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Quaker Rhetoric and Transatlantic Antislavery, 1657-1761

贵格会言论和跨大西洋反奴隶制，1657-1761 年

基本信息

批准号：
AH/H003630/1
负责人：
Brycchan Carey
金额：
$ 3.72万
依托单位：
Kingston University
依托单位国家：
英国
项目类别：
Research Grant
财政年份：
2010
资助国家：
英国
起止时间：
2010 至无数据
项目状态：
已结题

来源：
https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FH003630%2F1
关键词：
Quaker Rhetoric Transatlantic Antislavery 1657

项目摘要

As the national conversation that took place in 2007 to mark the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the British slave trade revealed, there is widespread public interest in both the history and the culture of slavery and abolition. That conversation also refreshed and invigorated the scholarly study of slavery and abolition and placed it firmly at the centre of British intellectual life. Nevertheless, while much recent public discourse has focused on the outcome of the eighteenth-century abolition movement, very little research has been conducted into its origins. In this context, while it is well known that the Society of Friends, or Quakers, opposed slavery from the mid eighteenth century onwards, it is not fully understood when and how they came to hold such a view or why they should choose to do so when no other major religious or national group was seriously suggesting such a radical departure from the accepted norms of the day. This study, which has the working title Quaker Rhetoric and Transatlantic Antislavery, 1657-1761, offers answers to these questions, drawing together literary, historical, and religious sources to show that Quakers, first in Barbados and later in Pennsylvania, spent a century arguing among themselves over the lawfulness of slavery in a variety of forums including meetings and debates, tracts, pamphlets, sermons, and essays. This long argument led to their developing in private a sophisticated and robust rhetoric of antislavery which they were then able to take fully-formed to the wider world after 1761, the year in which Quakers everywhere were required to have nothing to do with slavery or the slave trade, and the point at which antislavery rhetoric moved into mainstream literary discourse: a process examined in my earlier book British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760-1807 (Palgrave 2005). By studying the origins of Quaker antislavery discourse, therefore, this study also examines the origins of almost all antislavery thought and literature in both the British and American contexts. It aims thereby to provide an important new insight into the perennial scholarly debate over why the British chose to abandon first the slave trade and later slavery seemingly against their own economic best interests. This debate, one of the most important and most contested questions in British history, has been explained by both historians and literary scholars in social, economic, cultural, and religious terms. This study will weight the debate away from simple monocausal explanations to show that Quaker literary and religious culture, although rooted in their unique social and economic position in the colonies, led to their developing an antislavery rhetoric that ultimately caught the popular imagination more powerfully than any other Quaker testimony had done before, or would do again. The primary benefits of this study are, first, to bring to scholarly and public attention an overlooked but nevertheless key moment in the history of Britain's involvement in slavery and the slave trade and, second, to demonstrate the centrality of writing and rhetoric to a movement that is more often explained in terms of economic forces or individual biographies. While this will benefit both scholars and general readers seeking to understand Britain's role in the slave trade, and in the British American colonies more generally, it will also open up significant new areas of research and enquiry to literary scholars seeking to understand the development and structure of religious and humanitarian discourses in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

正如2007年为纪念英国废除奴隶贸易200周年而举行的全国对话所揭示的那样，公众对奴隶制和废除奴隶制的历史和文化都有广泛的兴趣。这次谈话也刷新和活跃了奴隶制和废奴的学术研究，并将其牢牢地置于英国知识生活的中心。然而，尽管最近的许多公共话语都集中在18世纪废奴运动的结果上，但对其起源的研究却很少。在这种背景下，虽然众所周知，友会或贵格会从18世纪中期开始反对奴隶制，但人们并不完全了解他们何时以及如何持这种观点，或者为什么他们应该选择这样做，因为没有其他主要宗教或国家团体认真地建议如此激进地偏离当时公认的规范。本研究的标题为“贵格会的修辞和跨大西洋反奴隶制，1657-1761”，它提供了这些问题的答案，汇集了文学、历史和宗教资料，表明贵格会教徒，首先在巴巴多斯，后来在宾夕法尼亚州，花了一个世纪的时间在各种论坛上争论奴隶制的合法性，包括会议和辩论、小册子、小册子、布道和论文。这场漫长的争论导致他们私下里发展出一种复杂而有力的反奴隶制言论，并在1761年之后将这种言论完全传播到更广阔的世界，这一年，各地的贵格会教徒都被要求与奴隶制或奴隶贸易无关，反奴隶制言论也进入了主流文学话语：我在早期的书《英国废奴主义和感性修辞》中考察了这一过程：写作、情感和奴隶制，1760-1807（帕尔格雷夫，2005）。因此，通过研究贵格会反奴隶制话语的起源，本研究也考察了英美两国背景下几乎所有反奴隶制思想和文学的起源。因此，本书旨在为长期以来的学术辩论提供一个重要的新视角，即为什么英国人选择放弃奴隶贸易，后来放弃奴隶制，这似乎违背了他们自己的经济最佳利益。这场辩论是英国历史上最重要、最具争议的问题之一，历史学家和文学学者都从社会、经济、文化和宗教的角度进行了解释。本研究将把辩论从简单的单因果解释中解放出来，以表明贵格会的文学和宗教文化，尽管植根于他们在殖民地独特的社会和经济地位，导致他们发展出一种反奴隶制的言论，最终比任何其他贵格会的证词都更有力地吸引了大众的想象，或者将再次这样做。这项研究的主要好处是，首先，引起学术界和公众对英国参与奴隶制和奴隶贸易的历史上一个被忽视但仍然关键的时刻的关注，其次，证明了写作和修辞在一场运动中的中心地位，而这场运动通常是用经济力量或个人传记来解释的。虽然这将有利于学者和普通读者寻求了解英国在奴隶贸易中的作用，更广泛地说，在英属美洲殖民地，它也将开辟重要的研究和探索的新领域，文学学者寻求了解17和18世纪的宗教和人道主义话语的发展和结构。