In his book on the American land speculator, politician and pioneer William Cooper, Alan Taylor discusses (pg 120-122) plans to export American maple sugar to Britain. This is around 1789. In particular he wanted to sell it to abolitionists, on the grounds that it was not made by slave labor. Like a lot of Cooper's plans this did not pan out.
My question is about the British abolitionists. Did they reject sugar and other products made with slave labor? Did they try and convince others to do the same? If so how effective was this? I know that today lots of people are bothered by consumer goods that have been unethically produced. Were the abolitionists the start of this, like they were the start of so many other things?
Taylor, Alan. William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic. Reprint edition. New York: Vintage, 1996.
The abolitionist movement was pretty big news in the 1780s. The ceramics manufacturer Josiah Wedgwood produced a famous cameo design with a kneeling slave and the phrase, ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’ which may be considered a sort of early political button. Olaudah Equiano’s important memoir, the first widely read slave narrative, was published in 1789 and provided readers with clear details of plantation life from a kidnapped and enslaved person’s point of view. Famous poet William Cowper published a piece taking aim at the willingness of people to tolerate the evils of slavery because it kept their sugar and run cheap. Quakers avoided slave-produced goods. The Society for the Purpose of Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade led a series of actions including a petition drive to urge Parliament to address the subject.
An actual widespread sugar boycott didn’t occur until 1792, when hundreds of thousands of British consumers refused to buy slave-made Caribbean sugar (many chose India sugar, made by people who were at least technically freely employed).
The idea of people as ‘consumers’ was just developing, along with widespread trade and early development of mass production. The word ‘boycott’ wasn’t coined until a man by that name became a target of one in the 1880s. But these efforts did succeed in raising public awareness, making the slave trade an election issue and emboldening William Wilberforce to bring before Parliament the bill for ending the slave trade that was finally adopted in 1807.