Sugarcoated Ethics

Unearthing the ethical entanglements of early children's books with the Atlantic slave economy.

What ethical lessons are children taught when their books are funded by enslavement and their childhoods sweetened with sugar? In Sugarcoated Ethics, Courtney Weikle-Mills traces the intertwined histories of children's literature and the transatlantic slave economy, revealing how stories written for the young often masked the realities of enslavement, consumption, and colonial power.

Focusing on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this book examines how early British and US children's books emerged alongside and within a world built by enslaved labor. With many texts imported into the colonial Caribbean, the trajectory of children's literature was shaped by the unethical systems that it failed to fully acknowledge. And yet, in their frequent concern with care, interdependence, and moral formation, children's books also reflected and distorted the relational crises at the heart of enslavement. Weikle-Mills explores how white-authored stories attempted to "purify" white children from complicity in slavery through narratives of sentimental training, civility, and false reciprocity. At the same time, she recovers traces of Afro-Caribbean storytelling and protest traditions such as songs, oral narratives, and archival fragments that offered radically different models of ethical responsibility rooted in collective action, improvisation, and intergenerational care.

Through literary analysis and archival research, Sugarcoated Ethics reconsiders the ethical stakes of early children's books and the young readers they addressed. Weikle-Mills shows how relational ethics—concerned with mutual vulnerability, openness to difference, and care across power imbalances—both surfaced and were suppressed in these texts. Her study challenges idealized visions of childhood innocence and expands our understanding of how literature has helped shape, soften, and sometimes resist the moral contradictions of the Atlantic world.

Courtney Weikle-Mills is the director of the Children's Literature program and an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the author of Imaginary Citizens: Child Readers and the Limits of American Independence, 1640-1868.