcerting Drescherian economic conclusions constrain us to
acknowledge an even more disconcerting conundum as we commemorate the
bicentenary of the closing of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade? For if
there were compelling economic reasons not to do so, then what must have
been the non-economic reasons that trumped common sense in an age where,
as Adam Hochschild and Seymour Drescher remind us, "freedom, not
slavery, was the peculiar institution."?[^18] How, to put the question
starkly, does one explain the sudden decision (in historical time) to
curtail an institution coeval with civilization?

To be sure, Victorian--Age historians had no doubt as to what was the
ennoblingly correct answer. But, no contemporary scholar would subscribe
to the effusions of William Lecky's *A History of European Morals*, in
which it was said that "the unweary, unostentatious, and inglorious
crusade of England against slavery may probably be regarded as among the
three or four virtuous pages comprised in the history of nations." As
late as 1933, Oxford's Regius Professor, Sir Reginald Coupland,
concurred in his arbitral *The British Anti-Slavery Movement.*[^19] This
was historical explanation by celebration that barely advanced the
abolition story beyond where Thomas Clarkson himself left it with his
1808 autobiographical history or Wilberforce's two sons in their
five-volume *Life of William Wilberforce*. This was the time when John
Newton's hymn, *Amazing Grace,* almost expunged from memory a life as a
slave ship captain; when Ouladah Equiano's autobiography became a
bestseller; when Josiah Wedgwood designed his seal for stamping
envelopes\-\-\--"Am I Not a Man and Brother?"; and when William
Wilberforce shocked the House of Commons with the image of the *Brookes*
slave ship.

Writing years later of his spectacular reinterpretive impact, Williams
demystified Quaker abolitionism with almost disingenuous casualness by
explaining that "the view was that a band of humanitarians\-\--the
Saints, they had been nicknamed\-\--had got together to abolish slavery,
and had after many years succeeded in arousing the conscience of the
British people against man's greatest inhumanity to man."\*\* As the
popular success of the recent film *Amazing Grace* signals, abolitionism
is still a subject made for hagiographic packaging, but academic
concerns are of a different order, for, while they embrace Williams's
abolitionist dymystification, debate rages among them as to how to
explain the sudden termination of the Atlantic slave trade.

The question as posed by David Brion Davis some forty years ago still
begs a definitive answer: why did men and women suddenly define as
immoral an institution that had been for several centuries accepted as
integral to European religion and law? One puts away with perplexity the
excellent collection of essay edited by my NYU colleague, Thomas Bender.
As David Eltis wearily observed in his review of *The Anti-Slavery
Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical
Interpretation* (1992)*,* "the missing element is not a resolution of
the issues so much as any hint that reconciliation is possible."[^20]
The distinguished colonialist, Barbara Solow finds Drescher's
interpretations "important and exciting" but "fundamentally mistaken."
Solow, Gavin Wright, and Thomas Holt join with other scholars to salvage
a modified version of Eric Williams's economic decline thesis by
insisting that the Haitian implosion and relative decline in the value
of the Caribbean gradually undercut the stranglehold on political power
by the North American and British slavocracy.

And so it goes. David Brion Davis's *chef d'oeuvre*, *Inhuman Bondage:
The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World* (2006), serves up a
compelling synthesis of the best of Williams's critics (Antsey, Eltis,
Drescher, Haskell) and the best of Williams. According to Davis, the
sugar, coffee, and tobacco grown by efficient, profitable slave labor
transformed the dreary lives of the common Englishman and American, and
in doing so created the appetites that undergirded a new consumer
mentality increasingly inimical to the indignity of wageless work.
Malthus and Ricardo and Manchester economics notwithstanding,
businessmen grasped the enormous potential of a working class
incentivised by wages and wanting more and more of the finer things of
life. The rapture of revisionism is endemic to scholarship. Explanations
for the suppression of the Atlantic slave trade are likely to sustain
historiography for years to come.

The rapture of revisionism is endemic to scholarship. Explanations for
the suppression of the Atlantic slave trade are likely to sustain
historiography long after the close of today's symposium and for years
to come. In that case, why not exercise the prerogative of offering
one's personal preference among the welter of theoretical alternatives?
I find Thomas Holt's superb 1987 review essay in the *Journal of Social
History* to offer a satisfactory penultimate, if not last, word. Of
Williams and his critics and the best sense to be made of a complex
historical problem, Holt writes this:

Why, after all, is it necessary to choose between workers' initiatives

and elite controls. Is there really an inherent contradiction between an

explanation of abolition in terms of a broadly based transformation

of moral perception and the machinations of elite classes? It would

appear, then, that Williams as correct: the advent of slavery abolition

was a function of the rise of capitalism. Capitalism promoted a new

psychology, new social relations, and new relations of state and
citizen.

One final observation. Historical reasoning by analogy may serve us.
Slaves were yesterday's energy source. Fossil fuels are today's. If the
suppression of the Atlantic traffic was economically irrational, will
historians tell future generations that the rush to wean ourselves of
petroleum dependence was economically irrational? New oil sources are
coming on line across the planet. New technologies of automotive
efficiency abound. Profits for Exxon and Shell are almost
incommensurable. Vast industries depend upon oil. How then explain the
Kyoto Accords\-\--today's equivalent of the 1808 traffic ban\-\--and Al
Gore our 21^st^---century Wilberforce? David Brion Davis's new book,
*Inhuman* Bondage, describes a world turned into an immense
concentration camp had New World slavery not been terminated, a dismal
picture hypothesized in the *New York Times* by Eric Foner two Sundays
ago. Our ancestors somehow realized that slave labor\-\--efficient and
abundant\-\--would, nevertheless, be ruinous morally, socially, and, in
the long ruin, technologically inferior. Such a mindset now seeps
through the developed world apparently and mercifully hell bent on
committing a new version of econocide. One hundred twelve years ago, Du
Bois set the interpretive bar high for historians of the slave trade.
The challenge continues.

[^1]: **\"\... eliminated in due time.\":** [Suppression]{.underline},
    pp. 197-98, and pp. 169, 171, 173, and 154.

[^2]: **\"\... when they ought to be done.\":** [ibid]{.underline}., p.
    197, and pp. 198, 199.

[^3]: **\"\... historical treatise into readable prose.\":**
    [Dusk]{.underline}, p. 269.

    ^?^ **[Suppression]{.underline}:** The original dissertation clearly
    suggests eleventh-hour typing problems - \"The Suppression of the
    African Slave Trade in the United States of America, 1638-1871.\" A
    Thesis for the Degree of Philosophiae Doctor et Magister Artum at
    Harvard University by W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, 2vols., Pusey
    Library/Harvard University. **Harvard Historical Studies** was not,
    as has sometimes been stated, the first such series; see,
    \"Introduction,\" by Herbert Aptheker, ed., [The Suppression of teh
    African Slave Trade to the United States of America,
    1638-1870]{.underline} (Millwood, N.Y.: Kraus-Thomson Organization
    Limited, 1973), p. 11.

    ^?^ **\"\... abolition of slavery.\":** [Suppression]{.underline},
    p. 198.

    ^?^ **\"\... when they ought to be done.\":** [ibid]{.underline}.,
    p. 197, and pp. 198, 199.

    ^?^ **Genovese\'s edition of [Suppression]{.underline}:** Du Bois,
    \"Apologia,\" [Suppression of the African Slave Trade
    \...]{.underline} (N.Y.: Social Science Press, 1954) \[Reproduced in
    the Aptheker 1973 Kraus-Thomson edition, pp. 327-29.\]

    ^?^ **\"\... twisted or utterly crushed.\":** [ibid]{.underline}.,
    p. 329.

    ^?^ **\"\... more mistakes than apparently I did.\":**
    [ibid]{.underline}., p. 329.

    ^?^ **\"\... law, human or divine.\":** Du Bois, \"The Enforcement
    of the Slave Trade Laws,\" [AHA Annual Report for 1891]{.underline};
    also, Aptheker, [Periodical Literature]{.underline}, I., p. 27.

    ^?^ **\"\... of income than morals.\":** \"Apologia,\" p. 329.

    ^?^ **\"\... eliminated in due time.\":** [Suppression]{.underline},
    pp. 197-98, and pp. 169, 171, 173, and 154.

    ^?^ **\"\... abolition of slavery.\":** [Suppression]{.underline},
    p. 198.

    ^?^ **\"\... when they ought to be done.\":** [ibid]{.underline}.,
    p. 197, and pp. 198, 199.

    ^?^ **Genovese\'s edition of [Suppression]{.underline}:** Du Bois,
    \"Apologia,\" [Suppression of the African Slave Trade
    \...]{.underline} (N.Y.: Social Science Press, 1954) \[Reproduced in
    the Aptheker 1973 Kraus-Thomson edition, pp. 327-29.\]

    ^?^ **\"\... twisted or utterly crushed.\":** [ibid]{.underline}.,
    p. 329.

    ^?^ **\"\... more mistakes than apparently I did.\":**
    [ibid]{.underline}., p. 329.

    ^?^ **\"\... law, human or divine.\":** Du Bois, \"The Enforcement
    of the Slave Trade Laws,\" [AHA Annual Report for 1891]{.underline};
    also, Aptheker, [Periodical Literature]{.underline}, I., p. 27.

    ^?^ **\"\... of income than morals.\":** \"Apologia,\" p. 329.

    ^?^ Indicative citations on the numbers thicket: William Darity,
    Jr., "The Numbers Game and the Profitability of the British Trade in
    Slaves", *Journal of Economic History* (Sept. 1985): 693-703; *The
    Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-Rom* (Cambridge and
    N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 1999), reviewed by Lorena S. Walsh
    for EH.NET; Robin Blackburn, *The Making of New World Slavery: From
    the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800* (London: Verso, 1997).

[^4]: ^?^ Estimates reported in Marcus Rediker, *The Slave Ship: A Human
    History* (N.Y.: Viking, 2007), p. 5.

[^5]: ^?^ Hugh Thomas, *The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave
    Trade, 1440-1870* (NY: Simon & Schuster, 1997), p. 795. Walter
    Rodney, *How Europe Underdeveloped Africa* (Washington, DC: Howard
    University Press, 1972), p. 97. John Thornton, *Africa and Africans
    in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800* (London: Cambridge,
    1992), ch.2. Paul Lovejoy, "The Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade
    on Africa: A Review of the Literature," *Journal of African
    History*, XXX (1989): 365-94.

[^6]: ^?^ Thornton, *op. cit.,* p. 53.

[^7]: ^?^ Afonso I quoted, David Brion Davis, *Inhuman Bondage: The Rise
    and Fall of Slavery in the New World* (NY: Oxford, 2006), p. 91.

[^8]: ^?^ Postlethwayt quoted, Christopher Leslie Bown, *Moral Capital:
    Foundations of British Abolitionism* (Chapel Hill: University of
    North Carolina Press, 2006), p. 209. Figures taken from Du Bois,
    *Suppression*, pp. 3, 5; and Rediker, *op. cit.*, p. 5.

[^9]: ^?^ Cf., William Darity, "The Numbers Game and the Profitability
    of the British Trade in Slaves," *Journal of Economic History*
    (Sept. 1985): 693-703, p. 694.

[^10]: **Genovese\'s edition of [Suppression]{.underline}:** Du Bois,
    \"Apologia,\" [Suppression of the African Slave Trade
    \...]{.underline} (N.Y.: Social Science Press, 1954) \[Reproduced in
    the Aptheker 1973 Kraus-Thomson edition, pp. 327-29.\]

[^11]: **\"\... twisted or utterly crushed.\":** [ibid]{.underline}., p.
    329. \[John Hope Franklin, review, *The Suppression of the African
    Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1683-1870. Journal of
    Negro History* (////// 1955): 182-84, p. 184.\]

[^12]: **\"\... law, human or divine.\":** Du Bois, \"The Enforcement of
    the Slave Trade Laws,\" [AHA Annual Report for 1891]{.underline};
    also, Aptheker, [Periodical Literature]{.underline}, I., p. 27.

[^13]: **\"\... more mistakes than apparently I did.\":**
    [ibid]{.underline}., p. 329.

[^14]: Lewis, *Du Bois*, II., p. 369.

[^15]: ^?^ Thomas C. Holt, "Explaining Abolition," *Journal of Social
    History* (//////): 371-78, p. 371. On Williams's argument, see,
    Seymour Drescher, "Eric Williams: British Capitalism and British
    Slavery," *Review of Reviews ???* 180-96; David Brion Davis,
    *Inhuman Bondage*, pp. 240-41. Eric Williams, *Capitalism and
    Slavery* (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944);
    and of more than antiquarian interest, Carter G. Woodson,
    "Capitalism and Slavery," *Journal of Negro History* (?????): 94-5 .

[^16]: ^?^ Seymour Drescher, *Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of
    Abolitionism* (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 1977). Robert
    William Fogel, *Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of
    American Slavery* (NY: Norton, 1989), p. 32.

[^17]: ^?^ Drescher, quoted, Barbara Solow, review, *Econocide: British
    Slavery in the Era of Abolition.* By Seymour Drescher. *Journal of
    Economic Literature* (June 1979):550-52, p. 550. Christopher L.
    Brown, review, *From Slavery to Freedom: Comparative Studies in the
    Rise and Fall of Atlantic Slavery.* By Seymour Drescher. *William
    and Mary Quarterly* (??????): 692-96, pp. 692-93.

[^18]: ^?^ Drescher, quoted, Adam Hochschild, *Bury the Chains: Prophets
    and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves* (Boston:
    Houghton Mifflin, 2005), p. 2.

[^19]: ^?^ W.E. H. Lecky, *A History of European Morals.* 2vols (London:
    Logmans, ????), II, p. 153. Reginald Coupland, *The British
    Anti-Slavery Movement* (London: Oxford University Press, 1833). See,
    F. O. Folarin, "British Historians and Capitalism and Slavery,"
    *Transaction 50. ????* 100-102.

    \*\*\*Du Bois, *Suppression*, p. 94\]

    \*\*\[Williams, *Inward Hunger; The Education of a Prime Minister*
    (London: Andre Deutsch, 1969), pp. 49-50.\]

    \*\*\*\[See Hochschild's caveats (whose *Bury the Chains* some saw
    as somewhat retro) about the film: "English Abolition: The Movie,"
    *The New York Review of Books* (June 14, 2007): 73-75\]

[^20]: David Eltis, review, *The Anti-Slavery Debate: Capitalism and
    Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation* (1992).
    *Journal of Southern History* (//////////): 752-54.