The Ameliorationist Trap: Reformist Capture and the Long Eighteenth Century

This essay advances ameliorationism as a keyword and diagnostic concept for reappraising eighteenth-century anti-slavery writing and political thought; it also considers the implications of eighteenth-century abolitionism for contemporary abolitionist theory and practice. I argue that Anglophone Atlantic writing on the transatlantic slave trade and colonial plantation slavery is overwhelmingly oriented by a reformist perspective that aims to soften, economize, and refine the practice of slave-based agricultural production in order to stave off demographic and environmental catastrophe. By way of a brief consideration of merchant and philosopher Thomas Tryon, I meditate on how this reformist line of thinking puts forward potent critiques of slavery that nonetheless reinscribe the plantation as a necessary form of social organization. This reformist trap confronts contemporary organizers and theorists of abolition, and scholars of the long eighteenth century might contribute to the struggle to abolish police forces and prisons by critically dismantling fictions about the recuperability of carceral systems.