Principles of Political Economy, CW II, p. 233. All references to Mill’s work will be to
1
The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, 33 vols., general editor John Robson (Toronto:
Toronto UP, 1963–91); volume and page numbers will be given.
“The Slave Power,” CW XXI, p.159.
2
Letter to Hickson, CW XIV, p. 24. For more on this blockade (in which other
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countries, including the United States, participated to a smaller degree), see Christopher Lloyd,
The Navy and the Slave Trade (London: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd, 1968).
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Mill’s Critique of Slavery
Hearing that Mill believes that slavery may sometimes be justified might lead one to
conclude that he is “soft on slavery.” Hearing next that he believes that slave owners may be
owed compensation when their slaves are freed could easily make this conclusion seem
unavoidable. It is therefore important to dispel this misconception at the outset. Mill is a
thoroughly committed critic of slavery as we think of it today, slavery as it was practiced by
Britons in the sugar plantations of the West Indies or by Americans in the cotton and tobacco
plantations of the South. His judgment about this kind of slavery is summarized in his Principles
of Political Economy, where he says that “It is almost superfluous to observe that this institution
can have no place in any society even pretending to be founded on justice, or on fellowship
between human beings.” Elsewhere he calls it “the most odious form of unjust dominion which
1
ever existed.” The nineteenth century has been described as the “Age of Emancipation,” at least
2
in the Americas, and Mill supported every step of this gradual process as it unfolds over the
course of his life. He endorsed the decision to free British slaves in the West Indies in 1833, his
quibbles with the details of the arrangement by which this was effected (about which more later)
notwithstanding. He wrote favorably of the lengthy British naval blockade of the African coast,
which was intended to deter the slave trade. Mill urged his compatriots to support the Union
3
Convention