Bronwen Everill. Not Made by Slaves: Ethical Capitalism in the Age of Abolition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020. 328 pp. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-674-24098-8.
Reviewed by Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy (University of New Brunswick)
Published on H-Early-America (March, 2022)
Commissioned by Troy Bickham (Texas A&M University)
During the Covid pandemic, campaigns like #supportlocal and #buylocal have aimed to help independent businesses survive the lockdowns and mandates that have driven many consumers into the online aisles of big companies like Amazon. Campaigns to support small businesses are part of a much broader culture of ethical commerce that sees consumerism as a political act. We see this in efforts to buy fair-trade coffee, foods that are free of genetically modified organisms, sweatshop-free clothing, and cosmetics that are free from animal testing. In her book, Not Made by Slaves: Ethical Capitalism in the Age of Abolition, Bronwen Everill demonstrates that the contemporary emphasis on the social responsibility of the consumer to make ethical and moral choices has a historical legacy rooted in the abolitionist era, from 1770 to 1885.
Everill traces the development of what she calls “ethical capitalism” by examining how various businessmen (and to a lesser extent, businesswomen), merchants, and reformers envisioned a profitable economy of products “not made by slaves” (p. 24). The book begins in the late eighteenth century with the first phase of British abolition, when questions about labor, the global economy, and morality became increasingly relevant to abolitionists. Reformers responded to the political and moral demands of the antislavery movement, while convincing stakeholders that ethical commerce was in their best interest. They argued that capitalism and the market could be used to promote ethical consumerism and improve society. Instead of focusing their attention on changing the system from the outside, abolitionists and businessmen attempted to generate reform from within by using capitalism to reshape notions of “acceptable” global capitalism. Everill aligns her work with a field of scholarship that explores British abolitionism not in isolation from the rest of the Atlantic world, but as a distinctly Atlantic movement that involved individuals and groups in Africa, the Americas, and Europe. She argues that West Africa was a central part of the consumer revolution and that businesses in West Africa shaped broader arguments about ethical commerce. In making such an argument, she joins scholars who contest the dependency theory of Africa prevalent in traditional economic histories of the Afro-Atlantic world.
The first two chapters explore how abolitionists, traders, shopkeepers, and merchants defined ethical consumerism and the challenges they faced as they navigated commerce in the new abolitionist environment. Reformers who desired legitimate commerce faced the dilemma of how to stop the quotidian consumption of slave-produced products, which had long been part of British consumer practices. To solve this, abolitionists focused their attention on consumers, campaigning that they had not only power but also responsibility in the purchases they made. Boycotting and abstention campaigns were a significant part of reformers’ strategy to empower consumers to see themselves and their purchases as political. In doing so, the reformers made antislavery part of a consumer identity, one in which the increased prices of ethically produced goods might denote a consumer’s commitment to ethical commerce. Everill examines how reformers defined ethical commodities as well as their often conflicting visions of legitimate commerce, and the ways in which ethical consumers disagreed on what goods were ethical to sell.
The next three chapters turn attention toward the business side of ethical consumerism. Everill illustrates the challenges of counterfeiting, fraud, credit, and debt in legitimate commerce with Africa and how traders overcame these obstacles. In chapter 3, Everill explores reformist efforts to make antislavery fashionable by way of branding and labeling products as “not made by slaves.” However, with this strategy came fraudulent attempts to undermine and abuse ethical commerce by sticking a fraudulent free-produce label on slave-made products. “This was not just about protecting the consumer;” Everill explains, “it was about protecting the consumer from unintentionally harming the producer” (p. 106). In chapter 4, Everill examines abolitionist thoughts on credit. Abolitionists argued that credit was necessary to the growth of productivity and offered protection for existing African international markets. Liberal abolitionists, in contrast, argued that credit was responsible for expanding slavery in West Africa. But to make legitimate commerce work, businessmen became reliant on both issuing and receiving credit. As discussed in chapter 5, by the nineteenth century, certain firms, such as Macaulay & Babington, found themselves in serious debt and called on government intervention to protect profits. Abolitionist businessmen supported government intervention and subsidy because it meant that ethical commerce benefited from the same government supports as slavery-produced commerce. They also supported tariff-free trade and wanted governments to curb preferential tariffs that supported colonial goods. Abolitionists wanted a ban on the slave trade, and in the meantime, a government that would implement market policies to tip the scales in favor of so-called ethical commerce.
In the final two chapters, Everill examines the legacies of ethical capitalism in the postemancipation Caribbean and in the United States in the decades leading up to the Civil War. After British abolition in 1834, new concerns arose about the supply chains and questions of ethical labor in African and Indian production. Economic arguments against slavery became mainstream and the consumer practices of ethical capitalism shaped the conversations around who should benefit from emancipation. Everill explores the moral conundrums that Indian and Chinese indentured laborers and Liberated Africans posed to campaigns for free produce and demonstrates that merchants and consumers worked together to justify the exploitation of foreign workers.
It is perhaps in these final two chapters that the term “ethical capitalism” becomes most contradictory. Everill’s analysis reveals that the turn from slave-made products to “ethical commerce” often involved questionable ethics, as those involved in reforming the Atlantic consumer culture and economy put their own interests and profits before anything else. In the decades leading up to and in the aftermath of British abolition, merchants and consumers worked together to justify the exploitation of apprenticed Liberated Africans and indentured Indian and Chinese workers, arguing that indentureship and apprenticeship constituted valuable “training” for workers (p. 188). Britain’s new transoceanic relationship with Asian indentured labor revealed its continued desire for a racialized and coerced labor force. In this way, the emergence of ethical capitalism and reformers’ often conflicting and contradictory visions of legitimate commerce were reflective of the much broader contradictions and hypocrisies of the abolitionist movement.
Not Made by Slaves tells a complex story with many moving parts and players about the moral and political gymnastics abolitionists and reformers went through to encourage consumers, businessmen, and politicians to move from slave-made products to “free commerce.” The historical actors in Everill’s narrative are abolitionists and businessmen, and in particular, the Macaulay family. The lived experiences of consumers, the enslaved, Liberated Africans, and indentured laborers and the unique roles they played in agitating for a different world is, unfortunately, not foregrounded in Everill’s account. Stylistically, Everill has the tendency to frequently interrupt her analysis with quotations from other scholars, making this book somewhat cumbersome to read. Nevertheless, Not Made by Slaves makes an important contribution to the economic histories of abolition and histories of capitalism by revealing the challenges reformers faced in ending and replacing slavery.
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Citation:
Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy. Review of Everill, Bronwen, Not Made by Slaves: Ethical Capitalism in the Age of Abolition.
H-Early-America, H-Net Reviews.
March, 2022.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=56890
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