Barbaric Traffic: Commerce and Antislavery in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic WorldEighteenth-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. |
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... discourse of man- ners.16 This term , as J. G. A. Pocock pointed out long ago , was central to the rise of " commercial humanism " in early modern European societies and emphasized the civilizing effects of the trade , exchange , and ...
... discourses of enlightened , or " Christian , " manners . To con- demn the slave trade was to uphold the precarious state of civilized commer- cial identity . As one writer for the American Magazine put it in 1787 , " It was not till ...
... discourses . In the words of Edward Said , " Once we accept the actual configuration of literary experiences overlapping with one another and in- terdependent , despite national boundaries and coercively legislated national autonomies ...
... discourses ( such as those disseminated by periodicals ) that dealt with sub- jects like commerce , feeling , manners , and the many other enlightened topoi of bourgeois culture.42 The subject of Chapter 1 , the " commercial jeremiad ...
... discourses about " liberty " and " rights . " Both Marrant and Smith pushed at the semantic boundaries of individual rights — boundaries that were in this historical period unsteady enough to be easily and even safely redrawn . The ...
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Barbaric Traffic: Commerce and Antislavery in the Eighteenth-Century ... Philip Gould Limited preview - 2003 |