In The Black Jacobins, CLR James offers a rather more cynical view of British moves towards abolition than I was accustomed to. Basically he argues that Pitt realised that Britain could make far more money out of free trade and exploiting India than it could out of slavery and West Indes-based protectionism, and so he set Wilberforce up as his catspaw and had him work towards the abolition of the slave trade so that he could kneecap Saint Domingue before it could move from buying slaves from Britain to other providers. I think James might be onto something with some of this - it's hard to refute the fact that Pitt later invaded the French West Indes with the explicit intent of carrying on slavery there - but at the same time this was a book published in 1938 by an author who sees malice and hypocrisy in everything that Britain and the United States did in this period, so I was wondering to what extent James represents, or did represent, the scholarly consensus on this topic?