Eighteenth-century antislavery writers attacked the slave trade as
"barbaric traffic"--a practice that would corrupt the mien and
manners of Anglo-American culture to its core. Less concerned with
slavery than with the slave trade in and of itself, these writings
expressed a moral uncertainty about the nature of commercial
capitalism. This is the argument Philip Gould advances in "Barbaric
Traffic," A major work of cultural criticism, the book constitutes
a rethinking of the fundamental agenda of antislavery writing from
pre-revolutionary America to the end of the British and American
slave trades in 1808.
Studying the rhetoric of various antislavery genres--from
pamphlets, poetry, and novels to slave narratives and the
literature of disease--Gould exposes the close relation between
antislavery writings and commercial capitalism. By distinguishing
between good commerce, or the importing of commodities that refined
manners, and bad commerce, like the slave trade, the literature
offered both a critique and an outline of acceptable forms of
commercial capitalism. A challenge to the premise that objections
to the slave trade were rooted in modern laissez-faire capitalism,
Gould's work revises--and expands--our understanding of antislavery
literature as a form of cultural criticism in its own right.
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