Alexander Boote

University of Oxford

The British Press as Observer and Driver of Antislavery, 1700–1838

My doctoral research examines the coverage of slavery in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British press, as well as the role of the press as an independent driver of support for abolitionism. Over the course of my second year, I sought to demonstrate a causal statistical relationship between the spread of newspaper access in England and Wales and the rise of popular support for ending the slave trade and slavery in the British Empire. The financial assistance I received from the Economic History Society proved invaluable to the completion of this work, which constitutes the empirical backbone of my thesis.