Not Made by Slaves: Ethical Capitalism in the Age of Abolition.

• Author: Mami, Fouad

Bronwen Everill, Not Made by Slaves: Ethical Capitalism in the Age of Abolition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020. 328pp. Hardcover $39.95.

There exist two tenable readings to Bronwen Everill's Not Made by Slaves. One that zooms on a bookish interest, ending in an inflation of inconsequential details: seeking to confirm one material here or challenge another one there. Under this approach and in considering the seven chapters that structure Everill's study, one will be fixated in a binary logic out of which little horizon will emerge. Alternatively, the other reading accelerates the chapters' content for a milestone of consciousness that underlines capitalism's obituary, not its presupposed ethicality as the subtitle intimates. This latter reading will surpass the literal content Everill offers. For in accelerating both readings against each other, one will hopefully clarify that important juncture in human history known as the abolition of slavery, and how that formal eradication did not translate to an egalitarian world order.

As its subtitle underlines, Not Made by Slaves refers to British and American abolitionists' strategies to reverse demands for enslaved labor, "humanizing" the trade by raising an ethical badge while fully knowing that the effort of maintaining its profitability had never been an easy undertaking. The prospects of ever making it work looked dim and unappetizing at a time when sellers and buyers from three continents had been enmeshed in human bondage in one way or another. Starting small had been the abolitionists' wager to challenge the unethical foundations of world trade at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. Abolitionists had to first convince buyers in Africa (mostly Liberia and Serra Leone) that slaves were no longer an acceptable commodity with which they can pay for desired goods. In exchange, they publicized the fact that their imported cargos were not made by slaves either. The availability of long-term credits from lenders in mostly London and Boston, payments by Africans made temporarily in kind (not cash), and persistent moralizing encouraged abolitionists to slowly but surely carve a part of the world market to their liking. Everill claims that in the decades between 1770 and 1830 abolitionists did not only survive competition but even thrived and started dictating their terms on other merchants.

Consumers, those at the receiving end of production, made...