THERE IS DEATH IN THE POT - The University of Texas at Arlington

and even the flesh of the slaves who produced these goods for British domestic
consumption. 25
Abstainers hoped to engage the support of domestic consumers, primarily women,
in the campaign against slavery by influencing their choice in the marketplace. English
potter Josiah Wedgwood, for example, manufactured ceramics with abolitionist designs,
which served as a visual reminder at ladies’ tea tables of the relationship between sugar
and tea and slavery. 26 In attempting to influence women, however, abstainers granted
women a political voice in the abstention campaign. Consuming or abstaining from
slave-grown sugar became a political choice either for or against the slave trade and
slavery.
In the eighteenth century many critics worried whether women were capable of
making the moral choice. As opportunities to consume material goods expanded in the
Atlantic world in this period, critics questioned the impact such changes had on society
and, in particular, on women. The “consumer revolution” unfolded concurrently with the
development of domestic ideology, which, as historian Nancy Armstrong argues,
“recentered the scattered community at myriad points to form the nuclear family, a social
organization with a mother rather than a father at its center.” 27 The link between
25 Quaker writers did emphasize the blood-stained character of slave-grown sugar and cotton, but
the more graphic, cannibalistic rhetoric such as Andrew Burn’s A Second Address to the People of Great
Britain was produced by non-Quakers. Burn is discussed in chapter 1.
26 Sam Margolin, “‘And Freedom to the Slave’: Antislavery Ceramics, 1787-1865,” Ceramics in
America (2002), 80-109; L.A. Compton, “Josiah Wedgwood and the Slave Trade: A Wider View,”
Northern Ceramic Society 100 (1995), 50-69; Mary Guyatt, “The Wedgwood Slave Medallion: Values in
Eighteenth-Century Design,” Journal of Design History 13 (2000), 93-105.
27 Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987),
95. The historiography of the consumer revolution is quite extensive. For the most useful works see Neil
xxvi