You know the arguments against the American Revolution: it retarded the end of slavery, led to worse treatment of Indians, we would have been better off with a Parliamentary system, etc. Ilya Somin responds:
1. Far from retarding the abolition of slavery, the Revolution actually accelerated it. Its triumph gave a big boost to Enlightenment liberalism, which inspired the First Emancipation in the US (the abolition of slavery in the North that became the first large-scale emancipation of slaves in modern history), and boosted antislavery movements in Europe, as well.
2. Had the Revolution been defeated, Enlightenment liberal ideology would have been dealt a setback in Britain and France, too. That would have set back antislavery movements there, as well. It is no accident that many antislavery leaders in Europe were also sympathizers with the American Revolution. The Marquis de Lafayette was just one of the most famous examples of European liberals who actively backed both.
3. The West Indian slaveowner lobby in Parliament was strong enough to block abolition of slavery until 1833. Had Britain also been saddled with the much larger proslavery lobby of the American South, it would have taken far longer. Especially when you combine the impact of the larger slavery lobby with the force of point 2 above.
4. A defeat for the American Revolution would have set back other liberal causes too, not just antislavery. That includes, among other things, universal suffrage, freedom of speech, religious toleration, and increased rights for women. Each of these reforms (and others, too) was given new impetus by American Revolution, which inspired European liberals to imitate them.
I agree with all of this. The end of slavery was not some kind of natural event that happened because it was just. It happened because of the progress of Enlightenment ideas and liberal politics. Until the Enlightenment, there had never been an organized movement to abolish slavery, and that was only one of the many, many extraordinary parts of that great movement: democracy, women's rights, children's rights, anti-racism, a global peace movement, and more. The American Revolution only happened as it did because of the spread of Enlightenment ideas through the European and American elites, and that spread was very much bound up with the success of the Revolution.
1 comment:
I don't disagree with anything here, but I think it's important to acknowledge how much of abolitionism was religious, even revivalist in flavor. The general historiography certainly identifies British abolitionism with Methodism in particular, and 19th-century American abolitionism with activist mainline Protestantism in the Northeast.
This is not to say that British abolitionism was not simultaneously related to the Enlightenment. In general, it would be interesting to see talk about the interaction of Enlightenment social moralist and change impulses with new anti-establishment 18th-century religious movements, obviously Methodism but also the new pietism that I believe emerged in Germany at that time. And in France, there seems to be some relationship between the Enlightenment and Jansenism.
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