HODGSON, Adam.

£125 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

A Letter to M. Jean-Baptiste Say, Second English edition, published the same year as the first, of this analysis of the true economic cost of slavery. Although the son of a slave trader, Adam Hodgson (1788-1862), a Liverpudlian merchant, wrote and campaigned extensively on the abolition of the slave trade: he equally corresponded with such figures as Robert Southey and James Cropper. In the Letter, Hodgson responds to Say's Treatise of Political Economy, which was first published in English in 1821. There, Say had emphasised the lower economic cost for producers, using slave labour. Hodgson sought to demonstrate, by quoting extensively from Adam Smith, that free labour was a more economically efficient model. The strength of his attack prompted a response from Say, who "claimed to have retreated from his earlier position, stating his faith in the progressive force and ultimate triumph of antislavery" (Glickstein, p. 305).

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