SOURCE: “The Intellectual Milieu: Contexts for Black Writing,” in Measuring the Moment: Strategies of Protest in Eighteenth-Century Afro-English Writing, Associated University Presses, 1988, pp. 43-72.

In the following excerpt, Sandiford provides an overview of white authors' writings on slavery and the slave trade in Britain from the 1680s to the end of the eighteenth century, and argues that the convergence of ideological currents during this time created a more favorable climate in which blacks could live and write.

The antislavery movement did not win the concerted advocacy of belletristic writers until the last three decades of the eighteenth century. The slow response was due to the following three factors. The first was the die-hard persistence of legalistic doctrines about slavery that helped to shield the institution from criticism for a long time. The second was that before the formation of the Abolition Society accelerated the course of antislavery, literary...