The Wages of Abolition: Liberation Beyond Labor in Edward Rushton’s West-Indian Eclogues and the Pamphlet War surrounding James Ramsay’s Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves

Abstract

This essay brings together British abolitionist poetry and pro-slavery essays from the 1780s, when British abolition was not yet a foregone conclusion. The examined texts center enslaved people’s rejection of wage labor schemes. When read together, a theory of self-emancipatory political economy emerges from these texts in opposition to wage labor, endorsed by some abolitionists as a sort of slow emancipation that would preserve colonial systems. Liverpool abolitionist Edward Rushton’s West-Indian Eclogues (1787) feature enslaved subjects who object to state-sanctioned violence, who organize their communities through political education and mutual aid, and who demonstrate more complex goals for free life beyond emancipation alone. Similarly, the pamphlet war arising in response to James Ramsay’s controversial Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves (1784) addresses the issue of wage labor in relation to abolition. Ramsay’s respondents argue that enslaved people would reject wage labor and, if freed, would instead form socioeconomic systems outside of an extractive agricultural model.