"There Is Death In The Pot": Women, Consumption, And Free Produce In The Transatlantic World, 1791-1848

Abstention from slave-labor products, along with petitioning, was a popular and consistent form of anti-slavery activism for British and American abolitionists, especially women. Despite renewed interest in the British and American free-produce movements, historians continue to focus on either eighteenth- or nineteenth-century British or American abstention, only briefly referring to the transatlantic and generational connections between the movements. Limiting questions about free-produce in this way overemphasizes the connection between abstention and the Society of Friends and privileges the nineteenth-century period of the movement. While Quakers were the primary proponents of abstention from slave-labor products, attempts by both Quakers and non-Quakers to establish an international free-produce movement are essential to understanding transatlantic abolitionism.This dissertation recovers and critically interprets the transatlantic free-produce movement from the late-eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth century, revealing the key role women played in the protracted battle for the abolition of slavery. Recognizing the importance of abstention to the abolitionist movement broadens the period of women's activism to the eighteenth century, more than forty years prior to the organizational activity of the 1830s that serves as the traditional starting point for histories of women's abolitionism. Abstention reveals the ways in which British and American women crossed generational, gender, geographic, religious as well as class and racial boundaries on behalf of the slave. This study places abstention and abolitionism within the context of the market revolution, examining abstainers' debates about the morality of the marketplace. Rather than political economy, abstainers urged Britons and Americans alike to create a moral economy, which privileged humanity and justice over financial profit. Asserting the importance of moral suasion and consistency in abolitionist activity, abstainers challenged the greed and racism that supported the transatlantic economy in this period. In doing so, abstainers called for the radical reform of society.