It has long been a fundamental maxim in business that trust and integrity are integral to the extension of credit between businesses, partners, and clients. It is a central theme of Josh Lauer’s book that, despite the revolutionary effects of technological capability, the central elements of trust and integrity remain in place. Lauer contrasts this continuity of principles with transformative changes in the fin-tech sectors, resulting in financialization of the modern American economy, the construction of individual financial identity, and customized financial products.
Lauer’s book, part of the ‘Columbia Studies in the History of U.S. Capitalism’ series, consists of nine chapters, recounting the historical evolution of systematic credit surveillance amid cumulative changes in the credit sub-sector of financial services. It is highly informative, immaculately researched, and written in crisp, precise prose. The earlier chapters are particularly insightful in explaining the transition from localized face-to-face economies to more impersonal modern financial institutions. The broader historical perspective on surveillance is identified and conceptualized, with historical parallels drawn from factory and prison surveillance, noted by Marx, Taylor, and Foucault (pages 10-11).
In earlier centuries, creditworthiness was assessed locally but as the American economy expanded, surveillance emerged as a surrogacy for personal knowledge and observation. Mercantile agencies, forerunners of credit bureaus, used advanced methodologies of reporting, surveillance, and intelligence-gathering. Creditworthiness was not primarily about wealth per se but honesty and integrity, that is, not whether you could pay but whether you would pay (pages 19-20). Evaluating and quantifying risk was always somewhat subjective, when assessing the alliterative core signifiers, or the ‘three Cs’, of character, capital, and capacity’ (page 20). Technology played a role in offsetting subjectivity, through quantitative data of balance sheets, statements, and alphanumerical coding, signifying recorded financial experience and activity (page 69).
Credit reports increased exponentially in the second half of the nineteenth century, and significantly, at the fin de siècle, two of the three leading contemporary credit bureaus were founded. ‘Credit Men’ within companies, acting as professional custodians and interpreters of creditworthiness, were organized into the National Association of Credit Men (NACM) in 1896 (page 83). While indicative of the (gendered) professionalization of credit management, after 1914, more women entered the sector and the nomenclature of the professional association was revised accordingly.
The post-1945 democratization of credit, underpinned by Mass Production, increasing availability of household goods, and installment deals, expanded the consumer base. It was accompanied by a relentless drive to educate consumers and to induce ‘Credit Consciousness’ (pages 135-136). Credit reporting networks extended across the national business landscape, strategically positioned to serve multiple sectors (page 84). Equally, a national credit infrastructure was closely aligned with the rise of department stores, with credit checks often made at point of purchase (page 87). Codes signified credit status, and authorization or refusal was conveyed within stores by pneumatic tubes. Technology again, in the form of the Dewey card-file system, vertical filing, and telephone usage, allowed for greater functionality and efficiency, not least through facilitating tighter control on credit limits.
Database marketing in the 1970s and 1980s made consumer segmentation possible, especially important given social fragmentation and rapid demographic change. Moreover, the sales potential of credit rating data had been quickly recognized, with customized information in promotional literature and correspondence. Identifying and locating income brackets and market segments became a powerful marketing tool, understood statistically through the Pareto Principle of the ‘vital few and trivial many’ (page 153). Typically, with 20% of customers providing 80% of sales, clearer financial visibility and micro-targeting of high-value and high-volume customers was possible (pages 153-154).
Computerization was transformative, not least by hastening standardization. It was a great leap forward in terms of efficiency, and decision-making was far more rapid than could be achieved by personal interviews and pneumatic tubes. Statistical scoring and ranking did have their limits, and even well into the 1960s, traditional methodologies were not fully obsolete. How character could be quantified and scored was resolved by a multi-variable approach, whereby possession of assets and commodities, such as a mortgage, a home phone, and a savings or checking account, provided a profile of creditworthiness based on personal stability and institutional validation (page 206). Affirmative and negative reporting of lifestyle, employment, income, and health, were bell-weathers of creditworthiness. Adjustable and variable interest rates followed the risk-based pricing model of the insurance sector but as the sub-prime crisis in the Federal home-loan markets of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac indicated, the temptation for lenders was to relax credit limits. (page 209-210).
Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, credit data played a vital role in the interstices of the State apparatus and criminal justice system. Yet, issues surrounding data-sharing and confidentiality became more contentious, and fittingly, privacy, data collection, and regulation dominate the second half of the book. Historically, the credit sector developed without close legislative scrutiny, but self-regulation was increasingly untenable. A raft of legislation, such as the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) of 1970, following the 1968 Consumer Credit Protection Act, including Truth in Lending clauses, provided powers of oversight, transparency, and accountability (page 226). There were societal welfare gains from a more efficient credit system but the trade-off was greater surveillance and data mining to inform credit decisions and to act as a marketing tool (page 234).
While credit bureaus sought to act as neutral information-gatherers, credit availability could not escape the broader socio-economic framework of modern America, with race, gender, class, occupational status, and residence all profiling factors (page 143). There were winners and losers. Single women and minorities were often excluded from mainstream credit and exposed to predatory lending. This ‘credit discrimination’ was tackled by Equal Credit Opportunity Acts (ECOA) in the 1970s, prohibiting credit refusal on the basis of gender or race, and promoting ‘blind’ scoring to eliminate discrimination (pages 235-236). Yet, financial identity based on economic stability and institutional status often still reflected entrenched racial and gender disadvantages. Statistical credit scoring can’t eliminate proxy discrimination since it deals with the effects rather than causes of disadvantage and discrimination (pages 237-238).
More positively, greater efficiency was driven by risk modelling and database marketing, with powerful information systems generating predictive data for different types of lenders (page 249). Crucially, electronic data is not containable in the same way as paper, thus privacy concerns are again viably raised. The practice of financial institutions, outside the purview of the FCRA, continuing to share financial information with affiliates and third parties in joint marketing activities, is a particularly egregious example (pages 263-264). The oligopolistic triumvirate of Equifax, TRW, and TransUnion may be able to use their market power to regulate the spread of information, but the credit landscape will not regress to an earlier iteration. From a process of localized character assessment to national FICO scores, creditworthiness remains central to an economy largely built on corporate, household, and individual debt. Identifying potential defaulters and extracting more profitability from ‘good’ borrowers remains central to creditors.
Indeed, that dichotomy portrayed by Lauer between the efficiency and functionality of the credit sector, and an increasingly intrusive surveillance apparatus, is convincingly validated by an impressive body of research. In many ways, the book is another thoughtful testimony to the disruptive effects of modern technology, and how there are positive and negative effects of innovation and expansion. Credit bureau databases were predictably an early target for hackers, but ironically a large volume of data is now provided by consumers themselves on social media, through declared data. Surprisingly, until fairly recently, there appeared to be little opposition to credit surveillance, but now, the mantra ‘All data is credit data’ resonates widely (page 267).
It may have been useful to have drawn an international comparison to test American exceptionalism, by assessing the creation of national markets through mass production, product uniformity, and standardization in less commercial societies. As Adam Smith famously wrote: ‘The division of labour is limited by the extent of the market’. Certainly, the expansion of the credit sector is part of that larger narrative of national markets and institutions eclipsing local economies, institutions, and relationships. In that sense, the development of the sector is indicative of a thriving capitalist economy.
Lauer arrives at a somewhat ominous conclusion as to technology, in stating: ‘No digital presence goes untracked; no digital profile goes unmined. This is by design’ (page 274). While algorithms facilitate high-level micro-targeting, and thus further erode human interaction, AI threatens to go further, most notably through automated screening in multiple contexts. The positive features of financialization and financial identity have clearly come at a cost to individual privacy. Avoiding further quasi-Orwellian intrusion may now depend, somewhat ironically, on robust government regulation and oversight.
‘Creditworthy: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America’ by Josh Lauer was published in 2024 by Columbia University Press (ISBN: 978-0-23-121663-0). 352pp.)
Gordon Bannerman is a professor teaching Business History at Wilfrid Laurier University and the University of Guelph-Humber, Ontario. His primary research interests focus on modern British political and economic history.
This is a repost of an appreciation of Pope Francis by CEME Fellow, Professor Philip Booth, first published on the Catholic Social Teaching blog of St Mary’s University. We thought it would be of interest to CEME readers, but reposting does not mean endorsement of every point.
In the coverage of the passing of Pope Francis to eternal life, surprisingly little has been said about an important aspect of Pope Francis’s social teaching – fraternity. This was the theme of his second social encyclical, Fratelli tutti. It is an important theme because it links the pastoral, spiritual, theological and social teaching of the late pope. The title of Fratelli tutti in English is ‘Brothers All’, and it is subtitled ‘On Fraternity and Social Friendship’.
Fraternity is part of the practice of the virtue of solidarity which was described clearly by Pope John Paul II:
Solidarity is not a feeling of vague compassion or shallow distress at the misfortunes of so many people, both near and far. On the contrary, it is a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good; that is to say to the good of all and of each individual, because we are all really responsible for all (Sollicitudo rei socialis, 38).
Fraternity has, of course, always been part and parcel of a good Christian life. As Pope Benedict wrote in an encyclical which returned to the roots of the practice of the early Church:
The State which would provide everything, absorbing everything into itself, would ultimately become a mere bureaucracy incapable of guaranteeing the very thing which the suffering person—every person—needs: namely, loving personal concern…This love does not simply offer people material help, but refreshment and care for their souls, something which often is even more necessary than material support (Deus caritas est, 28, emphasis added).
Just as Pope Benedict did, Pope Francis joins together the pastoral and the social. His exhortation to priests to ‘smell the smell of the sheep’ demonstrates how fraternity was an enduring, multi-faceted theme throughout his pontificate.
In Pope Francis’s social teaching, the idea of fraternity was developed in many ways.
Pope Francis is critical of individualistic ways of thinking, but also of bureaucratic solutions. He writes of how popular movements can make possible ‘an integral human development that goes beyond the idea of social policies being a policy for the poor, but never with the poor and never of the poor…’ (Fratelli tutti, 169).
The late pope wrote about how the virtue of solidarity starts with, and is authentically promoted within, the family but then radiates outwards, for example, in his letter following the synod on the family, Amoris laetitia: ’When a family is welcoming and reaches out to others, especially the poor and the neglected, it is a symbol, witness and participant in the Church’s motherhood’ (324).
Here we see the complementary nature of the Catholic social teaching principles of solidarity and subsidiarity. Pope Francis is showing how our human nature requires that our acts of solidarity start at the most basic level in society. However, the parable of the Good Samaritan shows how those acts should involve anybody with whom God’s providence leads us to have an encounter. Genuine solidarity requires a relationship and not just a cheque. These acts of solidarity can, if engrained in culture, radiate outwards and turn into a great social movement. But they can only take place if we have a political system which promotes the principle of subsidiarity and therefore allows the family to play its proper role.
Pope Francis’s teaching on migration is well known. Again, it is fraternity that is at the heart of his concerns. As he wrote in Fratelli tutti:
Our response to the arrival of migrating persons can be summarized by four words: welcome, protect, promote and integrate. For it is not a case of implementing welfare programmes from the top down, but rather of undertaking a journey together, through these four actions…(129)
In Fratelli tutti, Pope Francis attacks abstract proclamations of liberty (of a form which might be associated with socialism) as well as forms of liberty rooted in secular individualism. And he states that equality ‘[is not] achieved by an abstract proclamation that “all men and women are equal.” Instead, it is the result of the conscious and careful cultivation of fraternity’ (104). At the same time, he adds: ‘individualism [which might be associated with economic liberals] does not make us more free, more equal, more fraternal. The mere sum of individual interests is not capable of generating a better world for the whole human family’ (105).
But perhaps we can take this further. The French revolutionary mandates of liberty, fraternity and equality, are, according to a certain interpretation – indeed their original interpretation – incompatible with each other, despite the protestations of their proponents! If equality means equality of outcomes, its pursuit will, as Pope Leo XIII wrote in Rerum novarum, lead to a levelling down to a condition of equal misery and the loss of liberty. If freedom means a free for all, unconstrained by religious and moral norms, we will not achieve fraternity. But a Catholic interpretation of the slogan can enable us to achieve all three. If equality is equality before the law and before God, and freedom is the freedom to choose what is good guided by the grace of God, there is no obstacle to the promotion of fraternity. Indeed, our fulfilment as free human beings requires us to practise fraternity which is also necessary for the promotion of the common good and human dignity for all.
Globalisation has been a continual theme in politics since Pope Francis’s election in 2013. Some of his concerns were cultural. David Goodhart published a book in 2017 which captured a concern that some people, attracted to globalisation, became wealthy but lost their roots in their community. Others had strong community roots but were feeling marginalised from the mainstream and attracted to populism. In Fratelli tutti, Pope Francis captured this dilemma perfectly whilst giving sound practical advice to both groups based on principles of fraternity and openness.
It should be kept in mind that an innate tension exists between globalization and localization. We need to pay attention to the global so as to avoid narrowness and banality. Yet we also need to look to the local, which keeps our feet on the ground. Together, the two prevent us from falling into one of two extremes. In the first, people get caught up in an abstract, globalized universe… In the other, they turn into a museum of local folklore, a world apart, doomed to doing the same things over and over, incapable of being challenged by novelty or appreciating the beauty which God bestows beyond their borders. We need to have a global outlook to save ourselves from petty provincialism…At the same time, though, the local has to be eagerly embraced, for it possesses something that the global does not: it is capable of being a leaven, of bringing enrichment, of sparking mechanisms of subsidiarity. Universal fraternity and social friendship are thus two inseparable and equally vital poles in every society. To separate them would be to disfigure each and to create a dangerous polarization.
On a personal level, there are two things that I especially like about this theme of fraternity. In Catholic social teaching, it provides clear point of unity for people with different political perspectives. For example, the critique of the welfare state and of regulatory bureaucracies by supporters of a free economy is largely a critique of how these institutions have become impersonal: whatever their merits, it is argued that they erode relationships and personal responsibility for our fellow human beings whilst undermining civil society institutions for the provision of welfare lauded in Rerum novarum. At the same time, those on the left throw the same accusations at corporate capitalism. Both sides should be able to see the merit in the argument of the other and, in a spirit of intellectual generosity, discuss how we might bring about a more fraternal society. This can be a welcome change from two, or three, word phrases from Church documents being used to attack straw men in the attempted promotion of one’s own political cause.
Also, Pope Francis’s teaching in this area prompts personal reflection and an examination of conscience. It raises questions such as ‘do I give money to homeless charities but never stop to talk to a homeless person?’. ‘Do I campaign to change political structures, but never assist people personally or through community groups?’ ‘Do I write blog posts about Catholic social teaching but not actually make myself available to students to discuss their challenges?’.
We should end by noting again that Fratelli tutti is built on the parable of the Good Samaritan about which Pope Francis writes: ‘the parable shows us how a community can be rebuilt by men and women who identify with the vulnerability of others, who reject the creation of a society of exclusion and act instead as neighbours, lifting up and rehabilitating the fallen for the sake of the common good’ (67). And then, relating the parable to the modern world, he writes: ‘We can start from below and, case by case, act at the most concrete and local levels, and then expand to the farthest reaches of our countries and our world, with the same care and concern that the Samaritan showed for each of the wounded man’s injuries’ (78). This is a message that has been relevant from the very first book of the Old Testament to the modern Christian era.
Philip Booth is professor of finance, public policy, and ethics and director of Catholic Mission at St. Mary’s University, Twickenham (the U.K.’s largest Catholic university). He also works for the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales as Director of Policy and Research.
Image: Korea.net / Korean Culture and Information Service (Jeon Han), reproduced from Wikimedia commons under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic licence.
President Trump has certainly brought the issue to the fore with a bang. Perhaps his attempts at protectionism will show the error in the thinking of the anti-globalists in our own country. We don’t get many controlled experiments in economics. Perhaps this will be one.
The anti-globalisation trend, which is strongly supported by Christians in the US, has been around for ten years or more. Globalisation itself stalled following 2010, went into reverse by many measures (though not all) during the first Trump presidency, the policies of which Biden continued to follow. But things really do look grim now. It should not be thought that this is only a Trump phenomenon – protectionist sentiment is well engrained amongst Republicans and Democrats.
In the 2016 presidential election, Trump said: ‘You go to New England, Ohio, Pennsylvania …manufacturing is down 30, 40, sometimes 50 per cent. NAFTA is the worst trade deal maybe ever signed anywhere’. It is fair to say that he has not changed his view.
Those arguing for tariffs are wrong about whether there is a problem to be solved; wrong about the diagnosis of the problem they perceive; and wrong about the efficacy of their proposed solution to the non-existent problem.
In the same campaign, the left-wing Democrat candidate and Senator Bernie Sanders said: ‘I do not believe in unfettered free trade…We heard people tell us how many jobs would be created…you are now competing against people in Vietnam who make 56 cents an hour minimum wage.’
Reading his comments on Trump’s policies today, he seems simply to want a better ordered version of those policies.
I will leave the huge benefits of globalisation and free trade for another post. It is just worth noting that the development of the modern era of globalisation was coincident with a huge reduction in absolute poverty and the biggest reduction in global inequality the world has ever known.
But let’s go back to Bernie Sanders’ challenge. In responding to this, we effectively answer the concerns of Trump supporters about free trade. How can the US compete with Vietnamese producers paying 56 cents an hour? Surely, US industry will be wiped out, as Bernie Sanders suggests, if the US lets in Vietnamese imports.
The answer to this question is a clear ‘no’. US workers would earn vastly more than Vietnamese workers even if they were to produce garments because US workers are more productive: they have higher skill levels and use more capital equipment.
More importantly, though, US wages are higher than 56 cents because the US produces more valuable things than cheap garments. It makes sense to export other things that are more valuable and import cheap garments.
Free trade means that the US is able to produce goods and services that are more valuable than garments, export those goods and services and use the proceeds from selling its exports to buy garments. US consumers get cheaper goods from abroad and US producers are able to produce things of a higher value than garments. This is why the average income in the US is nearly 30 times that in Vietnam – it is not 56 cents an hour.
Furthermore, we have global supply chains in which countries produce those aspects of a product they are relatively best at producing. If you buy a shirt with ‘made in Vietnam’ on the label, the sewing machinery might have been made in South Korea or Japan, the dye might have been made in Germany, the cotton might come from Egypt, the shipping might be by a Greek firm, the finance and insurance for the shipping might be provided by a US bank, and so on. It is a collaborative effort. It would not benefit anybody if the whole process were ‘insourced’ and the Wall Street bankers had to go to work in garment and dye-producing factories.
There are significant problems in many developed countries, but I would suggest that they are caused much more by demographics (ageing populations), dysfunctional welfare states and the costs of family fragmentation. These are, essentially, religious and cultural problems which we should not blame on economic globalisation.
The US (like the UK), of course, has a large trade deficit: ostensibly, this is the reason for Trump’s tariffs. This deficit is caused by the US government and private sector (like the UK) being net borrowers – just as Germany’s surplus is caused by Germany being a net saver. [In reality, the situation is a little more complicated than this and issues to do with net direct investment, dividend flows, foreign holdings of dollars, and so on are also important.] If a country is a net borrower, it will import more than it exports and consume more than it produces. Tariffs will not change that situation – they will just make the country poorer.
Those arguing for tariffs are wrong about whether there is a problem to be solved; wrong about the diagnosis of the problem they perceive; and wrong about the efficacy of their proposed solution to the non-existent problem.
What is the Church’s position on free trade? Its position arises from her concern for the poor and is not unqualified. Pope Paul VI wrote in Populorum progressio in 1967: ‘trade relations can no longer be based solely on the principle of free, unchecked competition, for it very often creates an economic dictatorship’. This is interesting because Pope Paul is saying that poor countries lose from free trade whereas Trump is arguing that rich countries lose, and poor countries gain. Economists argue that both gain.
Pope Paul VI’s view reflected the ‘developmental state’ theory common in economics in the 1960s. John Paul II took a different view in his encyclical Centesimus annus:
Even in recent years it was thought that the poorest countries would develop by isolating themselves from the world market and by depending only on their own resources. Recent experience has shown that countries which did this have suffered stagnation and recession, while the countries which experienced development were those which succeeded in taking part in the general interrelated economic activities at the international level.
Empirically, this is correct. Even more pertinently for Catholic leaders of richer countries, Pope Benedict wrote of their obligations to poorer countries, in relation to trade, in Caritas in Veritate:
It should also be remembered that, in the economic sphere, the principal form of assistance needed by developing countries is that of allowing and encouraging the gradual penetration of their products into international markets, thus making it possible for these countries to participate fully in international economic life…Furthermore, there are those who fear the effects of competition through the importation of products — normally agricultural products — from economically poor countries. Nevertheless, it should be remembered that for such countries, the possibility of marketing their products is very often what guarantees their survival in both the short and long term. Just and equitable international trade in agricultural goods can be beneficial to everyone, both to suppliers and to customers.
It is difficult to think of any concern about free trade to which the right response is protectionism through tariffs. Putting aside its economic effects, protectionism creates disharmony and destroys relationships. It makes people who should gain from mutual co-operation believe they can gain at the expense of each other: we are already seeing this. Adam Smith taught us how countries gain from co-operation and exchange rather than from stealing each other’s ‘stuff’. We should not need to re-learn that lesson by having to endure the tragedy of ignoring it.
Image: Old cash register in Museum of Technology in Warsaw; reproduced from Wikimedia Commons using a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported licence.
On Wednesday 26 March, in conjunction with CCLA Investment Management, CEME hosted an event to launch the publication of a new book by CEME Senior Fellow Lord Griffiths of Fforestfach (Brian).
The event featured a talk on the book by Brian with responses from Lord Glasman (Maurice), founder of the ‘Blue Labour’ movement, a conservative socialism that respects tradition, community and faith, and Andy Haldane, former Chief Economist at the Bank of England.
In Inflation Is About More Than Money, Brian Griffiths charts recent history and policy developments with regard to inflation. He sees inflation as a moral problem: a form of taxation and deceit that those in positions of authority should always seek to address.
Considering a range of theoretical approaches to inflation, he advances a pragmatic monetarist approach and offers a series of concrete recommendations for both dealing with inflation and protecting against it in the future. In addition, Brian examines the cultural factors at play, such as disillusionment with democracy and social fragmentation. He argues for the importance of a shared moral framework, or “sacred canopy”, to underpin our collective purpose and provide a foundation for economic, social and political stability.
Brian was professor of banking and international finance at City University and dean of the City University Business School. A former member of the Court of Directors of the Bank of England who later served as head of the Number 10 Policy Unit, he is now a member of the House of Lords. He was the founding chairman of the Centre for Enterprise, Markets and Ethics.
Inflation Is About More Than Money: Economics, Politics and the Social Fabric, was published jointly by the Centre and the Institute of Economic Affairs.
Paul Sagar’s Adam Smith Reconsidered: History, Liberty, and the Foundations of Modern Politics offers an ambitious reinterpretation of Adam Smith’s intellectual legacy. The book challenges prevailing accounts of Smith’s political and economic philosophy, particularly the assumption that Smith harbored fundamental anxieties about market-driven societies. Instead, Sagar argues that Smith’s concerns lay less in moral corruption and more in the political dangers posed by commercial societies. The book is an essential contribution to modern debates on Smith, offering a historically grounded yet philosophically nuanced perspective.
Sagar organizes his study into five chapters, each tackling a specific dimension of Smith’s political thought.
Sagar begins by dissecting what he terms the ‘standard model’ of Smith scholarship. He critiques the widespread belief that Smith’s four stages theory constitutes a form of conjectural history. Instead, he argues that Smith used it as an economic model rather than a predictive framework for historical development (page 20). Sagar contends that many commentators have wrongly assumed that Smith believed in a linear progression of societies towards commercialism.
The second chapter examines Smith’s conception of liberty, moving beyond the standard republican interpretation. Sagar argues that Smith’s understanding of liberty aligns more closely with the notion of nondomination, derived from historical conditions rather than abstract philosophical principles (page 72). He differentiates Smith’s stance from contemporary republican theorists such as Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit, suggesting that Smith saw the rule of law—not civic virtue—as the key mechanism for securing liberty (page 85).
One of the book’s most provocative arguments emerges in its analysis of Smith’s engagement with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Many scholars have framed Smith as a measured respondent to Rousseau’s critique of commercial society. Sagar refutes this reading, arguing that Smith did not take Rousseau seriously as a thinker (page 120). Instead, Smith viewed Rousseau’s critique as intellectually weak, failing to engage with the empirical realities of history (page 138). This (third) chapter challenges long-standing interpretations that place Smith and Rousseau in dialectical opposition.
A key theme in Smithian scholarship is the question of moral corruption in commercial societies. In the fourth chapter, Sagar maintains that modern interpreters have overstated Smith’s concerns in this area. Rather than viewing commerce as inherently corrupting, Smith saw political mismanagement—particularly the alignment of economic power with political authority—as the real danger (page 165). Sagar carefully distinguishes between Smith’s concerns about elite behavior and a broader critique of commerce itself.
The final chapter turns to Smith’s famous critique of mercantilism and the influence of economic elites on government. Sagar frames Smith as a realist who understood the dangers of concentrated economic power but did not believe in an idealized republican counterforce (page 195). He argues that Smith’s Wealth of Nations should be read not as an economic libertarian manifesto, but as a work deeply preoccupied with the balance of power in political institutions.
Sagar’s reinterpretation of Smith is both refreshing and polemical. His main achievement is dismantling the Adam Smith Problem, the idea that Smith’s moral philosophy (in The Theory of Moral Sentiments) is fundamentally at odds with his economic thought (The Wealth of Nations). Sagar demonstrates that this supposed contradiction rests on a misunderstanding of Smith’s intellectual project. Smith was not torn between benevolence and self-interest; rather, he was developing a holistic view of social order where markets played an integral but politically contingent role (page 210).
One of the book’s strengths is its methodological rigor. Sagar carefully contextualizes Smith’s thought within the Scottish Enlightenment, drawing on sources that extend beyond standard economic interpretations. His engagement with historiography is particularly commendable—by distinguishing between historical reality and theoretical models, he clarifies many misconceptions about Smith’s views on commercial society.
However, the book is not without its weaknesses. Sagar occasionally overstates his case, particularly in downplaying Smith’s engagement with Rousseau. While it is true that Smith critiqued Rousseau’s speculative method, dismissing the Discourse on Inequality as intellectually weak (page 138), Sagar overlooks Rousseau’s influence on debates surrounding virtue, luxury, and civic participation. A more balanced account might acknowledge that, even if Smith rejected Rousseau’s conclusions, he still saw them as worth engaging with.
Additionally, while Sagar’s challenge to the standard model is compelling, he does not always fully explore its implications. If Smith was not concerned with moral corruption per se, but rather with political distortions of economic power, what does this mean for contemporary readings of his work? Does it suggest that Smith should be seen as a forerunner of institutional economics rather than classical liberalism? Sagar hints at these questions but does not fully develop them.
Despite these minor critiques, Adam Smith Reconsidered is an important work that forces scholars to rethink long-standing assumptions about Smith’s political philosophy. It challenges received wisdom with meticulous scholarship and clear argumentation. While some of its claims will spark debate—particularly regarding Smith’s engagement with Rousseau and his views on commercial morality—the book succeeds in shifting the terms of discussion.
For those interested in political economy, intellectual history, or the philosophical foundations of modern capitalism, Adam Smith Reconsidered is an essential read. It reaffirms Smith’s place not as a narrow economist, but as a sophisticated political thinker whose insights remain relevant for today.
‘Adam Smith Reconsidered: History, Liberty, and the Foundations of Modern Politics’ by Paul Sagar was published in 2024 by Princeton University Press (ISBN 978-0-69-123494-6). 248pp.
Jan C. Bentz is a lecturer and tutor at Blackfriars in Oxford, with interests in how medieval metaphysics shaped modern thought. He also works as a freelance journalist.
The mega-rich have pulled away from the rest of society. Inequality has widened dramatically. And without dramatic government intervention in the form of higher taxes society will eventually be torn apart. There are a whole series of assumptions that the liberal-left, along with much of the media, take as so obviously true that they hardly even need to be debated. There is just one problem, however. As Daniel Waldenström makes clear in this excellent and timely new book, they happen not to be true. In reality, we have, as the title pithily suggests, be getting both richer and more equal – and with a few minor, pro-market reforms we could carry on doing so.
Waldenström is not exactly a household name. As Professor of Economics at the Research Institute of Industrial Economics in Stockholm he has however established himself as an expert on the long term trends in capital, wealth distribution and equality measured over many decades. Indeed, his research was drawn upon by the French economist Thomas Piketty for his best-selling, and very influential, Capital In The Twenty-First Century. And yet, Waldenström draws very different conclusions from Piketty. ‘In this book, I build…a new analysis of the history of wealth and inequality in the West,’ he writes. ‘The data shows that we are both richer and more equal today than in the past, and the accumulation of housing wealth and pension savings among the middle classes emerge as the main factors behind this development.’
The facts, at least as set out here, are very different from the conventional narrative. Digging into 130 years of dense data, Waldenström argues that not only is the world far richer than it was 100 years ago – which admittedly is not going to prove very controversial – but also that ‘the value of assets owned by households after adjusting for hikes in consumer prices has increased many times over’. Perhaps more controversially, at least to anyone under the intellectual spell of Piketty and his many followers, he goes on to argue that ‘the twentieth century ushered in a democratization of wealth’, explaining that while in the 19th century wealth mainly consisted of agricultural and corporate assets concentrated in the hand of a tiny elite, over the last hundred years it shifted to property and pensions savings ‘contributing to a more equal distribution’. Finally and perhaps most importantly of all, Waldenström argues that ‘wealth has become notably less concentrated over the last 100 years,’ a process that he describes as ‘the great wealth equalisation’.
Those claims are backed up with robust statistical evidence surveying all the main assets. In a nutshell, however, Waldström’s key finding is that the spread of home ownership, and of pensions, means that wealth has been very widely distributed at least among the middle classes. Even taking into account offshore wealth, a favourite bugbear of the Piketty crowd, ‘modifies the details, but not the overarching narrative of a decreasing concentration of wealth’. The mainstream critique of capitalism – that it leads to rampant and accelerating inequality – turns out to be completely false. Modern economies have been getting steadily richer and more equal. ‘Over the past 130 years, wealth per capita in Western societies has escalated almost tenfold in real terms,’ the book states. ‘Since 1980 alone, it has multiplied by factors of more than two and three. The accumulation of wealth in the bottom groups outpaced that of the top groups in the postwar era, especially in Europe and, for some periods, also in the US.’
The strength of the book is the mass of detail. For anyone who wants to get into the thickets of why the claims that we are becoming less and less equal are completely unfounded, the statistics, tables, charts and growth are all here. In fairness, that is its weakness as well. Waldenström is not an exciting writer, preferring to meet the claims of his opponents with some detailed footnotes instead of a barbed retort or a rhetorical flourish. It is not going to change many minds for the simple reason that, unfortunately, not many people, especially if they are convinced anti-capitalists, will want to wade through a mass of statistical analysis. Waldenström is preaching to a narrow, specialist audience. That said, he has done the hard work that perhaps others can popularise.
That said, this is important work. The widespread assumption, pushed by the left, that inequality has been getting worse and worse, has led to demands for wealth taxes, global levels on offshore assets, as well as global corporation taxes. If the data is wrong, and Waldenström convincingly shows that it is, then so are the policy recommendations. Instead, we should be looking at what most of the developed world got right over the last 150 years, and how we can continue to become both ‘richer and more equal’. It is not that hard to figure out. First, argues Walderström, we should encourage individual home ownership. It is typically the single biggest driver of equalizing wealth distribution, and, unfortunately, in countries such as the UK, it has been going backwards. We need to get that rising again. Next, we should switch to ‘funded pension schemes’ over ‘pay as you go’ retirement systems, as that way people are building up stocks of assets over their working lives, and that will generate substantial wealth, as well as spreading it amongst the population. We should try to reduce the taxes on income, since it reduces the ability of people on average incomes to invest in their home and their pension, the two key assets that are likely to increase their wealth over time. Finally, we should tax the income earned on capital, not wealth itself, as attempts to impose wealth taxes have time and time again. If we stick to those simple principles, then we should continue to become both richer and more equal just as we have for the last century – no matter how hard the left might try to pretend otherwise.
‘Richer and More Equal: A New History of Wealth in the West’ by Daniel Waldenström was published in 2024 by Polity (ISBN: 978-1-03-207336-1). 256pp.
Matthew Lynn is an author, journalist and entrepreneur. He writes for The Daily Telegraph, The Spectator and Money Week, is the author of the Death Force thrillers, and is the founder of Lume Books.
We have witnessed thirty years of neo-liberal triumphalism. Essential services have been privatised, and utilities have been sold off, while the state has seldom been so weak, and, as a result, work has become more precarious, inequality has widened to unacceptable levels, and a super-elite of mega-rich plutocrats has been allowed to grow wealthier and wealthier at everyone else’s expense. The liberal-left has so successfully established this prevailing narrative about what is wrong with modern capitalism, and how only a stronger state can fix it, that even many of its natural opponents buy into much of its analysis. Ruchir Sharma’s analysis, however, is here to make a simple point. They are completely wrong. Modern capitalism is indeed in bad shape, he argues. But not because the state is too small, but because it is too big.
What Went Wrong With Capitalism tells a powerful story about how the system of making and selling stuff has changed dramatically over the last fifty years. In Sharma’s view, the conventional wisdom is that the state grew slightly in the immediate post-war period, but its size was dramatically rolled back during the Reagan and Thatcher era, and ever since then has shrunk in size and influence. ‘Millennials, the next ruling generation, have embraced a narrative that is clear on the problems of capitalism and way too certain of the causes,’ he writes. ‘Like the media establishment, many Americans seem to assume that the story of shrinking government is true [and] if these distortions arose in a period of shrinking government, they figure, then bigger government must be the answer. But if the era of shrinking government never happened, that is exactly the wrong answer.’
Sharma brilliantly sets out the stark facts and figures on the ever expanding role of government in the modern economy. While Reagan and Thatcher were preaching the virtues of liberal, small government, low-taxes and free markets, central bankers were moving steadily in the other direction. The rot started with the former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, ironically a devotee of the extreme liberal Ayn Rand, who started propping up the financial markets with cheaper money every time they fell a little. Ever since then, central bankers saw it as their job to tame and manage the business cycle. First interest rates were cut too close to zero, and then they started printing money on an extravagant scale, and that allowed governments to borrow to finance deficits on a scale that used to be impossible. As Sharma points out, in America potential Presidents used to pay at least lip service to balancing the books, and Bill Clinton actually managed it in one year, the last occupant of the White House to do so. Now they no longer even bother to mention it, so that by 2024, with a deficit of 6pc of GDP in a strong economy, until recently an unthinkable sum outside of wartime, the candidates compete with one another on how much more they can borrow and spend.
But it is not just debt of course. The state has been intervening more and more directly in the economy as well. In the US, Sharma points out the Code of Federal Regulations was first updated annually in the early 1960s, and has grown more than eight-fold since then, and now runs to 180,000 pages covering 240 volumes. America turned into ‘a nation of lawyers’ he argues, not because its people are naturally litigious, as is sometimes lazily assumed, but because it was the only way to cope with the often bewildering accumulation of extra rules that businesses have to follow. In Europe, it is even worse. Sharma brilliantly nails the myth of a ‘neo-liberal’ European Union, pointing out that all it has done is replace cumbersome national regulations with even more cumbersome versions designed in Brussels. ‘In part because the European Union lacks the power to tax and spend directly, its energies have been directed instead into what scholar Giandomenico Majone called “an almost pure regulatory state”, which by the late nineties was issuing regulations at an almost exponential pace.’ On both sides of the Atlantic, the story is the same, with governments attempting to micro-manage almost every aspect of commercial life. Both the Covid pandemic and now the drive to hit Net Zero targets have massively accelerated that.
The strength of the book is in its forensic use of facts to puncture left-liberal myths, and to chart the increasing role of government in our lives. For example, the number of lawyers in the US was growing by only 30,000 per decade prior to 1970, but increased to 100,000 every ten years after the tide of federal regulation grew and grew. Likewise, the number of lobbyists in Washington has overtaken the number of federal employees, with companies spending vast sums trying to manipulate the law in their favour. Almost every page contains a fresh nugget of data, each one illustrating how much more powerful the state has become. Add it all up, and Sharma paints a devastatingly accurate portrait of how massively the state has grown in size and power over the last thirty years, and more importantly, how that has slowed down the innovation and growth that were vital to a stable, free and prosperous society.
If it has a flaw, it is that the book is weaker on remedies. Sharma identifies Switzerland, Taiwan and, perhaps controversially, Vietnam as the three examples of states that have managed to get it right. They are good choices. The trouble is, voters in all the major democracies keep voting for leaders who promise to intervene more, spend more, and regulate more: Argentina is the only country in recent times to vote for less government. The hard part is to convince the voters that the state should get out of their lives, and while Sharma will convince his readers of the case, he has little to say about how to turn that into a message with mass appeal. Even so, it is an excellent book, timely and well-argued, and essential reading for anyone who wants a refreshing corrective to the prevailing wisdom.
‘What Went Wrong With Capitalism’ by Ruchir Sharma was published in 2024 by Penguin (ISBN: 978-0-24-159576-3). 384pp.
Matthew Lynn is an author, journalist and entrepreneur. He writes for The Daily Telegraph, The Spectator and Money Week, is the author of the Death Force thrillers, and is the founder of Lume Books.
The Second Machine Age is Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee’s best-known work. The book explores the profound implications of rapid technological advances, particularly in digital technologies, for society, the economy, and the labour market. Published in 2014, the book delves into the transformative effects of what the authors term the ‘second machine age,’ a period marked by exponential growth in computing power, the ubiquity of digital networks, and the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics (page 9). Through a well-structured narrative, Brynjolfsson and McAfee argue that while these technological advancements hold immense potential for economic growth and societal progress, they also present significant challenges, particularly in terms of inequality and the displacement of labour (pages 11-12). In this review we examine some of the book’s arguments, structure, and contributions to the wider ongoing discourse on technology and society.
Brynjolfsson and McAfee’s central thesis is that we are entering a new phase of technological advancement that is fundamentally different from the first machine age, which was characterized by the mechanization of manual labour through the invention of the steam engine and other machinery during the Industrial Revolution. The second machine age, in contrast, is driven by digital technologies that augment and, in some cases, replace cognitive tasks traditionally performed by humans (page 9).
Brynjolfsson and McAfee’s book is structured in a logical and accessible manner, making complex ideas about technology and economics understandable to a broad audience. The book is divided into three main sections: the first outlines the characteristics of the second machine age (chapters 1-6), the second discusses its implications for the economy and labour market (chapters 7-11), and the third offers potential solutions to the challenges posed by these technological changes (chapters 12-15).
The authors identify three key characteristics of the second machine age: (1) exponential growth in computing power, (2) digitalization, which allows information to be replicated at virtually no cost, and (3) combinatorial innovation, where new technologies are built upon existing ones, leading to rapid and often unexpected advances (page 37). The authors argue that these characteristics are driving unprecedented changes in productivity, business models, and the global economy (chapters 1-6).
A significant portion of the book is dedicated to discussing the implications of the technological changes for the labour market (chapters 7-11). Brynjolfsson and McAfee argue that while technology has always created winners and losers, the pace and scale of change in the second machine age are likely to exacerbate inequality. They point to the phenomenon of ‘skill-biased technological change’, where technology disproportionately benefits those with higher levels of education and skills, leading to a widening gap between high-skilled and low-skilled workers (page 134). This dynamic is further amplified by the ‘superstar’ effect, where a small number of highly skilled individuals and companies capture a disproportionate share of the economic gains from new technologies (page 150)
The authors also explore the potential for technological unemployment, where advances in AI and robotics could lead to the displacement of a significant number of jobs, particularly in sectors such as manufacturing, transportation, and even certain white-collar professions (page 173). However, they are careful to distinguish between short-term disruptions and long-term trends, noting that while some jobs will undoubtedly be lost, new opportunities will also emerge, particularly in areas that require creativity, complex problem-solving, and interpersonal skills (page 191).
One of the strengths of the book is its use of empirical evidence and real-world examples, the authors drawing on a wide range of data, from economic statistics to case studies of companies and industries that have been transformed by digital technologies. This evidence-based approach lends credibility to their analysis and helps to ground their sometimes abstract ideas in concrete realities.
However, a critic might argue that the book’s optimistic tone about the potential of technology to drive progress and prosperity is not sufficiently tempered by a consideration of the potential risks and downsides. While the authors do acknowledge the challenges posed by technological change, particularly in terms of inequality and job displacement, they tend to focus more on the potential benefits of innovation and less on the potential for negative outcomes, such as social unrest, the erosion of privacy and the proliferation of misinformation (e.g. fake news) in an increasingly digital world.
Moreover, while Brynjolfsson and McAfee offer several policy recommendations to address the challenges of the second machine age, such as investing in education, reforming the tax system, and fostering innovation (Chapter 13), some of the discussion around proposals such as higher tax rates, universal basic income and negative income tax may seem overly idealistic and difficult to implement in practice (Chapter 14). Some readers may find the patches of real-world naiveté throughout the concluding chapters off-putting.
Despite all this, The Second Machine Age makes a worthwhile contribution to the wider discussion on technology, economics, and society. Brynjolfsson and McAfee’s nuanced discussion of the potential for both job displacement and job creation provides a comparatively thoughtful perspective that is often missing from more alarmist accounts of technological unemployment. Their focus on the importance of education and lifelong learning in preparing workers for the jobs of the future is commendable and a valuable contribution to the wider policy debate.
In concluding, The Second Machine Age is recommended to all readers who are interested in the profound technological changes reshaping our economy and society. While the book is not without its flaws, particularly in chapters where the tone may seem overly optimistic, it remains an important contribution to the discourse on technology and society. As we continue to grapple with the impacts of AI, robotics, and other advanced technologies, Brynjolfsson and McAfee provide a useful framework for understanding the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.
‘The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies’ by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee was published in 2014 by W.W. Norton & Co. (ISBN: 978-0-39-335064-7). 306pp.
Andrei E. Rogobete is Associate Director at the Centre for Enterprise, Markets & Ethics. For more information about Andrei please click here.
The history of the liberals, radicals, socialists, feminists, and Christians who advocated for free trade as the necessary accompaniment to anti-imperialism and peace is the subject of Marc-William Palen’s Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World. Pax Economica was a term promoted by Jane Addams of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, whose idealistic vision was of such a world after the catastrophe of the First World War (page 199).
Today, free trade is most often associated with neo-liberal economic thought but Palen demonstrates that its origins are rooted in nineteenth-century left-wing politics, with its advocates promoting a heady blend of peace, anti-imperialism, and free trade: a vision at odds with the powerful currents of nationalism, protectionism, and colonial expansion.
The book charts the continuous movements for free trade from the 1840s to the present day. Its scope is broad in time and space, with the core themes often intersecting with major events across the period. The vicissitudes of the drive for free trade as the harbinger of a peaceful world is prominent, and its mutability is closely considered and evaluated.
Palen reveals how, for some of its more left-wing adherents, free trade represented a challenge to imperialism and militarism. In its most idealistic form, it was held that free trade would create international bonds of union, dependence, and harmony which would make war obsolete. Suffice to say, that idealist vision has not materialized.
Nonetheless, the vision of a ‘Pax Economica’ evolved to include supranational regulation, and the establishment of post-1945 liberal institutions such as the United Nations (UN), International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) which did meet, albeit insipidly and ultimately disappointingly, their support for global governance and cooperation. Yet Palen’s work is not primarily a history of international institutions but rather a detailed study of the left-wing vision of globalism. In the main, this means a roll call of movements, pressure groups, and individuals, mostly those employing an ‘outsider strategy’ as a means of changing policy. The work is ambitious, immaculately researched, and a timely publication amid the resurgence of economic nationalism and geopolitical conflict.
The text, divided into six chapters, ranges over an extensive landscape, encompassing the anti-imperialism of free trade, Christian pacifism, socialist internationalism, feminism, and Marxism. The idealism conflating free trade, peace, and prosperity is well-delineated, and the intellectual antecedents well-identified and contextualized, with Richard Cobden, Henry George, and Norman Angell referenced throughout in multiple contexts. The geographical diaspora of free trade sentiments is a fine testimony to the vibrancy and durability of these ideas.
The book considers these developments, broadly defined, with short-hand organizing themes such as the ‘Marx-Manchester’ and ‘Marx-List’ traditions. Continuity of struggle and complexity of the tasks are keynotes of the work, from the battle against the systemic protectionism of the 1840s to the current disputes over trade liberalization and neoliberalism.
Indeed, divisions over the legitimacy of free trade principles were explicitly made with the publication of Friedrich List’s National System of Political Economy as early as 1841 at the height of the campaign for economic liberalization in Britain. Economic nationalism, as a counterpoint to free trade, features prominently, with List’s ‘infant industry’ framework and the ‘American System’ of Alexander Hamilton appearing equally, if not more, historically important, in the commercial policy of nations. The idea of tariffs as a shield against foreign competition, and more positively, as an economic development strategy, proved highly influential in the United States, Canada, Australia, Germany, and even Britain.
Free Trade has always been presented in many different guises, and Palen effectively demonstrates that it is intersectional and situational. It could be a liberal, socialist, or anti-colonial force, for the variegated ‘productive profile’ of nations meant it possessed different connotations and meanings on a country-specific basis. While viewed as a liberating measure in Victorian Britain, the same policy preferences led to it being considered by less-developed countries, such as India, Ireland, and China, as a tool of economic imperialism, used against territories which had ‘suffered under the yoke of British free-trade imperialism’ (page 109). Conversely, protectionism, while historically often reflecting the dominance of political and business elites, was often considered, especially in recent times, integral to the economic development of emerging states, and in anti-colonial national struggles. Hence the terminology of ‘Marx-List’ and ‘Marx-Manchester’ traditions as a way of understanding political economy preferences via national subjectivities and economic complexities. Undoubtedly owing to constraints of space, the book does not go far in its forensic analysis of divergent commercial policy preferences, and a particularly notable omission is the extent to which policy preferences were influenced by the fiscal demands of increasingly democratic electorates.
Chapters on free trade feminism and Christian pacifism demonstrate the continuing influence of Cobdenite ideas into the twentieth century. The final chapter takes the story up to the present day, charting the post-war Bretton Woods system, and the triumph of the Pax Americana and neoliberalism, with the caveat that economic nationalism aligned with infant-industry strategy continues to challenge the long-standing association between equity and free trade. Argentina is usefully highlighted as a case study of a nation adopting a growth strategy informed by Listian and American System ideas as ‘economic blueprints’ for development (page 196).
In a divided and unequal world, an absolutist stance for free trade has often been construed as entrenching inequality. Interestingly, free traders often reconciled these Global South infant-industry strategies as a rational, though hopefully temporary, response to Western neo-liberalism, which preached free trade but practiced protectionism. Most notable in that respect, despite the guiding principles of Reciprocity and Non-Discrimination promoted by the World Trade Organization, is the recent surge of regional trade agreements delimiting and protecting rather than expanding market access.
In some ways, the timing of the book’s publication in 2024 was unfortunate, and the idea that the ‘neo-liberal order has been placed on notice’, appears chimerical. With rising global geopolitical tensions, and war in Ukraine and Gaza, any notion of Pax Economica appears unlikely (page 222).
Nonetheless, the analysis within the book is broad-ranging, conceptually coherent, and highly informative. A particular strength is the ability of the author to convey the changing nature of free trade movements, yet while the breadth of the study is highly impressive, it does necessitate a sacrifice of depth in places.
The book is primarily an intellectual and institutional history with a plethora of organizations, acronyms, and an eclectic array of individuals. At times, it would have been useful to know how popular many of the cited organizations were, and how long they lasted. Some readers may find the numerous terms, ideologies, adjectives, and acronyms difficult to follow. Equally, the thematic approach means there is some reiteration and repetition.
Nomenclature is a little odd at times, with John Bright described as an ‘antislavery activist’ and Cobden as an ‘opponent of slavery’ (page 155). It is not that these descriptions are inaccurate but that they convey a limited view of individuals whose backstory is much wider than suggested by the description. There are also some contentious points, such as the claim that the Manchester School ‘envisaged the gradual decline of the nation-state, and with it the elimination of national rivalries and trade barriers’ (page 97). Despite its purported universalist and utopian principles, there existed many, maybe even Cobden himself, who supported free trade at least partly because it aligned with vested class and/or national interests. Self-interest could co-exist with or even be disguised by idealism. Indeed, trade agreements today, such as the USMCA, are examples of managed and negotiated free trade, which are a far cry from the voluntarist model promoted by free trade idealists portrayed within the book.
At times the book appears a somewhat breathless account (indicated by 65 pages of notes and a 20-page index) in covering so many events, times, and places but there is much to be gained from a close and careful reading of the text.
In sum, the book will interest scholars and general readers. It follows the tradition of ‘broad sweep’ history, informed by a considerable body of research and synthesis, and as such is thought-provoking, engaging, and interesting to read.
‘Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World’ by Marc-William Palen was published in 2024 by Princeton University Press (ISBN: 978-0-69-119932-0). 309pp
Gordon Bannerman is a professor teaching Business History at Wilfrid Laurier University and the University of Guelph-Humber, Ontario. His primary research interests focus on modern British political and economic history.
As part of the new government’s effort to raise the number of houses built and spur economic growth, Labour ministers plan to allow homebuilders to receive planning permission for projects currently impacted by nutrient neutrality rules that require new construction in areas with high levels of nutrients in waterways to not contribute additional nutrients. The permission would be granted with so-called Grampian conditions (the name derives from a Scottish legal case) that would allow the homebuilding to begin subject to future off-site mitigation, rather than the status quo which requires the mitigation to be worked out before the homebuilding begins. This is one quick way that the government seeks to address the fact that because of nutrient neutrality homes impacting much of the country, homes can only be built after the details of mitigation are worked out. This is a huge administrative burden and is holding up something like 160,000 homes from being built. Few think that this will solve the issue, but it is a positive development and one of a number of efforts dealing with environmental concerns. Past efforts have failed to fix the issue and descended into rancorous debates, despite the specific issue of pollution from new homes being minimal.
The crux of the issue in question is that in recent years the environmental concerns surrounding nutrients like phosphates and nitrates in rivers have meant that because of new court rulings, new homes in a large proportion of the UK must mitigate all run-off that they would create.[1] Nutrient runoff into rivers causes algal blooms which consume oxygen and set off a chain of species die offs. European and British court rulings have widened the impact of the rules, including most recently applying the rules to projects which had already received planning permission.
This plan was suggested by Angela Rayner and Steve Reed last September when the last government attempted to overhaul the rules surrounding nutrient neutrality more comprehensively. That effort failed when the House of Lords defeated the Government’s plan to remove the legal requirements on homebuilders while increasing taxpayer funding of a more comprehensive scheme. At the time, the Labour Party was expected to support the reform but altered course just days before the vote. For those who haven’t been following the issue closely, much of the commentary on it in the main newspapers offers little insight and instead treats it as an elementary decision on a good environmental outcome or a poor one. Rather than going through the tangled legal history—I’ll leave that to those who charge by the hour (e.g. Zack Simons or Simon Ricketts)—I want to focus on how this issue and the failure to fix it has been emblematic of a broader problem with environmental issues.
What is the Problem with the Status Quo?
The problem with the current situation, one recognized by many experts, is that it places an extraordinary burden on a socially useful function: residential development. Taking as a given that the levels of nutrient pollution outlined in the rules are sensible, it is reasonable to want to limit any pollution that might occur beyond that point. When rivers reach a point where added pollution is unacceptable—as Natural England claims to be the case in 74 local authorities across the UK including most of Norfolk, much of Wiltshire and Somerset, and the area around the Solent—it makes sense to stop it from getting worse. As a result of this worthy cause, the rules are estimated to be holding up over 160,000 homes (a number that will continue to grow).
In principle, it could be reasonable to stop the market from building more much-needed houses because once the harm of the marginal nutrients is considered there is no net value being created. However, the marginal pollution created by people living in new homes is tiny. In fact, the pollution directly created by all structures (i.e. including existing structures) is supposedly just 5% of the total.[2] Basic economics suggests that there are many ways to regulate such that valuable uses like homebuilding proceed while paying for the reduction in pollutants in whatever way can be done at the lowest cost.
In fact, this is what is supposed to be happening now. The rules are supposed to set a budget for the total amount of nutrients in an impacted area and allow new homes if the developers offset the added pollutants by the same amount. This should encourage bargaining between homebuilders and other polluters. Homebuilders should be able to pay agricultural users who are the biggest polluters and who could reduce pollution at much lower abatement cost than homebuilders. This abatement could be achieved by farming less intensively by using fewer polluting fertilizers or by letting land go fallow. Alternatively, homebuilders could pay for methods to capture agricultural producers’ pollutants, or be able to pay water companies whose disposal of wastewater is one of the key mechanisms by which disparate users’ waste ends up in waterways. The benefit of such a type of regulation is that it creates market incentives to deal with the environmental problem at the lowest cost.
These are examples of the type of offsite mitigation schemes encouraged by the proposed reforms that (at a minimum) will net out the impact of the new development by reducing the relevant pollutants that new housing contributes. This would allow much needed new homes at a much lower cost than catching all added nutrients via onsite mitigation, while also keeping rivers limited to the same level of nutrient runoff. The rules allow nutrient offsetting schemes (and some have been worked out) but they don’t work well in practice due to procedural barriers. There is no environmental or economic reason for this to not be encouraged.
However, as Zack Simons writes:
Nutrient neutrality involves quantifying a ‘nutrient budget’ for both phosphorous and nitrogen, and then using either on or off-site mitigation measures to show that your scheme will not cause any net harm to the protected sites – see some guidance from Natural England here. Measures might include e.g. creating new wetlands, retrofitting sustainable urban drainage systems and making arable farmland fallow to reduce nitrates. But in many authorities, there simply is no standard nutrient neutrality strategy. Or no strategy at all. Very often, nutrient neutrality simply cannot yet be achieved – either viably, or at all.
As bad as the status quo which emerged from legal machinations is, perhaps more worrying is the fact that this issue, like many others, has become mired in unthinking partisan debate. Perhaps the worst offenders are the environmental groups whose interest in the issue suggests that they must realize the need for a better, more comprehensive regulatory system, but who instead depict the problem as a result of homebuilders’ actions.
Like many other countries in Europe, the UK is and has been facing a dramatic set of economic headwinds. Real reforms are needed to enable investment in green energy generation and transmission, but these too face opposition from those who would be expected to support them. Let us hope that this government can fix what the last couldn’t.
[1] The rules allow pragmatic schemes to mitigate nutrient pollution offsite, but the process for doing so is unnecessarily complicated.
[2] Baroness Willis of Summertown suggests that this number may be closer to 30%. But this makes little difference for this argument given this still suggests that the marginal addition is quite small, since the number of existing homes is far larger than the number of new homes held up.
John Kroencke is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Enterprise, Markets and Ethics. For more information about John please click here.
On the 24 February 1807, the House of Commons voted by 283 votes to 16 to end the trade in human slaves in all British territory. The principal opponent of the slave trade within Parliament and a leading figure in the diverse coalition of campaigners against the evil trade was a man named William Wilberforce. He worked closely with others building a broad coalition for the common good.
Wilberforce’s faith led him to campaign not only against slavery but also for wider moral reform of society and to his involvement in a range of organisations that are still going today.
In this publication (written for an April event with CCLA) Richard Turnbull introduces William Wilberforce.
A PDF is available here and the full text is below.
William Wilberforce is an iconic figure. He was the principal opponent of the slave trade within the British Parliament and a leading figure in the diverse coalition of campaigners against the evil trade in the country. Who was William Wilberforce and what lessons can we learn from him?
On 24 February 1807, the House of Commons voted by 283 votes to 16 to end the trade in enslaved people in all British territory. The slave trade had been in existence for around 300 years. Even when Parliamentary action commenced in 1789 there was still a long road of nearly 20 years before abolition. Why had it taken so long to achieve such a majority? Wilberforce first introduced an abolition Bill in 1789. For years he was blocked by vested interests, parliamentary procedures, the House of Lords, and varying degrees of both support and prevarication by the prime minister, William Pitt the Younger (1759–1806). The tide finally turned in 1806 under a new government.
Wilberforce was not perfect but he was a man of great character, resilience and faith. He suffered from ill-health for much of his life, not least very poor eyesight. He worked with others for the achievement of the greater good, forming coalitions that went beyond his own position of faith. He was described in the final debate prior to the vote for abolition as a man of ‘unwearied industry’, ‘indefatigable zeal’ and ‘impressive eloquence’.[1]
Wilberforce campaigned on this issue – and indeed many others – from the position of an explicit Christian commitment. He was perhaps the most prominent example of an evangelical Christian in Parliament at the end of the eighteenth century. He had converted to this form of Christianity in 1785 in the aftermath of a great revival or awakening which had swept Great Britain and North America in the middle decades of the century. Wilberforce believed that society needed this passionate love for Jesus and commitment to the teaching of the Bible, and nowhere more so than in the campaign against the slave trade.
Wilberforce’s faith led him to campaign not only against slavery but also for wider moral reform in society. He was involved in key evangelical organisations and a project to establish an evangelical newspaper, the Christian Observer. He also published a widely popular theological tract, known as A Practical View.
His evangelicalism was a distinctly moderate version which placed him at some odds with the wider movement, especially as time went on. He was a Member of Parliament (MP) from 1780 to 1826, representing three different seats in that time. In a period when politics and personalities were more fluid, he clearly associated with Tory groups and personalities, but always sought election as an independent. He remained a backbencher, never seeking or being offered high office. He was a significantly more complex character than is often appreciated.
[1] Sir John Doyle, Slave Trade Abolition Bill, Hansard, col 977 (23 February 1807). Note that the sitting is recorded as having taken place on 23 February but the vote actually took place at around 4am on 24 February.
Wilberforce was born in Hull in 1759, to Robert and Elizabeth Wilberforce. The family were prominent merchants in the city. With Hull being on the east coast rather than west, the city’s wealth derived primarily from trade with the Baltic countries rather than the slave trade.
Wilberforce’s childhood brought him at various points into contact with Christians of the more evangelical sort, which his mother did not appreciate. At Hull Grammar School, he came under the influence of the Milner family, later a significant evangelical family. However, in 1768, after his father’s untimely death at the age of 39, his mother, unable to cope sufficiently well, sent him to an uncle in Wimbledon and he attended a boarding school in Putney. His aunt belonged to the evangelical banking family of the Thorntons, and it was partially their influence that led William’s uncle and aunt (William and Hannah Wilberforce) to embrace the evangelical faith. This influence included taking William, at the age of 11, in early summer 1771, to meet John Newton (1725–1807) in his rectory at Olney, Buckinghamshire. Newton also became a prominent anti-slavery campaigner, and years later Wilberforce would seek counsel from him. Both Wilberforce’s mother and his grandfather were unhappy at these influences and Elizabeth removed her son from Wimbledon amid family disagreements.
Back in Hull, all was not straightforward – Joseph Milner (1744–1797), the school head, had turned ‘methodist’.[2] Wilberforce would, naturally, not be able to return to the school. So, he was despatched to Pocklington, near York, to board. The attractions of Hull during the school vacation – theatre, balls, cards, gaming, concerts and plays – all proved increasingly attractive to Wilberforce. Any early religious influence was pushed out of him. He entered the University of Cambridge in 1776 but there, in essence, he wasted his time. It was, however, while at Cambridge that Wilberforce first met and formed a friendship with William Pitt, the future prime minister, and he resolved to become an MP.
[2] The term ‘methodist’ was generally used at this time to describe any adherent of evangelical faith rather than the specific denomination, which emerged later in the century.
Wilberforce, finding no real reason to remain in Cambridge for the purposes of studying, began to travel to London and attend the visitors’ gallery at the House of Commons, along with William Pitt, who was also seeking a political career. The two developed a lifelong friendship that would at times be strained by the slavery question but that, nevertheless, endured.
In 1780, an election was looming. Elections prior to the Reform Act of 1832 were very different affairs from what we are used to now. Hull, with 1,500 electors made up of the town’s freemen, was not a pocket borough (an electoral district under the control of one person or a family) – though the freedom of the town was a piece of hereditary property! With his family connections, Wilberforce’s home town offered a viable seat.
There were two seats, one occupied by the Tories and the other by the Whigs. Wilberforce stood as an independent. The costs of running in an election anywhere could be high. The electorate almost demanded entertainment, and beer was a prerequisite. Moreover, to run in Hull with its 1,500 electors would incur additional expense. Several hundred of the electors lived in London. Not only did they need to be entertained but also, if they were to cast their votes in Hull, provision would be needed for their travel and lodging expenses, not to mention a going rate to cast their vote for the right candidate. The one thing the freemen feared most was an uncontested election!
Wilberforce’s preparation and work paid off with a dramatic result: he topped the poll. On 31 October 1780, at the tender age of 21, he took his oath as an MP. We must remember that while parties did exist, much politics at this time was heavily influenced by factions (groups of interest formed around powerful people). Wilberforce remained an independent but was gradually drawn into a revived form of Toryism around Pitt. In 1784 he was elected for the county seat of Yorkshire (with an electorate of 20,000), again as an independent but unopposed by the Tories. Wilberforce remained close to Pitt but was not invited to take office, then or subsequently.
Let us turn then to Wilberforce’s conversion and his adoption of the Christian faith as a living, vibrant, personal faith as understood by evangelicals at the time.
With the county election out of the way, in late 1784, Wilberforce set off on the traditional European tour for young men of his age with either an aristocratic family or a degree of status and wealth. The idea was to introduce the ambitious rising talent of the nation to the sights, the experiences and the encounters with art, philosophy, religion and culture that would come from being immersed in the daily life of Europe. These tours could last several months and were usually undertaken in the company of others. Wilberforce was accompanied on his tour by his mother, his sister and some female cousins. However, for male company he chose Isaac Milner (1750–1820), the younger brother of Joseph. Isaac was ordained, a mathematician, and a fellow and later president of Queen’s College, Cambridge. He was also an evangelical, the only downside from Wilberforce’s family’s perspective.
It was, in fact, one of his travelling cousins who gave Wilberforce a book written by one of the leading Protestant dissenting ministers of the time of the revival: Philip Doddridge’s The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul. Wilberforce needed to be back in Parliament and he and Milner left Nice on 5 February 1785. Wilberforce asked Milner whether the book was worth reading. Milner replied, ‘It is one of the best books ever written. Let us take it with us and read it on the journey.’[3]
In this way, Wilberforce began to be introduced to Christianity as a living, vibrant personal faith, as it was understood by evangelicals. The book covered the classic themes of evangelical faith, often known at this time as ‘vital religion’: self-examination, prayer, devotions, diligence and prudence, divine providence, and the certainty of death and judgement. Milner challenged Wilberforce to examine the scriptures themselves to see whether he found the same themes.
There is some evidence in Wilberforce’s diary he now felt a degree of disdain towards his own moral failings as well as those manifest more broadly in society. By June 1785, he and Milner had returned to Europe, meeting up with the women of the party in Switzerland. He objected to attending a play, refused to travel on a Sunday, and complained about the corruption and profligacy of the times. Significantly, he was also, by now, studying the Greek New Testament with Milner. By autumn 1785, his conversion was complete. He wrote:
I hope as long as I live to be the better for the meditation of this evening; it was on the sinfulness of my own heart, and its blindness and weakness. True, Lord, I am wretched, and miserable, and blind, and naked. What infinite love, that Christ should die to save such a sinner and how necessary is it he should save us altogether, that we may appear before God with nothing of our own! God grant I may not deceive myself, in thinking I feel the beginnings of gospel comfort. Began this night constant family prayer, and resolved to have it every morning and evening, and to read a chapter when time.[4]
In brief, the evangelicalism Wilberforce embraced gave weight to the scriptures and to justification (being declared righteous by God), conversion, preaching, the Christian life and divine providence. As Hannah More (1745–1833), another early pioneer, put it, this version of faith was not merely an opinion or sentiment, but a disposition – a turning of the whole mind to God.
In a letter to Pitt, Wilberforce mentioned the temptation to turn away from society and the world – perhaps to pursue ordination but certainly to withdraw from politics. The prime minister’s friendship with Wilberforce was deep and meaningful. He affirmed this friendship in responding to Wilberforce, referring to ‘the appearance of a new era in your life’.[5] Pitt urged Wilberforce to remain in public life:
If a Christian may act in the several relations in life, must he seclude himself from them all to become so? Surely the principles as well as the practice of Christianity are simple, and lead not to meditation only but to action.[6]
Pitt and Wilberforce met for two hours to discuss Wilberforce’s future on 2 December 1785. We do not know the direct outcome, but within days Wilberforce had sought a meeting with John Newton, now rector of St Mary Woolnoth in the centre of the city of London – the same John Newton that he had met as a child. Newton counselled Wilberforce to remain in public life. Nearly three years later, he wrote to Wilberforce, ‘It is hoped and believed that the Lord has raised you up for the good of his Church, and for the good of the nation.’[7]
Wilberforce was now ready to turn to new causes, purposes and actions in order to serve both God and the nation.
Wilberforce returned to the public political arena in 1786. He was a changed man. The following year he declared, ‘God Almighty has set before me two great objects … the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners.’[8]
Wilberforce now got involved in a wide range of campaigns, activities and projects. In 1787 King George III, under the influence of evangelicals, issued a proclamation for the encouragement of piety and virtue. Evangelicals were always against sin, but particularly the sin of others. Wilberforce gathered the great and good together to form the Society for Giving Effect to His Majesty’s Proclamation against Vice and Immorality, including Members of Parliament, peers, bishops and, of course, the prime minister himself, William Pitt.
The Proclamation Society was born. Drunkenness, gambling, prostitution and public decency were all areas of concern. The non-evangelical commentator Sydney Smith snorted that the concern was only with reforming the morals of the poor. Hannah More complained of the hypocrisy of imposing restrictions on the common people concerning pleasures happily continued in the houses of the nobility. In 1802 the Proclamation Society became the Society for the Suppression of Vice, and it remained the evangelical vanguard for campaigns on matters of indecency and obscene articles and publications.
[3] Robin Furneaux, William Wilberforce (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1974), pp. 33–34.
[4] Diary, 28 November 1785, quoted in Michael D. McMullen (ed.), William Wilberforce: His Unpublished Spiritual Journals (Fearn: Christian Focus, 2021), p. 58.
[5] Pitt to Wilberforce, 1785, private papers, quoted in William Hague, William Wilberforce: The Life of the Great Anti-Slave Trade Campaigner (London: Harper Press, 2007), p. 85.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Newton to Wilberforce, 12 September 1788, quoted in Hague, Wilberforce, p. 88.
[8] Diary, 28 October 1787, quoted in McMullen, Wilberforce, p. 83.
Wilberforce gathered around himself a wide group of evangelicals who supported and campaigned with him. This group of Christians prayed together, lived in the same immediate vicinity and worshipped together in the local church. Evangelicals in Parliament at this time were generally known as ‘saints’; the term ‘Clapham Sect’ actually derives from an article by Sir James Stephen (1789–1859) – son of the lawyer James Stephen (1758–1832), who was one of their number – in 1844. This group has a significant place in history and represents a central plank in not only the abolitionist campaigns but also those for moral improvement, philanthropy and the wider role of Christians in public life.
The origins of the group really lie with the Thornton family. John Thornton (1720–1790) was a wealthy merchant who converted to evangelicalism and inherited an estate on the southern side of Clapham Common. After his death, his youngest son – the convinced evangelical Henry Thornton (1760–1815) – purchased Battersea Rise House, on the western side of Clapham Common, while his brothers inherited the original nearby estate.
Henry Thornton consciously set out to provide the setting for a group of lay evangelical leaders for mutual encouragement and support in the aim of transforming society. He added two wings to the house (giving it a total of 34 bedrooms) and built a magnificent oval library as a meeting place for the Clapham group. He built more property on the site: houses which he let out to evangelical Members of Parliament. He secured the services of an evangelical cleric, John Venn, as the incumbent of Clapham Parish Church. Wilberforce moved into Battersea Rise House in 1792, and he remained there until his marriage to Barbara Spooner (1771–1847) in 1797, when they moved into another house on the estate. Other notable figures moved into Clapham as well: in 1797, the lawyer James Stephen (1758–1832), and in 1802, Lord Teignmouth (1751–1834) and Zachary Macaulay (1768–1838). Charles Grant (1746–1823), chairman of the East India Company, lived nearby. Others visited: Granville Sharp (1735–1813), Isaac Milner (1750–1820), Charles Simeon (1759–1836), and the above-mentioned Hannah More and John Newton. The core residents worshipped together in the parish church and were in daily contact.
They were primarily a lay group. They all brought a variety of gifts, skills and commitments to the table. Stephen was a lawyer, Grant an administrator, Thornton a banker and Wilberforce an eloquent speaker. All these skills would be brought to the fore as the campaign against the slave trade developed. Thornton gave away in the region of 90% of his income while single and 33% even when he had a family to support. Grant, Stephen, Thornton, Wilberforce and Thomas Babington (1758–1837), among others, were all Members of Parliament.
Significantly, they also worked with others, especially in relation to abolition, and several had close ties to the Quakers, who were leaders and early pioneers in the abolitionist movement. Members of the group were also the instigators of a wider variety of Christian voluntary societies and other initiatives, including the Church Missionary Society, founded in 1799, and a newspaper, the Christian Observer, first published in 1802.
Clapham was an evangelical centre. However, from around 1808 the residents, Wilberforce included, began to move elsewhere. Rather than a model to be copied, Clapham represented an important landmark, gathering point and support network for the early evangelicals in Parliament, giving birth to societies, campaigns and a newspaper – and, of course, forming the centre of the campaign against the slave trade.
Wilberforce was not a great intellectual, but he was a persuasive speaker and communicator. He wanted to set out his Christian beliefs and he did so in an extraordinarily influential treatise, first published in 1797. The book is generally known as A Practical View, which is unsurprising given the full title: A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians in the Higher and Middle Classes in this Country Contrasted with Real Christianity. The book is, as the full title reveals, something of a child of its age and in places is turgid and repetitive. The publisher was cautious: religious books seldom sold well, some of Wilberforce’s own friends advised against publishing, and little demand was anticipated. Wilberforce, though, did have national standing and the publisher risked 500 copies on the first run. They sold out within five days. Within six months, 7,500 copies had been sold; the book was a sensation and went through 15 editions in Britain during Wilberforce’s lifetime, becoming a bestseller.
Wilberforce made clear in the introduction that the book was not aimed at the sceptic but the nominal Christian. He argued that Christianity had become a faith of a vague assent to certain beliefs and generally moderate behaviour compared to others. Nothing he argued could be further from the particulars and specifics of what he termed ‘real Christianity’. He complained, for example, that many Christians saw vice as accidental rather than habitual – temporary rather than constitutionally engrained. To Wilberforce, the Christian faith had to be an all-consuming passion, dictating the whole of life and not restricted to either good works or Sunday duty. Consider just one illustrative quote:
How dexterously do they avail themselves of any plausible plea for introducing some week-day employment into the Sunday, whilst they have not the same propensity to introduce any of the Sunday’s peculiar employment into the rest of the week.[9]
His book was received with acclaim by his friends, the Christian public and, indeed, wider society.
[9] William Wilberforce, A Practical View (London: Cadell & Davies, 1798), Chapter IV, section II, p. 207.
The question of the slave trade and its abolition is a fascinating aspect of English history and one particular place where the general history of the nation intersects directly with the history of Christianity. We must ask honest questions. Opinion was divided.
Did the slave trade fail because of economic necessity or moral and ideological conviction? If the latter, were evangelicals at the heart of the matter or simply one part of a complex mosaic of religion and enlightenment rationality? There was also the issue of whether the conversion of slaves was more important to evangelicals than the abolition of slavery, though that may be a red herring.
There was undoubtedly a range of pressures upon slavery. However, central among these were the activities of the Clapham Sect, gathered around Wilberforce, who was the leading parliamentary agitator. Evangelicals were neither the first nor the only participants in the abolitionist movement, but they were central in this campaign to change public opinion, through petitions, publications and meetings in chapels. The evil trade was seen increasingly as a moral affront to God. Pragmatically, the campaigners aimed in the first instance at the trade in slaves rather than the institution itself – that came later.
The trade in slaves, long established, was regarded by the few who troubled to think about such things, as an unavoidable evil. This changed towards the end of the eighteenth century, for a variety of reasons, as, encouraged by the abolitionist campaign, the sense of revulsion grew. The slave trade had developed from the middle of the fifteenth century. After the first Europeans reached the Americas, vast agricultural and commercial opportunities were opened up and these led to the development of the triangular slave trade, which satisfied a craving for cheap labour in order to secure commercial advantage. The Old World and the New World became inextricably linked via Africa. In Britain it was the ports on the Atlantic west coast which were the focus of the slave trade, principally Bristol and Liverpool, which became heavily dependent on these activities. In the 1740s some 200,000 slaves were transported on British ships; at least double that number in the 1780s.
Some 85% of British textiles were exported to Africa as a crucial component of the slave trade. In 1783 Pitt estimated that 80% of British overseas income derived from the trade. Because it was triangular and hence (at least to an extent) largely hidden, few slaves ever appeared in Bristol or Liverpool. Rather, goods such as textiles and rum were taken by ship from those cities to West Africa, where they were traded in exchange for slaves, who were then transported in horrendous conditions on the Middle Passage to the West Indies and the southern part of North America. Here they were sold to work on the plantations, and raw materials and other goods, such as sugar, cotton and tobacco, were purchased and brought back to Britain.
To begin with, the captains of the slaving ships would sail along the West African coast for several weeks acquiring their human cargo as they went. However, this ad hoc approach to obtaining slaves was inefficient and was soon replaced by systems of agents and factories, where slaves could be gathered together in one place awaiting the arrival of a ship.
It was primarily the conditions of the Middle Passage, rather than those on the plantations themselves, which provided the fuel for the abolitionist campaign. When the human cargo was loaded, the slaves were often hysterical with terror. They were subjected to medical examination, and the old, the sickly and those with deformities were discarded and often killed.
Those who survived this process were branded with the owner’s mark and often flogged to force them onto the ship. They were crammed into the hold and kept chained in a space smaller than a coffin. Somewhere between 350 and 600 slaves were carried per ship. The more tightly packed, the greater the opportunity for profit even if there were losses, and considerable losses there were indeed. Foul conditions meant slaves often lay in their own filth for weeks on end. The mentally unwell and the dead were thrown overboard for the sharks. Disease was rife: smallpox, malaria, yellow fever. The average length of the journey on the Middle Passage was around 100 days. Sexual exploitation was also the norm, the crew taking their pick of the enslaved women. One slaver wrote, ‘Once off the coast the ship became half bedlam and half brothel.’[10] Olaudah Equiano (c. 1745–1797), one of the few slaves who ended up in Europe, became a free man in around 1766. In 1789 he wrote his autobiographical An Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, African. In it he noted:
The stench of the hold, while we were on the coast, was so intolerably loathsome, that it was dangerous to remain there for any time … now that the whole ship’s cargo were confined together, it became absolutely pestilential … the air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died … The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered it a scene of horror almost inconceivable.[11]
Before sale, the enslaved were fed quantities of food to ‘fatten’ them and had oil applied to their bodies. Once sold, they were ‘seasoned’ for up to a year to prepare them for a life of subjection and loss of liberty.
In terms of the abolitionist campaign, there were intellectual objections to slavery, but these did not originate with evangelicals. Instead they came from philosophers reflecting on ‘the rights of man’ in the light of the American and French revolutions – essentially, the philosophers of the Enlightenment. Others objected from a more Christian perspective. The moral philosopher Adam Smith (1723–1790) and the theologian William Paley (1743–1805) were among those who opposed slavery. By 1774, John Wesley (1703–1791) was railing against the trade in human beings:
Liberty is the right of every human creature, as soon as he breathes the vital air. And no human law can deprive him of that right, which he derives from the law of nature.[12]
Here, Wesley appeals to an innate dignity based on natural law – the natural law of God.
It was, however, the Quakers who led the way in setting out the Christian case against slavery and the slave trade, bringing to bear an influence far beyond their numbers. This was partly because they had among them highly active and respected individuals and partly because they were a well-connected transatlantic community. The Quakers as a body included many influential traders and merchants. George Fox (1624–1691), the Quaker founder, had spoken against slavery as early as 1671. In 1754, the Society of Friends in Philadelphia concluded that:
to live in ease and plenty by the toil of those who violence and cruelty have put in our power is neither consistent with Christianity or common justice.[13]
The Philadelphia Quaker Anthony Benezet (1713–1784) published an anti-slavery tract in 1760 titled Observations on the Inslaving, Importing, and Purchasing of Negroes. The London Society of Friends purchased 1,500 copies and distributed them to every member of both Houses of Parliament. The London Yearly Meeting (a Quaker group) in 1761 passed a resolution declaring the slave trade repugnant to Christianity.
In 1783 the Quakers formed a committee of six members, including two well-known banking names – Samuel Hoare (1751–1825) and John Lloyd (1775–1854) – ‘for the relief and liberation of the negro slaves in the West Indies and for the discouragement of the Slave Trade on the coast of Africa’.[14]
Very quickly indeed there was collaboration with Granville Sharp (1735–1813) and Thomas Clarkson (1760–1846), the former very close to the Clapham evangelicals, while the latter became a key ally of Wilberforce and was closely linked to both the Quakers and the Anglican evangelicals. The consequence was a coming together in May 1787 to form a Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade – the Abolition Society – under the chairmanship of Sharp, with Clarkson as secretary and nine of the twelve founders being Quakers. All that was needed was a parliamentary champion.
Before considering both the popular and Wilberforce’s parliamentary campaign, it is useful to reflect a little further on the manner and nature of the evangelical campaign now that the ‘saints’ were moving centre stage.
The above-mentioned John Newton, a former captain of slave-trading ships, became a public campaigner for the abolitionist movement when, in January 1788, he published his sensational and highly influential pamphlet Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade. There is no question that remorse was one of the motives behind the publication:
I hope it will always be a subject of humiliating reflection to me that I was once an active instrument in a business at which my heart now shudders.[15]
Newton’s testimony was vitally important in converting public opinion to the abolitionist cause. With his old shipboard diaries for the years 1750–1754 beside him, he described in horrendous detail the brutalising treatment and torture meted out to the hundreds of thousands or more slaves who were transported each year in English vessels, including the ones he captained: the Brownlow, the Duke of Argyle and the Africa.
In his autobiographical Authentic Narrative of Some Remarkable and Interesting Particulars, published in 1764, Newton had lamented the sins of his youth but not mentioned the slave trade. Many at this time, evangelicals included, had not considered the slave trade wrong. It was viewed by the faithful and wider society alike as morally unexceptional. In addition, Christians paid little attention to the matter. It was also profitable. However, some 25 years later, in his Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade, Newton described the trade as ‘a commerce, so iniquitous, so cruel, so oppressive, so destructive’.[16] In this work, published less than two months after Wilberforce’s announcement that he would take up the parliamentary mantel, Newton caught a moment. The Abolition Society purchased some 3,500 copies, distributing them to the members of both Houses of Parliament.
Hannah More (1745–1833) was born near Bristol and hence will have observed the British end of the slave trade and indeed the prosperity which it brought. Motivated also by her faith and links to the Clapham evangelicals, like Newton she was moved to campaign against the human evil of slavery. She too later regretted that she had not acted sooner. However, hot on the heels of Newton’s Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade, in 1788 she published Slavery: A Poem. In it she uses the techniques of poetry, rhyme and alliteration to convey her anti-slavery message. Here is one example:
Does then th’ immortal principle within
Change with the casual colour of a skin?[17]
William Cowper (1731–1800), friend of Newton, poet and hymn writer, also wrote against the slave trade. His poems were widely read. This literature was instrumental in mobilising evangelical opinion.
The close collaboration between religious groups around abolition was not restricted to the Anglican evangelicals and the Quakers. Baptists and Methodists were also heavily involved in the assault on the slave trade. The General Baptists were first out of the blocks, after the Quakers, and declared their support for abolition in 1787. The Calvinistic Baptists had preachers in Bristol – Caleb Evans (1737–1791) and Robert Hall (1764–1831) – writing to the press and raising funds for the abolitionist campaign. Other influential Baptist ministers in London and Cambridge also preached against the trade. Wesley, too, in 1788, preached an abolitionist sermon in Bristol. In Manchester, hundreds of Methodists signed the city’s great abolitionist petition ‘in the Chapel at the Communion Table, on the Lord’s Day’.[18] Samuel Bradburn (1751–1816), a Methodist preacher, exhorted his readers in a powerful address on the slave trade to petition Parliament, pray for abolition and boycott West Indian sugar.
The movement was a popular one, bringing evangelicals, other Christians and a wider moral concern together. The above-mentioned Thomas Clarkson travelled 35,000 miles between 1787 and 1794, setting up branches of the Abolition Society, orchestrating petitions, gathering evidence and publishing testimony. In 1789 over 100 petitions were sent to Parliament; in 1792 over 500. By this time at least 300,000 Britons had stopped consuming sugar and rum. The churches were central. Petitions, meetings, sermons and boycotts: these were the staple diet of the popular campaign. There was also a medallion, produced by the potter Josiah Wedgwood (1730–1795), with a kneeling slave in chains and the inscription ‘Am I not a man and a brother’. Wedgewood was a member of the Abolition Society, though a Unitarian.
From the foundation of the Abolition Society in 1787, things began to move quickly. The publications of Cowper, Equiano, More, Newton and others were making a real impact. In the three years prior to October 1787, only four items appeared in The Times relating to abolition. In the 15 months following, 136 such items appeared. With the popular campaign gaining strength, what was now needed was a worthy advocate in Parliament.
In autumn 1786, Wilberforce had been urged during a stay with Sir Charles Middleton (1726–1813) – a Tory MP, admired naval commander and abolitionist – to take up the mantle. By late 1786, Wilberforce was seeking to educate himself around the issues of slavery. Then, early in 1787, Clarkson called on Wilberforce in the first meeting between the two men. The final piece in this bit of the jigsaw was when, at a dinner in March 1787, Clarkson, Middleton and others formally asked Wilberforce to act and, in the absence of any better alternatives, Wilberforce agreed.
Wilberforce could not have known at this point of the years of toil ahead; indeed, he seems to have thought a quick success likely. An early decision was that the parliamentary campaign would seek the abolition of the trade in slaves rather than slavery itself, as a more achievable objective.
On 11 February 1788 the king directed that a Committee of the Privy Council should investigate the African slave trade. Wilberforce summoned Clarkson to London to help prepare the abolitionists’ case. It was soon clear that many vested interests were arranged against them and there was a dearth of witnesses willing to testify in the cause of abolition. Rather, witnesses claimed that the trade was a blessing, and that those slaves who ended up in the West Indies were doubly fortunate in being alive and removed to a better life. Some denied outright that kidnappings took place, claiming there was great happiness on the journey which constituted the Middle Passage. It was clear, even at this early stage in the inquiry, that the matter would need Parliament’s direct attention. Pitt announced in May 1788 that there would be a debate in the following session of Parliament, and subsequently set a date of 12 May 1789.
Prior to that debate, a Bill limiting the number of slaves that could be carried was successfully moved in the Commons but heavily amended in the Lords. It was simply an early skirmish. In the first months of 1789, Wilberforce, now assisted by the lawyer James Stephen, continued to amass evidence.
The Committee of the Privy Council which was commissioned to investigate the slave trade presented its report shortly before the 12 May debate. The arguments of the proponents of the trade were essentially, first, that life in Africa was terrible and slaves were grateful to be rescued; second, that slaves were well treated on the Middle Passage; and third, that the loss of labour without slavery would destroy the commercial position of the colonies and the nation as a whole. To give just one example from the evidence to the committee, Vice-Admiral Edwards, a former naval commander, gave evidence that
he knows of no instance of the slaves being ill-treated on Board … [and] the Negroes usually appeared cheerful and singing.[19]
In many ways, bringing the evidence together in one place helped the overall cause of abolition, although Clarkson had to work hard to put witnesses and evidence together. Despite everything, the report did leave the general impression that there were vile conditions on many, even if not all, slave-trading ships, and that there was extensive use of kidnapping and warfare as methods of securing slaves.
John Newton was, of course, a key witness before this committee – and, indeed, at roughly the same time as his Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade was published and circulated. Newton affirmed that kidnapping and warfare between tribes and nations were key means of securing slaves for onward sale to the traders. Clarkson brought other witnesses before the committee too.
Clarkson himself also gave evidence. He had spent at least two months in Liverpool and a further two in Bristol investigating the slave trade. He concentrated on two things: first, the quality of the produce available from Africa itself, which rendered the use of slaves to produce the same in the West Indies unnecessary, and second, the conditions faced by the crews of the slave-trading ships. He reported findings from investigating 88 ships which had returned to Liverpool and around 24 ships to Bristol in 1786 and 1787. It was a subtle approach. Direct trade with Africa would improve conditions on the African coast and it was not only slaves who suffered but also the crews. Clarkson was playing the long game.
On the day of the debate, 12 May 1789, the well-organised opponents of abolition delivered petitions from Bristol and Liverpool warning of the ruin of thousands and the loss of employment. Petitioners from Birmingham joined in as manufacturers of the goods exported to Africa; thousands were employed in these industries, other markets were not available, and the abolition of the trade would hand these markets over to the Dutch, French and Spanish.
Wilberforce had been unwell. He said that he had not prepared his speech, or even gone over all aspects of the matter, though he was well acquainted with the subject. Yet, with divine grace as he saw it, he was able to speak to the House of Commons for three and a half hours – a length neither unusual nor considered inappropriate at the time. Wilberforce was a natural, fluent and eloquent speaker. He had assiduously worked the committees and procedures of Parliament and was at ease with both the processes and the use of oratory. He relied primarily upon the testimony of others and, he argued, if this case was not fully presented and fully explained upon the floor of the House, many members would never hear the case; they would not read the material from either side.
Modern writer William Hague summarises Wilberforce’s impact:
Wilberforce would cast off his physical fragility that afternoon to deliver a speech which, even set against the centuries of debates in the House of Commons, stands out as one of the true masterpieces of parliamentary oratory.[20]
Appeals to Christian morality were very unlikely to work. Rather, Wilberforce needed to persuade the House that the abolition of the slave trade was not merely desirable but consistent with the interests of a commercial, trading, seafaring nation and empire.
His opening was disarming, referring to the magnitude of the task and his own inadequacy. He asked only for cool and impartial reason to be displayed, promising in a rather powerful paragraph that he would resist accusing others of guilt:
I mean not to accuse any one, but to take the shame upon myself, in common, indeed, with the whole parliament of Great Britain, for having suffered this horrid trade to be carried on under their authority. We are all guilty – we ought all to plead guilty, and not to exculpate ourselves by throwing the blame on others.[21]
He went through the leading features of the slave trade: in Africa many innocents were condemned into slavery, and wars were instigated and fought in order to gain slaves to sell to the traders. He deferred to the authoritative judgement of his fellow MPs and then turned to describe the Middle Passage:
This I confess, in my opinion, is the most wretched part of the whole subject. So much misery condensed in so little room, is more than the human imagination had ever before conceived.[22]
As to the singing and dancing of the slaves referred to by some witnesses to the committee, this, said Wilberforce, was only under the threat or actual use of the whip. He also added some explicitly Christian observations:
How strange it was that providence, however mysterious in its ways should so have constituted the world, as to make one part of it depend for its existence on the depopulation and devastation of another. I could not therefore, help distrusting the arguments of those, who insisted that the plundering of Africa was necessary for the cultivation of the West-Indies. I could not believe that the same Being who forbids rapine and bloodshed, had made rapine and bloodshed necessary to the well-being of any part of his universe.[23]
He sought to reassure the planters: they had nothing to fear from abolition as the population in North America was now growing and further importation of slaves was not necessary. He referred to Clarkson’s statistics on the losses among the crew, and appealed to the ideal of an honourable trade in natural products replacing the slave trade. He also appealed to justice, to international leadership and to the idea of free trade upon true commercial principles. He presented a choice to the House:
The nature and all the circumstances of this trade are now laid open to us; we can no longer plead ignorance, we cannot evade it, it is now an object placed before us, we cannot pass it; we may spurn it, we may kick it out of our way, but we cannot turn aside so as to avoid seeing it; for it is brought now so directly before our eyes, that this House must decide.[24]
Wilberforce then set out 12 statements to the House concerning the slave trade and invited the MPs to agree. These resolutions described the kidnappings, war and deaths that were occurring; the evils of transportation; and the possibility of honourable alternative trades. He avowed his end to be the total abolition of the slave trade. He was followed immediately after his speech by the two members for Liverpool, who forecast ruin and destruction. The battle was just beginning.
Biographer Robin Furneaux describes Wilberforce’s speech as ‘a rousing patriotic oration’ and ‘a polished and masterful performance’.[25] Hague describes it as ‘a comprehensive statement of the arguments’.[26] At the time, statesman Edmund Burke (1729–1797) praised the speech as ‘masterly, impressive and eloquent’,[27] and declared that it contained principles so admirable that he had never heard the like in modern oratory. The Speaker of the House praised Wilberforce, as did Pitt.
The pro-slavery forces had been thrown off balance by the tone of the Privy Council report and by Wilberforce’s speech. Now, late into the evening, the House adjourned debate until 21 May. Wilberforce’s opponents took the opportunity to regroup, realising that they would not be able to defeat his motions in a straight vote. On the resumption on 21 May, member after member rose to argue that the Privy Council report was inadequate and the House must hear its own evidence. Pitt was frustrated and Wilberforce agreed to a delay (potentially misplaying his hand). And so the long journey through Parliament began. Even if he had won the vote, Wilberforce himself subsequently pointed out that abolition would still have required an Act of Parliament. In reality, abolition was not going to happen quickly.
Parliament resumed hearing evidence later in 1789 and the process continued until April 1790. Wilberforce remained ever vigilant during this period, with his life full of political activity. Clarkson was constantly alongside him, analysing, checking and exposing their opponents’ evidence. Sometimes Clarkson was despatched on long journeys to investigate or clear up a particular piece of vital evidence. In one instance he boarded 320 ships and interviewed 3,000 seamen in order to track down a single witness. Wilberforce described his own house – in Palace Yard, Westminster (he had not yet moved to Clapham at this point) – as a hotel.[28] Pitt dined there regularly; the Abolition Society, Clarkson and others worked on the campaign; and constituents, petitioners, missionaries and preachers all crowded into his house from early morning onwards. The presentation of more evidence, the continuing distribution of pamphlets and poems across the country, and the impact of Clarkson’s circulation of a drawing of the slave ship Brookes all led the abolitionists to think that, once again, the tide was turning their way.
On 18 April 1791, Wilberforce moved in the House of Commons a motion for the abolition of the slave trade. This time he spoke for four hours. He sought to show how the evidence presented to Parliament supported the claims he had been making. Of course, even more evidence had now been amassed. The anti-abolitionists largely dropped their claims that the trade was humane and argued instead for its expediency. Wilberforce dealt with the arguments of commercial ruin faced by the planters and the ‘nursery for seamen’ argument (that the trade trained up seamen for war), as well as presenting the moral arguments for abolition. Pitt and the Whig statesman Charles James Fox (1749–1806) both spoke in support. However, as Furneaux comments:
Wilberforce’s speech was a powerful indictment of the Trade and many of his arguments were unanswerable; this did not, of course, prevent them from being answered.[29]
The opponents rehearsed their arguments. Delay had given them momentum. The new MP for Liverpool, Colonel Banastre Tarleton (1754–1833), claimed that at least 5,500 seamen depended on the trade. Other speakers, while accepting that the trade had undesirable aspects, asserted that abolition was not in the national interest. Wilberforce, deep down, knew he would not carry the day. He closed his speech with:
Never, never, will we desist till we have wiped away this scandal from the Christian name, released ourselves from the load of guilt, under which we at present labour, and extinguished every trace of this bloody traffic, of which our prosperity, looking back to the history of these enlightened times, will scarce believe that it has been suffered to exist so long a disgrace and dishonour to this country.[30]
The House was divided. Wilberforce was defeated by nearly two to one: 88 votes for abolition, 163 against.
Wilberforce reiterated that he would never abandon his work and that he was confident the slave trade would ultimately be abolished by the people of Great Britain. He cannot have known that abolition still lay some 16 years ahead.
The defenders of the slave trade celebrated Wilberforce’s defeat. In Bristol church bells were rung, bonfires lit and a half-day holiday declared. It seemed like four years of toil for nothing. Yet, this was not the case. The marshalling of the evidence, the changing moral mood in the nation and the increasing strength of the campaign across the country all played to the strengths of the abolitionists. The argument from the pro-slave-trade side was now increasingly reliant on the claim that the time was not right for abolition, rather than the idea that the trade was moral and humane. This probably meant that the moral arguments of the abolitionists would eventually win the day.
Petitions began to flow in. Some 500,000 people signed one petition or another out of a population of some 8 million, meaning that one in sixteen appended their signature. There was renewed hope. William Grenville (1759–1834), a noted abolitionist, became Pitt’s foreign secretary in 1791.
There was now pressure on Wilberforce not to bring forward his motion again. Pitt himself thought it could not proceed. But Wilberforce pressed on with his abolition motion, on 2 April 1792. Here he linked faith and liberty, the latter springing from the divine essence. It was, once again, a masterful speech. In the early hours of 3 April, Pitt rose in support of Wilberforce. In a marvellous piece of oratory, Pitt set forth a vision of a free, prosperous and trading Africa, arguing that Britain had a responsibility to ensure the continent could enjoy the same freedoms and opportunities that Britons did.
Tactics set in again. Pitt’s tacticians moved an amendment to insert the word ‘gradually’ into Wilberforce’s abolition motion. The amended motion passed the Commons by 230 votes to 85 – the Commons for the first time voting for abolition – but it was bittersweet, and Wilberforce described himself as hurt and humiliated while being congratulated from all sides of the House.[31] He resolved that ‘gradual’ must be as quick as possible, but in the event ‘gradual’ was to mean ‘very gradual’. He later described this word as a cloak under which the defenders of the trade hid.[32] The government proposed abolition of the slave trade from 1 January 1800. Wilberforce opposed this and managed to get the date changed to 1 January 1796, which he thought a good achievement, though one of his bishop supporters did not as he feared it would lead to the loss of the entire Bill. There was a further problem: the House of Lords, which forced a delay by demanding that they hear evidence directly at the bar of their own House.
It was around now that the Clapham group came together. In 1793, Wilberforce’s motion to effectively renew the 1796 abolition date was defeated in the Commons by 61 votes to 53. He tried to bring in alternative Bills but was defeated either in the Commons or in the Lords. His motion for abolition in 1795 also failed. Pitt was distracted by war with France.
Thomas Clarkson, exhausted by the campaign, retired from public life. The ‘saints’ gathering at Clapham now brought some resilience to the campaign. As modern writer John Wolffe has noted, their campaign against the slave trade ‘exploited their respective talents: Wilberforce’s parliamentary eloquence, Stephen’s legal acumen, Thornton’s business skill, and Macaulay’s capacity for gathering and ordering evidence’.[33]
Yet they had to be patient and tenacious. Wilberforce brought abolition Bills to Parliament year after year between 1794 and 1799 only to see them rejected. The Lords remained opposed and now Pitt and his administration had become somewhat less sympathetic. Wilberforce did not bring abolition Bills between 1800 and 1803 and the Abolition Society ceased to meet.
The ‘saints’ had not given up. In May 1804, the Abolition Society met for the first time since 1797. The attendees consisted of Wilberforce and Sharp with eight other evangelicals and Quakers, including Stephen and Macaulay, and Clarkson (who emerged from retirement). The Anglican evangelicals assumed a more dominant role and, in truth, they were probably better placed than the Quakers to drive abolition through Parliament. The addition of Irish members to the Commons was helpful to Wilberforce. These members helped a Bill through in 1804, but it lapsed before it could reach the Lords, who remained unlikely to pass it in any event. Appeals were made again to the public. Clarkson set off on the road once more in search of evidence, and in 1805 Macaulay issued a pamphlet, The Horrors of Slavery. However, Wilberforce and Clarkson were both pragmatists and wanted to keep the focus on the slave trade, rather than slavery itself, as a more achievable target.
Stephen came up with a new tactic: the ingenious idea of introducing abolition by stealth and perhaps gaining government support. His plan was to move against foreign ships which sailed under neutral flags, arguing that the flags of neutral nations lent support to Britain’s enemies in the Napoleonic Wars, especially France and Spain. The hidden genius in the scheme was that it would also debilitate much of the trade in slaves. If Britain’s navy moved against French, Spanish and neutral shipping, then a significant proportion of the slave trade would be disrupted as all three of these methods were used to transport slaves, including some British slaves. With Pitt’s death in 1806, there was a new ministry, known as the ‘Ministry of All the Talents’, under Grenville and Fox, both committed abolitionists. The government agreed to introduce the Slave Importation Bill. The abolitionists simply treated the Bill as a piece of ordinary government business. In May 1806 it passed into law, removing up to 75% of the slave trade.
The abolitionists now resurfaced and went for the kill. The tide was turning. They announced their intention of introducing an abolition Bill. Pamphlets flowed again from the pens of evangelical abolitionists, who now sounded ever more loudly the idea of divine judgement upon the nation. Sharp referred to hurricanes over the Caribbean plantations as judgements from God. Stephen, too, referred to the threat from France as a sign of divine anger against Britain for its involvement in the slave trade. France’s own punishment had been the revolution. A government motion in the remaining days of the 1806 session – which stated, ‘This House … will, with all practical expedition, proceed to take effectual measures for abolishing the said trade’ – passed 114 votes to 15 in the Commons and 41 votes to 21 in the Lords. Wilberforce put forward an address to the king calling for general abolition, which was carried without a division.
In 1807 Wilberforce published his Letter on the Slave Trade, summarising his arguments of 20 years:
Providence governs the world. But if we are not blind to the course of human events, as well as utterly deaf to the plain instructions of Revelation, we must believe that a continued course of wickedness, oppression, and cruelty, obstinately maintained in spite of the fullest knowledge and the loudest warnings, must infallibly bring down upon us the heaviest judgements of the Almighty.[34]
Grenville himself introduced the abolition Bill in the Lords. Wilberforce listened in the gallery. Grenville paid effusive tribute to Wilberforce:
I cannot conceive any consciousness more truly gratifying than must be enjoyed by that person, on finding a measure to which he has devoted the colour of his life, carried into effect – a measure so truly benevolent, so admirably conducive to the virtuous prosperity of his country, and the welfare of mankind – a measure which will diffuse happiness amongst millions, now in existence and for which his memory will be blessed by millions as yet unborn.[35]
The die was cast. The last bastion would fall. Grenville thought he had enough votes: 56 he reckoned, or perhaps 70, and in the event the Lords carried the abolition Bill by 100 votes to 34. In the Commons, there was now a sense of inevitability. At one point the solicitor general, Sir Samuel Romilly (1757–1818), contrasted Napoleon and his responsibility for so much bloodshed with Wilberforce, responsible for the continued life of so many of his fellow beings. The House erupted in applause and cheering while Wilberforce sat, head in his hands, tears streaming down his face.
Wilberforce summed up in debate, closing with the plea that Parliament
must shew to the people, that their legislators … were forward to assert the rights of the weak against the strong; to vindicate the cause of the oppressed; and that where a practice was found to prevail, inconsistent with humanity and justice, no consideration of profit could reconcile them to its continuance.[36]
The triumph was overwhelming. The vote passed by 283 to 16.
They were nearly there but not quite. Some sought to move rapidly against slavery itself, but Wilberforce counselled caution. The abolition Bill still faced amendments to iron out inconsistencies, and there was a potentially dangerous moment when the government fell from power over Catholic emancipation, which was supported by Grenville but not the king. But there was no going back for any reason and no real threat from the new administration. On 24 March 1807, William Grenville, on his last day as prime minister, obtained the consent of George III for the abolition Bill. At noon on Wednesday 25 March 1807, the Speaker of the House of Commons announced the enactment of the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. From 1 May that year, its provisions would take effect. The trade which had taken millions of Africans to the colonies of the British Empire was now outside the law.
The 1807 Act was a stunning achievement for the abolitionists, but it was, of course, far from the end of the story. Illegal slave trading and enduring exploitation of slaves continued apace. It was not until 1833 that Parliament legislated to emancipate 800,000 slaves. This was just three days after Wilberforce’s death, but he had lived to hear of the likely passage of the Bill.
[10] Captain Drake of the Gloria, quoted in Furneaux, Wilberforce, p. 62.
[11] Olaudah Equiano, An Interesting Narrative, quoted in Hague, Wilberforce, p. 125.
[12] John Wesley, Thoughts upon Slavery, quoted in Hague, Wilberforce, p. 131.
[13] Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Epistle of Caution and Advice (1754). Online at https://digitalcollections.tricolib.brynmawr.edu/object/hc135442
[14] Furneaux, Wilberforce, p. 69.
[15] John Newton, Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade (London: Buckland & Johnson, 1788), p. 2.
[16] Newton, Thoughts, p. 41.
[17] Hannah More, Slavery: A Poem (London: Cadell, 1788), lines 63–64.
[18] Samuel Bradburn, quoted in John Coffey, ‘Evangelicals, Slavery & the Slave Trade: From Whitefield to Wilberforce’, in Anvil, vol 24, number 2 (2007), p. 109.
[19] Report of the Lords of the Committee of Council Appointed for the Consideration of All Matters Relating to Trade and Foreign Plantations (London, 1789), part II.
[20] Hague, Wilberforce, p. 178.
[21] Wilberforce, speech, 12 May 1789, quoted in Hague, Wilberforce, p. 179.
[22] Ibid.
[23] Wilberforce, speech, 12 May 1789, quoted in Hague, Wilberforce, p. 181.
[24] Ibid., p. 183.
[25] Furneaux, Wilberforce, p. 88.
[26] Hague, Wilberforce, p. 184.
[27] Quoted in Furneaux, Wilberforce, p. 90.
[28] Furneaux, p. 94.
[29] Furneaux, Wilberforce, p. 101.
[30] Wilberforce, speech, 18 April 1791, quoted in Hague, Wilberforce, p. 198.
[31] Quoted in Hague, Wilberforce, p. 235.
[32] Ibid.
[33] John Wolffe, quoted in Coffey, ‘Evangelicals, Slavery & the Slave Trade’, p. 113.
[34] Quoted in Hague, Wilberforce, p. 352.
[35] Lord Grenville, Slave Trade Abolition Bill, Hansard, col 664 (5 February 1807).
[36] William Wilberforce, Slave Trade Abolition Bill, Hansard, col. 994 (23 February 1807).
Wilberforce was never very healthy. He married Barbara Spooner in May 1797 after a whirlwind romance. His friends were alarmed but the couple had 35 years of deeply happy marriage and six children. The Clapham group largely disbanded in the period after 1807 and in 1813 Sharp died, followed two years later by Thornton. Wilberforce handed over the leadership of the anti-slavery movement to the evangelical Quaker and MP Thomas Fowell Buxton (1786–1845). He retired from Parliament in 1825 and died on 29 July 1833.
How might we assess Wilberforce, his work and his faith? He was a man of real depth of Christian faith and character, with a broad range of public, moral and Christian concerns. He was tenacious in his campaigning, his painstaking gathering of evidence and his parliamentary tactics. He deployed secular and Christian arguments and collaborated across many divides.
William Wilberforce was a giant on the British public stage without whom the slave trade would not have been abolished when it was. He was, under God, a great statesman.
