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The question of what to buy and where to buy it raises many different considerations. Consumers routinely encounter a range of competing claims on their moral and financial resources, including whether or not to support local producers, boycott tax-dodging multinationals, or buy fair trade products. These choices are rarely straight forward. Is a canvas shopping bag made in a Bangladeshi sweatshop a better ethical choice than a plastic bag? How do we reconcile differences in standards of living and working conditions when it comes to deciding what is morally acceptable in international supply chains? How do campaigns for fair trade and 'free' labour influence our perceptions of the 'distant others' who produce much of the food and clothing consumed in the Global North? These types of questions have a long and complex history. As we shall see, late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century boycotts in the United Kingdom of slave-grown sugar from the West Indies encountered many similar dilemmas. A closer look at this pioneering foray into ethical consumption only underlines how difficult it is for consumers to make clear-cut and effective moral choices today.
The anti-saccharite movement, as abstention from sugar for political and moral reasons came to be known, was closely tied to the British anti-slavery movement. Its historical peaks coincided with upsurges of British activism against the slave trade in the 1790s, and then against slavery more generally in the 1820s. The principle focus of the anti-saccharite movement was a boycott of West Indian sugar and rum as a means of undermining the economic foundations of slavery. For British consumers who abstained, slave sugar was regarded as morally, metaphorically and physically contaminated with the sin of slavery. ‘Are drops of blood the horrible manure,' one abolitionist poem asked, 'That fills with luscious juice the teeming cane?’
