Edmund Burke on slavery and the slave trade

This article reconstructs Edmund Burke's thoughts on slavery from his Account of the European Settlements in America to his parliamentary speeches in the late 1700s. It seeks to demonstrate that Burke's program for slave reform, Sketch of a Negro Code, was one of the earliest plans for gradual abolition and gradual manumission formulated in eighteenth-century England and, quite possibly, the first ever in modern British history whose scheme was detailed and comprehensive. This article further explains how the plan reflected both Burke's antipathy to slavery and his unusually wide comprehension of the many obstacles to abolition. It concludes by stressing Burke's belief that Africans were not condemned to servitude by their background.