Interesting article, which starts mentioning Ioan and AG.
Poor nations reap rich world's climate pain
Jacob Saulwick
December 8, 2007
Page 1 of 3 | Single page
In Amazing Grace, released last year, the Welsh heart-throb Ioan Gruffudd starred as William Wilberforce, the English abolitionist credited with wiping out the slave trade in the British empire.
In a pleasant romp of a film, Gruffudd plays Wilberforce as a plucky Brit, who, with the clear-eyed help of his young wife, battles on against the powers-that-be to claim the day for morality.
Historically speaking, however, the film is all over the place. For a start, the tune of the titular song, launched into during the film, had not been composed during Wilberforce's time.
But more important, it was not Wilberforce's British sense of decency that finished off slavery in the empire. In a seminal history of the slave trade in the West Indies, the sometime Guardian cricket journalist, revolutionary and historian, C.L.R. James, saw Wilberforce's role in sharp contrast to the one romanticised in British history. What really mattered was not morality, James argued in The Black Jacobins, but that the abolition of slavery at the time was in the interests of British commerce.
http://business.smh.com.au/poor-nations-reap-rich-worlds-climate-pain/20071207-1fq5.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1