This paper explores the body of the slave as a site for the politics of compassion and of consumption in the abolitionist discourse of the late eighteenth century. How did the slaves'' embodiment play out in the development of humanitarianism and the cult of sensibility? What does it mean to construct the slave as the ultimate victim of violence, and of commerce? The paper focuses on the campaign for abstention from sugar and rum to explore the connections between slaves'' bodies and the politics of consumption, and to investigate some of the resonances in the rhetoric of ethical consumption between the eighteenth century and today. In the process, it highlights some of the ways in which the racial and sexual contracts rewrite each other.
