🌅 The Whaling Industry’s Overlooked Role in Ending Slavery

SOURCE

McDougal & Choi-Fitzpatrick (2025)

WHAT TO KNOW

• Researchers at the University of San Diego analyzed U.S. Census records and logbooks of American whaling voyages from 1790 to 1840, finding a “nearly perfect” 1-to-1 inverse relationship between whaling and slavery during that period. Put differently, whenever imports of whaling products went up by 1% during that period, the proportion of enslaved people in the corresponding state declined by 1%. Further, when the team mapped their findings geographically, they discovered that the more whaling occurred, the more widely decreases in slavery occurred in nearby states. Taken together, the findings suggest whaling led to decreases in slavery in the U.S., and the effect even spread across state lines.

WHY IT MATTERS

• Whaling was the first global industry to reach the colonies that would eventually become the U.S., and, early on, the industry indeed helped fuel the slave trade as whale oil was one of the world’s critical energy commodities prior to the adoption of cheap fossil fuels. By the middle of the 19th century, Black sailors made up around 30% of whaling crews, often employed by wealthy Quaker merchants who were some of the earliest and most ardent supporters of abolition. Some Black sailors were enslaved people who would use their earnings to purchase freedom for themselves or their family, while others were free people who went on to finance abolitionist efforts or houses of worship.

CONNECT THE DOTS

• Historians have long debated whether the end of slavery was primarily driven by the moral authority established by early abolitionists or economic changes as machinery replaced enslaved labor on farms and inside factories. The authors of the present study say their work challenges both of those perspectives, arguing that the whaling industry played an overlooked role in the spread of abolition and subsequent decline of slavery in the U.S.