The West India planter-master became the most vilified figure in British literature as a result of the abolitionist campaign to end the slave trade. The abolitionist primarily responsible for this shift in perception is James Ramsay, specifically in the controversy around his Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonics (1784). He argues that the tyranny of absolute mastery is inherent in African slavery. This essay re-examines the rhetoric of Ramsay’s publication and the ensuing pamphlet war for the “definitional rupture” in the term “master.” This new planter-master, configured as wholly corrupt, shifted the paradigm and created a powerful trope for abolitionists. Srividhya Swaminathan, Long Island University Brooklyn, srividhya.swaminathan@liu.edu.

Adam Smith's contribution to antislavery rhetoric has been well-documented by scholars. However, few have thought to examine his impact on the writing of slavery advocates. In the late eighteenth-century debate to abolish the slave trade in Great Britain, abolitionists appropriated Smith's rhetoric to create a “moral economy” that could not tolerate the practice of slaving. Proslavery writers, perceiving the sincere threat to their livelihood, also manipulated Smith's rhetoric and the concept of “moral economy” to formulate arguments in defense of the slave trade. This article complements and expands analyses of Smith's rhetorical and economic theories as well as the rhetoric of the first abolitionist campaign in order to open avenues of inquiry that examine both sides of the debate.