The Culture of English Antislavery, 1780-1860 by David TurleyReview by: R. J. MorrisSocial History, Vol. 18, No. 2 (May, 1993), pp. 290-291Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4286132 .

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290 Social History VOL. i8: NO. 2

The book is intended to be the first in a series based on the archives of the Warburton family and their estate round Arley Hall; the next volume will be about Cheshire cheese and farming in the area in the eighteenth century. It

is hoped that the series will continue to be cheaply and attractively produced.

C. W. Chalklin University of Reading

Marianne McLean, The People of Glengarry. Highlanders in Transition, z745-1820 I99I), xiv + z85 (McGill-Queen's University Press, ?29.95).

This detailed and scholarly book is unusual in its treatment of what might be called 'trans-Atlantic Highland culture' for its sound understanding and use of archival material from both Scotland and Canada. Not only is the examination of emigration to Glengarry County in Ontario founded upon an understanding of changes in the 'old country', the two local contexts are shown as part of broader expressions of demo- graphic and social change which, from the later eighteenth century, so dramatically transformed Scottish (and British) rural society and con- tributed to the peopling of the 'New' World. In part, the book is an exploration of the demo- graphic and economic circumstances relating to the emigration of Highland Scots from western Inverness-shire to Upper Canada in the seventy years from 1750. In this context, we are told in particular terms of the rental increases, the incoming of the potato and the extension of a market-oriented capitalism that underlay changes in this region, as elsewhere then in the Highlands. Claims by the occupants to lands as ancestral holdings - an ideological expression espoused throughout the Highlands by the common folk - stood for naught in the face of externally motivated change. For the people of Glengarry, the solution was not acquiescence but, literally, radical departure: emigration being then considered a creative response.

As McLean shows, emigration to Canada was a deliberate attempt to re-create the old in the

new: out-movement was by substantial tenants and families aiming to retain the community in a new environment. In part also, then, the book is an exercise in community reconstruction or, at least, in emphasizing how the forms of Highland society were (and were not) re-created and maintained in Canada. McLean stresses again and again the communal basis both of emi- gration and of the settling process in the new Glengarry. Even over the several phases of emigration and settlement, the community ex- perience connected lands and people on both sides of the Atlantic. McLean writes in several places of the larger Gaelic community across Canada - how Glengarry shared with Nova Scotian Highland Scots, for example - yet only once (and then quoting a Scottish clergyman in I841) does she explicitly consider the issue of a wider Gaelic culture that viewed both the Highlands and, in this case, Upper Canada, as one country. It is clear many then saw things this way. But this is not a major reservation about the work, rather a prompt to arise from it. Overall, this is an excellent study that combines local detail with larger patterns and emphasizes the need for such locality studies if we are to understand better the global expression that was the European peopling of the Americas.

Charles W. J. Withers Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher

E'ducation

David Turley, The Culture of English Antislavery, z78-z86o (I99I), xii + 284 (Routledge, 35s.oo).

If, dear reader, you are one of those philan- thropic gentlemen who devoted years of moral energy to the petitions, platform parties and publications of the anti-slavery movement in Britain, you will find this an interesting and often thought-provoking book. David Turley's stated aim is to examine the 'culture' of anti- slavery in Britain and to do so in the context of 'class'. He locates the movement's culture in the context of the middle-class reaction to in- dustrialization and to the variety of religious and

intellectual positions within the middle classes. He brings out well the tension in anti-slavery thought between the need for moral and social discipline and the insistence on the value of individual autonomy and the manner in which this expresses key elements in middle-class consciousness.

The difficulty for an historian of the anti- slavery movement lies in its long life after the great drive for emancipation and the achieve- ment of abolition. After abolition, so what?

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May 1993 Short Notices 29I

Turley is loyal to his subject but has to admit by I840 'a staleness in the British campaign'. The great campaign for British legislation held to- gether an unlikely coalition of evangelicals, Quakers and rational dissenters. After abolition, the movement split and wrangled over religion, women's rights, links with the US movement and even over who inherited the true mantle of the great founders of the 1790S. To be honest, there was not much else they could do. They might ponder deeply on the wisdom of recog- nition for the new rebel state of Texas, but who was listening?

Could Turley have done more with his theme? He talks of 'culture', but does little to take apart and analyse the ritual and procedures of the meetings and campaigns. These things were crucial if anti-slavery is to be placed in a class culture. There is a mention of 'images', but little sustained analysis. In a book on anti- slavery it seems important to know what black people as slaves looked like to the platform parties of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society and the like. Did these evangelicals see them as savages, as children or as lost souls steeped in original sin?

This book succeeds in setting anti-slavery in a reform culture, of seeing it as part of a larger whole, but it never looks at the nature of that larger whole. How do we evaluate the Tuke

family's link with the reform of the treatment of lunacy alongside William Shaen's work for women's suffrage and education? Both were anti-slavery activists.

At the end the author admits that Catholic Emancipation, the I832 Reform Act and the rest would probably all have been much the same without the influence of anti-slavery, which he comes to see as symptomatic of middle-class political and philanthropic culture rather than influential upon it. Perhaps, after spending so much time with the fractious and ineffective anti-slavers of the I840S, he goes too far. We do know that their discourse was influential in the manner in which middle-class people began to discuss the emancipation of women and legis- lation regarding British workers, notably chil- dren. We know that the language of race was developing in influential ways during this period. It seems reasonable to suppose that a group of people who spent much time discussing what they could and should do for a very visible group of black people, would have had an influence on this. After all, historians have come to realize that gender and race play a part in class identities as important as work and property. This is an interesting but frustrating book.

R. J. Morris E,dinburgh University

Pauline M. H. Mazumdar, Eugenics, Human Genetics and Human Failures. TheEugenics Society. Its Sources and Its Critics in Britain (I992). X + V71 (Routledge, L4o.oo). This book provides the most comprehensive account yet published of the eugenics movement in Britain. Based upon thorough research of the Eugenics Society's own archives, and widely read in the secondary literature on this subject in both English and German, Mazumdar shows how the Eugenics Education Society was born out of the class-bounded concerns of the pro- fessional middle class in Britain at the beginning of this century. She argues that the movement worked within a well-defined scientific problem- atic, i.e. 'a field of concepts which organizes a particular science by making it possible to ask some kinds of questions and suppressing others' (i). Thus the author demonstrates that although eugenics had its origins in the ostensibly value- free paradigm of Darwinian evolutionism, the movement's purpose of 'promoting those agen- cies under social control which might improve the human race' stressed the links between evolution, inheritance and the predictability of the transmission of abilities and defects from one

generation to the next. The latter reflected the class-derived criteria of the British professions when confronted with the social problems as- sociated with the 'urban degeneration' of their time. Straightfoward family pedigree analysis, combined with the quantitative persuasiveness of correlation analysis, was used to prove the predominance of nature over nurture in ex- plaining the proliferation of a wide range of social problems, varying from venereal disease to alcoholism, in addition to the inheritance of intelligence itself. The policy implications of the eugenics movement included 'negative' eugenics, which at its most extreme called for systematic sterilization, and so-called 'positive' eugenics that argued for tax subsidies to intelli- gent and successful families in order that the superior stocks in the population might be increased.

Although these general contours of the eugenics movement are well known, this book breaks new ground in several important

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