Carey has authored and edited several books and many articles on slavery and abolition. These include
The Unnatural Trade: Slavery, Abolition, and Environmental Writing, 1650–1807 (2024),
From Peace to Freedom: Quaker Rhetoric and the Birth of American Antislavery, 1658-1761 (2012), and
British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760-1807 (2005), as well as an edition of
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, The African (2018). In addition to
The Unnatural Trade, his published research in the environmental humanities includes work on
bull-baiting in the eighteenth-century,
ecocritical essays on
Gilbert White and
Oliver Goldsmith, and a collection of essays on birds in eighteenth-century literature (2020). Carey makes his academic research available to a broad public audience through a website first created in the 1990s. This is noted for its information on Olaudah Equiano and
Ignatius Sancho and also offers biographies of many British abolitionists, full texts of eighteenth and nineteenth-century antislavery poems, and information and literary resources for several places including
Cornwall and
Cambridgeshire. Carey is an active participant in British
scholarly societies. He was President of the
British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in 2021-24. He was a founder and, in 2011-2014, the first president of
The Literary London Society. He was President of the UK and Ireland branch of the
Association for the Study of Literature and Environment from 2015 to 2019. He is a fellow and, in 2021-24, was a Council Member of the
Linnean Society of London. ==Books==