Not Made By Slaves

What if the moral problems of global capitalism - problems like slavery - could be solved by global capitalism? What if all it took was convincing consumers that buying ethical goods was good for their bottom line? These were the questions that anti-slavery business owners set out to answer at the end of the eighteenth century.

Not Made By Slaves argues that idea that consumers are ultimately responsible for capitalism’s ethics —and that consumers will only respond to self-interest — was the result of the businesses that tried to make the end of slavery profitable across the 19th century.

Read more at the Harvard University Press Blog: Shopping for Racial Justice, Then and Now

‘Impressive...[Readers] will be rewarded with greater understanding of historical developments that changed the relationship between consumers and producers in a global economy in ways that reverberate to this day.’ —Wall Street Journal

‘Everill repositions West Africa as central to the broader Atlantic story of 18th and 19th century economic morality, its relationship with commercial ethics, and the expansion of capitalism.’ —Financial Times

‘Offers a penetrating new perspective on abolition in the British Empire by spotlighting a particular cast of characters: the commercial abolitionists in West Africa who fashioned a consumer-focused, business-friendly antislavery ethics. These figures sought to prove the moral and economic superiority of non-slave labor while profiting from the transition away from slavery...Impressive.’ —Jacobin

“Historians usually situate studies of slavery and abolition within primarily British or American intellectual contexts, but Everill makes plain that ‘Western’ economics were unavoidably entangled with West African ideals.’ —London Review of Books