Activities and Outputs

On October 29th 2025, I delivered a presentation on some of my new work on Harriet Martineau to the PPE Research Group of the Department of Political Economy at King's College London. The talk was entitled, 'Harriet Martineau's Demerara: Economic Theory, Realist Fiction and Moral Urgency in the British Slave Emancipation Debates of the 1830s'.

Abstract: Little remembered today, Harriet Martineau was a publishing phenomenon throughout the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Novelist, travelogue writer, social commentator, she was also the author of numerous reports into the state of modern Britain and its colonies, thousands of op-eds on the most pressing contemporary policy dilemmas, and a daily supply of letters to a whole army of famous and influential correspondents across the Atlantic world. She came to public prominence with her Illustrations of Political Economy, twenty-four novellas published monthly for two years to educate the aspiring middle classes to her favoured laissez-faire solutions, which proved to be so popular with the reading public of the time that they outsold Dickens by a factor of five. They were written between 1832 and 1834, during the period of Whig ascendancy, the first Great Reform Act and the high point of the British debate about slave emancipation. The story on which my talk will concentrate, Demerara, was the fourth in the series, the second to be set in a British colony, and the only one to focus on what position the British state should take in the post-abolition debate about the West Indian planters’ insistence that they should continue to hold property in enslaved people.

How, though, should Demerara be read? Martineau makes a partial appearance in the text, with the lead character, Alfred, freshly returned to his childhood Guyanese home following time in England at boarding school, always on hand to give voice to her contention that the science of political economy offers the most respectable guide available as to how the middle classes should form their political views. However, this was also a time at which she was undergoing an epistemological break with her own religious upbringing. Even though the hesitant path to becoming a former Unitarian plays no obviously generative part in her narrative, its imprints are still visible only marginally below the surface of the text, and they mix with the strict contemporary secular religion of political economy in often unstable ways. Martineau’s purely moral condemnation of slave-based systems of production from as recently as eighteen months previously seems at first reading to have given way to a more personally detached account of how the laws of political economy will succeed in ending slavery whereas her prayers on the subject have failed. But closer textual study suggests that it does not do so completely, and various literary critics have consequently described the Illustrations not as an economic principles book at all, but as the combination of myth, fable and cosmology more widely seen in religious conduct books. I wish to explore the interstitial position of what it means to try to deliver lessons in political economy as an exercise in spiritual autobiography, one where the penitent individual necessarily invoked in such a tradition is scaled up to the level of the nation as a whole. Much in the manner of the realist fiction of the time, Martineau is still asking her readers to feel guilt about the fact that they have not yet done enough to ensure that full slave emancipation is passed into statute. In the context of mass public abstention from the consumption of slave-grown sugar, this could have been the guilt of individuals who continue to prop up the demand on which the West Indian plantocracy relied. Instead, it is guilt at the collective failure of society as a whole to use the available principles of political economy to force the government to end sugar subsidies and hence require the planters to submit to the brute economic logic that systems of free labour are always the most productive. The combination of moral and economic argumentation is the common thread that runs through the whole of Demerara, but the economic often overpowers the moral in a way which prevents the messengers who carry Martineau’s opinions within the story from ever becoming the relatable characters of realist fiction.