American Race Relations and the Legacy of British Colonialism

Thomas H. Stanton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781032173955
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000053111
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

Colonial rule distorts a colony's economy and its society, and British rule was no exception. British policies led to a stratified American colonial society with slaves on the bottom and white settlers on top. The divided society functioned through laws that imposed rules and defined roles of the respective races. This occurred in other colonies too, often leading to strife that continues today. Especially since World War II the United States seems finally to have been able to remove many laws and practices that had created barriers between races in the divided society. Appeals to legitimacy, such as by abolitionists and the Civil Rights Movement, were essential to change laws from support of the divided society to instruments for disestablishing it. Thanks to the rule of law – another important British legacy -- the U.S. is much farther along than many former colonies in making progress. By highlighting the history of the interplay of two fundamental concepts, the divided society and the rule of law, and briefly contrasting the experiences of other former colonies, this book shows how the United States has made significant long-term progress, although incomplete, and ways for this to continue today.

1 Introduction and Overview

Colonial rule is different from other forms of government. That’s because the ruling country has goals and purposes that differ from those of the local people, and the capacity to impose its will. Colonial rule distorts both a colony’s economy and its society, and British rule was no exception. In its pursuit of economic gain, Britain created distortions in America’s society with effects that continue even today. Most importantly, British policies led to the importation of slave labor, which provided generous economic returns from the sale of enslaved people, from related enterprises such as the shipping industry, and especially from the sale of the agricultural products that slaves produced. This economic drive had social consequences in creating a stratified American colonial society with slaves on the bottom and white settlers on top. Effects of British colonialism include not only creation of such a society but also continuing British shaping of the American South to be a virtual colonial agricultural economy, both before and after the Civil War.

Even while creating a divided colonial society, British rule also gave to the United States the “rule of law,” which is a major source of strength as the United States has sought to overcome the legacy of that divided society. The rule of law, despite its apparently simple meaning, involves complexities and sometimes contradictory meanings that people and governments might impute to the idea. This book adopts a specific concept of the rule of law, based on a government that has limited its own authority to engage in arbitrary actions vis-à-vis its subjects and that is governed by a legal system that those subject to the law have a hand in shaping. The rule of law inclines people to obey laws because they believe that the legal system is legitimate, rather than merely because they fear adverse consequences if they disobey.

A fundamental division in American society, based on slavery and laws that maintained slavery, lasted from colonial times to the Civil War. To hold the 13 colonies together, the framers of the U.S. Constitution made compromises to accommodate slavery and states’ rights and to provide disproportionate electoral strength for southern slave states. For whites, the Constitution guaranteed the rule of law, while black slaves remained subject to an authoritarian “rule by law.” Without sufficient possibilities to resolve these issues within the political or legal systems, a civil war occurred before the U.S. formally abolished slavery.

Even after the Civil War, southern states used the law as an instrument to maintain economic benefits of compulsory servitude of former slaves while nominally granting them freedom. Again, rule by law, this time over emancipated slaves, played a major role in sustaining a divided society. Even though Congress forced the addition of new Civil Rights Amendments to the Constitution after the Civil War, state laws and decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court eliminated much of their benefit.

A fundamentally divided American society persisted until well into the twentieth century. Even in the New Deal, programs favored whites over blacks in both design and implementation. Finally, World War II brought a turning point in the attack on the divided society in the United States. As public sensitivity to civil rights grew, courts and the national government more generally became active in addressing race discrimination. The rule of law came into play as the key instrument for deconstructing the divided society in America. In contrast to other colonies and their divided societies, the fact that the United States had a rule of law meant that social division could be addressed by including people of all races in those whom the rule of law benefited. This was a difficult task, but one that was easier than trying first to adopt the rule of law and then using it to address the problem of social division.

The effort at overcoming the colonial history of a divided society is succeeding in the United States, although only after many years and a Civil War, to an extent that has not been possible in post-colonial societies that lack institutions and cultures based on strong support for the rule of law. While the United States has achieved notable success, the legacy of a stratified colonial beginning has left considerable work undone. Under the rule of law, the content of particular laws, court decisions, and implementation of laws changes back and forth in response to prevailing political and cultural views. Sometimes political winds shift to encourage favorable laws in the effort to reduce social divisions, and sometimes there are adverse changes. Yet, the rule of law built into the American constitutional system means that adverse changes are limited in the extent that they can quickly move society backwards again. This book reviews the arc of history and variations in the American legal system over time to show the substantial, although incomplete, progress that the United States has made toward ending the divided society that is a legacy of British colonialism.

2 Colonial Economies, Societies, and Laws

Defenders of the British Empire point to its positive benefits, including global trade and capital markets, the spread of rule of law and civil administration, and the ubiquity of the English language (Ferguson, 2002, pp. 358–364). Yet, the other side of the ledger cannot be ignored. It was British colonialism that created the challenges of black-white race relations in the United States today, to say nothing of its contribution to the racial, ethnic, and religious strife that continues to bedevil former British colonies around the globe. While each colony’s experience was different, the pattern of British rule created similarities in other countries that shed light on the American experience as well.

Economic Drivers of British Colonialism and American Slavery

Colonial conquest was driven largely by the pursuit of economic gain. English interaction with the New World began in the sixteenth century. Seafarers undertook voyages of discovery and foreign trade and privateer ventures against the Spanish. Early voyages were funded individually by investors; when a ship returned with cargo and profits, the owners divided the proceeds and then funded another expedition.

As the volume of trade increased, merchants developed the concept of the joint-stock company: rather than investing in the proceeds of an individual voyage, investors purchased stock in a company chartered by the Crown to engage in trade within specifically demarcated boundaries. Often, as an incentive for investors, the Crown would authorize chartered companies to hold a monopoly over their authorized domains. In return the Crown would receive a share of the proceeds. Thus were born the great royal companies, including the Russia Company, the English East India Company, the Hudson’s Bay Company, and – most unfortunately – the Royal African Company (Brock, 1887).

Other companies relevant to the New World included the Massachusetts Bay Company, the Virginia Company, and other companies authorized to establish plantations and to colonize particular parts of North America (Tomlins, 2001, p. 343). Establishment of white settlements was a means to achieve economic ends and to help exploit America’s abundant natural resources (Beer, 1922, pp. 53–77). Thus, the 13 colonies became settler colonies, similar to Ireland, Canada, South Africa, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Australia, and New Zealand, which involved large numbers of British and other European settlers who sought to dominate or displace indigenous peoples (Huttenback, 1976). Settler colonies stood in contrast to the many British colonies, such as India or the Caribbean colonies, that were governed and controlled by a small minority of British administrators.

In the nineteenth century Britain enacted Companies Acts, allowing investors to establish companies without regard to limitations specified in a royal charter. This helped to promote competition that might have been constrained by the language of specialized company charters issued earlier. The progression of organizational forms, together with advances in shipping technology, increased the scale available to English adventurers and ship owners to engage in the transportation of not only colonists but also indentured laborers and slaves and the agricultural products they produced.

Besides offering a haven for those colonists seeking better lives, colonization of North America also served a variety of purposes for the Crown, and especially economic purposes. Historian George Louis Beer observed that some

favored colonization as a remedy for overpopulation and social distress; but far more emphasis was laid on colonization as a means of quickening English commerce and of freeing England from what, according to prevailing economic theories, was a dangerous dependence on rival nations . .. the colony was to be primarily a source of supply for the metropolis.

(1922, pp. 53, 66)

It was no accident that the Board of Trade and its precursors played a major role in British administration of the 13 American colonies (Beer, 1922, pp. 337–338).

Operating under a mercantilist philosophy, British policymakers saw colonization as a means to provide raw materials and help to reduce British dependence on foreign sources of supply. In addition to providing imports to Britain itself, products of the 13 American colonies, especially tobacco, brought Britain considerable revenue when shipped to Western Europe (Price, 1998). Investors in royal companies, and later in commerce more generally, sought their own economic returns.

This approach placed the American colonies in a position of economic subordination, and British efforts to strengthen the home country’s position vis-à-vis the colonies aroused American ire. Thus, the tea that merchants and their compatriots threw into Boston Harbor during the Tea Party in 1773 belonged to the East India Company, which operated under British law as a monopoly that the Americans considered threatening to their livelihoods (Schlesinger, 1918). Many of the grievances listed in the Declaration of Independence related to the customs service that Britain used to enforce the Navigation Acts and other economic requirements that Britain sought to impose:

An American reading of that passage in the Declaration of Independence which denounces the king because he had “erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance” would understand this reference to the customs officials. More specifically, the complaints in the Declaration that the colonists had been deprived “in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury” and transported “beyond Seas to be tried for pretend offices” singled out the Admiralty court system which was a major element in the customs apparatus.

(Barrow, 1967, p. 256)

In addition, Barrow notes, a major complaint in the Declaration against the king was “For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world.”

Along with profitability to the home country, British colonial rule emphasized an unwillingness to pay much for colonial administration. Jack Greene (1994, p. 15) notes how the reluctance of Britain to pay for large overseas military and civil establishments shifted considerable governance and power from the home country to the colonies. When the British parliament sought to assert greater control and to impose new trade rules and taxes on the colonies, the result was a crisis that exposed the growing differences between a home country that believed it possessed the right to rule and American colonists who believed that they had the rights of Englishmen to influence the process of making laws that they would be required to obey.

Profits also drove the slave trade. As Niall Ferguson (2002, pp. 78–79) puts it, “slavery made overwhelming sense as an economic proposition.” William Robert Scott (1912, reprinted 1968), in his classic treatise on English, Scottish, and Irish joint-stock companies, writes of the origins of the English slave trade in 1562:

The commencement of the English slave trade was no after-thought but the original foundation of the venture, since [John] Hawkins formulated his scheme on the basis of negroes being “very good merchandise in Hispaniola.” During the cruise off the coast of Africa 300 slaves were obtained “partly by the sword, partly by other means.” Sales were made in the West Indies on such a profitable scale that Hawkins was able not only to fully load his three ships with hides, ginger and sugar, besides s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction and Overview
• 2 Colonial Economies, Societies, and Laws
• 3 The Rule of Law and Its Significance
• 4 Law and America's Divided Society
• 5 Conclusion: Overcoming the Colonial History of America's Divided Society
• Index