¹ John Seed, ‘“A set of men powerful enough in many things”: Rational Dissent and political opposition in England, 1770–1790’, in Knud Haakonssen, ed., Enlightenment and religion: Rational Dissent in eighteenth-century Britain (Cambridge, 1996), p. 141; Rational Dissenters are frequently mentioned in Roy Porter's Enlightenment: Britain and the creation of the modern world (London, 2000).

² The classic interpretation of anti-slavery as a cause promoted by middle-class capitalists is Eric Williams, Capitalism and slavery (Chapel Hill, NC, 1944); for a depiction of Rational Dissenters as ‘bourgeois radicals’, see Isaac Kramnick, Republicanism and bourgeois radicalism: political ideology in late eighteenth-century England and America (Ithaca, NY, 1990).

³ There is no discussion of Unitarians in the two standard early twentieth-century works on British anti-slavery: Coupland, R. S., The British anti-slavery movement (London, 1933)Google Scholar, and Klingberg, Frank J., The anti-slavery movement in England (New Haven, CT, 1926)Google Scholar.

⁴ Anstey, Roger, The Atlantic slave trade and British abolition, 1760–1810 (London, 1975)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁶ Rice, C. Duncan, ‘Archibald Dalzel, the Scottish intelligentsia and the problem of slavery’, Scottish Historical Review, 62 (1983), pp. 121–36Google Scholar; for a more positive recent assessment of the Scottish Enlightenment's role in anti-slavery, see Whyte, Iain, Scotland and the abolition of black slavery (Edinburgh, 2007), pp. 41–69Google Scholar.

⁷ Hudson, Nicholas, ‘“Britons never will be slaves”: national myth, conservatism, and the beginnings of British antislavery’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 34 (2001), pp. 559–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar, to a large extent ignores the many nonconformist abolitionists and fails to note that some of the Anglicans he uses to support his argument were heterodox.

⁸ James Walvin, ‘The public campaign in England against slavery, 1787–1834’, in David Eltis and James Walvin, eds., The abolition of the Atlantic slave trade (Madison, WI, 1981), pp. 63–82; idem, England slaves and freedom, 1776–1838 (London, 1986), pp. 108–14; Royle, Edward and Walvin, James, English radicals and reformers, 1760–1848 (Brighton, 1982), pp. 31–41Google Scholar.

⁹ Drescher, Seymour, Capitalism and antislavery: British mobilization in comparative perspective (Oxford, 1987), pp. 70–1Google Scholar; a collection of his articles has been published in From slavery to freedom (New York, NY, 1999).

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¹⁸ Stange, British Unitarians, p. 150.

¹⁹ R. I. and S. Wilberforce, The life of William Wilberforce (5 vols., London, 1838); for an excellent discussion of the controversy over the Life of Wilberforce, its marginalization of Clarkson, and influence on subsequent histories of abolition, see J. R. Oldfield, Chords of freedom: commemoration, ritual and British transatlantic slavery (Manchester, 2007), ch. 2; Brown, Ford K., Fathers of the Victorians: the age of Wilberforce (Cambridge, 1961), p. 308nCrossRefGoogle Scholar; Howse, Ernest Marshall, Saints in politics (London, 1953), pp. 15–28Google Scholar, 59, does not discuss Clarkson's religious opinions, but describes him as an ‘admirable henchman’ of the Clapham sect, and lists Smith among the ‘Saints’; Morgan, Kenneth, Slavery and the British Empire (Oxford, 2007), p. 154Google Scholar, lists Clarkson as an evangelical.

²⁰ William Paley criticized slavery in his influential The principles of moral and political philosophy (London, 1785), pp. 195–8; Peter Peckard wrote in support of religious and political liberty, delivered influential sermons against the slave trade at Cambridge in the early 1780s, and set the essay question that sparked Thomas Clarkson's lifelong commitment to anti-slavery activism, see Walsh, J. and Hyam, R., Peter Peckard: liberal churchman and anti-slave trade campaigner (Oxford, 1998)Google Scholar.

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²⁷ R. K. Webb, ‘Emergence of Rational Dissent’, in Haakonssen, ed., Enlightenment and religion, pp. 12–41.

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³¹ G. M. Ditchfield, ‘English Rational Dissent and philanthropy’, in Hugh Cunningham and Joanna Innes, eds., Charity, philanthropy and reform from the 1690s to 1850 (Basingstoke, 1998), pp. 193–207; Thomas, D. O., ‘Francis Maseres, Richard Price, and the industrious poor’, Enlightenment and Dissent, 4 (1985), pp. 65–82Google Scholar; Bradley, James, Religion, revolution and English radicalism: non-conformity in eighteenth-century politics and society (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 174–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁴⁸ Ditchfield, ‘Manchester College and anti-slavery’.

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⁵⁵ Equiano, Interesting narrative, pp. 8–9.

⁵⁶ Olaudah Equiano to George Walker, 27 Feb. 1792, in Equiano, Interesting narrative, pp. 358–9.

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⁷¹ Oldfield, Popular politics, pp. 56–60, 81, 89.

⁷² Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Thomas Clarkson, 3 Mar. 1808, in Collected letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs (6 vols., Oxford, 1956–71), iii, p. 78; May, Tim, ‘Coleridge's slave trade lecture: Southey's contribution and the debt to Thomas Cooper’, Notes and Queries, 55 (2008), pp. 425–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁷⁸ Speeches in parliament, respecting the abolition of the African slave trade (Edinburgh, 1789), pp. 7–39.

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⁸⁹ Wilberforce, Life of Wilberforce, iii, p. 48.

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⁹² ‘Industrialists … were more likely to belong to other sections of dissent and, indeed, were just as likely to be Anglicans’, Seed, ‘Theologies of power’, p. 121.

⁹³ Theophilus Lindsey to William Tayleur, 5 May 1792, John Rylands University Library, Lindsey Letters, ii, no. 64.

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⁹⁹ 23 Apr. 1792, Cobbett's Parliamentary History, xxix, p. 1247; Clarkson, History of abolition, ii, p. 353.

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¹⁰⁸ Monthly Review, 80 (1789), p. 551; my emphasis.

¹⁰⁹ William Enfield to Ralph Griffiths, 21 Feb. 1792, cited in Martin Fitzpatrick, ‘The view from Mount Pleasant: Enlightenment in late eighteenth-century Liverpool’, Studies of Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century (2008), p. 133n.

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¹¹³ English Review, 11 (1788), p. 469.

¹¹⁴ Correspondence 1750–1810 of James Wodrow and Samuel Kenrick, London, Dr. Williams Library, MSS 24:157; see for example their letters in early 1788: fos. 135–6.

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¹¹⁷ James Walvin, ‘The impact of slavery on British radical politics, 1787–1838’, in Vera Rubin and Arthur Tuden, eds., Comparative perspectives on slavery in New World plantation societies (New York, NY, 1977), pp. 343–55; Oldfield, Popular politics; Drescher, Capitalism and antislavery, p. 131, claims: ‘in the early 1790s radicals universally supported abolition of the slave trade’. This is questionable.

¹¹⁸ While some notable individuals such as Brissot were members of the Society of the Friends of Blacks, prior to 1791 no Jacobin club corresponded with the French abolitionist society; Jacobins were ‘men of property’ who appreciated the commercial importance of the slave trade, and most only began to endorce abolition after the slave revolt in Saint Domingue and with the increasing radicalization of the revolution after 1792, see Higonnet, Patrice, Goodness beyond virtue: Jacobins during the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 1998), pp. 98–100Google Scholar.

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¹²⁵ Richardson, ‘The ending of the British slave trade in 1807’, p. 140.

¹²⁶ Price, Observations on the importance of the American Revolution, pp. 77–8.

¹²⁷ Fitzpatrick, ‘The view from Mount Pleasant’, pp. 122–3, 138.

¹²⁸ David N. Miller, Defining the common good: empire, religion and philosophy in eighteenth-century Britain (Cambridge, 1994), p. 116; Hirshman, Albert O., The passions and the interests (Princeton, NJ, 1977)Google Scholar.

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¹³⁰ On the bright economic prospects of free trade with Africa espoused by James Ramsay and Thomas Clarkson, see Ryden, West Indian slavery and British abolition, ch. 7; Henry Beaufoy was a founding member and acted as secretary, and the Unitarians James Martin MP, William Smith MP, Benjamin Vaughan, Josiah Wedgwood, John Wilkinson, and the duke of Grafton were members of the Association, as were the heterodox Anglicans Samuel Whitbread and Richard Watson, bishop of Llandaff, Proceedings of the Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa (London, 1790), pp. iii–vii, 8.

¹³¹ Drescher, Mighty experiment, ch. 4.

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¹³⁸ [Benjamin Vaughan], New and old principles of trade compared (London, 1788), pp. 28, xi.

¹³⁹ Kippis, A sermon, pp. 34, 36.

¹⁴⁰ [Belsham], An essay on the African slave trade.

¹⁴¹ W. Currie, ed., Memoir of the life, writings and correspondence of James Currie (2 vols., 1831), i, pp. 135–6.

¹⁴² Benjamin Vaughan to Thomas Jefferson, c. 14 June 1789, Julian P. Boyd, ed., The papers of Jefferson (36 vols. Princeton, NJ, 1958), xv, p. 182.

¹⁴³ De Morgan, S., Threescore years and ten: reminiscences of the late Sophia Elizabeth De Morgan (London, 1895), p. 24Google Scholar; Robert's brother, George Hibbert, became the leading spokesman for the West India interest in the House of Commons.

¹⁴⁴ Stange, Douglas C., ‘Teaching the means of freedom to West Indian slaves, or, failure as the raw material for antislavery propaganda’, Harvard Library Bulletin, 29 (1981), pp. 403–19Google Scholar.

¹⁴⁵ Davis, Dissent in politics, p. 74.

¹⁴⁶ The debate on a motion for the abolition of the slave-trade, in the House of Commons, on Monday 2nd of April, 1792, pp. 56–63, 73.

¹⁴⁷ Joseph Foster Barham was a member of the Whig Club who had inherited plantations in Jamaica from his Moravian father, Thorne, House of Commons, 1790–1820, iii, p. 804.

¹⁴⁸ Cobbett's Parliamentary History, xxx, p. 1446.

¹⁴⁹ Ryden, David Beck, ‘Does decline make sense? The West Indian economy and the abolition of the British slave trade’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 31 (2001), pp. 347–74CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; idem, West Indian slavery and British abolition.

¹⁵⁰ Josiah Wedgwood to Anna Seward, Feb. 1788, in Ann Finer and George Savage, eds., The selected letters of Josiah Wedgwood (London, 1965), p. 310.

¹⁵¹ Drescher, ‘Whose abolition?’, p. 147.

¹⁵² Substance of the debates on the bill for abolition of the slave trade (London, 1808), pp. 74–7.

¹⁵³ Cited in Farrell, ‘“Contrary to the principles of justice, humanity and sound policy”’, p. 158.

¹⁵⁴ Drescher, ‘Long goodbye: Dutch capitalism and antislavery’, pp. 57–60; for debate on the impact of slave resistance, see the essays in Seymour Drescher and Pieter C. Emmer, eds., Who abolished slavery? Slave revolts and abolitionism (New York, NY, 2010).

¹⁵⁵ Clark, J. C. D., English society 1660–1832 (2nd edn, Cambridge, 2000)Google Scholar.

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¹⁵⁸ Bickham, Troy, Making headlines: the American Revolution as seen through the British press (DeKalb, IL, 2009), pp. 158–82Google Scholar.

¹⁵⁹ Clarkson, History of abolition, i, p. 216; Priestley, Sermon on the slave trade, p. 387; on the importance of religion in the intellectual life of the eighteenth century, see Sheehan, Jonathan, ‘Enlightenment, religion, and the enigma of secularization: a review essay’, American Historical Review, 108 (2003), pp. 1061–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁶⁰ Brown, Moral capital, p. 450; Colley, Britons, p. 355, argues that anti-slavery became popular in Britain in part because it was ‘uniquely uncontroversial’.

¹⁶¹ Debates on the bill for abolition of the slave trade (1808), p. 111.

¹⁶² Davis, Problem of slavery, pp. 94–100; Geggus, David, ‘Racial equality, slavery and colonial secession during the Constituent Assembly’, American Historical Review, 94 (1989), pp. 1290–1308CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Auerbach, Stephen, ‘Debating liberty: merchants and the slave trade in Bordeaux, 1784–1794’, Consortium on the Revolutionary Era: Selected Papers (2007), pp. 146–58Google Scholar.

¹⁶³ Drescher, Seymour, ‘The ending of the slave trade and the evolution of European scientific racism’, Social Science History, 14 (1990), pp. 415–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Desmond, Adrian and More, James, Darwin's sacred cause: race, slavery and the quest for human origins (London, 2009)Google Scholar; while Charles Darwin turned away from religion, the unity of all life at the heart of his theory of evolution was linked to a belief in human racial unity – a principle he inherited from abolitionist parents and grandparents that included the Unitarian Josiah Wedgwood.