A revealing look at how antislavery scientists and Black and white abolitionists used scientific ideas to discredit slaveholders
In the context of slavery, science is usually associated with
slaveholders’ scientific justifications of racism. But abolitionists
were equally adept at using scientific ideas to discredit slaveholders.
Looking beyond the science of race, The Science of Abolition
shows how Black and white scientists and abolitionists drew upon a host
of scientific disciplines—from chemistry, botany, and geology, to
medicine and technology—to portray slaveholders as the enemies of
progress. From the 1770s through the 1860s, scientists and abolitionists
in Britain and the United States argued that slavery stood in the way
of scientific progress, blinded slaveholders to scientific evidence, and
prevented enslavers from adopting labor‑saving technologies that might
eradicate enslaved labor.
While historians increasingly
highlight slavery’s centrality to the modern world, fueling the rise of
capitalism, science, and technology, few have asked where the myth of
slavery’s backwardness comes from in the first place. This book contends
that by routinely portraying slaveholders as the enemies of science,
abolitionists and scientists helped generate that myth.
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