William Fox

William Fox was a radical abolitionist pamphleteer in late 18th-century Britain. Between 1773 and 1794 he ran a bookshop at 128 Holborn Hill in London; from 1782 he was in a business arrangement with the Particular Baptist Martha Gurney, who printed and sold his and others' pamphlets.

Publications His most famous work, published in 1791, was An Address to the People of Great Britain, on the Propriety of Refraining from the Use of West India Sugar and Rum. The Address became the most widely circulated 18th-century pamphlet, going through 26 editions in less than a year, with over 200,000 copies distributed in Great Britain and the United States. Fox asserted that enslaved Africans should be emancipated regardless of whatever consequences might ensue: "notwithstanding the unmeaning clamour which [Edmund] Burke has raised against abstract principles, I mean to contend, That 'No circumstances, or situation, in society, can justify the subjecting a human being, as a property, to his fellow-creature; or the continuance of such a state, where it already exists' ... Slavery is ... inimical to all government." Historian Christa Dierksheide notes that "opponents and defenders [of slavery] were not the binary opposites that historians have so long supposed ... both sides endorsed gradual improvement schemes to mitigate and reform the slave trade and slavery." Historian Padraic X. Scanlan, in his Freedom's Debtors: British Antislavery in Sierra Leone in the Age of Revolution, further notes that "by focusing on the slave trade as a target for immediate abolition, abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic could put off the difficult question of what post-emancipation society would be like, preserve plantation economies, and coddle politically powerful planters."