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Enlightenment, Scientific Exploration and Abolitionism: Anders Sparrman's and Carl Bernhard Wadström's Colonial Encounters in Senegal, 1787–1788 and the British Abolitionist Movement

By the late eighteenth century, leading British abolitionists credited two Swedish scholars – Anders Sparrman and Carl Bernhard Wadström – with important contributions to the breakthrough of the British abolitionist movement. After witnessing the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade during a journey to Senegal, both scholars came to be explicit critics of this trade. In this article, I argue that the two Swedes contributed to the abolitionist cause particularly because of their status as academic scholars. This enabled a science-based rhetoric to complement the sentimental rhetoric of most other abolitionists at the time.