Anti-Slavery
To read the history of the campaign against slavery is to be reminded at many levels of the present campaign for nuclear disarmament. Hind- sight makes the main difference, in that abolition seems now to have been inevitable, while disarma- ment usually appears as something desirable in theory but not part of the approaching future in practice. And there is the difference that all the marches and meetings have not yet thrown up single-minded leaders like Granville Sharp, Clark- son or Wilberforce, but only brought forward faces already familiar from other causes. But the parallels lie in comparing the way in which on both occasions the moral rage of a religious few has spread out to infect a mass of ordinary people who do not always believe the religious premises of the leadership, but who will accompany it to its ends. The Anti-Slavery Society was the first of the non-political leagues, or moral lobbies, which have played the initiating part in so much of sub- sequent British politics.
- Mr. Sherrard's short history of slavery and its abolition recalls that the campaign against slavery, like its modern counterpart, had to face the question of whether to go straight for total and immediate abolition, or whether to endanger its sense of direction a little by concentrating at first upon nearer and subordinate goals. In 1787, the joint anti-slavery committee, composed of Clarkson and Sharp and a group of Quakers, de- cided, against the appeals of Sharp, to work for the abolition of the slave trade and to leave the institution of slavery alone for the moment. This, Mr. Sherrard believes, was a bad mistake : once the trade had gone, the public and the politicians relapsed into a relieved feeling that the issue of slavery had now been dealt with. Emancipation had to wait for another twenty-six years.
This book deals excellently with many aspects of slavery and the campaign against it, ending with a warning that slavery still exists as a disease endemic to human society. But it is not long enough. The space of 200 pages is too short to discuss both the whole history of slavery from the ancient world through the Spanish system to Saudi Arabia, and the detailed politics of the movement for emancipation in England. Either of these subjects demands really close treatment, although it is a fine tribute to the bicentenary of Wilberforce's birth to try to combine them.
NEAL ASCHERSON
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