Volume 54, Number 10 · June 14, 2007
English Abolition: The Movie
By Adam Hochschild
Amazing Grace
a film directed by Michael Apted
Two hundred years ago this spring, Britain ended its Atlantic slave trade, an event of immense importance, because the country then dominated the traffic in human beings. From the mid-1700s on, roughly half the captive Africans taken to the Americas had been transported in British ships. Ever since, Parliament's vote to end the slave trade and then, a quarter-century later, to end British slavery itself have fascinated historians, because in both cases it seemed that a country acted contrary to its economic self-interest.[1] Some scholars recently calculated that these actions cost the British people roughly 1.8 percent of their national income over some six decades.[2] How can they be explained?
Review, 4109 words
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