Brown-Bag: Conversion and Antislavery, 1750-1830

Benjamin Wright, Rice University

Wright’s research explores the connections between religious conversion and antislavery activism in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It argues that the Americans and Britons who attacked slavery prior to 1830 did so primarily out of a desire to convert the colonies, the new American republic, and eventually the world. This study demonstrates how ideologies of conversion directed the tactics of early antislavery reformers and how changes in these ideologies transformed antislavery into abolitionism.