Quaker Rhetoric and Transatlantic Antislavery, 1657-1761

正如2007年举行的纪念英国废除奴隶贸易200周年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。那次对话也使有关奴隶制和奴隶制的学术研究焕发了新的活力，并将其牢牢置于英国知识分子生活的中心。然而，虽然最近的公共讨论都集中在18世纪废除奴隶制运动的结果上，但对其起源的研究很少。在这方面，虽然众所周知，公谊会从18世纪中叶起就反对奴隶制，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，因为没有其他主要的宗教或民族团体认真建议如此彻底地背离当时公认的规范。这项研究的临时标题是贵格会修辞和跨大西洋反奴隶制，1657-1761年，提供了这些问题的答案，汇集了文学、历史和宗教来源，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就奴隶制的合法性进行辩论，包括会议和辩论、传单、小册子、布道和散文。这场漫长的争论导致他们私下发展了一种复杂而有力的反奴隶制修辞，并在1761年后完全形成了反奴隶制的修辞，1761年后，各地的贵格会教徒被要求与奴隶制或奴隶贸易无关，也是反奴隶制言论进入主流文学话语的时刻：我早先出版的著作《英国废奴主义和情感的修辞：写作、情感和奴隶制，1760-1807》(PalGrave 2005)对这一过程进行了研究。因此，通过研究贵格会反奴隶制话语的起源，本研究还考察了英国和美国语境中几乎所有反奴隶制思想和文学的起源。因此，它的目的是为长期的学术辩论提供一个重要的新见解，即为什么英国人首先选择放弃奴隶贸易，然后似乎违背自己的经济最佳利益而放弃奴隶制。这场辩论是英国历史上最重要和最具争议性的问题之一，历史学家和文学学者从社会、经济、文化和宗教的角度对此进行了解释。这项研究将把这场辩论的权重从简单的单一因果解释中转移出来，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的独特社会和经济地位，但导致他们发展了一种反奴隶制的言论，最终比贵格会以前做过或将再次做的任何其他贵格会证词更能激发民众的想象力。这项研究的主要好处是，首先，让学术界和公众注意到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，其次，证明写作和修辞对这场运动的中心地位，这场运动更多地被用经济力量或个人传记来解释。虽然这将使试图了解英国在奴隶贸易中的作用的学者和普通读者以及更广泛的英美殖民地受益，但它也将为寻求了解17世纪和18世纪宗教和人道主义话语的发展和结构的文学学者打开重要的研究和询问的新领域。

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.