Happy birthday to Elizabeth Heyrick, who initiated one of the world's first consumer boycotts - half a century before the word boycott entered the language.
She was born in Leicester, into a religiously dissenting family of manufacturers. At 20, she married a lawyer who became a soldier and then a poet and then died. Still not 30, the widow Elizabeth devoted the rest of her life to being against bad things, such as war, poverty, capital punishment and bull-baiting. She was childless and never remarried.
Heyrick became a Quaker and, like many of that faith, campaigned against slavery. The slave trade itself was by then illegal in Britain - but British colonists were still allowed to use slave labour. The established anti-slavery movement, led by men like William Wilberforce, was gradualist; they pushed their cause slowly forward through parliamentary debates and by appealing to the better natures of the slave masters, or by buying them off through compensation schemes.
Elizabeth found this approach repugnant. Slavery was obviously wrong, and therefore it must be stopped - not at some unspecified point in the future, but right now. She came to believe that the power to end "the accursed thing" lay in the hands of the women of Britain, not those of the men of parliament. In 1824 she published what became a best-selling pamphlet: Immediate, not gradual abolition, or, An inquiry into the shortest, safest, and most effectual means of getting rid of West Indian slavery.
"Sweet dust" - sugar - was her chosen weapon. She urged the housewives of Leicester to ensure that any sugar they bought came from the East Indies not the West Indies. The latter was produced by slaves; the former by free workers. (Free was a relative term, as Heyrick was well aware; East Indian sugar workers were poor and oppressed, but they were at least not legally the property of their employers.)
Door-to-door canvassing in favour of the boycott led to a drop in sales of slave sugar of around a quarter, a pretty extraordinary result, given that the official anti-slavery movement was publicly contemptuous of Elizabeth and her campaign, especially when she openly supported revolts and uprisings by slaves. Clearly, she was a crazed extremist and "the grown-ups in the room," to use a 2020s phrase, wanted nothing to do with her. Wilberforce banned his supporters from speaking at meetings of her supporters.
At its height, it was estimated, the boycott had persuaded 400,000 British households to forswear West Indian sugar. Many grocers refused to stock it, and for those who could afford to buy them there were sugar bowls available which were inscribed with declarations that their contents were "not made by slaves." Heyrick and her colleagues argued that those who sold the products of slavery were thieves, and those who bought them were receivers of stolen goods.
As with so many boycotts, the significant effect was more symbolic than financial. Elizabeth Heyrick died in 1831, but by then her ideas had spread to the USA where thousands of women became involved in Heyrick-inspired groups. By 1830 the gradualists were in retreat, and the Anti-Slavery Society formally switched to supporting immediate abolition.
The Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, while still containing many shameful compromises, included most of the demands of the Heyrick faction. By injecting a militant urgency into the anti-slavery movement, not only in the UK and US but also in the colonies themselves, Elizabeth's boycott played an important part in forcing the British state to accept that defending slavery was no longer worth the candle.
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Sources:
www.quakersintheworld.org/quakers-in-action/146/Elizabeth-Heyrick-
www.oxforddnb.com
https://theconversation.com/how-one-woman-pulled-off-the-first-consumer-boycott-and-helped-inspire-the-british-to-abolish-slavery-140313
www.blackhistorymonth.org.uk/article/section/history-of-slavery/4321/