Taylor begins by recounting the Demerara uprising because such forms of resistance, and the brutal punishment that followed, put pressure on the British parliament to do something and, at the same time, entrenched the will of planters to do nothing. They feared a diminution of power, even talk of it, because it would give hope and courage to the people that they enslaved.

Another grouping, known as the West India Interest (of this book’s title), championed slavery from within the United Kingdom, because they owned slaves, represented those who did (as MPs, agents, publicists and so on), or benefited from Britain’s slave economy in a myriad of other ways. John Gladstone fitted all three categories.

Taylor is a terrific storyteller who is drawn to the biographical anecdote, especially that which underscores history’s contingency. He is not especially interested in exploring the lineage of ideas and geopolitical forces that led Britain to begin enslaving Africans, having earlier rejected slavery within the United Kingdom. Instead, his book is driven by the ebb and flow of parliamentary events concerning slavery between 1823 and 1833, as well as by the activities and personalities of high-profile British speakers on slavery from this time.

British pro-slavery thought remains underexamined, especially compared to the more uplifting subject of abolitionism. A forensic examination of the Interest, which this is not, would have unearthed its structural composition, internal hierarchies and argumentation, and points of weakness. It would have begun by making plain the size and character of the Interest, as well as the precise nature of individuals’ financial exposure to the slave industry.

Some of this exposure emerges in Taylor’s final chapter. Of the roughly 3,000 resident United Kingdom slaveowners at the point of abolition, he tells us, there were around 150 Anglican clergymen, more than one hundred ‘past, present, or future MPs’, seventy-five baronets, sixteen earls, fifteen barons, three dukes, two viscounts, and one marquess.

Taylor’s account would have been beneficially complicated by considering Canning’s earlier support for the abolition of the slave trade, the considerable transformation of Gladstone’s slave holdings during the years preceding slavery abolition, and the exact nature of the Gladstone and Canning alliance.

Scholarship does exist on the reorganisation of British pro-slavery thought in the decades leading up to the 1820s (most notably Paula E. Dumas’s 2016 work, Proslavery Britain), but Taylor might have profitably engaged with and extended this. Writing on pro-slavery discourse, Catherine Hall argues that by the end of the 1820s pro-slavery advocates ceased arguing that Africans were incapable of improvement and began contending that slavery was an agent of civilisation. While Taylor prefaces his book by noting that different ideas were responsible for the abolition in 1833 from those that brought about the 1807 abolition of the slave trade, these distinctions are hard to discern in his book.

Still, there is much to admire. Taylor’s decade-long time frame gives him the capacity to dwell on the variety of arguments put forth, publicly, by the Interest in this crucial time. Any notion that they were part of a disinterested debate is upended by his pairing of parliamentary speeches and public communications with personal histories and private interests.

During the 1820s, geopolitical arguments for maintaining slavery were powerful, though less potent than they had been during the Napoleonic Wars. The Interest could justifiably claim that planters harboured secessionist plots when faced with the possibility of abolition. With American independence in living memory, Whigs and Tories trembled. In parliament, the interests of the British Navy, which provided security for the Caribbean and counted many investors and planters among its ranks, were well represented by the duke of Wellington, former commander-in-chief of the British Army and prime minister from 1828 to 1830.

Pro-slavery advocates also presented arguments of a racial, religious, historical, and legal nature. Taylor is particularly good on the complex relationship between Christianity and West Indian slavery. While abolitionists came from Quaker, Methodist, and Baptist teachings and networks, the Interest proffered Biblical quotations sanctioning slavery and funded the building of churches throughout Britain.

As Taylor shows, it was no coincidence that abolition followed the 1832 Reform Act, when middle-class attitudes towards slavery came to matter politically. From 1823, the Interest established a literary committee and poured money into pro-slavery literature (published by John Murray and Blackwood’s) as well as pro-slavery placards (‘Ships, colonies, and commerce’ read one). Taylor’s account of these marketing measures and strategic decisions is a highlight. With major newspapers, including The Times, making themselves ‘useful’ to the Interest, abolitionist George Stephen sensed that ‘all the press are against us’, excepting such abolitionist stalwarts as the Edinburgh Review.

Unfortunately, The Interest does not do a particularly good job of acknowledging the historical work that it is built on. That Dumas’s and Hall’s most relevant material on pro-slavery thought is barely cited, and that secondary sources for the famous 1823 Demerara and 1831 Jamaican rebellions are scant and unpaginated, is both odd and ungenerous. A final bugbear is Taylor’s use of descriptors: the words and actions of pro-slavery advocates are far more damning than the adjectives ‘racist’, ‘bigoted’, ‘bellicose’, or ‘odious’ could ever be. Where an abolitionist speaks with passion in Taylor’s tale, a pro-slavery advocate ‘whines’ and ‘rages’. Pro-slavery thinking, shocking as it is, as monumentally influential as it was, needs no garnish.