Brycchan Carey, The Unnatural Trade: Slavery, Abolition, and Environmental Writing, 1650-1807 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024) 280 pp. $65.00. Hb. IBSN: 978-0300224412
The Unnatural Trade: Slavery, Abolition, and Environmental Writing, 1650-1807 by Brycchan Carey magnifies the cross-section of eighteenth-century British abolitionist writing that sought to un-naturalize slavery in a part of the world that had come to regard it as natural and inevitable. In doing so, such writing responded to the previous century’s archive of natural histories of the Caribbean and Africa by the earliest colonial naturalists, who wrote slavery into ‘nature’- describing it as both a natural progression of civilization and a divinely ordained order. Offering a new environmental history of abolitionism, Carey suggests that ‘nature’ was a central discourse through which the transatlantic slave trade was materialized, endorsed, and resisted. A dialectical reading of these ‘narratives of nature’ spanning two centuries demonstrates how determining the nature of nature is inextricably entwined with the history of political and moral world-making.[1]
Navigating early modern writing requires an optic that sees beyond the oppositions of science and religion, fiction and polemic to illuminate shared discursive grounds. Carey brings to this task a methodology attentive to how nascent genres mutated and co-constituted each other. He reads across forms while attending to their evolving rhetorical conventions, engaging discourse, aesthetics, and ethics through the category of ‘environmental writing’. This category, for Carey, ranges from plantation management manuals and voyage narratives to taxonomical accounts, poetry, prose, essays, and life writing. Through this approach, he stages a conversation between colonial naturalists – ranging in background and purpose – and abolitionist writers who often strategically cited and subverted the natural history archive to support arguments against slavery. Reading ecological consciousness as central to abolitionist writing surfaces as Carey’s key proposition: that ‘almost all descriptions of the slave trade and plantation slavery readily available to British readers before 1760 were written either by naturalists or by travellers with a strong interest in natural history’, shaped British abolitionism as ‘much as an issue of eighteenth-century science as one of economics or humanitarian sensibility’ (p.4).
The book is curated into two parts. The first, ‘Building the Archive’ (chapters 1-4) enters natural histories of the Caribbean and Africa by British naturalists, travellers, and agriculturalists. These accounts, often claiming to be ‘true’, ‘exact’ and ‘complete’, largely reinforced hierarchical, extractive systems ‘in the service of the plantocracy’ (p.51). However, Carey adroitly demonstrates that the task of neatly categorizing these texts into an either-or binary of pro-slavery/anti-slavery is less straightforward than it seems. Natural histories were not uniformly hard-handed in their affirmations of slavery; their rhetorical strategies varied, and racial ideologies were tentative and evolving. His case studies demonstrate ethically ambivalent, complex, and contradictory ideas about the entanglements of ‘nature’ and slavery. For example, popular ameliorationist natural histories and plantation manuals, which criticized certain excesses and advocated ‘humane management’, accepted slavery’s continuity. Slavery was seen to have ‘natural limits’, enslaved people were viewed as economic units and European slavery was often depicted as less tyrannical and at times more ‘humane’ than the internal slave trade in Africa. Furthermore, some texts bypassed moral critique altogether, embedding slavery within a larger vision of the plantation as a naturalized, hierarchical microcosm of the state – ‘a well governed commonwealth’ (p.43).
The second part, ‘Deploying the Archive’ (chapters 5-7), turns to the beginnings of British abolitionist writing in the late eighteenth century, which, Carey underscores, leapt into the natural history archive and unleashed a counter-discourse to render slavery not only as inhumane but ‘unnatural’; a ‘dread perversion of nature’. Abolitionists extensively drew on descriptions of the ‘natural and agricultural fecundity, prodigality and plenitude’ of Africa and the Caribbean to expose the debilitating damages to environment and society wrought by European interference (pp.144-146). They pushed back against claims that slavery was a natural consequence of warfare in Africa, instead portraying warfare itself as ‘unusual’ in Africa and asserting that the natural state of African society was freedom.
One of the book’s most compelling contributions lies in its examination of how abolitionist writing was entangled with imperial and commercial logics. Appeals to end the slave trade invoked the need to restore a ‘natural’ equilibrium among nations, now envisioned as pursuing profitable commerce under new ‘true commercial principles’ (p.214). Africa was described as an ‘inexhaustible mine of wealth,’ and Eden-like images of its ‘natural resources’ were offered, thus lending itself to new forms of extraction. Furthermore, abolitionist discourse before 1807 focused more on ending the slave trade than dismantling slavery itself. These visions, Carey argues, laid the groundwork for the subsequent colonization of Africa, complicating the alignment of abolitionist alternatives with interspecies justice.
Yet, Carey’s attention to textual agency – particularly in his reading of the case of the formerly enslaved African abolitionist Olaudah Equiano – offers a nuanced view of how he treats abolitionist literature as formally inventive and politically efficacious. Rather than treating Equiano’s autobiography as a source of truth-claims, Carey foregrounds its rhetorical strategies, intertextual framings, and generic positioning within popular natural history discourse as central to its impact and reception. He demonstrates how ecological imagery did more than just depict loss and suffering – it reconfigured the very terms of moral argument.
Carey’s project is equally laudable for its exploration of how religious thought supplied the language both for naturalizing and unnaturalizing slavery. While the naturalists portrayed slavery as divinely ordained, the abolitionists framed it as an affront to the divine order. The author is set to explore this thread in an adjacent undertaking titled, The Parish Revolution: Parochial Origins of Global Conservationism. Read side by side, these two texts shed light on ‘clerical naturalists’, who advanced both the plantocracy and, later, global conservation discourse.[2] In Unnatural Trade, we glimpse how these clergymen made taxonomic descriptions and biological theory cohabit with ideas of Creation and hierarchies like the Great Chain of Being. Natural theology, blending scriptural authority with observational practice, upheld the belief that human and other than human beings occupied fixed, divinely assigned positions – thus rendering slavery ‘a natural phenomenon put in place by a wise creator’ (pp.55-57). Such views discouraged inquiry into how hierarchies formed and often projected European perspectives as universal. In tracing the lineage of ‘History’, some writers compared modern slavery with biblical or classical slavery to argue its historical necessity. Quaker and Methodist abolitionists, by contrast, condemned slavery as a ‘sin’ and some even invoked a divine spirit of Nature to restore ‘natural justice’.
Rather than offering an uncritical recuperation of early abolitionists, the author reveals the intertextual nature of abolitionist rhetoric and metaphor, underscoring how they produced ethical claims and material consequences with deep roots in the present. Carey has written a book that, in a sense, undisciplines- offering a timely reminder that all genres of knowledge have long centred ‘nature’ as a site of authority, and that ideas of the natural continue to serve as vehicles for the ethical.
Nayanika Shome, Manipal Institute of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts.
[1] J. M. Kanjirakkat, G. McOuat, and S. Sarukkai (eds.) Science and narratives of nature: East and West (Routledge, 2015), p.10.
[2] B. Carey (n.d.) Clerical naturalists in the age of enlightenment’, Clerical naturalists (index.htm). Available at: https://www.brycchancarey.com/naturalists/index.htm (Accessed: 6 August 2025).
