A Thought About the Perils of Post Hoc Explanations

Toward the end of his book, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves, Adam Hochschild describes books by Thomas Clarkson and by the two sons of William Wilberforce that give different views of the history of the campaign against the slave trade. Hochschild has written his book with still a different version of that history, and the movie Amazing Grace presents still a different version. Since Hochschild's book is primarily a story of the people who energized the movement, his comment would seem comparable to the demonstrations in fiction of different stories by different people such as The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell, The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford, or Akira Kurosawa's film Roshomon.

Why did Britain end slavery. It is certainly appropriate to credit the efforts of Clarkson and Wilberforce who not only worked very hard for a very long time to achieve that end, but also were very clever in the way in which they worked. Their credit should not detract from the credit of their inner circle who also worked very hard on the campaign, nor indeed the millions of people who joined the campaign and added their support.

There are two questions, however, that seem important. Would they have been able to succeed no matter how long, hard and smart they worked had the social and economic conditions not been propitious for their effort's success. Were those conditions so propitious that had Wilberforce and Clarkson not stepped forward, would others have done so in their place?

It is hard to imaging the abolition of the slave trade and of the slavery itself had there not been earlier The Enlightenment. So too, it seems as Hockschild has suggested, that the campaign would not have succeeded had it not been the age of revolution; indeed, the slave revolts which were themselves so important in the process must have been influenced by the revolutions in the United States and France. The Industrial Revolution and with it the exploitation of labor and the growth of industrial cities such as Manchester (a hotbed of anti-slavery sentiment) must have had its influence. Hockschild points out that the movement was lead by Quakers and that the Baptist and Methodist missions to the slaves were very influential. He also reports that the reform of Parliament that reduced the power of the landed classes and opened suffrage in Great Britain made it possible to pass the anti-slavery law at last.

I would suggest that there may have been physical reasons for the success. European troops died by the thousands when sent to put down slave revolts in the Caribbean, while the residents of the area who were in revolt had survived in that environment that had killed so many, and may have been more fit to continue surviving there. It is also not clear how much the improvement of transportation technology and the spread of sugar growing to other regions had diminished the economic importance of the British and French sugar and rum sources in the Caribbean.

Retrospectively trying to understand the web of causality involved in such a historical change that resulted from a historical process that lasted for decades is basically impossible, and it is not surprising that different historians offer different explanations stressing different factors to different degrees. Reading such histories can help to expand one's understanding of the possibilities, but is unlikely to reveal factual truth about the processes. You may find out who did what, but not how important the acts or actors really were, or the counterfactual alternatives, the "what if's".

Incidentally, slavery is one institutional system by which some people exploit the involuntary servitude of other people. Today we have a major problem of sexual trafficking, with an estimated 50,000 people trafficked into the United States each year in this process. Debt servitude still "enslaves" hundreds of millions of people in Asia and elsewhere. We still have to fight for human rights!