For forty years, Richardson has worked on the British slave trade, producing pioneering documentation of the Bristol slave traders, playing a key role in the collaborative wonder that is the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, and co-founding the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation (wise) in Hull. He began analyzing and demonstrating the economic significance of the British slave trade in an era when the received wisdom was that slavery had no role in Britain’s Industrial Revolution, and the focus of British historians and of the British popular imagination was on abolition, not on the slave trade or slavery per se.
Richardson is therefore perfectly placed to provide what British history has long required, a synthesis between two competing explanations for Britain’s abolition of the slave trade in 1807—broadly characterized as a “humanitarian” tradition, as represented by Clarkson, Lecky, Coupland, and Drescher, and as a “materialist”...