Emancipation and the remaking of the British Imperial world

Catherine Hall, Nicholas Draper, Keith McClelland, Nicholas Draper, Keith McClelland, Catherine Hall, Nicholas Draper, Keith McClelland

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780719091834
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526103024
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Slavery and the slavery business have cast a long shadow over British history. In 1833, abolition was heralded as evidence of Britain's claim to be the modern global power. Yet much is still unknown about the significance of the slavery business and emancipation in the formation of modern imperial Britain. This book engages with current work exploring the importance of slavery and slave-ownership in the re-making of the British imperial world after abolition in 1833.

The contributors to this collection, drawn from Britain, the Caribbean and Mauritius, include some of the most distinguished writers in the field: Clare Anderson, Robin Blackburn, Heather Cateau, Mary Chamberlain, Chris Evans, Pat Hudson, Richard Huzzey, Zoë Laidlaw, Alison Light, Anita Rupprecht, Verene A. Shepherd, Andrea Stuart and Vijaya Teelock.

The impact of slavery and slave-ownership is once again becoming a major area of historical and contemporary concern: this book makes a vital contribution to the subject.

Part I

Formations of capital: beyond ‘merchants and planters’

1

The scope of accumulation and the reach of moral perception: slavery, market revolution and Atlantic capitalism

Robin Blackburn

In this essay I reconsider the relationship between the rise of capitalism in Britain and the United States and the emergence of a very intense regime of plantation slavery in the Americas. This interlinked process is seen as prompting countervailing movements that seek to limit or challenge slavery in the name of ‘free air’, ‘free labour’ or the cause of humanity.

Slavery seemed a distant memory in Elizabethan England and yet was to acquire great significance in Britain’s plantation colonies. Protector Somerset, it is true, attempted to revive a species of slavery as a punishment for vagrancy in 1547. But this penalty proved impossible to enforce, because so generally unpopular.¹ Thomas Smith asserted in De Republica Anglorum (1575) that slavery had died out because English landlords had no need of slaves. The condition had been ‘little by little extinguished’ because landlords had found ‘more civil and gentle means’ of inducing labourers to work for them.² He was referring to the economic pressure on landless labourers to work for wages.

The ‘free air’ doctrine and the paradox of colonial slavery

A popular claim that England’s ‘free air’ was incompatible with slavery helped employers to discover the advantages of wage labour. In late medieval times many municipalities had claimed that all their inhabitants were free, and that any bondsman who found refuge within the city limits for a year and a day could also claim their freedom. By the late sixteenth century wider, incipiently national, claims for free air were being made. Jean Bodin cites such a declaration in his Six Books of the Republic, and William Blackstone in the 1760s, echoing a sixteenth-century case, makes a similar claim for England. As you may imagine there was considerable doubt as to the exact scope of such declarations. The case cited by Bodin covered those subject to the Guyène parlement, while that cited by Blackstone referred to those subject to English courts but, in both cases, overseas dependencies were implicitly excluded. However, captured royalists in the English Civil War – condemned to forced labour in Barbados – invoked the ‘free air’ principle in their defence. The eighteenth-century parlements of Guyenne and Paris freed scores of those held in slavery in metropolitan France.³ As these core European states expanded and acquired more colonies, the ‘free air’ doctrine was generally confined to the metropolis. Indeed I will be exploring the strange logic whereby the expansion of wage labour in the metropolitan regions directly prompted the rise of large-scale slavery in the plantation zone of the Americas. This is a story which begins in the seventeenth century but does not reach its climax until 1860. I will briefly revisit Eric Williams’ famous ideas on the subject of capitalism and slavery, but widen the optic to take account of the ‘slaveholder capitalism’ of the nineteenth-century United States.

The re-emergence of slavery in England’s seventeenth-century New World colonies, notably Barbados, Virginia, Jamaica and South Carolina, responded to conditions very different from those in metropolitan regions. The colonists could seize land from the natives but not persuade them to work for wages. Those who sponsored plantations, men catering to a new mass market for tobacco, sugar and indigo, had two solutions. For a time they could persuade destitute English youths to bind themselves to labour for a few years in the colonies, if their passage was paid and if they were promised land. However, few wished to work for wages once their time was up, and the stream of indentures dried up as word of plantation conditions spread. So the merchants opted for a more expensive, but also more long-term, solution, the purchase of African captives. The merchants’ ability to pay good money to purchase and transport slaves reflected the strength of money demand in regions of Europe in which capitalism was spreading. The larger numbers now in receipt of rent, fees, salaries or wages in these regions dramatically widened the market. The fact that their purchasing power could command exotic commodities and even turn them into items of everyday consumption added something special.⁴ In his book on Economic Growth and the Ending of the Atlantic Slave Trade (1987) David Eltis wrote that a willingness to substitute goods for leisure was a defining attribute of modernisation.⁵ The ‘industrious revolution’ described by Jan de Vries also dwells on this moment. As markets widened, the bargain came to seem more tempting to some, with plantation produce alleviating the lot of those in receipt of wages, even where they had sacrificed a margin of independence. The plantation products were soon part of a new way of life involving such consumer treats as tobacco, sugar, cacao, coffee, cotton fabric and bright dyestuffs.

The colonial option for slavery also reflected and intensified a racialised conception of African captives and their descendants as a convenient and legitimate source of coerced labour. The slaves were aliens, of African, supposedly heathen, origin and hence not covered by the ‘free air’ doctrine. The situation of the slave was sometimes acknowledged to be an unhappy one but nevertheless necessary, and ultimately beneficial to all, even the slaves supposedly gaining useful occupation and a hope of salvation. The slave status was both infantilised and feminised by patriarchal slavery. It was also more intensely commercialised as it was harnessed to Atlantic trade. Slavery ceased to be a temporary or transitional institution and became the permanent fate of an uprooted and racially defined group.

There were occasional doubts as to the legitimacy of the enslavement of Africans and their descendants, but such qualms were smothered by the pressing need to find hands to cultivate tobacco, sugar, cotton and indigo. The nature of the links between Africa, the New World and the Old involved huge distances and unfamiliar commercial practices. The precise nature of the local customs, and of the European impact on them, was hard to decipher. On the one hand, exchange tended to focus on a series of dyadic relations rather than on the wider context or what sociologists have called the ‘extra-contractual element in contract’.⁶ At least for a while the colonial element in colonial slavery did imply some attempt to embed the institution in a framework of law, even if the nature of the slave plantation embodied a patriarchal planter sovereignty within the household which diminished or resisted regulation.

In the epoch of colonial mercantilism the metropolitan authorities imposed far-reaching commercial laws governing colonial trade but the Atlantic slave trade nevertheless acquired an independent momentum. Free enterprise turned out to be more adept than state corporations at the complex undertaking of trafficking tens of thousands – eventually over a hundred thousand – of captives across the Atlantic each year. Independent traders had the specialist knowledge and the flexibility to haggle with both the African merchants and the New World planters, and to monitor their employees and agents. This early triumph of free trade – making the Atlantic a competitive slave-trafficking zone – is one rarely cited by proponents of laissez-faire. Yet the latter term was coined by Thomas Legendre, a French colonial trader. And, as so often with free enterprise, its protagonists expected public protection and even subsidies, such as the tariff exemption (acquits de guinée) received by French slave traders who brought their captives to French colonies. In the colonial epoch the imperial regulation of trade strove to channel the plantation-related trades to home ports and to keep contraband in check. But in the half-century following the American Revolution the various colonial systems – British, French, Spanish and Portuguese – were successively destroyed, with American planters and merchants often taking the lead. This too was a complex process, since many of the new patriots in the former colonies were slave-holders. In the course of the struggle for independence the planter elite backed a widening of the geographical scope of the free air doctrine while continuing to practise slave-owning on an even larger scale, albeit that some planter leaders were prepared to accept an end to the Atlantic slave trade.

The contribution of slavery to industrialisation

This brings me to another aspect of the relationship between capitalism and slavery. For over half a century historians have debated whether exchanges between Britain, Africa and the New World slave plantations furnished a decisive stimulus to Britain’s Industrial Revolution in the last decades of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth. The argument was powerfully made in Eric Williams’ famous study, Capitalism and Slavery, published in 1944. It still has something essential to teach us nearly seventy years later. In American Crucible I conclude that the ‘Williams thesis’, broadly construed, and with certain amendments, is in good shape.⁷ The broader construction of the argument looks not just at profits, or the slave trade, but at the way that slavery in the Americas and the Atlantic slave trade furnished markets, capital or credit and raw materials for the industrialising economy. Early cotton manufacturers needed extended credit if they were to reach the Atlantic markets that would reward industrial production. The colonial merchants of Liverpool, London and Bristol were able to supply this credit, as bills of exchange drawn on the plantation trades helped to finance canals, docks, wharves, manufactures and agricultural improvement. Recent discussion has focused on how the Americas furnished a providential escape from the constraint of geography and resources on a small island. In The Great Divergence (2002) Kenneth Pomeranz has urged that the famous ‘ghost acreage’ acquired by British manufacturers in their exchanges with the plantation zone enabled them to overtake China.⁸ While this notion of ‘ghost acres’ is helpful, it is necessary to stress that it was slave labour and the relentless pace of coerced slave gangs that brought those acres into production. And while Williams’ argument focused on the Caribbean sugar economy, Pomeranz stresses the huge growth of slave-grown cotton in the US South, the latter rapidly overtaking Brazil as a supplier of slave-produced cotton after 1815.

With or without colonial rule, New World slavery in the greater Caribbean, from the Mississippi to the Paulista West in Brazil, added millions of acres of fertile soil supplying vital ingredients at a constant or even declining price for the industrialising economy. If forced to rely on its own agricultural resources, 1820s Britain would have needed to devote the whole of its arable and pastoral land to supply enough woollen yarn or flax to make up for the loss of raw cotton imports from North America. If slavery had been unavailable, then more costly alternatives would have been needed to supply the needed inputs. In Power and Plenty (2008) Kevin Findlay and Ronald O’Rourke further develop the case that Britain would have grown more slowly or not at all in a closed or purely European economy.⁹

Cotton yarn lent itself easily to manufacturing processes, and consumers loved the new cotton garments. Cuban sugar and Brazilian coffee likewise added allure to new modes of consumption built around indigo-dyed cotton (‘jeans’), coffee and sugar.

While the authors I have mentioned can be seen as renewing the ‘Williams thesis’ we should be careful not to imply that the path taken was in every way the best and most productive. If British governments had never permitted the slave trade or had freed the slaves much earlier, they could have constructed a more humane model, based on voluntary migration and cooperative or individual landownership, with generous credit and commodity price-stabilisation boards; then supplies of sugar, cotton and coffee would have been forthcoming. Or if, following an earlier emancipation, compensation had gone to the direct producers and to road-building and education, this would have helped to give a post-emancipation free labour regime a flying start. Likewise, recognition of indigenous land claims would have made waged employment more attractive, a consideration central to the argument of the New Zealand promoter Edward Gibbon Wakefield. Unfortunately the settlers, with official connivance, trampled on native rights, flouting the Treaty of Waitangi. But this does not invalidate the argument that a better course was available.

Plantation products commanded good prices, enabling the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables
• A note on the front cover
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: Catherine Hall, Nicholas Draper and Keith McClelland
• Part I Formations of capital: beyond ‘merchants and planters’
• Part II From slavery to indenture
• Part III The imperial state
• Part IV Public histories, family histories
• Part V Reparations, restitution and the historian
• Index