18/06/2026
Find out more about how 18th century anti-slavery campaigners built their case for abolition in a fascinating talk for York Georgian Festival this summer.
Brycchan Carey, academic and author of The Unnatural Trade - Slavery, Abolition, and Environmental Writing, 1650-1807, asks how late eighteenth-century British abolitionists came to view the slave trade and British colonial slavery as unnatural, a "dread perversion" of nature.
He focuses on slavery in the Americas, and the Caribbean in particular, alongside travellers' accounts of West Africa.
Before the mid-eighteenth century, natural histories were a primary source of information about slavery for British and colonial readers. Increasingly they adopted a pro-slavery stance to accommodate the needs of planters by representing slavery as a "natural" phenomenon.
However, from the mid-eighteenth century, abolitionists adapted the natural history form to their own writings, and many naturalists became associated with the antislavery movement.
Carey draws on descriptions of slavery and the slave trade created by naturalists and other travellers with an interest in natural history, showing how these were used by abolitionists to build a compelling case that slavery was “unnatural”, a case popularised by abolitionist poets.
Find out more on Monday 10 August at York Mansion House. Details at yorkgeorgianfestival.co.uk.
