Abstract

Richard Nisbet was a White British enslaver who studied at Oxford. He lived for part of his life in Nevis and St. Kitts in the West Indies before moving to Philadelphia. The chapter is an excerpt from his 1773 work Slavery Not Forbidden by Scripture: Or a Defence of the West-India Planters, which he published in Philadelphia under the pseudonym “a West-Indian.” He composed this text as a rebuttal of Benjamin Rush’s antislavery pamphlet Address to the Inhabitants of the British Settlements (see previous chapter). In the excerpt, he responds to Rush’s descriptions of the enormous cruelty of enslavers in the West Indies. He claims that enslaved Black people in the West Indies have much better lives than free people in Africa. Nisbet also makes enormously racist claims about the natural capacities and cultures of Africans. For Rush’s reply, see the next chapter.