their acceptance of obligations to a universal moral community, but rather
on their parochial identities as Protestant Dissenters, members of the
middle class, and their national identity as Englishmen. They saw slavery,
together with the overlapping complex of the planters, the aristocracy that
controlled British political life, and the hierarchy of the established Church
as a single body of corruption, immorality, and arbitrary power that
threatened the souls of all Englishmen and had to be defeated in order to
redeem the nation. Anti-slavery overseas was one component of a program
for redemption at home.^99This returns us to the necessary contingencies of the humanitarian impulse, where
the object of concern receives recognition by virtue of her/his status as human, but
the manifestation of the humanitarian imperative takes place within a complex and
contingent setting of thicker solidarities and politics. For Kaufmann and Pape:
“although universalist logic was sufficient to persuade Englishmen to regard slavery
as immoral, this did not translate into a willingness to take action.”^100
The political campaign that followed, which enabled an unprecedented
commitment of blood and treasure, illustrates some of the advantages of a
sustained engagement with the state and therefore with politics. The key period in
this campaign was that between the foundation, in 1787, of the London Committee
for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, and the 1807 Act of Parliament. What
Kaufmann and Pape bring out is the importance of the domestic political context in
committing the British state to abolishing the slave trade, especially the important
place the abolitionists occupied within the coalition dynamics of the time. At
various times throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, the appeal of or to
abolitionism was decisive in determining electoral success for both Tories and
Whigs.^101
The suggestion here, which will be returned to in Chapter 6 at more length,
is that for humanitarians, in attempting to create greater solidarity deriving from
recognitions of a common humanity, politics, whether at the level of the mediating
environment they speak through, or in the conventional sense of constituency
99
100 Ibid.: 644-645.
101 Ibid.: 645.
Ibid.: 645, 649-657.