British Proslavery Arguments and the Bible, 1823–1833

When Britain's Anti-Slavery Society inaugurated its campaign for colonial slave emancipation in 1823, the British West Indian interest orchestrated a counter-campaign in defence of colonial slavery. Prevailing scholarly opinion holds that British proslavery agents did not use religious or scriptural arguments in their fight against emancipation. This article overturns that assumption by demonstrating that the Bible and Christianity were in fact central to British proslavery discourse: the West Indians and their agents mined both Old and New Testaments, reassembling exegeses on divine punishment, Hebrew servitude, Pauline teaching and social hierarchies into a proslavery iteration of Christianity which, they argued, removed the imperative to emancipate slaves on religious grounds.

[1]  D. Money,et al.  The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution , 2017 .

[2]  D. Davis,et al.  Christianity and Slavery in the British West Indies 1750-1865 , 2016 .

[3]  B. Wood.  The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race , 2014 .

[4]  P. Dumas.  Defending the slave trade and slavery in Britain in the Era of Abolition, 1783-1833 , 2013 .

[5]  Richard Watson.  Anecdotes of the life of Richard Watson Bishop of Landaff written by himself at different intervals and revised in 1814 , 2011 .

[6]  Heather Miyano Kopelson,et al.  The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600–2000 , 2009 .

[7]  D. Goldenberg.  The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam , 2009 .

[8]  Henry Nelson Coleridge.  Six Months in the West Indies , 2008 .

[9]  Richard Bickell.  The West Indies as They Are, or a Real Picture of Slavery, but More Particularly as It Exists in the Island of Jamaica: In Three Parts, With Notes , 2007 .

[10]  J. Noonan.  A Church That Can and Cannot Change: The Development of Catholic Moral Teaching , 2005 .

[11]  G. Postema.  Moral and political philosophy , 2002 .

[12]  P. Linebaugh.  The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern , 1997 .

[13]  Larry E. Tise.  Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701–1840 , 1987 .

[14]  B. Higman.  Main Currents in Caribbean Thought. The Historical Evolution of Caribbean Society in Its Ideological Aspects, 1492-1900 . By Gordon K. Lewis. (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983. Pp. x, 375. Notes. Index. $25.00) , 1985, The Americas.

[15]  Leland J. Bellot.  Evangelicals and the Defense of Slavery in Britain's Old Colonial Empire , 1971 .

[16]  L. Ragatz.  The fall of the planter class in the British Caribbean, 1763-1833 : a study in social and economic history , 1928 .

[17]  Joseph Mccabe.  Christianity and slavery , 1927 .

[18]  C. R. Williams.  A tour through the island of Jamaica , 1827 .