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The Gentlemen Slavers:

Status, Structure and Social Movements for the Conduct of Dirty Business

Paul Ingram and Brian Silverman

April 16, 2014

We consider the influences on which overseas traders entered the Liverpool slave

trade. This phenomenon represents an important class of activity we call ‘dirty

business,’ where legal economic activity violates cultural values. We consider

individual disposition to violate norms as a function of status, social contagion in

a network where status determines influence, and the role of a social movement to

ignite attention to the norms and their violation. We find that high-status

Gentlemen were more likely to become slavers, and that they were highly

influential on the behavior of their network partners. The abolition movement

affected a marked shift in these dynamics, dampening social network influence,

but amplifying the impact of individual identities. These results have implications

for theories of the interdependence of social movements, culture and networks.

Draft. Please do not cite or quote without permission of the authors.

We are grateful to Steve Behrendt, James Fenske and Namrata Kala for sharing data used in this

paper. We are also grateful to Steve Behrendt, Chris Brown, Ray Horton, Huggy Rao, Chris

Washburne, Lori Yue, and seminar participants at Baruch College, Columbia University, Cornell

University, Dartmouth College, George Washington University, Georgetown University,

Harvard University, the University of Maryland and the University of Toronto for useful

comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

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“Slavery is so vile and miserable an estate of man, and so directly opposite to the generous

temper and courage of our nation, that it is hardly to be conceived that an Englishman, much less

a gentleman, should plead for it (John Locke, 1680/1768: 139).”

This paper examines the influences on a choice. The choice was whether to enter the slave trade,

and the choosers are overseas traders in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Liverpool.

Understanding this choice matters in three ways. First, it matters in and of itself, as one of the

choices that has made a lasting difference on society and economy. Second, this choice matters

as a representative of a category that remains relevant today. It is an instance of ‘dirty business’,

by which we mean economic activities that are not effectively prohibited by legal authority, but

are nevertheless counter to social values. Alternative worlds lie in the chasm between what is

allowed and what is admired. Cultures and economies may turn on whether capable and

influential people take up activities such as selling life insurance, performing abortions, or

marketing complex financial products to people who don’t understand them.

Engagements in dirty business represent a breakdown in the chain between cultural

values and individual behavior, so it makes sense to structure our inquiry around the links in that

chain. At the top are the cultural values themselves, at the bottom is the individual, and in

between is the network that connects individuals and transmits culture. Most sociologists will

think of the actor’s local network when confronting the question of why some engage in dirty

business. The idea that some actors are embedded in networks with norms that diverge from

broader cultural values was our first instinct too, and it turns out to be true in the Liverpool slave

trade. Reference to divergent local networks, however, is not a fully satisfying explanation for

dirty business, nor for the slave trade. A particular challenge is how dirty-business practices can

take root in networks embedded in an inhospitable value system. Our case highlights status for

both the emergence and diffusion of dirty business.

In The Human Group, Homans (1950) argued that norms have lesser grip on those with

higher status, because their positions in the hierarchy are sticky, and robust even in the face of

normative violations, an argument that has been subsequently refined by Phillips and Zuckerman

(2001). We find evidence for the idea that individual status increases the likelihood of entering

the slave trade. Beyond that individual effect, we examine and find support for a social role of

status, as a driver of the diffusion of behavior through a network. High-status traders influenced

their partners to behave as they did. Our setting allows us to rule out the idea that status served

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as a proxy for competence or knowledge, and we see the network effect of status as normative

influence in the context of contention over values. We therefore see a process where high-

status individuals adopt dirty-business practices because they are less subject to the social

sanctions attached to those practices, and infect their network partners with those practices.

These are the Gentlemen slavers of our title.

If the status-contagion argument explains where and how dirty business takes root, the

question of where it stops remains. This brings us to the third reason to study the choice to enter

the slave trade, which is an opportunity to contribute to theories of social movements, culture

and networks. To summarize what we’ll show subsequently, the dynamics of entering the slave

trade changed in a striking way when the abolition movement was active. It is not merely that

the abolition movement made traders less likely to enter the slave trade, but that the effect of the

influences on the choice to enter, from economic incentives, individual status, to network effects,

all changed. Our models suggest that the abolition movement effected a radical reorganization

of the interpretive schema (aka culture) that converts environmental stimuli into individual

action. It acted almost like a culture switch. Drescher (1986:86) labeled the product of the

abolition movement a “cultural revolution”, which is true in the sense that existing elements of

the culture were re-ordered. A closer articulation of our view of the cultural impact of the

abolition movement was that it made the “unspeakable… speakable (d’Anjou and Van Male,

1998:222).” The abolition movement took cultural values against slavery that were often tacit,

and activated them such that traders considering the slave trade were forced to confront them,

even before the legal abolition of slavery.

The evidence of the cultural impact of the abolition movement is very useful for social

movement theories, which increasingly recognize the interdependence between culture and

social movements, but focus more often on how social movement organizations and

entrepreneurs use culture, rather than how they affect it (Earl, 2004). Our leverage on the

question of how movements affect culture comes from the fact that we study people’s choices,

rather than the typical outcomes in the social movement literature of changes in states or

organizations. Our approach is in line with Poletta’s (2008) recommendation to “focus on

people’s beliefs about appropriate means,” what she calls the institutional schema, or what others

call an institutional logic (Thornton, Ocasio and Lounsbury, 2012). We show that the same

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resources and opportunities resulted in very different investment decisions by traders in different

periods, evidence that the logic through which they relate those resources and opportunities to

their goals changed. These changes are tightly tied to the periods of mass activity by the

abolition movement. This evidence not only suggests a new dependent variable for social

movement research in terms of effects on individual sense making and choice, but also a micro

path through the individual that may account for social movements’ impacts on states and

organizations, an idea we take up in the discussion.

Like the social movements literature, the literature on networks has had an energetic but

incomplete relationship with culture. The energy has gone into examining the influences of

networks on culture, for example using network methods to analyze the structure of narratives

and symbols, identifying the structural determinants of fields and publics, and specifying social

influences on tastes (Pachuki and Breiger, 2010). Less research has employed Emirbayer and

Goodwin’s (1994) idea that culture has an “analytically autonomous” influence on structure, or

their resultant advice that “an adequate approach to historical explanation must encompass both

social structural and cultural perspectives on social action (1414).” Understanding the role of

networks as influences on entering the slave trade requires attention to the cultural context. As

Skocpol (1985: 91) put it, the “very definitions of groups, their interests, and their relations to

each other will be determined by cultural idioms.”

Two characteristics of the cultural context of the network among Liverpool traders are

particularly relevant for us. First, the status that makes a trader influential on his partners’ choice

to enter slaving is a function of deeply rooted legal and cultural institutions that establish the

English gentry, not the boot-strapped concept of status as centrality that is most common in

network analyses (we empirically examine network centrality to show its effect is distinct from

that of legal status). The status of Gentleman was typically acquired at birth, and the Liverpool

trading network which Gentlemen held sway over emerged quickly during their lifetimes. Thus it

was analytically autonomous from the network, yet critical to understanding its operation.

Second is the fact that the operation of the trader network was very different when the abolition

movement was hot. Put simply, slavery diffused through the trading network when norms

against slavery were only tacit, but did not when the abolition movement made them explicit.

Davis and Greve (1997) show a kindred result, that the normatively neutral poison pill takeover

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defense diffused through board interlock networks, while the illegitimate practice of the golden

parachute did not. Here we show the connection between the legitimacy of a practice and

network diffusion with the same practice, and the same network connections. If the abolition

movement acted as a switch for the culture, the cultural change switched the effect of the trader

network.

Of course, the abolition movement and the resultant cultural change are independent

variables for us. Even though we ground this with appropriate reference to the relevant history,

we know that some readers will object that we are oversimplifying the causal relationships

between these forces. We agree that we simplify, but this is justified by the fact that we are

explaining the behavior of traders in Liverpool, not the origins of the abolition movement, nor

changes in British culture. For example, while we know that abolition movement had structural

influences, those influences were not located in the Liverpool trading community (d’Anjou,

1996; Drescher, 1986). Our aim is not to trivialize the broader relationships between culture,

structure or agency, but to use those concepts to explain an important phenomenon. Useful

explanations are necessarily simplifications.

An Analytic Narrative Approach

We explore the determinants of participation in the slave trade among 5920 investors in overseas

ventures in Liverpool between 1730 and 1807, when the British trade was abolished. Thirty

percent of these invested in a slave voyage at some point in their careers. In most of what

follows the specific empirical question is: What is the likelihood that the next voyage invested in

will be a slave voyage, for investors who have not yet participated in slaving? This might be

thought of as the “transition to slaving1.”

Our presentation will be in the form of an analytic narrative (Bates et al., 1998;

Alexandrova, 2009). This approach draws simultaneously on analytical tools and on the

narrative form that is commonly employed in history. We have placed the detailed description of

1 We analyze the occurrence of the first slaving investment because there is a discrete and important difference

between traders who participated at all in the slave trade and those that did not, as opposed to merely considering how many slaving voyages an investor participated in. The first slaving investment makes a trader a “slaver”; the distinction between investing in five slave voyages or six is comparatively less significant. Eighteenth Century Brits also viewed “slaver” as a dichotomous category (e.g., Broadbent, 1908: pp. 120-121). We do show an analysis of the influences on exit from the slave trade in Table A5.

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our quantitative data, methods and results in the appendix to this paper. Here in the body, we’ll

iterate between theory, history, and the statistical results, as we consider individual, network, and

cultural influences on the transition to the slave trade. Compared to the more typical

sociological approach that presents theory, (sometimes) a case history, and statistics serially, our

iterative approach is intended to be self-disciplining. By bringing these pieces closer together, it

is easier to ensure that the analysis serves theory, while at the same time doing justice to

seemingly peripheral details of history that do not fit the basic theory, rather than dismissing

them as outliers. Related, the use of historical narrative forces us to confront interdependencies

between the causal forces at work in Liverpool slaving while an approach that privileged a

statistical analysis might foster an illusion of independence of effects (Gaddis, 2002).

Liverpool and the Transatlantic Slave Trade

Figure 1 shows the number of transatlantic slaving voyages throughout history from the most

common ports of departure. Of the 28,443 voyages with known ports of departure, more

originated in Liverpool than in any other place (4,974, or 17.5% of the total). In the years when

Liverpool was most active in the slave trade, from about 1750 to abolition in 1807, it clearly

dominates all other ports. Between 1791 and 1806, its “market share” measured in terms of

percentage of the world’s slaving voyages never falls below 30%, and goes as high as 63% in

1798. Liverpool was well deserving of its sobriquets ‘slave trading capital of the world’ and ‘the

metropolis of slavery.’

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Figure 1, Slave Voyages from Leading Ports

London was initially the leading British slaving port owing to a monopoly granted to the Royal

Africa Company that lasted until 1712. For a number of decades after that Bristol and London

vied for leadership in the global industry, until Liverpool took over first place in 1744 and held

that position until abolition. Liverpool’s dominance of the trade in this period was a function of

three factors. The first was that it was a first mover in building a number of wet docks, building

the first in Great Britain in 1715, and following that with more throughout the eighteenth

century. Power (1997) attributes this initiative to a town council dominated by the interests of

overseas traders, noting that Liverpool experienced a “commercial coup d'etat (p. 311)” around

the turn of the eighteenth century. Besides facilitating overseas trade, the docks also made

Liverpool a shipbuilding center. Vessels used in the British slave trade were built in more than

one hundred places, but they were much more likely to originate from Liverpool than anywhere

else. Forty-two percent of Liverpool slaving voyages were on locally built ships, while the

comparable proportion of local supply for Bristol and London was seventeen and ten percent.

London

Bristol

Liverpool Rio

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The second Liverpool advantage was its location. Liverpool ships could sail north

around Ireland, taking them away from privateers during the frequent wars of the eighteenth

century, while ships from the southern ports of Bristol and particularly London were more

vulnerable. Liverpool slave traders also benefitted from proximity to the Isle of Man, which was

a tax haven until 1765, allowing Liverpool traders to avoid duties on foreign goods used to barter

for slaves in West Africa. Related, Liverpool benefitted from the burgeoning textile industries in

nearby south Lancashire and Manchester, and from improvements in the transportation linkages

between those places and the port. Textiles were the most common commodity in the barter for

slaves, typically making up about half of traded value. Other goods exported to Africa such as

hardware and gunpowder were also made around Liverpool. The growth of the trade-industrial

complex around Liverpool also created possibilities to process and sell the imports (staples such

as sugar and cotton) that slave traders brought home from the Americas.

The third Liverpool advantage was human capital. We have already noted the dominance

of merchants over Liverpool’s politics. There was a similar commercial dominance over its local

culture, which was particularly materialist and mercantilist, and often openly hostile to the

aesthetic and humanitarian aspirations of the enlightenment (Checkland, 1952). But this

commercial focus, combined with the opportunities and risks of overseas trade, produced

improvisers and innovators, and in many ways, Liverpool simply did the slave trade better. They

implemented effective organizational governance mechanisms and trade remittance mechanisms

for their far-flung enterprise, more so than slave traders from London and Bristol (Silverman and

Ingram, 2013; Morgan, 2007). They developed close, even social, relationships with the African

traders that supplied them with slaves, allowing them to rely on trust to smooth exchange

(Behrendt, Latham and Northrup, 2010).2 They exploited market power in both acquiring and

selling slaves, and they were first-movers into new slave markets (Morgan, 2007). Liverpool

was also ahead of Bristol and London in the supply of capable ships’ officers that allowed them

unique advantage to operate in places such as the Bight of Biafra that did not have European

resident agents, and therefore required that trade be conducted directly between ships’ officers

and African merchants (Behrendt, 2007). McDade (2011) attributes many of these advantages to

2 At one point, the leader of an African slave trading clan in Old Calabar lived in “Liverpool Hall”, a home built in

Liverpool by his British slave-trading partners and shipped to the west coast of Africa as a gift to him (Behrendt et al., 2010). “By the late 1780s as many as 50-70 Africans studied as schools around Liverpool, where they made contacts and learned about the slave trade (Morgan, 2007: 27).”

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the larger, more connected network of traders in Liverpool (compared to Bristol), which she sees

as an advantage for knowledge transfer and access to resources of all types.

Overseas traders in Liverpool could invest in the slave (triangle) trade or the more

common direct trade. The direct trade involved taking immigrants and manufactured goods to

the Americas and returning with agricultural staples. The ship owners typically did not own the

cargo. The slave trade from Liverpool involved taking tradables (manufactured goods, bar iron,

salt) to the West Coast of Africa, trading them with African traders or European factors for

slaves (and perhaps ivory), sailing to the Americas, selling the slaves and, if time permitted,

acquiring a cargo of agricultural staples for the return trip. Liverpool traders might acquire

slaves in many places in West Africa, but the Bight of Biafra, particularly the ports of Bonny and

Old Calabar, was their favored place of embarkation. Similarly, they sold slaves all over the

Americas, but Jamaica (31% of Liverpool slaving voyages) and Barbados (14%) were the most

common destinations. As Table 1 indicates, the slave trade represented more risk, more potential

reward, and greater financial outlay than the direct trade.

Table 1

Comparison of Direct Trade and Slave Trade, 1730-1807

Share of

Voyages in

our Data

Ships Sunk,

Seized or

Condemned

Average

Number of

Owners

Estimate of

Voyage

Expenses, not

including ship

Estimate of

Gross Profit

of Successful

Voyage

Direct Trade 82.4% 8.1% 3.19 £1,550-£2,000 £750-£1,000

Slave Trade 17.6% 18.8% 4.07 £3,850-£5,500 £3,000-£4,000

Estimates from our data and Silverman and Ingram, 2013

How did the Slave Trade Fit with British Values?

One might reasonably ask whether slavery was in fact “dirty business” in Britain in the period

we study, given the economic importance of the slave trade and slavery to the metropole and her

colonies, the fact that the trade was carried out legally by British traders for more than two

centuries, and that there was no active abolition movement in Britain until late in the eighteenth

century. The answer is “yes.” The first chapter of Moral Capital, Chris Brown’s remarkable

history of the cultural antecedents of British abolitionism, is titled “Antislavery without

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Abolitionism.” In it he argues that the slave trade represented a divergence between economic

practice and normative values, and that there was a social cost to be paid: “Slave traders in

Britain encountered public disapproval early in the eighteenth century, decades before the

emergence of those cultural movements [the abolition movement] often credited for engendering

antislavery sentiment (2006: 37).” A key claim is that antislavery sentiment did not emerge

simultaneously with the abolition movement, but was instead widespread throughout the period

we study. As Davis explains, “climates of opinion do not give virgin birth to social movements

(1999: 215).”

In Capitalism and Antislavery, Seymour Drescher further documents the low normative

standing of the slave trade: the “tension between economic utility and social distaste was present

early in the development of the British slave colonies. Such attitudes appeared far too soon to

attribute the phenomenon to the enlightenment. The condemnation of the slave trade as un-

Christian and inhuman was distilled even into mid-eighteenth century children’s literature

(1986:18).” He notes that slave vessels never landed in Britain, that metropolitans exposed to

slavery in the Caribbean expressed culture shock, and that:

“By the mid-seventeenth century, when English subjects began systematically to buy and

sell other human beings on a large scale, neither chattel slavery nor inherited bondage

existed any longer within the boundaries of their own land. The language of antislavery

ran through their rhetoric, their rituals and their riots throughout the eighteenth century. A

‘libertarian heritage’ was the dominant political ideology in the eighteenth century, to

which all groups subscribed….The world was made safe for North-West European

colonial slavery by the tyranny of distance rather than by universal principles.”

The view from history is of two solitudes, a muffled tension between a British culture

that celebrated liberty operating adjacent to a colonial economic system that relied on slavery3.

As Emma Rothschild concludes in her cultural history of the Johnstones, an eighteenth century

Scottish family that participated in the slave economy (one of them was son-in-law to a

Liverpool slave trader) while sometimes championing the values of abolition, “[t]he forty years

…from the new settlements of 1763 to the abolition of the slave trade (in British ships) in 1806,

were a time of humanitarian sentiment as in the abolitionist associations...and at the same time,

3 This separation between the British value of liberty and colonial economic practice reminds of the “internal tension

of empire and nation” between the value of national sovereignty and the colonial system itself that existed at about

the same time in the Empire (Strang, 1990). Both abolitionists and champions of national sovereignty employed the

analogy between slavery and colonialism (Brown, 2006).

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of consolidation and expansion in the Atlantic slave economy (2011: 162).” These separate

moral worlds could coexist because slavery occurred far away from Britain. While its

perpetrators were not lauded at home, neither was it necessary to constantly confront their

offense to British values. Slavery violated those values, but distance from the slave colonies

made it possible to avoid the conversation, and that was mostly what happened until the late

eighteenth century.4 Slave traders, however, represented an exception to this normative

suspension. They were literally the brokers between the metropole and the slave economy, the

only residents of Britain actively involved in slavery. Slave traders were the bridge between

those separate worlds, and therefore the focus of the energy produced by their normative tension:

“Anti-slavery sentiment did circulate in the early eighteenth century….[but] critics tended to

judge American slaveholders and Atlantic slave traders rather than British institutions and British

policies (Brown, 2006: 36).” This brings us to our puzzle, why did the Liverpool slave traders

engage in a dirty business despite exposure to the anti-slaving values of British culture?

Status and Entry to the Slave Trade

Given that the slave trade was legal, any sanctions traders incur for violating cultural

expectations would be social. Slave trading, like other instances of dirty business, was in the

realm of normative control. And even though there was no active contention over the trade until

late in the eighteenth century, Liverpool traders did suffer occasional social sanctions: “The

moral censure of ‘Liverpool Men’ by evangelicals and Dissenters was to shape subsequent

perceptions of the town’s eighteenth century merchants as brutal and boorish (Longmore, 2007:

227).” The hostility was visited at an interpersonal level, as in the case of the London

correspondent of a Liverpool slave trade supporter, who addressed him as ‘Liverpool man’, not

to be confused with the Londoner who claimed the label ‘humanity man’ (Wilson, 1998). In an

often repeated story, a famous visiting actor, performing a drunken Richard the III in 1772,

responded to the complaints of his Liverpool audience with a speech that is a model of norm-

based scolding:

4 In this view, what differentiates the years of the abolition movement from the decades that preceded it is not a shift

in public attitudes towards slavery, but rather the enactment of attitudes that existed, but were not talked about or

acted upon (d’Anjou, 1996). This is part of the reason for the very fast acceleration of the abolition movement once

it began: “The overwhelming majority of articulate Britons were abolitionists as soon as they gathered together to

discuss the slave trade (Drescher, 1990: 580).”

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“What! You hiss me? Hiss George Frederick Cooke? You contemptible money-getters! I

banish you! There is not a brick in your damn town but what has been cemented by the

blood of a negro! (Broadbent, 1908, 120-121).”

In the face of such stigma, the necessary question to explain the initiation of the slave

trade is: “are some individuals are less affected by norms than others?” Various arguments in

social psychology and sociology point to status as a moderator of normative control. Phillips and

Zuckerman (2001) integrate those arguments and evidence to offer a theory of middle-status

conformity. The idea is that norms grip most tightly for those in the middle of a status hierarchy.

Those at the top and bottom of the status hierarchy have more freedom from the norm and are

more likely to engage in anti-normative behavior. The key mechanism is security of status.

Phillips and Zuckerman describe a status system that is quite sticky for those who are clearly

insiders, or outsiders. Since those at the top are safe in their status, they feel autonomy from

norms. Since those at the bottom don’t perceive much chance of climbing in the status

hierarchy, they too feel autonomy. Those in the middle, however, feel the potential to climb and

the risk of falling, and they therefore attend most carefully to normative expectations.

Throughout the eighteenth century, Liverpool’s elite citizens were associated with the

slave trade. For example, we traced the names of the 41 members of the Common Council of

Liverpool in 1752 (found in The Liverpool Memorandum Book, 1752) to our data, and found

that 24 were slaving investors. Only four were involved in overseas trade but not the slave trade,

so participation in slavery was much more likely among the traders on the Council than in

Liverpool overall. However, the political (and probably economic) status represented by sitting

on the town council is not what Phillips and Zuckerman rely on to predict middle-status

conformity. They are careful to explain that the theory applies when status indicates “the amount

of honor or esteem accorded to a person (386),” not power, ability or resources.

To capture the “honor or esteem” accorded to overseas traders, we rely on legal status,

particularly those who held the titles of worship: Esquires and Gentlemen. An authoritative

contemporaneous account of English law defines Esquires to include the first sons of Knights

and their eldest sons in perpetual succession; the younger sons of peers and their eldest sons in

perpetual succession; those who receive the designation from the King, and their eldest sons;

those who bear any office of trust under the crown (Liverpool mayors gained the designation of

Esquire). Gentlemen were those who “studieth the laws of the realm, who studieth in the

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universities, who professeth liberal sciences, and (to be short) who can live idly, and without

manual labour, and will bear the port, charge, and countenance of a Gentleman (Blackstone,

1765, Book 1: 394).” Esquires and Gentleman were not, of course, the top social rank in Britain.

The order of ranks were the nobility; titles of dignity (Knights and Baronets); titles of worship

(Esquires and Gentlemen); Yeoman or Freemen (commoners with enough capital to qualify to sit

on juries and to vote in elections for public office); and all others. However, there were no

nobles or titles of dignity among the investors in overseas trade in Liverpool. Among 200

leading Liverpool slave traders that appear in the index of wills in Pope (2007) four died with

titles of dignity, but all of these were obtained after entry to the slave trade.

By statute, individuals were required to identify by rank in legal proceedings and other

actions, so these categories were not superfluous. Further, among the 5920 traders we study,

there were only 145 Gentlemen and 57 Esquires. This paucity of high-status titles suggests that

they were not claimed idly, at least in the sources we rely on. Given their rarity, we collapse

Esquires and Gentlemen into one category for analysis which we will refer to as call simply

“Gentlemen,” following Edward Coke who confounded the two titles, and observed “every

Esquire is a Gentleman (Blackstone (1765: 393).”

Figure 2 shows the base-rate of transition to slaving for the status types of Gentleman,

Merchants, and Others. Merchants and Others were all Freemen. Others performed some

designated profession or occupation (e.g., brewers, glaziers, captains). Merchants lived off their

capital through importing and exporting, and we therefore categorized them as closer to the

“idle” Gentlemen. Haggerty (2012: 26) notes that the title “merchant” was prestigious,

designating the “elite of the trading community”, giving them clear precedence over Others,

although nobody would argue that Merchants were above Gentlemen in status. The effect sizes

represent the likelihood of an overseas trader who has not yet invested in slaving taking a stake

in a slave voyage. Other is the comparison category (with a likelihood of entering the slave trade

of 1.00). Merchants were overall twenty-percent more likely than Others to enter the slave trade,

and Gentlemen 123% more likely. Traders with higher status were indeed more likely to flout

the norms against participation in the slave trade.

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Figure 2 Transition to Slaving as a Function of Legal Status (Table A1, Model 2)

Figure 2 indicates that anti-normative slave trading increased monotonically with the

status of the trader, which does not on the surface appear consistent with the prediction that the

greatest conformity will be at middle-status levels. It is important to remember, however, that

our data represents a truncation of the status hierarchy. All of the overseas traders, even those

that appear in our data with the rank of Other, were of relatively high status in the broader

society. For example, in 1800, when there were approximately 80,000 residents of Liverpool,

our data identify 748 distinct Liverpool traders. These were not necessarily the 748 wealthiest in

the town, but they were among the roughly 12% of Liverpool residents at that time that appeared

in Gore’s directory of “principal residents.” The vast majority of residents could not have

afforded to invest in overseas trade. This was certainly true for the lowest rungs of the status

hierarchy, the group that would, according to the middle-status conformity prediction, be

expected to join the high-status Gentleman in the slave trade. The fact that the lowest of the low

could not invest in the slave trade did not stop them from participating in other ways, particularly

as crew. Consider this account of a Liverpool slave ship captain:

1

1.20442226

2.23446092

1

1.2

1.4

1.6

1.8

2

2.2

2.4

Others Merchants Gentlemen

Mu

ltip

lier

of

the

Tra

nis

tio

n t

o S

lavi

ng

Rat

e

15

“With respect to the mortality amongst the crews of African ships5, it must be taken into

account that many of the individuals composing them were the very dregs of the

community. Some of them had escaped from jails, others were undiscovered offenders,

who sought to withdraw themselves from their country, lest they should fall into the

hands of the officers of justice. These wretched beings used to flock to Liverpool

(Williams, 1897: 688).”

Phillips and Zuckerman (2001) suggested that the anti-normative behavior of those of high- and

low-status could take different forms. With Gentleman being most likely among overseas traders

to invest in slaving, and the “dregs of the community” carrying out the dirty business as crew,

the result is indeed middle-status conformity.

For us, one of the appeals of the Gentleman category as an indicator of status is that it is

completely independent of trading, or indeed, any economic activity. By decoupling conduct

and status, a cleaner view of the liberating potential of high status becomes possible. We do

have access to another measure of status among Liverpool traders. A trader’s status in the inter-

trader network created by co-investments6 does not have the advantage of being completely

separate from slaving, but it nevertheless represents a form of “honor or esteem” in the sense of

indicating that a trader is an attractive partner. Furthermore, the familiar Matthew Effect

(Podolny, 1993) creates stickiness in this hierarchy, such that highly central traders may feel safe

in their network status, while low centrality traders may feel sufficiently peripheral as to be

emboldened to flaunt the broader social norm against slaving. As Figure 3 shows, the likelihood

of engaging in slaving is highest for those at the high and low end of the network status

hierarchy. Conformity to the anti-slaving norm is highest at middle status.

5 The mortality rate of European crew on transatlantic slave voyages was approximately 20%, owing mostly to

malaria and yellow fever (Curtin, 1969). 6 Network status is operationalized as the trader’s rank by eigenvector centrality in the year.

16

Figure 3: Transition to Slaving as a Function of Network Status (Table A1, Model 2)

We also examined for Liverpool slaving one of Phillips and Zuckerman’s (2001) key caveats,

that the middle-status conformity prediction holds only when status does not equal power,

ability, or resources. Network centrality in particular is a function of previous voyage-

investments, and might therefore be expected to correlate with ability (through experience) and

wealth (through previous successful voyages). However, our models include a direct measure of

previous non-slaving voyages, an appropriate control for both trader experience and wealth

through trading investments. As would be expected this variable is highly correlated with

network status (.54). Interestingly, it is negatively associated with the likelihood of participating

in a slave voyage (see table A1). Furthermore, the models in the appendix include another

variable that proxies material resources, the percentage of an investor’s previous ships that have

been lost (sunk, seized or condemned). That variable has a positive relationship to the likelihood

of entering the slave trade. This, combined with the effect of direct-trade experience, suggests

that it is not simply the case that those made wealthy in the direct trade went into the slave trade.

Instead, the results suggest that engaging in the slave trade was more an act of desperation of

traders who had not experienced success in the direct trade.

0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

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97M

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ran

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R

ate

Rank in Year by Eigenvector Centrality

17

Despite the assurance provided by these control variables, we were still concerned that

the Gentleman category might represent material endowments that made it easier to get into the

expensive slave trade. We consulted the data on the values of personal estates of leading

Liverpool slave traders presented in Pope (2007) as one source of insight into the levels of

wealth represented by our status categories. The Gentlemen in that list left estates with an

average value of £18515. Merchants left estates averaging £11767, while the comparable figure

for the Other rank was £9303. The much larger average estates of the Gentlemen was mainly

due to one massive estate. When the largest estate in each category is eliminated the averages

for Gentlemen and Merchants were not significantly different (£8824 and £7561), although

larger than the Other category (£4688). Of course, Pope’s list is a sample of leading slavers, not

a census, and the figures represent wealth upon death, not at the time of entering the slave trade.

Nevertheless, it is consistent with the fact that there is nothing in the legal definition of

Gentleman that necessitates great wealth, particularly relative to the active merchant class.

As yet another investigation into whether Gentlemen brought non-status advantages to

the conduct of the slave trade, we conducted an extensive analysis of the investments and

performance of Gentlemen in the slave trade. It is detailed in the section in the appendix titled

“Did Gentlemen Slavers Perform or Invest Differently?” and results are summarized in Table

A2. Investments by Gentlemen were no more or less likely than investments by non-Gentlemen

to sink, to be captured, or to experience crew deaths. The length of Gentlemen’s voyages was no

different than non-Gentlemen. There is an indication that ships Gentlemen invested in suffered

smaller shortfalls between their planned and actual number of slaves. Nine extra slaves per

voyage represent a modest performance advantage. Gentlemen invested in larger ships than

others, ranked higher on the lists of owners, and were more likely to serve as ship’s husband

(akin to managing partner). Overall the performance of Gentlemen’s voyages was very similar

to non-Gentlemen. Gentlemen’s investment profile in slaving voyages suggests that they may

have made bigger investments than others, but not that they were more likely to take risks. The

modest performance effects, and the evidence of larger investments could support an alternative

to our claim that their status liberated them from the anti-slaving norm, but below we show that

their entry to slaving varied under different cultural conditions. That evidence is decisive in

favor of our argument and against the idea that Gentlemen entered slaving only because of

wealth, or because they performed better in the slave trade.

18

Network Influences on the Transition to Slaving

A large and robust literature on social contagion shows that attitudes and behaviors are more

likely to be shared among connected actors. Overwhelmingly, however, the literature on social

contagion examines the diffusion of opinions, knowledge, and the adoption of innovation. These

things are different fundamentally from entry to slaving. In the typical example of social

contagion, what is in question is the utility of a product or idea (e.g., Tolbert and Zucker, 1983).

The backdrop is uncertainty and the absence of normative expectations, not, as in the case of

slaving, a normative expectation not to adopt the “innovation.” Potential slave traders did not

face uncertainty as to whether slaving was an effective economic strategy, and neither could they

claim uncertainty as to its illegitimacy. Moreover, the status of a trader as an “opinion leader”

cannot be assumed to be independent of the normative evaluation of his behavior. Social

influence in this situation cannot operate according to the same mechanisms as it does in others.

Some studies have identified social contagion in the context of anti-normative behavior

(e.g., Christiakis and Fowler’s 2007 analysis of the diffusion of obesity; Bearman and Stovel,

2000 on becoming a Nazi). Norms rely on social sanctions, so if one’s social group adopts anti-

normative behavior, one could find local social support for engaging in the same behavior. In

Liverpool, a trader might feel enabled (or even pressured) to enter slaving if his network contacts

were slavers. Relevant empirical evidence for the question of social contagion in the entry to the

slave trade comes from Younts’ (2008) experimental analysis of the social influences on anti-

normative behavior. He identified that (a) endorsement of anti-normative behavior (cheating) by

a reference group increased the likelihood of the subject cheating; and (b) the suggestion to cheat

was more influential when it came from a high-status confederate.

Figure 4 shows the impact of a trader’s network contacts on the likelihood of entering the

slave trade. The last six columns represent the influence of ties in the trading network

(slavers/non-slavers * Gentlemen/Merchants/Others). The first two columns represent ties

formed through membership in an elite club, the Mock Corporation of Sephton (which we’ll

refer to as the Sephton Club). The Sephton Club operated from 1753 to after abolition,

essentially the whole period during which Liverpool dominated the slave trade7. More than 1000

7 Haggerty and Haggerty (2011) examined the associational structure of eighteenth-century Liverpool with

reference to a number of organizations. These included another social club, the Ugly Face Club, that operated for

19

men were members at some point during that time. In the Sephton Club civic and business

leaders of Liverpoool gathered ostensibly to engage in a role play of governing the suburban

town of Sephton (they would conduct mock elections for municipal offices), but mostly to drink.

In contemporary terms, it was like a model U.N. populated by actual leaders from the U.N., with

alcohol. Two-hundred and thirty nine of our 5920 traders were members of the Sephton Club,

and compared to traders who were not part of the Sephton Club they invested in many more

voyages (26.4 vs. 8.7), were more likely to be Gentlemen (11% vs. 3%), more likely to be

Merchants (72% vs. 51%) and less likely to hold the lowest legal status of “Other” (16% vs.

46%). For every Sephton Club member, we count the number of slavers and non-slavers they

were tied to through the club, and represent these effects in the first two columns in Figure 4.

The results show that social contagion did indeed operate in the Liverpool slave trade.

With the exception of one of eight coefficients (that for Other Slaver Ties), it is always the case

that network ties to slavers increase the likelihood of entering the slave trade, while ties to non-

slavers decrease that likelihood. Further, there is a clear influence of legal status: Gentlemen

were much more influential on their social contacts than Merchants or Others.

Figure 4: Social Influence through the Trading Network (Table A1, Model 4)

a much shorter period than Sephton. They also included smaller and special-purpose organizations such as the Library and the Committee of African Merchants. We’re coding networks created through those organizations, but the Sephton Club seems likely to be the most significant for our analysis given its temporal scope and size.

20

Younts’ (2008) explanation for the status effect on the diffusion of deviance depended on

the correlation between status and ability, such that the high-status endorsement is more credible.

We are doubtful of that mechanism, at least in our context, because we simply don’t believe

there was uncertainty about the efficacy of a slaving investment. Moreover, with an anti-

normative behavior as opposed to one whose efficacy is uncertain, the costs of social sanction

must be considered. As explained, we don’t think that Gentlemen would likely have been

viewed as more competent about trading or slaving—their status comes from a different

institutional source, and their performance was not atypical. We expect instead that the

contagiousness of Gentlemen slavers comes from the “moral cover” that their status provides.

Consistent with this, in supplementary analysis we found that traders with more network status,

gained as a function of voyages, were not more influential on their network partners’ likelihood

to enter slaving. Whether or not one entered the slave trade was not a function of technical

uncertainty but moral authority. Legal status provided a dispensation that centrality in the

network of traders did not.

Another possibility worth considering is that the network effects we report represent

access to information. Traders would need to source investment opportunities, and their

networks provide obvious opportunities. Again, this alternative fails to account for the fact that

Gentlemen were so much more influential than Merchants or Others. If the network tie

represented only information, presumably legal status would matter much less, or not at all.

Moreover, there is little reason to believe that it was hard for investors to find investing

opportunities. In sixty-five percent of traders’ initial slaving investments, the group they

invested with included nobody who was previously part of their network. Clearly, it was

possible to find investment opportunities without relying directly on ones’ network. If we allow

for indirect mechanisms to discover investments, myriad paths were available to the Liverpool

traders.

Social Movement Influence: Switching the Locus of Social Control

The abolition movement in Britain started in earnest in 1787, and succeeded in legislation

twenty years later. The mystery of the movement is perhaps that it did not happen sooner.

21

Intellectual and economic currents had been moving against the slave trade throughout the

eighteenth century, and “every argument in favor of abolition and emancipation had been present

for a long time” (d’Anjou, 1996; d’Anjou and Van Male, 1998: 222). These arguments were

proffered by radicals and conservatives, Whigs and Tories, essentially everyone of influence

without a direct financial interest in the slave economy (Duncan, 2001). The ideas were “in the

air” waiting action (Davis, 1966: 489; Anstey, 1975a). As for sources of the necessary action,

d’Anjou and Van Male (1998) document the successful efforts of social movement actors to

frame issues in a cultural context that was unsettled, at least in the sense that the primacy of

competing issues was unclear. Drescher (1986) examines action in the form of petitions, which

were pervasive and drew wide-ranging support. Parliament’s increasing willingness to accept

petitions as “a mode of integrating public opinion into the legislative process (83)” provided a

political opportunity.

Excellent histories of the abolition movement appear in the sources cited above. Our

interest is in its effects, through the mechanism of cultural change, on the choices of Liverpool

traders. The common conclusion is that the cultural influence of the movement was striking and

sudden, affecting a re-ordering of value claims that had before permitted the slave trade to be

justified as a necessary evil, or more often allowed Brits to avoid confronting it at all.

According to d’Anjou and Van Male (1998: 221) it “succeeded… in fundamentally changing the

way people thought about trade in slaves and about slavery itself. After 1792 both practices

were collectively defined as abject and immoral.” But how if at all did this shift, documented in

literature and eventually manifest in law, affect individual behavior? And was it pervasive

enough to reach even Liverpool?

In the twenty years after 1787, Liverpool did not shrink in the face of contention, but

rather increased its dominance of the slave trade. The city provided a defense of slaving that

was unique in the country. Every major British city produced petitions for the abolitionist cause

save Liverpool, which instead produced frequent petitions in favor of the slave trade. The

motivation for this resistance was not merely economic interest. In Manchester, which had a

deep economic interest in Liverpool’s slave industry as the source of manufactured goods for

trade, 10,000 people signed an abolition petition in 1787. By that time most Brits were

22

economically dependent on the slave trade, some intensely so, but only in Liverpool were actual

slave traders common. That difference mattered, at least at the level of political action.

There were occasional episodes of mob violence against abolitionists in Liverpool. But

without a doubt, the arguments for abolition from outside the community of traders became

prominent. “The friends of the hapless Africans, and many such are to be found even here, have

not been passive and unconcerned in the struggle…They have remonstrated in public and in

private (The Picture of Liverpool, 1805: 148).”As Howell (2007: 282) puts it, “It seems that the

matter was being widely discussed [in Liverpool] and strong positions on both sides of the

argument were being adopted.”

Before the abolition movement, there appears almost no explicit defense of the slave

trade from Liverpool, probably because there was no active threat against it. Discussions of the

slave trade in guides to Liverpool before the abolition movement were matter of fact

descriptions, with no justifications (or condemnations). The abolition movement ignited an

active defense of the trade. The Liverpool Council commissioned an extensive defense of the

trade on religious grounds (Harris, 1788). Letter writers, poets, and others presented secular

arguments. The content of published documents suggests the discussions and arguments that

must have been happening in Liverpool at this time. Harris (1788) cited many non-condemning

references to slavery from the Old Testament. Secular arguments included that Africans were

already enslaved in Africa; that the transatlantic trade exposed them to Christianity; and that it

presented them with some chance of emancipation. Of course the economic benefits of the trade

were also cited. In petitions and Parliamentary debates, economic issues were the foundation of

the anti-abolitionist argument (Drescher, 1990). In the local discourse, it was sometimes

observed that economic benefits were spread wide in Liverpool through its generous charitable

institutions (Drescher, 1988).

On the abolition side, the arguments targeted the inhumanity of the practice. They

backed up that characterization with stories of brutality from the ships, and a very early effort of

abolitionists was to collect such testimonials from captains and seamen in Liverpool and

elsewhere. They also challenged the anti-abolitionists’ claims about the condition of Africans in

Africa. Drescher (1990) shows abolitionists’ emphasis on moral issues, for example that their

most characteristic arguments in Parliamentary debates were: Policy Irrelevance (the idea that

23

economic interests are irrelevant to the fundamentally moral issue); British guilt; British pride;

religion; and justice. The champion of abolitionism in Liverpool was William Roscoe, who

argued for decades against the trade. Roscoe was an historian, the author of an influential

biography of Lorenzo de’Medici, and he frequently compared Liverpool to renaissance Florence.

That flattering analogy offered redemption of identity to Liverpudlians who were willing to

sacrifice the naked commercialism of the slave trade and invest in culture (Wilson, 1998).

Ultimately, the cultural revolution did reach Liverpool. Liverpool elected Roscoe, the

face of abolition in the town, to Parliament in 1806. Further evidence that attitudes to slavery

shifted in Liverpool is apparent in the tone of guides to the town published in the early-

nineteenth century (Drescher, 1988). The Picture of Liverpool published in 1805 begins its

discussion of the trade by calling the label “metropolis of slavery” an unfounded and illiberal

characterization of the town. The slave trade is attributed to three or four houses, and to

merchants from outside Liverpool. It is “the duty of those who feel for the honour of the town,

and disapprove of the traffic to rescue it from this general opprobrium by every means in their

power (147).” The slavers are recognized as being sometimes “of fair, unblemished characters,

but of mild and conciliatory dispositions, exemplary not only for their public spirit, but also for

their private munificence and liberality (147).” These concessions remind us that that the

slavers were neighbors of the writer, but they were also made under the rubric of “giving the

devil his due.” The emerging picture is of a society that separated itself from the slavers.

Status Effects During the Abolition Movement

If the abolition movement’s cultural revolution affected Liverpool, what response would

we expect from traders? With regard to status effects, the prediction is clear. The abolition

movement strengthened and clarified the normative prescription against the slave trade, so we

expect that status will have a larger effect to increase entry into the slave trade. Status increases

liberty from normative prescriptions, so when the prescriptions are stronger and clearer, status

should matter more.

24

Figure 5: Status Effects During The Abolition Movement (Table A1, Models 5 and 6)

Figure 5 compares the effect of legal status for abolition and non-abolition years. It

clearly shows that the role of legal status to encourage entry to the slave trade is markedly

stronger during the abolition movement, when social pressure against the slave trade was intense,

compared to the non-abolition years when it was latent. This difference is wholly consistent with

the idea that high status traders flouted social pressure against the slave trade and is also useful

for ruling out an alternative explanation, that Gentlemen invested in the slave trade due to

advantages of capital or competence.

Network Effects During the Abolition Movement

Regarding the effect of the abolition movement on network influence, a useful starting

point is Davis and Greve’s (1997) finding that a normatively ambiguous corporate governance

practice diffused through a business network, while a clearly anti-normative one did not. They

cite long standing evidence that pro-normative practices diffuse faster than anti-normative ones.

That argument doesn’t fit our context perfectly. The slave trade was never pro-normative, rather

it was anti-normative, but ambiguously so, and then clearly anti-normative during the abolition

movement. Our theoretical attention is drawn to the individual relationship that is the structural

foundation of network diffusion. The relational effect we have demonstrated is based on

contacts between slavers and non-slavers. These increase the likelihood of non-slavers entering

the slave trade, more so if the slavers are of higher status and therefore more influence. The

0

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Others Merchants Gentlemen

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25

congress that produces this effect can be imagined in the absence of the abolition movement, as

slavers would at least be able to offer justifications for the trade, and attest to its rewards. But

just how could that conversation work in the heat of the abolition movement, when the trade had

been “collectively defined as abject and immoral (d’Anjou and Van Male, 1998:221)?”

Put differently, the abolition movement transforms the relationships through which

slaving could diffuse, indeed it wrenches them by undermining the moral equivalency of the

actors on each side of the relationship. The abolition movement transforms relationships

between slavers and non-slavers from structural holes, where the parties have access to different

but potentially reconcilable bases of knowledge, to what Pachuki and Breiger (2010) call

“cultural holes”, which span vast and potentially irreconcilable differences of values. Cultural

holes are much harder to traverse, suggesting that network influence on the likelihood of entering

the slave trade would be less strong during the abolition movement.

Figure 6: Social Influence Effects During Abolition Movement. (Table A1, Models 5 and 6).

26

Figure 6 compares the influence of network ties in abolition and non-abolition years. The

difference is striking. Essentially, the network which was so potent in non-abolition years

matters almost not at all during the abolition movement. The figure shows that there were five

significant network influences in the non-abolition years (nine including the effects of the

Sephton network and network centrality which aren’t shown in Figure 68) and only one during

the abolition movement (two counting ties to slavers through the Sephton Club). Notably, major

network influences that pulled people into the slave trade in non-abolition years—the positive

effects of ties to slavers who were Gentlemen and Merchants—do not operate during abolition.

It is almost as if a switch was flipped, such that diffusion through much of the network was

turned off.

If diffusion through the network stopped during the abolition movement, what did

operate? The structural change models (5 and 6 in Table A1) show that a number of individual-

characteristics operate differently during abolition to predict whether a trader enters slaving. We

have already noted that legal status matters more during abolition. Before abolition, traders were

more likely to enter slaving if they had suffered recent losses in the direct trade, but that effect

doesn’t operate during abolition, suggesting a reduction in the legitimacy of the slave trade as

part of a portfolio of investment options that a trader can choose from depending on his risk

preference. Related, the effect of competition from slave traders outside Britain switches during

the abolition movement. Before abolition, slave voyages from outside Britain encourage entry

among Liverpool traders, an effect that suggests the exuberance of a slaving bubble. During

abolition, we see a more normal competitive effect, where voyages from elsewhere discourage

Liverpool traders from entry to slaving. This dissuasive effect of competition suggests that

traders insist on a higher level of profitability to enter slaving during abolition, in line with the

idea that the illegitimacy of the trade increased.

A different dynamic comes from looking at traders who live in Liverpool, as opposed to

living elsewhere. Liverpool residents were 46% more likely to enter the trade than non-residents

in the non-abolition years, but 104% more likely during abolition. As we have noted, Liverpool

was stigmatized by anti-slavery rhetoric during abolition, and its residents responded to the

8 These network effects are relevant to our argument but don’t appear in Figure 6 because the magnitude of the

Sephton slave tie variable during abolition would dwarf other effects, and because the network centrality variable is a rank among traders, not a count of ties, so would not make sense graphed in comparison to tie effects.

27

external threat to their identities with a unique stance in favor of the slave trade. They carried

their case to the end, indeed, beyond it as Roscoe was met by a violent mob when he returned to

Liverpool after casting his vote for abolition.

The theoretically relevant point is that while network position mattered very much to

determine who enters the slave trade before abolition, during abolition years, the influences did

not depend on the network position of a trader. The abolition movement represented an

activation of latent cultural values, such that all traders were now exposed to arguments that

might have previously been shared in private between network partners. In effect, the locus of

social control switched from the network to the culture, and the mechanism switched from

network diffusion to broadcast diffusion (Strang and Soule, 1998). Gentlemen no longer

provided moral cover to others.

Did the Abolition Movement Affect Economic Conditions?

Our identification strategy depends on the claim that the relevant impact of the abolition

movement was cultural, to heighten the clarity of the norm in British culture against the slave

trade. If this claim is accepted then alternative explanations for our status and network effects

fade. Specifically, the increase in the relevance of legal status during the abolition movement is

consistent with our argument on normative autonomy, and inconsistent with an argument that

Gentlemen invested in the slave trade because of wealth or risk preference. Similarly, the fact

that the network influences entre to the slave trade much less during the abolition movement is

consistent with our argument that network ties provided moral cover, but inconsistent with an

argument that they merely provided access to information (after all, access to information on

available slaving investments would presumably be harder to find when the abolition movement

was hot, suggesting that the network should matter more during abolition if it primarily

represented access to investment opportunities).

Just why are we confident that the impact of the abolition movement represents culture

and not some change in the economic conditions of the slave trade? To begin with, recognize

that our analytic models represent an extensive set of control variables for industry conditions,

capturing completion from other nations, prices for sugar and slaves, and shocks to the supply of

slaves from changes in African weather. For arguments that these things may have been higher

28

or lower in the years the abolition movement was hot, we can rely on the fact that our models

account for such changes. Another possibility is that our status measure may interact with

industry conditions. For example, slave prices may have been higher during abolition and

Gentlemen may have been particularly likely to enter the trade when slave prices were high (or

low), perhaps because they had a different wealth or risk preference. We examined possibilities

like this by including interaction terms between our Gentlemen variable and economic

conditions. The appendix describes this analysis in detail, and the results appear in table A3.

Gentlemen were no more or less likely to enter the trade as a function of economic conditions.

One economic factor that not yet considered is the cost of operating a voyage. We know

of no cost estimates for the whole period we study that could be used for this purpose. The most

relevant source is Anstey (1775b) who estimates costs and profits for the British slave trade as a

whole from 1761 on. He identifies influences on costs, including war and regulation, but does

not mention the abolition movement in this regard. Table A4 shows our full models including

Anstey’s cost estimates. Even though inclusion of cost estimates requires that we ignore

observations before 1761, the results are comparable to those from the full data shown in Table

A1. Furthermore, supplementary analyses showed no significant interaction between the

Gentlemen variable and the cost variable.

The bottom line is that our models capture changes in the economics of the industry

throughout the period we study. High status traders did not invest differently from others as a

function of economic conditions. We therefore remain confident in the conclusion that the shifts

in entre to the slave trade affected by abolition came through the cultural revolution that

movement represented.

Were the Quakers Slavers?

Quakers are typically recognized as the most significant cultural entrepreneurs of the

British abolition movement (d’Anjou, 1996). Fascinatingly, our multivariate models do not

indicate that Quakers were less likely to enter the Liverpool slave trade, regardless of whether

the abolition movement was active. Indeed, Quakers among Liverpool traders were actually

more likely to participate in the slave trade than non-Quakers (although that basic difference is

not statistically significant in multivariate models).

29

Quakers were active and successful in commerce and it is known that some Quakers

participated in the slave trade even as other Quakers railed against it. Leading Quakers

prosecuted the slave trade in Rhode Island, and served as members of the Royal Africa

Company, the early British slave trading monopoly (Davis, 1966: 304-305). Quakers were

prominent and influential in Bristol when it was a leading slave port, and were leading slavers in

Lancaster, close to Liverpool (Hudson, 2001: 562). Table 2 presents a comparison between

Quaker and Non-Quaker traders in our data. The Quakers among Liverpool traders represented

higher status than non-Quakers. They were more likely to be Gentlemen and Esquires, more

likely to participate in the elite Sephton Club, and more central in the trading network. So, our

arguments about the direct and network effects of status on the entre to slaving would have

operated to push and pull Quakers into the trade. Add to this the idea that tight-knit Quaker

networks promoted the transfer of capital and minimized business risk during the eighteenth and

early nineteenth centuries (Prior and Kirby, 1993), which would make the Quakers less sensitive

to the capital requirements and risks of the slave trade. These arguments suggest that while the

Quakers may have been subject more than other traders to ideological arguments against the

slave trade, they also had more of the status, social and economic resources that we have shown

made traders more likely to participate in slaving.

Table 2

Quakers Among the Liverpool Traders

Non- Quakers Quakers

Number 5272 648

% Slavers 28% 38%

% Sephton Club Members 4.2% 10.6%

% Gentlemen/ Esquire 3.2% 5.1%

% Merchants 51.0% 54.3%

% Other Status 45.8% 40.6%

Network at the End of Trading Career

Number of Ties 7.1 13.2

% Ties to Quakers 17% 20%

30

Exit from the Slave Trade

We do not view becoming a slaver as the mirror image of exiting the slave trade. Slaving

represented a normative stain that could not be completely washed away with the last investment

in a slave voyage. Still, we were interested in the effects of status and networks on exit from the

trade, so we analyzed exits (appendix; Table A5). There were, it turns out, notable parallels

between the influences on entry and exit from the Slave trade. The effect of legal status on exit

is a mirror of entry, with Gentlemen less likely to exit the trade, and even less likely during the

abolition movement (Figure 7). We also observe that exit behavior is influenced by network ties,

with ties to high status Gentlemen weighing most heavily. However, in a switch from the entry

results, the network matters most on exit during the abolition movement. We speculate that

slavers closed social ranks when they came under attack during abolition, and therefore

experienced local social influence at the same time that non-slavers transitioned from local social

to global cultural influence. Based on this speculation, we conducted an analysis of the

formation of new trading relationships.

Figure 7: Status Effects on the Exit from Slaving. (Table A5, Models 2 and 3).

How Did the Abolition Movement Affect Network Dynamics?

The idea that the abolition movement created a cultural hole between slavers and non-

slavers suggests changes in the dynamics of the network that connected traders. To investigate

1.00

0.37 0.36

1.00

0.41

0.03 0.00

0.20

0.40

0.60

0.80

1.00

1.20

Others Merchants Gentlemen

Mu

ltip

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of

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Exi

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om

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g R

ate

Non-Abolition Years Abolition Years

31

this, we analyzed the rate of two forms of network engagement. The first, which we call

“network extension” occurs when a trader invests with another they had not invested with before.

It represents the formation of a new tie in the trading network. The second, network deepening,

involves trading with an existing network tie, a form of repeat interaction. Methods are

discussed in the appendix and analytic results presented in Table A6. Across all years, non-

slavers showed a higher rate of network extension than slavers, while slavers exhibited more

network deepening. In other words, non-slavers were more likely to engage with new network

partners, while slavers were more likely to re-engage with existing partners. This is broadly

consistent with the idea that some stigma was attached to slaving, although we can imagine

alternative explanations. Slave voyages were more likely than direct voyages to be the context

for network extension during non-abolition years, and less likely in abolition years. The opposite

pattern is true for network deepening in slave voyages, that it was less likely in non-abolition

years, more likely in non-abolition years. Overall, the patterns are in line with the ideas that (a)

slavers suffered a stigma that inhibited network extension; (b) this effect was exacerbated by the

abolition movement; and (c) during the abolition movement the group of slavers became more

insular, with decreased tendency to form new investing partnerships and an increased tendency

to re-engage with old partners.

Figure 8: Network Dynamics for Slaving Voyages Compared to Direct Voyages. (Table A6, Models 3, 4, 5 and 6).

-0.4

-0.2

0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1

1.2

Non-Abolition Years Abolition Years

Mu

ltip

lier

of

the

Rat

e

Network Extension

Network Deepening

32

Discussion

We justified analysis of the Liverpool slave trade as a source of insight about the trade itself,

the phenomenon of dirty business, and theory. We’ll consider these in the reverse order in this

discussion. One of the great opportunities for theory presented by the case is to examine the

understudied effect of social movements on culture (Earl, 2004; Poletta, 2008). The abolition

movement has previously been identified as an example of this effect. Our contribution comes

from our analytic attention to individual choices made in cultural context. Poletta (2008: 93)

identifies the “methodological precision of psychological treatments of cognitive schemas” as a

model for analyzing changes in “people’s beliefs about appropriate means.” We aimed to reveal

the impact of the abolition movement on the models of action of Liverpool traders by comparing

the effects of the same influences on their behaviors when the movement was on and when it

wasn’t. Factors such as individual status, social relationships, residential identity and economic

interests operated differently on the traders depending on the status of the abolition movement.

The differential effect of, for example, foreign competition or institutionalized status, on the

investment decision of a trader, can only be attributed to a change in his model of action.

Models of action, along with definitions of success, are culture as it manifests itself in

individuals.

Attention to individual models of action not only provides a rare opportunity to document

cultural change. It also provides insight into cultural change as it occurrs in higher-order

structures. Changes in organizations and states, the typical explanatory targets of social

movement analysis, occur on the foundation of changes in the people who populate them. This

suggests another path for social movement theorists seeking to understand the macro effects of

movements, through changes they create at the micro level. Of course, social movement

research has examined individuals, but typically those who are mobilized, rather than those they

mobilize against. Our approach suggests that the culturally informed models held by the

individuals that populate the institutions social movements target matter for social movement

outcomes. Understanding those models could help predict which social movement tactics will be

effective and when macro change will occur. As Drescher (1986: 94) put it, “[t]he creation of a

climate of opinion was therefore the most important residue of frequently renewed petitions.”

33

That climate of opinion not only changed the behavior of Liverpool traders, but ultimately led to

a change in British law to outlaw the slave trade.

Our analysis also suggests that the study of social movements might examine culture’s

effects on individual choice as an end in itself, and not only as a trigger for more macro change.

For example, we wonder if the abolition movement could have eventually strangled the

Liverpool slave trade through normative pressure, absent a change in law. Regardless, there

were certainly other behavioral changes that resulted from the cultural shift affected by the

abolition movement. Soon after British abolition Liverpool became an enthusiastic center of

support for subsequent abolition and emancipation campaigns, an effect that is hard to explain

except as a redemptive response to earlier normative targeting of the city by abolitionists.

Attention to the cultural impacts of social movements invites attention to the models of action of

individuals. This opens up a range of potential outcomes of social movements, micro and macro,

intended and unintended.

Our findings also encourage increased attention to the cultural context of social networks,

even to the point of suggesting that ties and networks cannot be understood independent of their

cultural context. In our analysis, the same network tie had very different effects depending on

the cultural context. The normative status of slaving transformed the identity of slavers, and

their potential relationships with others. Emirbayer and Goodwin (1994: 1441) observed that

”[s]ymbolic polarities crystallize within cultural structures, dividing social and metaphysical

reality into such antithetical categories as “pure” and “polluted,” “just” and “unjust,” and

“sacred” and “profane.” Such categories provide the groundwork for normative evaluations as

well as the guidelines for action.” We would add that they provide the foundation on which

relationships, and networks of relationships, are built.

The transformation, at least in its influence, of the Liverpool trading network wrought by the

abolition movement, reminds analysts that relationships depend on identities, status including

morale standing, and the quality of interaction, which in turn is affected by shared values and

symbols. This idea has been applied to understand cross-national results of brokerage (Xiao and

Tsui, 1997). We think it deserves consideration whenever the effects of structure are compared

across organizations, places and times. It may be critical to understanding the operation of

structure even within a single network in times of cultural tumult. The concept of a cultural hole

34

(Pachuki and Breiger, 2010) is a useful way to think of one extreme effect of culture on a dyadic

relationship, when the two parties to a relationship represent incompatible value systems. We

have shown that influence through the relationship, at least in the domain of the conflicting

values, decreases in this situation.

Future research should examine other implications of cultural holes. Staying in our empirical

context, we wonder about the domain specificity of the effect we identified. After abolition,

might slavers and non-slavers influence each other in ways besides entry into the slave trade, for

example might they influence each other’s votes for parliament, or taste in art? And what of the

ongoing dynamics of the trading relationship? Trapedo (2013) showed that Whigs and Tories

partnered under certain conditions in overseas trading voyages in Bristol, in the same period we

study. It remains to be determined if the much wider cultural hole between slavers and non-

slavers after the abolition movement could be traversed to allow co-investment. Future research

should also embrace the fact that cultural holes do not represent mere incompatibility, but are in

many cases associated with negative value judgments. This suggests the possibility of second

order effects of stigma in networks. Pontikes, Negro and Rao (2010) showed that the network

partners of stigmatized actors were penalized. Status matters also in the diffusion of stigma. In

a result that may be a cousin of our finding that high status traders violate strong norms, they

found that Academy Award-winning actors who make films with communists were penalized

less than lower status actors who did the same. And it may not only be people that suffer stigma,

but also ideas. Silverman and Ingram (2013) show that the Liverpool slavers were responsible

for early innovations in economic governance that did not transfer smoothly to other commercial

cities. Were the ideas themselves, which were applicable to many trading situations, tainted

through association with slaving? The recognition that relationships depend on cultural

understandings leads to many research topics, and the concept of the cultural hole serves to

connect many of them.

Of course, our case has limits as a basis for future theorizing. Obvious among them is that

we have treated the abolition movement as a purely exogenous influence in our analysis. We see

that as justified given our focus on the investing behavior of Liverpool traders, but we do not

suggest that the abolition movement emerged independent of the economic interests that it

affected. We encourage theories of the reciprocal relationships between social movements and

35

their targets, even when those targets are individuals. Similarly, the abolition movement is

probably an unusual case in terms of its impact on cultural change. The culture it affected was

ripe for change. d’Anjou (1996) considers the implications of this for general theories of social

movements and cultural change. Furthermore, the “cultural hole” we study, that between slavers

and non-slavers in the heat of the abolition movement, may itself be unusual. It represents an

extreme case of value-incompatibility, and may therefore be unrepresentative of the ways that

cultural differences effect relationships and networks.

Beyond theories of social movements, culture and networks, we also see in our study an

opportunity to examine an important phenomenon, which we called dirty business. When will

economic actors do things which are legal but against cultural values? The answer includes the

ingredients of individual status and social influence, but their quantities are contingent on the

clarity of the cultural values (Davis and Greve, 1997). When slaving was anti-normative in an

ambiguous sense (“a necessary evil”, distasteful but not confronted openly), social influence

through the trading network mattered. It was apparently possible to sustain social spaces where

slaving was endorsed, or at least not penalized. These spaces were influenced by individuals of

high status. When the cultural ordering was settled decisively against slaving by the abolition

movement, entry to slaving continued, but with different predictors. Network influence

mattered much less, but individual status mattered much more.

These results can help to both predict and prevent the emergence of dirty business. For

prediction, our results suggest that there is an element of chance as to whether and where dirty

business first takes root. Before abolition, Gentlemen were more likely to enter the slave trade

than others, but the effect was relatively small. Whether or not they did enter, they weighed

heavily to influence their network partners to do as they did. If chance had played out slightly

differently, and one or two Gentlemen slavers had foregone the trade, it may have been much

harder for it to take root in the network. Similarly, opportunities for contact will also influence

the emergence of dirty business. Yue, Luo and Ingram (2013) found that collusion was more

likely to emerge among New York bankers connected through private clubs than through public

directorships. Relationships in the Liverpool trading network were private, embedded as they

were in small voluntary groups. And the Sephton Club in Liverpool offered a space where the

elite could associate in private, and it was a fertile site for the incubation of the slave trade

36

(related, it is interesting that ties to slavers through this private club were the only ones that

promoted slaving after the onset of abolition). One strategy for reducing the incidence of dirty

business would be to publicize the associations of the elite.

Another way to defuse the social influence that may encourage dirty business is to clarify the

normative status of the practices. When that was clearly negative for slaving in Liverpool, the

network lost sway, and individual status was the big gainer in influence. It is interesting here to

think about the nature of status in our analysis, embedded in law, and often derived from birth.

This is just the sort of sticky status that would be most likely to encourage norm violations

(Philips and Zuckerman, 2001) and British society is probably safer now that the categories of

Gentlemen and Esquire have lost their legal significance and social meaning. More generally,

we recommend that analysts consider the conditions under which status is sticky, and when it can

be eroded by anti-normative behavior.

Another change when norms turned against slaving concerned the influence of risk and

reward on the entry choice. In the face of abolition, risk-taking traders were less likely to turn to

slaving, and economic rewards for entering the slave trade had to be higher to induce entry.

Moreover, before abolition, foreign competition actually encouraged entry to slaving, an effect

akin to a speculative bubble, while during abolition there was a more typical effect of

competition to dissuade entry. North (1990: 22) has suggested a trade-off between individual

values and economic returns. Our evidence suggests that others’ values also enter the equation,

and that variance in the strength of values should be considered in addition to variance in the

economic price of maintaining them. This indicates another point of pressure for efforts to

reduce the practice of dirty business, targeting the economic risks and returns directly. Effects of

this strategy will depend on normative clarity regarding the targeted practices. This suggests an

addition to emerging theories about corporate response to boycotts, and may help understand the

theoretical route through which the media affects boycott impact (King, 2008).

Our final step is to interpret our analysis for what we know about the slave trade itself.

We see our results as confirming what is perhaps the core tenet of the last half-century of history

on the trade: That it was counter to key elements of the British culture, but that these differences

were mostly tacit until the abolition movement. We approached participation in the slave trade

as an act of economic deviance, and gained substantial purchase on it by applying theories as to

37

who breaks social rules. On the other hand, there is no anticipation in the extant literature of our

finding that Gentlemen played a key role in the prosecution of the trade, or that social-structural

positions affected who took up the trade. In the infrequent instances when the question of who

the slave traders were has been considered at all, the conclusion has been (upon little or no

evidence) that they were no different from their contemporaries, and the implication that the

decision to take up slave trading was comparable to the decision to take up any other business

(High, 1959). That idea we have shown to be false. Entering the slave trade was different even

from participation in the direct trade to the slave colonies, although that business too was

sometimes challenged as morally tainted. It was nothing like becoming a grocer.

The particular role of Gentlemen does suggest an interpretation for British history beyond

the one for social theory. Gentlemen (and Esquires) in the late eighteenth century did not merely

represent an institutionalized social status. They could also be seen as the representatives of a

hierarchical system that would soon fall away. Our analysis might not have been possible a

generation later, as the titles, particularly Esquire, proliferated to the point of losing their

meaning (Leneman, 2000). Given this, the question occurs as to whether Gentlemen entered the

slave trade not only because they were less subject to social penalties, but because they were

more attracted by its inherent hierarchy. Drescher (1986: 140) generalizes that “the British

elite’s reaction to abolitionism….is that the higher the social level the deeper was the

opposition.” This may over-simplify the battle lines. Hudson (2001) shows the Tory and

Church of England ties of a number of abolitionist leaders. He also identifies planters who

returned to Britain with slave-made wealth as a boorish threat to the country gentry. Compelling

histories of the abolition movement have been based on the idea that exogenous forces such as

the industrial revolution and rivalry with the U.S. cemented surprising alliances (Drescher, 1986;

Brown, 2006). Our focus on the commercial partnerships of the time provides a new

methodology for examining the impact of the myriad political, social and cultural forces on

actual Brits as they pursued their fundamental interests (see also Trapido, 2013).

The flip side of the fact that some high Tories were abolitionists is the fact that many

Quakers were slavers. The Quaker participation in the slave trade has sometimes been cited as

an illustration of the tensions for Quakers between piety and worldliness. But Quakers are

usually credited with resolving decisively against slavery by the middle of the eighteenth

38

century, and Quaker arguments, diffused initially through Quaker networks, are routinely cited

as at the heart of abolitionist propaganda. Not only did Quakers push the cause, but purportedly

enforced it in their community: “Quaker elders agreed to disown slave traders (Brown, 2006;

90).” Yet we find that even when the abolition movement was hot, Quakers in Liverpool were

no less likely than non-Quakers to enter the trade. They were never influential on their non-

Quaker network partners to forego the trade. The trade-off between profits and other interests is

the crux of political economy, and our evidence suggests that there is even more to be gleaned

about it from the Quakers’ relationship to the institutions of slavery. Our evidence also yields an

observation about historical methods. Our micro study of who participated in the slave trade

parallels Drescher’s (1986) examination of who participated in the abolition movement. Both of

these efforts conclude that the Quakers were less exceptional than do the histories that focus on

the writings about abolition by great men (Davis, 1966; Anstey, 1975a; Brown, 2006). We do

not make an argument for history “from above” or “from below”, but instead cite this example to

justify taking multiple perspectives on important phenomena.

Conclusion

Fischer (1970) lists among the functions of analyzing the past to understand who we are

as a people. Historians of the United States still argue that early American racial attitudes were

transplanted from British culture (e.g., Bailyn, 2012: 175). Yet the core values of British culture

were antithetical to slavery even as the slave trade thrived. It is more accurate to say that slave

traders dodged the judgment of the dominant culture than to say they represented it. We do not

claim direct insight regarding contemporary American (or British) culture from the case of the

Liverpool slave traders. Indeed, we see the case as a caution against drawing straight cultural

connections between times and peoples. Yet, that style of cultural determinism is apparent when

American scholars think of Britain’s cultural influence with regard to race. In manifests itself in

otherwise sophisticated cultural analyses, as in the expectation that eighteenth century Londoners

would view an interracial marriage with the same distain Americans did (Gerzina, 1995), or the

idea that brutality against Africans in the in the seventeenth century Chesapeake was a cultural

import from Britain (Bailyn, 2012). It is tempting to respond that early Americans may have

imported their racial attitudes not from British culture but from British slave traders. But even

that idea falls on the evidence. The slave traders were mercantilists and materialists. They valued

39

profits more than the freedom of Africans, but they did not act on a theory of racial inferiority as

Bailyn (2012: 175) suggested. Most important, the slave traders were deviants, rather than

paragons of the British culture of the time. Whatever our own cultural schema with regard to

race are, they are not directly descended from British slave traders. This, of course, is a statement

of “who we are not” rather than “who we are.” But in the face of the frequent treatments of race

in culture that assume a determinism that is almost genetic, we intend it to liberate the scholarly

imagination.

40

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Appendix

Data, Methods and Analysis

We relied principally on data from four sources: (1) The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (to

identify slave voyages and their owners); (2) Liverpool Plantation Register (to identify non-slave

voyages and their owners); (3) Gore’s Directories (to identify the occupation and status of

owners); (4) Archival records of the Mock Corporation of Sephton (to identify members and

their dates of joining). We created a trader network where two traders were connected if they

had ever co-invested in an overseas shipping venture. The Sephton Club network counted two

individuals as connected to each other if they were simultaneously members of the club.

The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (TAST) compiles data on all known slave voyages

throughout the entire trans-Atlantic slave-trade period, between 1514 and 1867. For each

voyage, the database includes the following information where possible: the names of all vessel

owners, the dates on which the voyage began and ended, the location(s) on the African coast

where the vessel embarked slaves, the location(s) in the Americas where the vessel disembarked

slaves, and the outcome of the voyage – successful completion, sank, captured by privateers or

pirates, lost to some other calamity, etc. We use these data to identify the number of voyages by

year and departure port for Figure 1. We use the data for Liverpool-departing voyages to

identify slave voyages undertaken by Liverpool ships, and the shipowners involved in these

voyages. Co-ownership of vessels in this database is used as an input into the construction of the

shipowner network.

The Liverpool Plantation Register database (Schofield et al., undated) is a series of computer

files compiled by historians of Liverpool’s maritime trade. The files cover a range of data,

including information on all vessels registered at the port of Liverpool between 1734 and 1784

(as recorded in the official Register of Vessels at Liverpool) and on all voyages known to have

been undertaken by these vessels (as recorded in voyage registration documents, insurance

documents, and newspaper advertisements and articles). For each voyage, the database includes

the following information: the names of all vessel owners, the occupations of many vessel

owners, the dates on which the voyage began, the destination(s) of the voyage, and the outcome

of the voyage – successful completion, sank, captured by privateers or pirates, lost to some other

calamity, etc. These data cover both slave-trade and non-slave-trade voyages. We use these data

to identify the non-slave voyages undertaken by Liverpool ships, and the shipowners involves in

these voyages. We also use these data to double-check the TAST data on slave voyages.

Although the Schofield et al. compilation ends in 1784, the original Liverpool Plantation

Registers continue well past our 1807 end date. Historian Stephen Behrendt is in the process of

compiling all subsequent records, and graciously shared with us the vessel registrations and

voyage information for Liverpool vessels from 1786 through 1807.

46

Beginning in 1766, John Gore began publication of Gore’s Liverpool Directory, Containing an

Alphabetical List of the Merchants, Tradesmen, and Principal Inhabitants of the Town of

Liverpool with their Respective Addresses. This directory was published roughly every three

years through the mid-1800s. We used this directory to identify occupations of those shipowners

whose occupations were not provided in the Liverpool Plantation Register database, and to

double-check the occupation data that were provided in that database. By integrating

information in Gore’s Directory with that in the Liverpool Plantation Register database, we were

able to identify occupations for more than 98% of all owners appearing in our data set.

The Records of the Mock Corporation of Sephton were accessed directly by us in the National

Archives housed at the Liverpool Record Office. These were complemented by reference to

Horley (1893) who wrote a history of Sephton that relied extensively on the Records of the Mock

Corporation. He transcribes some records that we have not found the originals of. The records

present summaries of meetings. They also present a comprehensive list of members, which

provides information on when they joined in most cases. We relied on this list to construct the

associational network of the Sephton Club. The members list also presents the legal status of the

members, which we used in some cases to fill in status data that was missing from other sources.

In addition, we drew control variables regarding conditions in the slave trade from two other

sources. Estimates of slave and sugar constant-pound prices in the Caribbean come from Eltis,

Lewis and Richardson (2005). Measures of temperature shocks at African slave trading ports

come from Fenske and Kala (2012). Those authors show that the supply of slaves at a given port

was lower in years when the temperature was higher, an effect they attribute to changes in

disease patterns and agricultural productivity. Our own analysis of voyage outcomes supports

Fenske and Kala (2012) in that voyages experienced lower yields of slaves, and higher rates of

crew deaths, when they traded with African ports experiencing shocks of warmer temperature.

The variable we call African Temperature Shock is an average of the deviation from annual

mean temperature at African slaving ports, weighted by the number of Liverpool voyages to the

port in the year. We lagged all of the variables on industry conditions by two years, reflecting

the fact that slave voyages would have to be planned before news of the last year’s trading

conditions reached Liverpool via returning triangle-trade ships.

Analysis of Transition to Slaving

Our statistical analysis looks at the likelihood of a trader first entering the slave trade by

investing in a slaving voyage. The unit of analysis is the investor-voyage, and the dependent

variable is a zero if that investment is not slaving, one if it is. The models in Table A1 are logit

models. The “transition to slaving” suggests a hazard model, however a hazard model is an

awkward fit to our context due to the fact that the number of investments traders made had an

irregular relationship to time. Traders might invest in multiple voyages in a year, or have multi-

year gaps between voyages, so it makes no real sense to consider the hazard to entering slaving

as a function of time. For purposes of comparison, we did estimate Cox proportional hazard

47

models by representing duration as a non-slaver in terms of direct trade voyages, and present the

results in Table A7. The results are comparable in all substantive ways to those from the logit

regression.

There are a number of interesting results among the variables that are not central to our

arguments in this paper. % Ships Lost, which is the percentage of a trader’s previous voyages

that have not returned, increases the likelihood of entering the slave trade. Traders that suffered

losses in the direct trade turned to slavery, perhaps in search of a business they could succeed at,

or because their propensity to take risks increased as a function of their losses. Direct Trade

Experience, which is the log of the number of direct trade voyages a trader has invested in, is

negatively associated with entering the slave trade. In one sense, this is unsurprising, as know-

how in one business should predict persisting at it. However, direct trade activity is an indicator

of wealth, so the result indicates that it was not simply the wealthiest traders who entered slaving

(that conclusion is reinforced by the evidence that direct trade losses prompted entrance to

slaving).

The transition to slaving was reduced during the U.S. Revolutionary War, a time when the

British slave trade was greatly reduced. We conducted supplementary analysis to see if other

variables in our model (e.g., status or networks) functioned differently during the War, as they

did during the abolition years. They did not; instead it was an across-the-board decrease in the

likelihood of entering the slave trade. Liverpool residents were more likely to enter slaving than

investors who lived elsewhere, and more so during abolition. We interpret this as a result of the

oppositional identity that Liverpool developed as a result of its deep association with slaving.

Global Competition is the number of slaving voyages in a year launched from outside England.

It is negatively associated with the transition to slaving, more so during abolition. We also

include a dichotomous variable “Post 1761” to capture the increasing momentum and salience of

intellectual arguments against slavery as the eighteenth century advanced (d’Anjou, 1996). We

chose 1761 as it was the year that Anthony Benezet, probably the most influential anti-slavery

thinker, began communicating his arguments and exhortations to British Quakers.

We operationalize the active years of the abolition movement based on Drescher’s categorization

of the “hot” years of the movement as 1788-1792 and 1804-807 (1986:12-13). These years

include eighteen percent of the voyages and nineteen percent of the slaving voyages in our data.

In Models 1-4, Abolition Year attracts a negative coefficient, indicating that on average, traders

were less likely to become slavers during the movement. Models 5 and 6 present a structural

change model by estimating our full model on two exclusive subsets of our data, that

representing non-abolition and abolition years.

Did Gentlemen Slavers Perform or Invest Differently?

We argue that Gentlemen entered slaving at a higher rate, and influenced others to enter, as a

function of their social status. We have already explained that we rely on the fact that status

48

effects were strongest when the normative pressure against the slave trade was strongest to rule

out the alternative explanation the Gentlemen’s entry into slaving was due simply to superior

resources or capabilities. The fact that the greater infectiousness of Gentlemen disappears during

abolition similarly works against the argument that they were more influential simply because

they were more capable. Nevertheless, the fact that Gentlemen’s status mattered does not mean

other differences between Gentlemen and others didn’t, so here we investigate whether

Gentlemen had differential success or patterns of influence.

We explored those questions by looking at all Liverpool voyages in the Slave Voyages data base,

and considering whether there were Gentlemen among the Owners for the voyage. Additionally

we control for the size of the ship (tons), whether the voyage was in wartime, the size of the

ownership group, the experience of the ship’s husband (the lead investor who typically took an

active role planning the voyage), and whether the captain had an ownership stake in the venture.

We additionally control for the same four measures of the macro conditions of the industry that

we use in other models, the number of voyages from nations others than Britain (Global

Competition), the prices of slaves and sugar, and African temperature shock (in the performance

models these variables are not lagged).

Our dependent variables for performance include the likelihood of being captured or sunk, the

number of crew who died on the voyage, the shortfall in slaves (the number planned for the

voyage less the actual number obtained, which is a negative indicator of performance), the time

of the overall voyage and the time spent in the Americas selling slaves and acquiring cargo

(shorter voyages are better because they increase the likelihood of time for a voyage the

following year). Gentlemen slavers were neither more nor less likely to see their ships sink, be

captured, or their crew die. Their voyages were no longer or shorter, no more likely to employ

Captains as owners, and no more likely to occur in war. The only significant performance

difference was that Gentlemen slavers invested in voyages that experienced lower shortfalls

between planned and actual slave volumes.

In an analysis not reported, we found that Gentlemen tended to be higher on the ownership list

than non-Gentlemen (average rank 2.6 for Gentlemen, 3.1 for non-Gentlemen) and were more

likely to show up listed first (the role we call “Husband”) among the owners (36% vs. 26%). If

that tendency indicates a higher ownership stake, it might mean that Gentlemen invested more

than others, but listing first may represent not the magnitude of Gentlemen’s investments, but

instead a form of deference. Moreover, Gentlemen invested in larger ships. This suggests they

made larger investments, which could be a function of differential access to economic resources.

However, the fact that they were no more likely to invest during war suggests that they were not

more risk-seeking than other investors, and therefore works against an alternative explanation as

to why they were more likely to enter the slave trade.

We also examined whether Gentlemen’s slaving investments were more successful during

abolition years (supplementary analyses available from the authors). There was no systematic

49

indication that they were. Given that Gentlemen slavers were relatively few, we repeated the

analysis of slave voyage outcomes using fixed effects to identify the Gentlemen slaver that was

highest ranked on the ownership list. Results (available from the authors) indicated that when

fixed effects are included, there are no main performance effects for Gentlemen Husbands or

Others (effects regarding the size of ships and propensity to invest during war remain). Further,

no individual Gentlemen Slavers jump out as having consistently better performance. The

closest are probably Thomas Hughes and Richard Stevens who had unlikely runs of slaving

voyages that experienced neither capture nor shipwreck. Yet neither of these seem to have left

much of an imprint on history (for example, neither appear in the name index of Richardson,

Schwarz and Tibbles (2007) recent history of Liverpool slaving, nor in Williams (1897) older

history). Together, the various analyses of the performance of Gentlemen slavers suggest that it

would have been very hard for even a careful observer of the industry to develop a belief that

Gentlemen had a performance advantage in slaving based on anything except superstition.

Did the Abolition Movement Change Economic Conditions as Well as Culture?

The controls for industry economic conditions in the models in Table A1 include the

price of sugar and slaves, global competition in the form of voyages from outside Britain, and

shocks to the supply of slaves from the temperature in Africa. Empirically, slave prices and

global competition were higher during the abolition movement, sugar prices lower, and African

temperatures lower. Direct effects of these factors on the likelihood of entering the slave trade

would be reflected in the coefficients of those variables. Another possibility is that other

variables may interact with global conditions. Particularly likely is our status measure of

Gentleman. We have noted that Gentlemen were a little wealthier than other investors. It may

be, for example, that Gentlemen were particularly likely to enter the industry when sugar prices

were low, and that their increased likelihood to enter during the abolition movement is because

sugar prices were lower in those years.

We examined this possibility empirically by estimating interactions between the

Gentleman variable and economic conditions. To avoid issues of multi-collinearity we included

only a single interaction in each model, estimating separate interactions for each of the economic

control variables, in abolition and non-abolition years. A summary of the interaction effects

appears in Table A3. The interactions between Gentlemen and the economic control variable

were never significant, which indicates against the argument that Gentlemen responded

differently to industry conditions, and supports our interpretation of their increased entry to the

slave trade during abolition as due to normative autonomy.

One economic factor that our models have not controlled for is the cost of operating a voyage,

because we only have systematic cost estimates dating from 1760 (from Anstey, 1975b). We

included cost estimates in models estimated on observations from 1760-1807 and present the

results in Table A4. These results are fully comparable to those from the full data shown in

50

Table A1. Further analyses showed no significant interaction between the Gentlemen variable

and the cost variable (see last row of Table A3).

Voluntary Exit from the Slave Trade

In Table A5 we present a logit analysis of voluntary exit from the slave trade. We

include an observation for every slave voyage an investor invested in, and recognize his last such

investment as voyage for each slave investor until their last slave investment, which represents

their exit from the industry. One challenge with identifying voluntary exits is that abolition in

1807 outlawed the trade, so there were surely some investors who had their careers as slavers

stopped involuntarily. It wouldn’t work to simply treat investors in slave voyages in 1806 or

1807 as right censored, because it was not unusual to have gaps of longer than two years between

slaving voyages. Mostly, a slaver’s subsequent slaving investments followed quickly after each

other, but twenty-five percent of slavers had a gap of five years or more between slaving

investments at some point in their career. To account for this fact, we cut off our analysis after

the first wave of the abolition movement in 1792. This allows a full fifteen years for a slaver in

1792 to make a subsequent slaving investment (only one-quarter of one-percent of the gaps

between traders slaving investments exceeded fifteen years, so the likelihood we will miscode an

involuntary exit as a voluntary one with this method is very small).

As we explain in the text, we are open to the possibility that exits from the slave trade

will follow a different pattern than entries. However, the results were broadly comparable. Most

notably, Gentlemen are more likely to persist in the industry than Merchants, who are more

likely to persist than those of Other rank. The differential persistence of Gentlemen is much

greater during the abolition movement: Gentlemen have an exit rate 36% that of Others in Non-

Abolition years, but only 2.5% that of Others in Abolition Years. Interestingly, network ties to

Gentlemen slavers (non-slavers) increase the likelihood that a slaver will persist (exit) during

abolition years, but not non-abolition years. That is a different pattern from the entry models,

that tended to show network influence during non-abolition years but not during abolition. Ties

to slavers through the Sephton Club also predict persistence in slaving during abolition (this is

akin to their effect to encourage entry to slaving during abolition). A feasible explanation for

this pattern of results is that slavers closed social ranks during the abolition movement, and

therefore were not affected in the same way as non-slavers by the transition from local network

to global cultural norms regarding the slave trade.

Analysis of Network Dynamics

We analyze two elements of network dynamics. “Network extension” is the process of

establishing new ties in the trading network. It occurs when the focal trader co-invests for the

first time with another trader. “Network deepening” represents repeat investments with existing

trading partners. The unit of analysis here is the trader-investment, as in other analyses. All of a

focal investor’s investing partners on a voyage represent either deepening (if they were partners

51

previously) or extension (if they are partners for the first time on this voyage). The dependent

variables are counts, and we analyzed them using negative binomial regression, which was

favored over Poisson regression because of overdispersion. Results appear in Table A6.

The first four columns represent models of network extension, for non-slavers, for

slavers, and for slavers in non-abolition years and abolition years. The second set of four models

analyze network deepening for the same samples. While there are many avenues of investigation

regarding who partnered with whom in Liverpool shipping, we point to three broad regularities

that resonate with our account of the normative status of slaving. First, non-slavers were more

likely to engage in network extension (compare the constant terms in models 1 and 2; χ2 = 26.62,

p <0.001) while slavers were more likely to engage in network deepening (compare the constants

for models 5 and 6; χ2 = 67.99, p <0.001). Second, that difference increases in the abolition

movement, when slavers are less likely to extend and more likely to deepen their networks

compared to non-slavers (compare the coefficients for abolition in models 1 and 2, χ2 = 4.76 p <

.05, and in models 5 and 6, χ2 = 7.45, p < .05). Third, when slavers invested in slaving voyages

during the abolition movement, they were less likely to use network extension and more likely to

use network deepening than in non-abolition years (compare the coefficients for slave voyage in

models 3 and 4, χ2 = 257.19 p < .001, and in models 7 and 8, χ

2 = 42.34, p < .001).

We read each of those findings as supporting our claims as to the normative status of

slaving. We see the fact that non-slavers were more likely to extend their networks and slavers

to deepen them as consistent with our view that slaving was always an activity associated with

stigma. Because they were engaged in a dirty business, slavers invested in a more closed

network. Furthermore, the increasing closure of slavers, particularly on slave voyages, during

the abolition movement evidences our view that the movement opened a “cultural hole” between

slavers and others. During the abolition movement, slavers were much less likely to forge new

co-investing relationships, and relied much more on pre-existing ones. And while a paper with a

different focus than ours could go much further in investigating the dynamics of the trading

network, there is nothing else in Table A6 that is particularly germane to our thesis here. The

fact that Gentlemen and Merchants were less likely to exhibit both network extension and

network deepening simply indicates that they invested in smaller teams—probably because their

wealth allowed them to take bigger stakes than Others.

52

Table A1

Logit Models of the Transition to Slaving

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) All Years All Years All Years All Years Non-Abolition

Years

Abolition Years

Gentleman 0.761*** 0.804*** 0.772*** 0.492*** 0.256** 1.611***

(0.103) (0.104) (0.105) (0.112) (0.129) (0.301)

Merchant 0.194*** 0.186*** 0.178*** 0.115* 0.105* 0.542**

(0.0578) (0.0581) (0.0581) (0.0592) (0.0624) (0.220)

Quaker 0.0201 0.0125 0.00972 0.00700 0.0187 -0.0687

(0.0720) (0.0721) (0.0723) (0.0744) (0.0777) (0.265)

Network Status -0.00169*** -0.00169*** -0.00190*** -0.00204*** -0.00107

(0.000304) (0.000304) (0.000310) (0.000336) (0.000905)

(Network Status)2 1.09e-06*** 1.11e-06*** 1.05e-06*** 1.16e-06*** 5.66e-07

(2.49e-07) (2.49e-07) (2.56e-07) (2.81e-07) (7.14e-07)

% Ships Lost 0.611*** 0.640*** 0.624*** 0.673*** 0.747*** 0.133

(0.186) (0.188) (0.189) (0.192) (0.202) (0.684)

Sephton Member 0.0621 0.0863** 0.0869* -0.107

(0.0400) (0.0402) (0.0446) (0.133)

Sephton Slaving Ties 0.110*** 0.102*** 0.0892** 0.858**

(0.0358) (0.0362) (0.0378) (0.366)

Sephton NonSlv Ties -0.108*** -0.103*** -0.154*** 0.130

(0.0383) (0.0383) (0.0417) (0.109)

Gentlemen Slaving Ties 0.177*** 0.227*** -0.147

(0.0622) (0.0699) (0.155)

Gentlemen NonSlv Ties -0.410*** -0.456*** -0.209

(0.0850) (0.0964) (0.172)

Merchant Slaving Ties 0.0360*** 0.0440*** 0.0266

(0.00886) (0.00975) (0.0269)

Merchant NonSlv Ties -0.0173 -0.00847 -0.121***

(0.0118) (0.0123) (0.0416)

Other Slaving Ties -0.0971*** -0.142*** 0.0197

(0.0333) (0.0365) (0.0931)

Other NonSlv Ties -0.0531*** -0.0570*** 0.0846*

(0.0133) (0.0141) (0.0457)

Direct Trade Exp. -0.830*** -0.707*** -0.722*** -0.544*** -0.547*** -0.588***

(0.0299) (0.0345) (0.0349) (0.0405) (0.0427) (0.135)

Liverpool Resident 0.538*** 0.544*** 0.546*** 0.444*** 0.420*** 0.709***

(0.0565) (0.0567) (0.0568) (0.0581) (0.0616) (0.199)

US War -0.883*** -1.018*** -1.002*** -1.006*** -1.000***

(0.248) (0.248) (0.250) (0.250) (0.251)

Abolition Year -0.109 -0.101 -0.110 -0.111

(0.104) (0.104) (0.105) (0.106)

Global Competition 0.000554 0.000906** 0.00103** 0.00113** 0.00177*** -0.00605***

(0.000452) (0.000455) (0.000457) (0.000459) (0.000488) (0.00191)

Slave Prices -0.0402*** -0.0413*** -0.0415*** -0.0424*** -0.0507*** -0.0407

(0.00856) (0.00860) (0.00864) (0.00878) (0.0101) (0.0362)

Sugar Prices 0.0470*** 0.0504*** 0.0493*** 0.0485*** 0.0500*** 0.0571*

(0.00559) (0.00566) (0.00568) (0.00577) (0.00595) (0.0304)

African Temperature Shock 0.830*** 0.792*** 0.804*** 0.833*** 0.986*** -0.918

(0.262) (0.262) (0.262) (0.265) (0.292) (0.731)

Post-1761 -0.565*** -0.506*** -0.502*** -0.488*** -0.402***

(0.0894) (0.0905) (0.0913) (0.0923) (0.103)

Constant -2.063*** -2.047*** -2.010*** -1.889*** -1.782*** -1.559

(0.218) (0.219) (0.221) (0.224) (0.270) (1.010)

Observations 26,038 26,038 26,038 26,038 21,143 4,895

Standard errors in parentheses

*** p<0.01, ** p<0.05, * p<0.1

53

Table A2

Did Gentlemen Slavers Invest or Perform Differently?

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9)

Ship-

Wrecked

Captured Crew died Slave Shortfall Voyage Length Time in Americas Captain

Owner

Ship Size Voyage in War

Number of Owners -0.02 -0.05* 0.07 3.22*** 4.20*** -0.41 0.30*** -2.78*** 0.01

(0.03) (0.02) (0.06) (0.56) (0.88) (0.45) (0.02) (0.58) (0.02)

Captain Owner -0.37* -0.33* 0.70 13.99*** 16.28*** 3.53 -2.47 0.09

(0.19) (0.17) (0.46) (3.50) (5.61) (3.00) (3.78) (0.11)

Husband Experience -0.00 -0.00 0.04*** 0.20*** 0.19* 0.04 -0.04*** 0.53*** 0.01***

(0.00) (0.00) (0.01) (0.06) (0.10) (0.05) (0.00) (0.07) (0.00)

Size 0.00 0.00* 0.00*** 0.12*** -0.12*** 0.05*** -0.00 -0.01***

(0.00) (0.00) (0.00) (0.01) (0.02) (0.01) (0.00) (0.00)

War Year 0.02 0.86*** 0.77* 4.04 24.77*** 9.60*** -0.10 -21.99***

(0.16) (0.13) (0.41) (3.34) (5.48) (2.72) (0.12) (3.43)

Gentleman among Owners -0.01 0.04 -0.14 -8.65*** -3.65 3.74 -0.18 12.60*** 0.06

(0.15) (0.14) (0.32) (3.10) (4.96) (2.34) (0.11) (3.30) (0.10)

Global Competition -0.00 0.01*** -0.01** -0.20*** -0.03 -0.04** 0.00*** -0.03 0.01***

(0.00) (0.00) (0.00) (0.02) (0.03) (0.02) (0.00) (0.02) (0.00)

Sugar Price 0.00 0.03*** -0.03 1.33*** 0.16 -1.02*** 0.02* -2.59*** 0.27***

(0.01) (0.01) (0.02) (0.22) (0.37) (0.16) (0.01) (0.23) (0.01)

Slave Price 0.00 -0.06*** -0.01 -1.28*** -2.40*** -1.69*** -0.03*** 4.14*** -0.24***

(0.01) (0.01) (0.03) (0.27) (0.44) (0.21) (0.01) (0.28) (0.01)

African Temperature Shock -0.02 -2.56*** 0.88 76.06*** 13.30 -28.84*** 0.34 -135.70*** -6.75***

(0.58) (0.53) (1.28) (12.12) (19.72) (9.43) (0.46) (12.75) (0.46)

Constant -2.69*** -2.64*** 7.59*** 70.45*** 494.95*** 174.03*** -2.32*** 88.71*** -3.66***

(0.46) (0.41) (1.29) (10.46) (15.88) (7.59) (0.36) (10.03) (0.37)

Observations 4,519 4,519 2,137 3,829 3,277 1,703 4,519 4,519 4,519

R-squared 0.02 0.09 0.07 0.16 0.19

Standard errors in parentheses

*** p<0.01, ** p<0.05, * p<0.1

54

Table A3 Did Gentlemen Respond Differently to Industry and Global Economic Conditions?

Interactions Added to Models 5 & 6 From Table A1

Gentlemen * Non-Abolition Years Abolition Years

Global Voyages 0.0012 (0.74) 0.0083 (1.36)

Slave Prices 0.0136 (0.83) 0.0339 (0.92)

Sugar Prices 0.0119 (0.65) 0.0145 (0.49)

African Temperature Shock -0.1713 (0.16) -0.1534 (0.09)

Cost of Ship and Trade Goods 0.0516 (1.66) 0.0587 (1.11)

t-values in parentheses; ** = p < .01; * = p < .05

55

Table A4

Logit Models of the Transition to Slaving, Including Voyage Cost Estimates

(1) (2) (3)

VARIABLES All Years (post 1760) Non-Abolition Years Abolition Years

Gentleman 0.682*** 0.369** 1.607***

(0.130) (0.156) (0.303)

Merchant 0.179** 0.149* 0.552**

(0.0735) (0.0795) (0.221)

Quaker 0.0719 0.0892 -0.0683

(0.0920) (0.0986) (0.266)

Network Status -0.00219*** -0.00242*** -0.000824

(0.000366) (0.000408) (0.000912)

(Network Status) 2 1.40e-06*** 1.56e-06*** 3.75e-07

(2.91e-07) (3.26e-07) (7.19e-07)

% Ships Lost 0.659*** 0.732*** 0.246

(0.225) (0.241) (0.686)

Sephton Member 0.0418 0.0593 -0.108

(0.0432) (0.0476) (0.133)

Sephton Slaving Ties 0.100*** 0.0847** 0.829**

(0.0380) (0.0396) (0.359)

Septhon NonSlv Ties -0.0336 -0.101* 0.124

(0.0478) (0.0535) (0.111)

Gentlemen Slaving Ties 0.264*** 0.393*** -0.0791

(0.0726) (0.0851) (0.162)

Gentlemen NonSlv Ties -0.437*** -0.534*** -0.254

(0.0945) (0.112) (0.172)

Merchant Slaving Ties 0.0331*** 0.0436*** 0.0285

(0.0105) (0.0122) (0.0270)

Merchant NonSlv Ties -0.00224 0.0119 -0.121***

(0.0151) (0.0163) (0.0416)

Other Slaving Ties -0.119*** -0.195*** -0.00646

(0.0414) (0.0499) (0.0950)

Other NonSlv Ties -0.0595*** -0.0656*** 0.0933**

(0.0169) (0.0187) (0.0469)

Direct Trade Experience -0.619*** -0.626*** -0.619***

(0.0490) (0.0531) (0.136)

Liverpool Resident 0.556*** 0.531*** 0.682***

(0.0716) (0.0787) (0.199)

US War -1.183*** -1.177***

(0.252) (0.254)

Abolition Year -0.496***

(0.116)

Global Competition 0.000193 0.000677 -0.00509***

(0.000531) (0.000572) (0.00195)

Slave Prices -0.0544*** -0.0544*** -0.0391

(0.00947) (0.0113) (0.0367)

Sugar Prices 0.0470*** 0.0518*** 0.0145

(0.00663) (0.00765) (0.0331)

African Weather Shock 0.0786 0.275 -0.209

(0.326) (0.386) (0.751)

Cost of Ship and Trade Goods -0.0803*** -0.0784*** -0.102***

(0.00928) (0.0123) (0.0360)

Post-1761 0.267* 0.229

(0.147) (0.153)

Constant 2.453*** 2.148*** 4.643*

(0.490) (0.517) (2.498)

Observations 21,426 16,531 4,895

Standard errors in parentheses

*** p<0.01, ** p<0.05, * p<0.1

56

Table A5

Logit Models of Voluntary Exit from the Slave Trade 1730-1792

(1) (2) (3) VARIABLES All Years Non-Abolition Years Abolition Years

Gentleman -1.345*** -1.021*** -3.658***

(0.211) (0.212) (0.861)

Merchant -0.964*** -0.996*** -0.892***

(0.0842) (0.0888) (0.309)

Quaker -0.211** -0.254** 0.0389

(0.102) (0.107) (0.363)

Network Status -0.00110** -0.00104** 0.000911

(0.000464) (0.000496) (0.00169)

(Network Status) 2 5.47e-07 4.60e-07 -9.95e-07

(4.65e-07) (5.03e-07) (1.57e-06)

% Ships Lost -0.0668 -0.0941 -0.780

(0.241) (0.248) (1.198)

Sephton Member 0.0910** 0.0789 -0.0343

(0.0448) (0.0487) (0.193)

Sephton Slaving Ties -0.0190 -0.00284 -0.625*

(0.0466) (0.0484) (0.336)

Septhon NonSlv Ties 0.0542 0.0382 0.104

(0.0446) (0.0469) (0.158)

Gentlemen Slaving Ties -0.0830* -0.0512 -0.293**

(0.0451) (0.0485) (0.118)

Gentlemen NonSlv Ties 0.107 -0.0394 0.446***

(0.109) (0.149) (0.162)

Merchant Slaving Ties -0.00638 -0.00765 -0.0154

(0.00675) (0.00726) (0.0231)

Merchant NonSlv Ties -0.0430** -0.0417* -0.0376

(0.0205) (0.0220) (0.0560)

Other Slaving Ties 0.00746 0.00362 0.164***

(0.0112) (0.0117) (0.0602)

Other NonSlv Ties -0.0170 -0.00505 -0.0864**

(0.0135) (0.0151) (0.0343)

Direct Trade Experience 0.119** 0.0686 0.365**

(0.0493) (0.0530) (0.171)

Slave Trade Experience -0.861*** -0.866*** -1.401***

(0.0650) (0.0786) (0.180)

Liverpool Resident -0.463*** -0.469*** -0.528*

(0.0824) (0.0870) (0.296)

US War 0.414 0.429

(0.288) (0.288)

Abolition Year 0.449**

(0.222)

Global Competition 0.00215*** 0.00213*** 0.00661

(0.000668) (0.000680) (0.0140)

Slave Prices -0.0692*** -0.0718***

(0.0159) (0.0163)

Sugar Prices 0.00713 0.00219 -0.0113

(0.0108) (0.0115) (0.0703)

African Weather Shock 0.311 0.213 1.847

(0.346) (0.374) (1.354)

Post-1761 0.724*** 0.718***

(0.148) (0.149)

Time Since First Investment 3.71e-06*** 5.36e-06*** 1.14e-06

(6.68e-07) (8.07e-07) (1.70e-06)

Constant 1.967*** 2.268*** -0.999

(0.578) (0.586) (3.765)

Observations 7,563 6,269 1,294

Standard errors in parentheses; *** p<0.01, ** p<0.05, * p<0.1

57

Table A6

Negative Binomial Models of the Dynamics of the Trading Network

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8)

Dependent Variable: Network

Extension

Network

Extension Network

Extension Network

Extension Network

Deepening Network

Deepening Network

Deepening Network

Deepening

Non-Slavers Slavers Slavers Slavers Non-Slavers Slavers Slavers Slavers

All Years All Years Non-Abolition

Years

Abolition Years All Years All Years Non-Abolition

Years

Abolition Years

Gentleman -0.0301 -0.312*** -0.247*** -0.343* -0.415*** -0.279*** -0.284*** -0.112* (0.0641) (0.0752) (0.0824) (0.187) (0.0407) (0.0254) (0.0282) (0.0586) Merchants -0.0840*** -0.181*** -0.200*** 0.190 -0.179*** -0.119*** -0.152*** 0.103** (0.0286) (0.0478) (0.0505) (0.141) (0.0183) (0.0159) (0.0170) (0.0428) Quaker 0.000786 -0.0126** -0.0113** -0.0220 0.00208 0.00321 0.00623*** -0.0243*** (0.00390) (0.00547) (0.00566) (0.0235) (0.00288) (0.00195) (0.00202) (0.00762) Slave Voyage 0.881*** 0.810*** 1.044*** -0.244*** -0.899*** -0.0241** -0.0547*** 0.104*** (0.0455) (0.0312) (0.0339) (0.0818) (0.0361) (0.0106) (0.0117) (0.0236) Abolition Year 0.0489 -0.100* -0.108*** -0.0320* (0.0423) (0.0525) (0.0268) (0.0170) Liverpool Resident -0.00698 -0.0524 -0.0292 -0.189 -0.290*** -0.0797*** -0.0453*** -0.124*** (0.0277) (0.0355) (0.0371) (0.118) (0.0178) (0.0117) (0.0123) (0.0357) Sephton Member -0.195*** -0.0262 0.0171 -0.257** -0.0839** 0.0126 0.0631*** -0.176*** (0.0565) (0.0420) (0.0455) (0.108) (0.0357) (0.0137) (0.0149) (0.0334) Total Tiesv-1 -0.0245*** -0.00289*** -0.00507*** -0.000663 0.0463*** 0.00328*** 0.00354*** 0.00264*** (0.00107) (0.000485) (0.000571) (0.000965) (0.000927) (0.000175) (0.000198) (0.000351) Global Competition -0.00217*** -0.00384*** -0.00414*** -0.00391*** 0.00147*** 0.000134 0.000584*** -0.00165*** (0.000213) (0.000257) (0.000270) (0.000966) (0.000140) (9.19e-05) (9.75e-05) (0.000301) Slave Prices -0.00903*** 0.00864** 0.0126*** 0.0756*** -0.0110*** -0.00291** -0.0102*** 0.0265*** (0.00301) (0.00355) (0.00372) (0.0171) (0.00192) (0.00119) (0.00126) (0.00479) Sugar Prices -0.00605** -0.0131*** -0.00702** -0.0748*** 0.00236 -0.00226** -0.00894*** -0.000981 (0.00258) (0.00330) (0.00347) (0.0142) (0.00167) (0.00109) (0.00120) (0.00391) African Temperature Shock

-1.027*** -0.723*** -1.099*** 0.780** 0.0183 0.348*** 0.185*** 0.286***

(0.133) (0.150) (0.168) (0.345) (0.0814) (0.0483) (0.0551) (0.106) Constant 1.537*** 0.715*** 0.337** -0.189 0.761*** 1.363*** 1.801*** 0.234

(0.0895) (0.123) (0.138) (0.508) (0.0596) (0.0413) (0.0473) (0.154)

Observations 26,038 29,536 24,332 5,204 26,038 29,536 24,332 5,204

Standard errors in parentheses

*** p<0.01, ** p<0.05, * p<0.1

58

Table A7

Cox Proportional Hazard Models of the Transition to Slaving

(1) (2) (3)

All Years Non-Abolition

Years

Abolition

Years

Gentlemen 0.0404 -0.000206 0.693*

(0.134) (0.145) (0.384)

Merchant 0.121** 0.100* 0.485**

(0.0555) (0.0580) (0.217)

Quaker 0.0417 00467 -0.123

(0.0694) (0.0721) (0.267)

Network Status -0.00193*** -0.00171*** -0.00309***

(0.000344) (0.000370) (0.00104)

(Network Status)2 1.24e-06*** 1.05e-06*** 1.96e-06**

(2.76e-07) (3.02e-07) (7.74e-07)

% Ships Lost 0.494*** 0.575*** 0.0970

(0.186) (0.194) (0.644)

Septhton Member 0.0923** 0.0791* -0.0131

(0.0377) (0.0418) (0.130)

Sephton Slaving Ties 0.0781** 0.0714** 0.661*

(0.0336) (0.0350) (0.367)

Sephton NonSlv Ties -0.0759** -0.109*** 0.0953

(0.0348) (0.0375) (0.108)

Gentlemen Slaving Ties 0.205** 0.204** 0.163

(0.0830) (0.0887) (0.292)

Gentlemen NonSlv Ties -0.280*** -0.284*** -0.360

(0.0947) (0.104) (0.232)

Merchant Slaving Ties 0.0972*** 0.0883*** 0.201***

(0.0113) (0.0123) (0.0391)

Merchant NonSlv Ties -0.0351*** -0.0198 -0.160***

(0.0119) (0.0124) (0.0470)

Other Slaving Ties 0.203*** 0.204*** 0.0463

(0.0475) (0.0508) (0.152)

Other NonSlv Ties -0.0601*** -0.0671*** 0.0552

(0.0133) (0.0140) (0.0467)

Liverpool Resident 0.322*** 0.316*** 0.498**

(0.0545) (0.0573) (0.195)

US War -0.953*** -0.926***

(0.244) (0.245)

Abolition Year -0.158

(0.108)

Global Competition 0.00110** 0.00147*** -0.00558***

(0.000438) (0.000462) (0.00189)

Post-1761 -0.0444*** -0.0463*** -0.0731*

(0.00882) (0.00993) (0.0395)

Constant 0.0428*** 0.0439*** 0.0710**

(0.00562) (0.00578) (0.0329)

Observations 25,751 20,951 4,800

Standard errors in parentheses

*** p<0.01, ** p<0.05, * p<0.1