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

William Fox, Martha Gurney, and Sugar Boycott, 1791-1792
Historians have argued that abstention was seen from the first as a female
concern. 21 Yet, early abstainers did not appeal specifically to female consumers or
invoke the familiar space of the tea table. They did, however, draw supporters’ attention
to the link between domestic consumption and colonial slave labor. The gendered nature
of the abstention movement identified by historians developed instead in response to
William Fox’s first abstention tract.
In July 1791, three months after parliamentary defeat of the slave trade abolition
bill, William Fox composed and published anonymously An Address to the People of
Great Britain on the Utility of Refraining from the Use of West India Sugar and Rum. 22
Fox’s pamphlet quickly came to symbolize the eighteenth-century rejection of slave-
grown sugar. Thomas Clarkson estimated 300,000 Britons abstained from West Indian
21 See Corfield, “English Abolitionists and the Refusal of Slave-Grown Goods,” iv; Seymour
Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective (New York and
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 78-79; Midgley, Women against Slavery, 35. As Drescher argues,
abstention “brought women and children directly into the orbit of the campaign.” While abstention did
bring women into the eighteenth-century abstention movement, abstainers such as William Fox did not
specifically seek women’s support, at least in the early weeks of the campaign.
22 The anonymous author of A Vindication of the Use of Sugar, published in 1792 in response to
Fox’s Address, claimed, “the Author of the pamphlet in question is well known to be a Mr. F**. formerly
an eminent Bookseller in Holborn.” The author also noted that Fox “has not been a little remarkable for the
singularity of his opinions in general,” implying that Fox’s politics were well known in London. See A
Vindication of the Use of Sugar, the Produce of the West-India Islands in Answer to a Pamphlet Entitled
Remarkable Extracts, &c. (London: T. Boosey, 1792), 9. Fox, the bookseller and author of the Address,
has been the subject of mistaken identity. His works have been attributed to William Fox, an attorney-atlaw;
William Fox, a Baptist and founder of the Sunday School Society; and his son, William Fox, Jr. For
an analysis of Fox’s identity, see Timothy Whelan, “William Fox, Martha Gurney, and Radical Discourse
of the 1790s,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 42 (2009), 404-408. William Fox has also been confused with
his contemporary, William Bell Crafton of Tewksbury, author of A Short Sketch of the Evidence Delivered
Before a Committee of the House of Commons. To Which is Added, a Recommendation of the Subject to
the Serious Attention of the People in General, 3 rd ed., with additions (London: M. Gurney, 1792). Fox’s
Address and Crafton’s Sketch were published almost simultaneously. Both advocated abstention from
West Indian produce. The first edition of Sketch was most likely printed in Tewksbury in 1791. See
Clarkson, History, II: 348.
9