This is a postprint version of the following published document:

DOI: 10.1111/issj.12069

© Wiley, 2014

Stamatov, P. (2014). Beyond and against capitalism:abolitionism and the moral dimensionof humanitarian practice. International Social Science Journal. 65 (215-216), 25-34

Beyond and against capitalism:abolitionism and the moral dimensionof humanitarian practice

PeterPeter StamatovStamatov∗∗

How do we understand the origins of modernhumanitarianism and what can these origins tellus about the study of humanitarianism in general?

Peter Stamatov (peter.stamatov@nyu.edu)is Associate Professor of Social Researchand Public Policy in the Social ScienceDivision of New York University Abu Dhabiand Distinguished Researcher at the Car-los III/Juan March Institute of Social Sci-ences, Madrid. He is the author of theaward-winning bookThe Origins of GlobalHumanitarianism: Religion, Empire, andAdvocacy(2013) and has studied the interac-tions of culture, religion, and political actionin the global context from a comparativehistorical perspective.

Here I revisit a criticaljuncture of the formation ofmodern humanitarianism, thelate 18th-century movementto abolish the British slavetrade, through the lens of aprevailing paradigm that hasexplained it as deriving fromthe logic of capitalist devel-opment. A closer look at thisearly phase of abolitionismwithin its historical context

I conclude by drawing out the larger impli-cations of this historical complexity for the studyof humanitarianism at large. The intricate causalinterconnections between early abolitionism urgesus to be more attentive to the manifold formsof humanitarian practice and to situate themin a proper causal context instead of assumingthat humanitarianism is an epiphenomenal man-ifestation of allegedly deeper structural forces,

∗I thank Iain Wilkinson, David Cook-Martın and the partici-pants of the Social Trends Institute workshop on humanitar-ianism for their help in developing the argument presentedhere.

such as the economy. Reversing this assumptionand directing attention to the casual influenceof humanitarianism on other areas of social life

opens up a promisingfield of scholarly inquiry.

Abolitionism andthe Marxistexplanatoryparadigm

What was abolitionism andwhy is it a landmark inthe trajectory of modernhumanitarianism (Barnett2011)? Consisting of three

public campaigns from 1788 onwards and resultingin the abolition of the trade in 1807, abolition wasthe first highly visible, enduring and influentialcoupling of a humanitarian norm, the norm againstslavery, with persistent institutions and practices(Brown 2006; Drescher 1987; Jennings 1997; Old-field 1995). British abolitionism also exercised aformative influence on the complex phenomenon ofhumanitarianism. It generated recurrent campaignsagainst various slaveries in British colonies andthen elsewhere; it became an important interna-tional “brand” of humanitarianism, as constituen-cies outside of Britain mobilised for the abolitionof “their” slaveries; there is an almost unbrokencontinuity between the first London Abolition com-mittee and today’s Antislavery International; andabolitionism’s rhetoric and organizational modelswere adopted widely by subsequent social move-ments, from the campaign against “factory slavery”

eveals the implausibility ofthe economy as the mostsalient explanatory factor for the origin and successof the abolitionist project. Instead, this projectemerged at the interstices of a complex causalentanglement between the areas of economic andmoral action.

in Yorkshire to the women’s movement. Moregenerally, the first abolitionist movement was ableto gradually articulate a strict prohibitive moralregime against the slave trade and slavery and toforce states, starting with the British state, and theninternational organisations to accept this regime.In short, abolitionism of the 1780s was the signof an important historical change, heralding thearrival of humanitarianism as we know it. In manyways, then, the proper understanding of the originsof modern humanitarianism depends on a properunderstanding of the origins of these first abolition-ist campaigns in the 1780s.

The idea that the primary cause for aboli-tionism was the capitalist transformation of theeconomy was enshrined in a series of canonicalworks initiated by Eric Williams’s (1944)Capi-talism and Slavery. Relying on a selective inter-pretation of the evidence, Williams explained theabolition of British colonial slavery in orthodoxMarxist terms, arguing that by the time of itsabolition in the 1830s it had become a losingproposition for British capitalists. More carefulexamination of the economics of slavery and theslave trade showed, however, that neither was asinherently unprofitable nor as disadvantageous asto lead to its own abolition (Drescher 2010; Eltis1987). As more detailed work in the economy ofslavery and the slave trade made it increasinglyclear that the abolition was impossible to explainon the grounds of economic rationality, scholarsshifted their attention instead to non-economic yeteconomically determined factors that they thoughtwere the important causal connection between thecapitalist “base” and the abolitionist “superstruc-ture” (Temperley 1977). For David Brion Davis([1975] 1999) a capitalist ideological hegemonythat was disturbed by ancient enslavement yet feltcomfortable with Marx’s “wage slavery” was thatmissing link. In another intervention in the debate,Thomas Haskell (1985) drew attention away fromthe functional fit between capitalism and oppressiontechniques to argue instead that what matteredwas the extensive scale of capitalist economic trans-actions. Expanding markets required more sophis-ticated cognitive reckoning to account for complexeconomic transactions, according to Haskell, andhumanitarian relating to distant others started tohappen when people were able to transfer thesecognitive skills to non-economic areas. Hence theorigin of the moral concerns with colonial slaves.

What unites this historiographic tradition is anadherence to the Marxist postulate of the incompat-ibility of allegedly economically irrational slaverywith the capitalist mode of production. On aneven deeper level, the source of this tradition isMarx’s insistence on the primary importance ofrelations of production as the ultimate causal factorin social dynamics. In Marx’s model, no genuineand positive social change in the 19thcentury waspossible without the total transformation of a prole-tarian revolution, the cyclical equivalent of earlier“feudal” and “bourgeois” revolutions. Therefore,the activity of “reformers” and “humanitarians”was nothing more than the lukewarm effort ofthe bourgeois class to ensure its dominance byapplying cosmetic remedies to capitalism’s mostsevere social problems. In regard to abolitionismand antislavery, this Marxist disparagement of sub-revolutionary reform expressed itself in exposingsuch movements as subservient to and dictated bythe logic of capitalism. In the Marxist scheme,each productive system had its own correspondingsystem of oppression. Thus capitalism replaced the“ancient” and “medieval” oppressions of slaveryand serfdom with the “modern” oppression of“wage slavery” in capitalist factories (Tucker 1978,p. 713,169). If abolitionism sought the ending ofslavery and the slave trade, it was because theseinstitutions were incompatible with the logic of thenew capitalist order.

That the first abolition of the slave trade (ifwe discount the Danish abolition of its slave tradein anticipation of the impending British one) andthen of slavery occurred precisely in the Anglo-American world, the quintessential home of moderncapitalism, strengthened the intuitive plausibilityof this postulate. On the other hand, economichistorians did not find evidence that slavery wasinherently incompatible with capitalism. Thus his-torians were faced with a discrepancy: abolition didhappen in the most developed capitalist contexts yetit was not clear that it was economic developmentthat necessitated the abolition of slavery, becauseslavery was well integrated with the new capital-ist order before its abolition. Scholars sought toresolve the tension between these two incompatiblecircumstances by crafting complex and nuancedcausal schemes in order to ultimately prove – orindeed salvage against countervailing evidence –the Marxian postulate about the ultimate role of theeconomy. Loosening up the causal rigour of a purely

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economic explanation, the strategy was to maintainthe causal primacy of the economy by opening whatwas emerging as a black box of causal linkages andto find the specific feature of capitalism that createdabolitionism.

Yet even these more complex casual schemesfail to satisfy. If, as Davis argued, Anglo-Americanindustrialists and merchants joined abolitionismbecause of their ideological interest in instilling amore appropriate wage-based mode of oppression,why was it that their counterparts in contemporaryFrance or late 19th-century Catalonia did the exactopposite and aligned themselves firmly with thepro-slavery camp (Fradera 1990; Gauthier 2007;Maluquer de Motes 1986; Quinney 1970, 1972)? Inother words, Davis’s postulated ideological connec-tion between capitalism and abolitionism asserteditself selectively only in the Anglo-American case,which in itself requires an additional explanation.

Similarly, in a period when in SeymourDrescher’s (1987, p.20) words, “capitalism pro-vided the principal motives and the ideologicalunderpinnings of British Atlantic slavery”, Britishslave traders occupied the perfect position thatshould have made them – according to Haskell’slogic – an illustration of the disciplinary power ofthe market to cultivate awareness of consequencesand humanitarianism. In contrast, for example, withthe monopoly exercised by the East India Companyin the Indian Ocean area, the trade with Africawas open to individual investors, thus approachingthe dream of the free market capitalist. Whilethe African Company, supported financially byparliament, maintained the infrastructure of fortson the West African coast, the profits of theAfrican trade were accessible after 1750 to anyonewilling to invest in a trading voyage. In practi-cal terms, this meant that British entrepreneursinvolved in the slave trade by conducting complexand geographically spread operations in near free-market conditions, were one of the most sophis-ticated market operators of their time (Behrendt2001). They were the ideal market participantswho, according to Haskell, would develop thepreconditions for the new humanitarian sensibility:a cognitive proclivity for understanding long causalchains, a habitus of promise-keeping, and belief inthe efficacy of one’s actions.

Yet not a single one among them joined theabolitionist ranks. It is, of course, possible, althoughunlikely, that the market-embedded entrepreneurs

engaged in the slave trade did develop the human-itarian sensibility hypothesised by Haskell but didnot express it privately or publicly because of anoverriding unconscious wish not to endanger theirprofits. The non-expression of such a hypotheticalprivate conscience is, however, striking in light ofthe periodic public struggles over the organisationof the African trade in which various faction ofAfrican traders publicly debated various organi-sational alternatives and aired instances of abusesand corruption (Brown 2007; Keirn 1995; Klinge1973). The main concern of all participants in thesedebates was the maximisation of the volume andthe profit of the trade. Yet not a single time didthe various factions of “African” merchants expresseven a fleeting acknowledgment of the sufferingendured by enslaved Africans.

A similar selectivity can be seen at workamong the Quakers, out of whose organisation theproject of abolitionism originated. Both Davis andHaskell explain the Quakers’ pioneering role inantislavery with their involvement as merchants andindustrialists in the emergent capitalist market. Yetdecisive for the Quaker turn towards antislaverywas a culture of religious reformism carried out bya minority of reformers with a relative detachmentfrom the workings of the market. By contrast,many of the British Quakers most invested in theeconomy, the economically successful Quakers ofvarious trades, adopted the abolitionist programmeunder the intense pressure exercised by suchreformers who were able to gradually overtake thegovernance organs of the Society of Friends (Brown2006). Similarly important in the Quakers’ case wasa tradition of political activism. The small nucleusof Quakers who formed the first London abolitioncommittee were entrepreneurs deeply embedded inbusiness networks (Jennings 1997). Yet they werealso engaged in the generational conflict withinthe Society of Friends between older and moreconformist elders and a new cohort of more activistand socially conscious entrants in the elite (Brown2006). One of them, James Phillips, was a highlysuccessful printer and bookseller familiar with theworkings of the market and, indeed, his businessconnections served him well in recruiting adherentsto abolitionism (Jennings 1997; Oldfield 1995,p.43). Yet he was also the son of early “anti-war”activist Catherine Phillips, the travelling femaleQuaker minister who had spoken to members of thePennsylvania legislature for cessation of hostility

with Indians in a context when the majority ofwhite Pennsylvanians clamoured for their 18th-century equivalent of “war” on Indian “terrorists”(Phillips 1797). Again, the influence of a purelyeconomic position was remarkably diluted here.Quakers, some of them indeed embedded deeplyin a capitalist market, engaged in the movementagainst the slave trade not because they werecapitalists, but because they were subjected to thepressure of fellow abolitionist reformers who in turnrelied on a long-standing tradition of Quaker activistintervention in politics.

In short, these accounts of abolitionism resultin a paradox. On the one hand they work rhetoricallyto reinforce the Marxist intuition that there mustbe something in capitalism that produces antislav-ery. At the same time numerous deviations fromthis postulated causal pattern appear if one is tosearch for an empirically testable causal link thatwould persuasively show the paramount influenceof capitalism and economic determination on theactors of early abolitionism. The ultimate source ofthis tension is an implicit “oversocialised” model ofsocial action where uniform attitudes are assumedto derive from a single overarching cause, such ascapitalism, with no regard for the all too realisticpossibility of either non-trivial variance in humanresponses to a single structural stimulus or multiple(and thus competing) causal influences. For whilerelaxing the strict parameters of the classic Marxistmodel and introducing an intermediate casual factorsuch as capitalist or humanitarian ideology, theseauthors still streamline their arguments along onesingle deterministic causal arrow that, flowing fromthe economic structures of capitalism, powerfullyinfluences human behaviour.

Abolitionism in its historicalcontext

These causal constructs are flawed in an even deepersense because they misrepresent the complex rela-tionship between two, at first sight, separate areasof purposive social action: the area of economictransactions and the area of moral action. A closerlook at early British abolitionism reveals, however,the complex relationship between these two areasand how this complexity arose inevitably from thefact that the actors of abolitionism were not theoversocialised humans subjected to the totalisinginfluence of capitalism but rather strategic and

moral actors who confronted the economic realitiesof their time in a purposive manner.

To unpack this causal complexity it is neces-sary to consider, in their fullness, both theexplanan-dumof abolitionism and the putativeexplanansof the economy. Abolitionism was not simply an“easy”, sub-revolutionary, ameliorative or purelyhumanitarian project but a political and moralproject of economic radicalism that sought suc-cessfully to transform the accepted moral calculusjustifying an important part of the British economy.Nor can the new capitalism of the 18th centurybe reduced to a highly stylised realm of purelyeconomic action driven exclusively by consider-ations of profitability and efficiency. It is onlywhen we recognise the inherent complexity of bothphenomena that we can evaluate the formative roleof the economy for the rise of abolitionism.

Yet there is no sense in the works of theMarxist tradition, for example, of the complexmeanings of the British slave trade that for its con-temporaries, participants and observers alike. Thecommercial trading in enslaved Africans – the targetof the abolitionist project – was remarkably moderneconomically and fit snugly with increasingly “cap-italist” circuits of production, exchange, and con-sumption (Curtin 1990; Drescher 2010). The slavetrade was neatly integrated in Atlantic commercialchains culminating in the delivery and re-exportof highly demanded tropical products, such as theslave-produced sugar from the Caribbean. It wasbased on sophisticated financial machinery, suchas bills of exchange and the West India brokeragehouses in London that underwrote commercialtransactions. It was lucrative for domestic investors,normally bringing them a stable return of slightlybelow 10 per cent. Indirectly, the trade providedemployment for thousands producers throughoutEngland (Anstey 1975; Checkland 1958; Klein2010; McCants 2007; Morgan 2007; Porter 1970;Rawley 2005; Richardson 1987, 1998).

The slave trade was thus an inherently eco-nomic issue in that it was deeply connected withthe larger economy. Yet, paradoxically, preciselybecause of its economic salience, the slave trade wasalso an inherently moral issue even before the riseof organised abolitionism in so far as the “Africantrade” (of which human cargo was the most prof-itable “commodity”) formed one of the foci ofongoing political and moral debates on Britishforeign and imperial trade. Consolidating British

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capitalism, as a social formation, was not onlya distinctive configuration of economic relations,but also a set of heterogeneous and contentiousmoral discourses, arguments, and ideologies. In thecontext of an imperially backed expanding foreigntrade, moral polemics in the public sphere andin parliament constructed the perceived “value”of specific branches of that trade competing forthe state and parliament’s attention and resources.This politically constructed value of the trade was,in turn, increasingly important in an increasinglycomplex economic environment where ascertaininghow profitable (and for whom) foreign tradingactivities were was an increasingly complex enter-prise. Multiplying claims of competing economicgroups produced a complex and contentious moralenvironment in which political battles over howexactly economic activities should be organisedinfused parliamentary politics and the public sphere(Bowen 1991; Bowen 2006; Brown 2007; Keirn1995; Klinge 1973; Lipson 1931; Osborn 2002;Rawley 2005; Sutherland 1952; Van Aalst 1970).

In the historical context of abolitionism’semergence, the economic and the moral sphereswere intertwined in complex ways and it is thesecomplex interstices of moral struggles over eco-nomic issues that form the immediate explana-tory background of abolitionism, not an abstract“capitalism”. The fact of this intertwining com-plicates the basic Marxist explanatory plotline inwhich the economic environment “pushes” indi-viduals towards certain thoughts and actions, suchas the antislavery stance. That would have been thecase if the economic area was, a priori, more fun-damental and causally stronger than the sphere ofmoral reflection. Instead, the institutional arrange-ments of the economy were in many ways the resultof political and thus inherently moral struggles.Potential 18th-century humanitarians were not sim-ply the passive recipients of the impersonal forces ofthe “market”. People in England were surrounded,if not enveloped, by ongoing cultural struggles overthe moral meanings of markets and the economy.

It is impossible, in this context of ongoingmoral debates on the economy, to reduce aboli-tionism to the expression of a market-producedhumanitarian sensibility, as, for instance, Haskellattempts to do. The important innovation of theabolitionist ideological platform was not simplya new humanitarian focus on the suffering of theenslaved. The image of the suffering slave – in

the abstract – was at that time a well-known tropeof sentimental literature (Carey 2005). But theslave’s condition was considered lamentable andsympathy-provoking yet natural and inevitable –especially when enslaved labour in the coloniescontributed to English economic power. The dis-tinctive political “move” of early British aboli-tionism was to insist that the entire market inenslaved humans be abolished. Thus abolitionismhad an inherent radical dimension that transcendedthe parameters of “pure” humanitarianism in twointerrelated aspects. It reversed an existing moralcalculus in which the negative “externalities” ofdistant enslavement were far outweighed by thebenefits of the slave trade for the English economyand it demanded the immediate suspension of theslave trade, not its amelioration on humanitariangrounds. In addition to its humanitarian concernwith enslaved Africans, abolitionism made twointerconnected and novel claims: that enslavementwas morally wrong regardless of its economicbenefits; and, therefore, that the trade in enslavedhumans had to be stopped immediately.

A market-generated generalised humanitariandisposition, however, would have been consistentwith a number of other potential political projectsof changing the parameters of the internationalslave trade. Counterfactually, one could imaginea vastly different target and outcome of the abo-litionist project: for example, an international legalregime regulating the slave trade and ensuring someminimal “rights” to enslaved individuals that wouldguarantee them more humane treatment. In fact,there were several such ameliorative projects ofregulating the slave trade and slavery in 18th-century Britain (Brown 2006). Yet this is not whatabolitionists envisioned and sought. As CharlesJames Fox argued in the first parliamentary debateon the abolition of the slave trade in 1789, tocompromise and just regulate the trade insteadof fully abolishing it would be the equivalent of“regulation of robbery and restriction of murder”(House of Commons 1789b, p.194).

No ideology or disposition directly producedby capitalism can explain why enslaved Africans –as opposed to other potential recipients of sympa-thy – formed such a strong focus of concern. Inretrospect, it is tempting to explain this choiceof humanitarianism’s “target” with the assump-tion that there must have been something intrin-sically and particularly heinous about slavery that

automatically placed it so high on the moralagenda that it trumped other forms of suffering.But this is to rewrite history through the lensof the abolitionist normative framework that bynow has become a commonsense moral intuition.It was the abolitionist ideology supported by anactivist network that crystallised in the 1780s thatdeliberately and successfully defined commercialtransactions with humans in the role of commodityas an absolute moral wrong, against prevalent moralunderstandings that normalised enslavement was atbest lamentable yet ultimately an indispensable andtaken-for-granted aspect of the economy.

Illustrative examples of the general tenor ofpre-abolitionist public discussions related to theBritish African help highlight the contrast between,on the one hand, the complacent moral climateinto which abolitionism burst in in the 1780s, and,on the other hand, the truly radical dimension ofthe re-definition of the slave trade as an absolutemoral wrong in need of immediate eradication. Apropagandist of the slave trade exclaimed in 1745:

... is it not notorious to the whole World, that the BusinessofPlantingin ourBritish Colonies. . . is carried on bythe Labour ofNegroes, imported thither fromAfrica? Arewe not indebted to those valuable People, theAfricans,forourSugars, Tobaccoes, Rice, Rum,and all otherPlantationProduce?And the greater the Number ofNegroesimported toourColonies, fromAfrica,will not the Exportation ofBritishManufactures among theAfricansbe in Proportion; they beingpaid for in such Commodities only? The more likewise ourPlantations abound inNegroes, will not more Land becomecultivated, and bothbetterand greaterVarietyofPlantationCommoditiesbe produced? As those Trades are subservient tothe Well Being and Prosperity of each other; so the more eitherflourishes or declines, the other must be necessary affected . . .(Postlethwayt 1745, p.6).

At the very same time he argued that that parlia-ment’s refusal to compensate the African Com-pany’s expenses for maintenance of trading fortsin West Africa was a violation of rights that “wouldsavour so barefacedly of the Tyranny and Oppres-sion of the most slavish Countries” (Postleth-wayt 1745). In 1777, a parliamentary petition ofLondon traders accused the Committee of theAfrican Company of encouraging “unjust practicesof certain individuals” who undermined “the tradefor Negroes to that part of the cost where thebest Negroes . . . are mostly to be got” (quotedin Klinge 1973, p.361). In 1772, Edmund Burke,who would later cultivate an abolitionist reputation,

defended the African Company by arguing thatunder its management the number of “imported”slaves had increased more than twofold (quotedin Klinge 1979). As late as 1789, petitions fromLiverpool and Manchester for the preservation ofslave trade in 1789 emphasised the inextricable con-nection between British production and the demandof the “African” trade to argue that an abolitionwould harm local artisans (House of Commons1789a). Remarkably innocent of the parallels withthe forced displacement of Africans, the Liverpoolpetitioners sought sympathy for “honest Artificers”whom abolition would degrade into “solitary Wan-derers into the World, to seek Employment inForeign Climes”.

In other words, before the arrival of the abo-litionist mobilisation, the British slave trade wasconsidered typically as a purely economic or even“technical” topic and the focus was on its prof-itability and efficiency. There was rarely an expres-sion of humanitarian concern for the enslaved: thehuman beings who were inflicted with a significantdegree of suffering, degradation, and deprivation ofbasic liberties for the purposes of economic ratio-nality. If there were publicly expressed concernsabout the morality of the slave trade, they wereabout the putatively harmful ways in which aspectsof the trade affected the British negatively, whetherthe economic wellbeing of the “nation” or ofcertain groups whose wellbeing and rights wereundermined by the institutional arrangements of thetrade.

We can find the occasional questioning ofthe moral foundations of the slave trade, such asHorace Walpole’s 1750 letter that expresses pas-sionate yet private disgust with the moral absurdityof the parliamentary proceedings establishing a newframework for the African Company:

We have been sitting this fortnight on the African Company:we, the British Senate, the temple of Liberty, and bulwarkof Protestant Christianity, have this fortnight been ponderingmethods to make more effectual that horrid traffic of sellingnegroes [sic]. It has appeared to us that six and forty thousandof these wretches are sold every year to our plantationsalone! – It chills one’s blood – (Lewiset al.1960, p. 126).

Yet disgusted as Walpole the MP (and other putativehumanitarians at the time) might have been, he didnot rise in the Commons to express a principledposition against the slave trade. Publicly, the tradeonly turned into a moral problem in so far as it

affected British interests and examination of thesuffering it caused to the enslaved was relegated tothe occasional private exercise of moral rigour.

The transformation that the rising abolitionistmovement produced consisted thus in a radicalreframing of the entrenched moral evaluation of theslave trade and in the normalizing of this refram-ing. From this new perspective, the trade was notevaluated according to how it benefited or harmedthe profits of its British participants. Instead, abo-litionism claimed, people in Britain – even thosenot connected directly with the economics of theslave trade – were deeply responsible for the abso-lute moral wrong of enslavement. It argued thatthe trade left an indelible moral stain on the nation,its government and parliament, all of them com-plicit in such inhumane and morally indefensibleeconomic activity. As an early abolitionist pamphletput it, “the revenue of the government, the profitsof the merchants, and the luxury of the people haveinvolved the whole nation asparticipes criminis”(Woods 1784, pp.22-23) in the maintenance ofcolonial slavery. “As Englishmen, the blood ofthe murdered African is upon us, and upon ourchildren”, exclaimed Thomas Cooper later (1787,p.28).

In addition to this substantive reversal of thehabitual moral calculus, however, an importantachievement of the abolitionist project was to takethe absolutist moral argument of the wrongness ofslavery from the recesses of private musings into thepublic arena. It gradually yet effectively broadcastand “normalised” the moral rigour of a minoritythat had developed – against the prevailing moralconsensus – a far-reaching conviction that slaverywas an evil to eradicate regardless of economicconsiderations. It turned a radical moral claim intoa taken-for-granted commonsensical intuition thatwe still share.

It is impossible to explain the articulationand adoption of this economic radicalism by anyoverarching attitudinal or dispositional factor cre-ated by the logic of capitalism. Anything but thefull abolition of the slave trade could have servedhumanitarians and capitalists of any hue very well,precisely because there were well established moralconventions that reconciled the existence of theperhaps lamentable condition of enslavement witha thriving and profitable capitalist economy.

In fact, recent work has emphasised thedeeply heterogeneous and networked character of

abolitionist constituencies that grew gradually byaccretion (Palmer 2009; Stamatov 2013). It isimpossible to define these constituencies along asingle dimension determined by their economicposition. Correspondingly, it is not realistic toexpect a single causal path that led everyone toabolitions: the analytical task is to identify thedistinctive motivations behind various individuals’and networks’ adoption of the abolitionist cause.

What is more, explaining adherence to aboli-tionism from pre-existing uniform attitudes inducedby capitalism may lead to circular reasoning. Indi-viduals and groups might have engaged in pro-abolition activity not because of “deep” dispositionsconditioned by capitalism, but simply because theyengaged in what economists call “preference falsifi-cation” (Kuran 1995), that is, the public declarationof allegedly genuine individual preferences thatare subtly tailored to what is considered sociallyacceptable. To put it simply, many of the signatoriesof the public petitions for the abolition of the slavetrade might have given their signature not fromintrinsic conviction but because they adopted theabolitionist cause under the subtle social pressureto conform to what they thought were the prevalentpreferences of their peers. Research on how com-munities at the time transitioned between popularsupport of otherwise diametrically opposed radicaland conservative causes only lends support to theimportance of non-ideological contextual factorsfor popular political behaviour (Philp 1995). Fromthis point of view, the important factor was notthe pre-existing attitudes of the English, but thefact that the core of abolitionist organisers wereable by various means to recruit a critical massof supporters throughout England which, in turn,increased the social valuation of professed aboli-tionist preferences. It is quite likely that when theysigned abolitionist petitionsen massethe Englishwere doing the historical equivalent of the “bucketchallenge” of yesteryear: they were doing it becauseit was the popular thing to do, not because they werecarriers of mindsets created by capitalism.

If there was one characteristic that united thedisparate adherents of early abolitionism even morestrongly than their embeddedness in a changingeconomy, it was their basic religious literacy thatmade them sensitive to the religious rhetoric ofabolitionism. Central to the abolitionist platformwas the centuries-old “prophetic” trope of a reli-gious community that needs to amend its ways

lest it suffer God’s wrath. This “Hebraic” fram-ing of slavery as sin for which the communityhas to expiate remained an enduring core of theabolitionist project from its emergence in mid-18th-century transatlantic Quaker networks untilmuch later into the 19th century (Stamatov 2013;Oldfield and Huzzey 2012). It was one persuasiveway to connect discursively the economic andthe moral and almost imperceptibly introduce areligious, and thus unassailable, justification forwhat was after all a rather unusual reform proposal.To the average English person of 1750 the abolitionof the slave trade must have sounded as outlandishas the idea of legalised same-sex marriage to theaverage American two centuries later – preciselybecause the slave trade by that point had beenjustified by moral arguments that discounted theenslavement of Africans as an acceptable “price”to pay for British well-being. The Hebraic tropeof the sinful nation reversed this moral calculus.The important point, however, is that for contem-poraries the plausibility of this Hebraic framingdid not require any distinctive attitude producedby capitalism, but just the basic biblical literacy thatwas the only universal trait shared by all inhabitantsof the British Isles at the time.

In other words, early abolitionism is bestunderstood as arising from the complex inter-play of a variety of factors that include culturalframings that resonated with contemporaries andthe autonomous dynamics of successful collectivemobilisation. In itself, the economy, understoodas a set of profit-oriented practices and structures,gives us no analytical leverage in understanding theorigins of abolitionist economic radicalism or inanswering the question why the abolitionist normwas adopted by a significant number of people.There is simply no plausible way to derive thedistinctive salient features of the abolitions projectdirectly or indirectly from economic structures. Thepathways through which a distinctively “humanitar-ian” linkage between the economic and moral werecreated and disseminated were multiple and com-plex. They did not presuppose a single attitudinaldisposition created by the rise of capitalism.

Refocusing humanitarianism

The deep question opened by the scholarly debateon the origins of abolitionism and antislavery isthe precise nature of the connection between the

economic and moral dimensions of human action.In practice, these two dimensions are inextricablyconnected: humans seek both material advantagesand moral certainty. The analytical challenge thenis to specify how they intersect to exercise causalinfluence on cognitions and actions. The generalproblem of the Marxist tradition in explainingabolitionism is its reliance on a convenient yetreductionist analytical shortcut: instead of explor-ing the complex intersections between the logics ofthe economic and the moral this tradition takes itfor granted that capitalism and the economy formthe bedrock structure that ultimately conditions andsteers the moral dimension of action.

The historical irony in all this is that thescholarly tradition of economic derivatism was builton the shaky foundations of an error of Marx’s.The presumably economically inefficient and pre-modern nature of slavery was an ideological trope,and thus inherently a moral statement, that theabolitionist project used in order to justify itsgoal, the abolition of slavery. It was at odds witheconomic and social facts: colonial slavery and theslave trade were generally highly profitable beforetheir abolition; for the owner, the enslaved body hadthe double economic advantage of being capital andsource of labour at the same time; in many settingsslavery was compatible with industrial modes ofproduction; and there is no indication that slaverywas the predominant “ancient” mode of oppression(Drescher 2010; Fredrickson 1981; Price 1991;Starobin 1968; Wickham 1994). Yet Marx took thisinherently moral statement and casually elevated itinto an abstract principle of factual historical devel-opment. He mistook abolitionist rhetoric and theoutcome of abolitionist action for the impersonalworkings of large historical forces.

Colonial slavery, however, was not abolishedbecause the impersonal forces of industrial capi-talism did not need it. It was abolished becauseof temporally enduring and geographically spreadwaves of mobilisation that purposefully targeted itsend (Drescher 2009). Within this larger and endur-ing abolitionist cycle of mobilisations, the earlyabolition campaigns in late 18th-century Britainwere a critical event that built the initial base oflater global abolitionisms.

Seen in this light, early abolitionism as aformative event in the history of global human-itarianism was a social phenomenon that exer-cised causal influences on its own. It did not

produce the totalising effect of a “revolution” inMarx’s eschatological sense. Yet it was an importantstep towards the transformation of global moral-ity by successfully introducing a “prohibitive”regime against the enslavement of human beings(Nadelmann 1990). In other words, it gives its stu-dents strong reasons to leave behind the preconcep-tions of the Marxian legacy that sees abolitionismand humanitarianism as inherently derivative andthus sociologically uninteresting phenomena.

This is where the examination of the origins ofabolitionism is suggestive for the study of human-itarianism in general. The clearest conclusion ofthe examination of these origins is the importanceof a pervasive and irreducible moral dimension ofthe early abolitionist project with its focus on thecomplete ending of the slave trade as an absolutemoral wrong. Abolitionism defined the conditionof human enslaved as morally indefensible and –after a series of complex interactions – transformedthe global moral landscape. This moral dimensioncannot be explained as deriving from the logic ofeconomic transformations.

Recognising, analytically, the strong moraldimension of the abolitionist project, or anyhumanitarian project, does not mean its normativeendorsement. A discussion of the inherent “right-ness” of a moral norm and a moral conviction, whilea legitimate endeavour, is beyond the scope of asustained discussion of the analytical dimensions ofhumanitarianism’s origin. Yet students and criticsof humanitarianism will be well served by morefocused attention to the inherently moral aspectsof humanitarian projects, institutions, and practicesin history and today. In that, they can count onthe insights of scholars of social movements andinternational relations who in their own ways havehighlighted the analytical importance of the moraldimension (Jasper 1997; Finnemore 1996).

My discussion shows that abolitionism stoodin a complex, entangled, and antagonistic rela-tionship with the economy. There is a twofoldmethodological lesson here: despite the instinctsof the Marxian legacy, abolitionism was a causallysignificant, non-derivative phenomenon that needs,first, to be studied and understood in its complexityand, second, to be situated in a complex causal con-text. Extrapolated onto the wider field of humanitar-ianism in history, these two lessons call, first, for abetter understanding of humanitarianism in the fullvariety and complexity of its manifestations and,

second, for careful specification of the casual con-nections between existing humanitarianisms andother institutional spheres in various national andsupranational arenas.

There is ample ground for a basic taxonomicand definitional work in the study of humanitarian-ism. What are the various forms of humanitarianismandhowaretheybestdefined(Wilkinsoninthisissue)? Even in an early manifestation, such as18th-century British abolitionism, humanitarianismmanifested itself in a variety of practices. Abo-litionism had a distinctly political dimension inmobilising public opinion for pressure on parlia-ment; it initiated economic projects for “alternativedevelopment” in Africa of economic activities tosubstitute the trading in human beings; and itdeveloped a culture of selective consumption inBritain of “free produce” sugar and cotton, thusprefiguring contemporary practices of “fair trade”.All these are related yet analytically distinct formsof humanitarian practice. The usual image of con-temporary humanitarianism – partly the result ofthe visual propaganda of humanitarian agenciesin a highly saturated market – is the seeminglyapolitical narrative of aiding distant individualssuffering the consequence of catastrophic events.Yet even more so than in the 18th century, the globalinstitutional field of humanitarianism is rich andcomplex. A first step of making humanitarianismsociologically interesting and rescuing it from thelimiting assumptions of its derivative characterinvolves sharper attention to the various organisa-tional forms that constitute the humanitarian fieldtoday.

The historical dynamics of early British abo-litionism cannot be fitted into an economicallydeterministic frame of explanation. The claim ofthe overwhelming causal effects of the economyis rather the scholarly elaboration of unwarrantedassumptions made in the 19th century. What doesthis say about more recent statements about thesubservient role of humanitarianism to capitalism(Chimni 2004; Donini 2010)? While it is quitepossible that the causal force of the economy hasincreased remarkably in the recent past, this is aclaim that needs to be proved, not taken for granted.Be that as it may, the lesson from the study ofearly abolitionism is that regardless of the exactnature of its relation with other spheres of society,humanitarianism has exercised causal effects on itsown. The recognition of this fact opens up the

possibility of exploring these causal effects andenriching the agenda of humanitarianism studies,especially if scholars venture to study the interfaceof humanitarianism with other institutional areas.What, for example, have been the effects of human-itarianism on concrete social phenomena such as

labour, immigration, and social policies? More gen-erally, how has humanitarianism contributed to thelong-term process of normative and moral change?These are the kind of analytically fruitful questionsthat a careful examination of early abolitionismbrings to our attention.

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