Questions:

To what extent did the American Revolution raise questions about the position of slavery within the British Empire that had not previously been thought important?

To what extent were the beginnings of the abolition campaign in part a response by evangelicals to the excesses of planter culture?

Compare and contrast the attitudes to the American Revolution of planters in the British West Indies and planters in South Carolina

To what extent was the American Revolution a profound crisis for the plantation system

To what extent did the American Revolution entrench slavery and the plantation system within the social and political structures of the United States of America?

Readings:

Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: British Concepts of Emancipation in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 209-58.

Robert Olwell, Masters, Slaves, and Subjects: The Culture of Power in the South Carolina Low Country, 1740-1790 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 221-70

Christer Petley, “`Home’ and `this country’: Britishness and Creole identity in the letters of a transatlantic slaveholder,” Atlantic Studies 6 (2009), 43-61.