Corbin’s Hypothesis: Drowning, Lifesaving, and the Emergence of the Anglo-American Abolition Movement in the 1780s

In 1789, Englishman Henry Corbin credited the British Parliament’s nascent efforts to end the slave trade to the Royal Humane Society, a group established in 1774 and dedicated to the recovery of drowning victims. In Corbin’s view, abolitionism grew from efforts to save people from watery graves. Amanda Moniz probes whether there was indeed any connection between the lifesaving cause and the advent of the abolition movement.