Slavery, Memory and Identity

National Representations and Global Legacies

Douglas Hamilton, Kate Hodgson, Joel Quirk

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781848932258
• eBook ISBN: 9781317321965
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This is the first book to explore national representations of slavery in an international comparative perspective. Contributions span a wide geographical range, covering Europe, North America, West and South Africa, the Indian Ocean and Asia.

1 ‘A Thoroughly National Work’:¹ The Politics of Blame and European Abolitionist Identities

Kate Hodgson

In a speech to Parliament in 1815, the British foreign secretary, Lord Castlereagh, cautioned the powerful British abolitionist movement that they were in danger of alienating the rest of Europe. He asked that they ‘refrain from reviling the Governments of those countries from arriving quickly at the termination of a traffick which we, with our nicer moral feeling upon it, had not accomplished until the lapse of many years’.² In the interest of keeping the peace in Europe, openly vilifying other nations for their slave-trading activities was thus discouraged. Castlereagh’s speech also tackled broader assumptions of British moral superiority and ‘civilization’. After the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, British campaigns against the slave trade increasingly found a new focus overseas and the identification of the foreign ‘Other’ as slave trader was a vital stage in the construction of national identities around the issue of abolition.³ Castlereagh’s remark regarding Britain’s recently-acquired ‘nicer moral feeling’ on the issue of slave trading implicitly criticized self-aggrandizing responses to the abolition of the slave trade, as well as the associated accusations of immorality levelled at other countries. However, the warning was ignored and the politics of blame became an increasingly widespread aspect of international abolitionist campaigns, making a significant contribution to British campaigns against the continued European slave trade after 1807.

This chapter looks at processes of nation-building in the nineteenth century around the issue of abolition, both positively, through a sense of morally-justified national pride and achievement, and negatively, through blame, vilification and moral shaming. It examines how ‘notorious’ slave-trading nations such as France, Spain and Portugal came to be constructed from the outside (particularly, but not solely, from a British standpoint) and portrayed as ‘immoral’ or ‘uncivilized’. It then takes a parallel view of the reception of these externally-imposed judgements on slave-trading activity and colonial policy, examining how abolitionists in those countries singled out for criticism reconciled this reputation as ‘immoral’ slave traders with their own abolitionist convictions. The analysis is extended to look at the implications of abolitionism for the construction of national identities in nineteenth-century Europe. The chapter ends with a case study examining how Portugal, the major European slave-trading nation after 1807, was able, by the end of the century, to retroactively construct the story of their abolition of the slave trade in a way that reinforced national identity and collective pride. By contrasting post-1807 British attitudes to abolition with their Portuguese counterparts in the second half of the nineteenth century, this chapter highlights the development of retrospective abolitionist national identities during this period.

Emergent European and National Identities and the Abolition of the Slave Trade

The campaign against the slave trade did not achieve full international consensus until the second half of the nineteenth century, but abolitionists in Britain and elsewhere were constructing transnational networks of supporters and contacts from the beginning. Collaboration between British and North American abolitionists contributed to the formation of eighteenth-century transatlantic ‘cultures of abolition’, as Cora Kaplan and John Oldfield have examined in detail.⁴ There were also foundational links between the British Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, established in 1787, and the French Amis des Noirs which was subsequently set up in February 1788 in order to ‘compete with the London society’.⁵ Anthony Benezet, Thomas Clarkson, Brissot de Warville and other leading abolitionists built on these international connections through their writings and their engagement abroad against the slave trade, with Clarkson spending several months in Paris from 1789 to 1790.

The context of the French Revolution and the political hostilities between Britain and France made abolitionists in both countries wary of openly promoting or encouraging these ties, however. When Granville Sharp wrote to the Amis des Noirs in 1788, for example, the possibility of publishing his letter in the French national press was considered by the Committee, but ultimately they decided that this open association with well-known British activists was too risky.⁶ A similar reluctance to be publicly associated with ideas seen as radical or strongly anti-slavery was felt on the other side of the Channel, as campaigners in Britain found that close relations with revolutionary France were a liability at home. During his tour of Scotland on behalf of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1792, William Dickson noted in his diary after meeting two potential supporters in Portsoy: ‘Neither of them have any connection with the French Revolutionary Club here, and I charged them to beware of any allusions to it, or even to liberty.’⁷ Concerns over potentially damaging transnational connections were thus expressed by both British and French abolitionists at this point. This reluctance was motivated by a fear of alienating potential supporters or giving ammunition to opponents by appearing to promote radicalism, but xenophobia, exacerbated by the outbreak of war between France and Britain, also played a role in diminishing the promise of international cooperation against the slave trade. British abolitionist campaigners during the Napoleonic wars turned their attention instead to campaigning on a national level, appealing to growing popular patriotic sentiment.

National divisions within abolitionist politics mirrored broader political tendencies towards a growing British isolationism, rooted in ‘a belief that they were different from those beyond their shores’, or ‘a strong sense of dissimilarity from those without’, as Linda Colley’s study of the development of British national identity during this period suggests.⁸ Particularly when faced with the outbreak of war against France in 1793, the patriotic ideal of national unity became increasingly important. The idea of ‘belonging’, or national identity, has been described by Liah Greenfeld as a ‘unique form of social consciousness’ and a ‘compelling, inclusive image of society’ that offered a distinct way for individual members within a given society to envisage and relate to one another.⁹ However, national identity can also be understood as a form of exclusion in order to protect the national community from an external threat. The latter ‘oppositional model of national identity’ has typically been constructed (and fought) on the issue of national borders and fear of invasion, as Peter Sahlins has suggested in his study of France and Spain.¹⁰ Subsequently, over the course of the nineteenth century a racially determinist model became a key determining influence on national identity, and increasingly the idea of a shared ‘Europeanness’ (over and above border conflicts), shared Christianity and the broad imperialist concept of a shared European civilization took shape.¹¹ Within this model, more than one identity could still be held concurrently, as identities operated in multiple registers and moved between different national and international contexts.

In the particular context of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, British abolitionists moved away from building European connections to focus more strongly on appealing to popular sentiment at home. The abolition of the slave trade and later that of slavery succeeded particularly well in Britain when they were promoted as a ‘thoroughly national work’ – to cite a retrospective appraisal of the movement in the magazine John Bull – rather than a ‘thoroughly international’ one.¹² Creating a national narrative of abolitionism was (during this period at least) a more useful political strategy than an approach based on international cooperation. But how did these claims upon national identity and the assertion of national difference become such prominent issues within the abolitionist movement? Was the popularity of abolition as a public cause in Britain inseparable from a belligerent form of nationalism that regarded all foreigners with mistrust as potential slave traders? In order to understand how and why nationalist forms of abolitionism and the tactics of ‘blame’ and ‘shame’ impacted on national identity, it is useful to examine abolitionist political culture in Britain and compare this with public attitudes towards the slave trade in Europe as a whole.

The brief late eighteenth-century period of transnational, cosmopolitan relationships between British and French abolitionists were succeeded by a wartime climate of mistrust in which national rivalries were deeply rooted. In the early nineteenth century, British abolitionist campaigners such as George Harrison, the Quaker merchant and founding member of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, made use of anti-French feeling and invasion fears by evoking the hated Napoleon Bonaparte or ‘Boney’, and implicitly comparing the French leader to a slave trader who would ‘drag us from our native soil … then convey us in chains to a distant region, under sufferings indescribable’.¹³ The re-establishment of slavery in the French colonies in 1802 was also noted in an anonymous British abolitionist pamphlet, which criticized Napoleon for bowing to pressure from his wife’s family and other ‘powerful private interests’ within the French colonial lobby.¹⁴ These abolitionist images of a slave-trading Napoleon Bonaparte interestingly echo a general theme in wartime propaganda of this period that linked the French general to enslavement, and more particularly to galley slavery in the Mediterranean. For example, one 1803 tract was entitled ‘John Bull turned into a Galley Slave; or, the Corsican Bonaparte (the Grand Subjugator’s) New Plan for raising an Army of British Volunteers’. Another political caricature published in July 1803, in which an English volunteer soldier holds up the head of Napoleon impaled on a fork and addresses the Emperor as follows: ‘Ha, my little Boney! What dost think of Johnny Bull now? Plunder Old England, hay? Make French slaves of us all, hay?’¹⁵ In these pamphlets and cartoons, Napoleon Bonaparte became the centrepiece of a nationalistic propaganda campaign that associated France with enslavement and Britain with freedom.

Although there were no major British petitioning campaigns against the slave trade during the Napoleonic Wars, abolitionist campaigning continued in Britain in the form of popular tracts, and even took on new shape by appealing to popular nationalism and anti-French and anti-Napoleonic sentiment. This tactic echoed the popular press of the time, and attempted to appeal to a popular readership in Britain, gripped by invasion fears and wartime xenophobia. It was supported by a growing sense of nationalism which, Gerald Newman has argued, was based upon the British popular idea or myth of national liberty and self-determination, sustained by ‘consciousness of national rivalry with the foreign foe bent upon “enslavement”’.¹⁶ By reaffirming this rhetorical link between slavery and enemies abroad, turn-of-the-century campaigners not only helped establish abolitionism as a British national cause, but also fuelled the politics of blame among European countries.

Portrayals of other wartime European enemies as heartless slave traders or slave owners were popular in British writings published during the Napoleonic Wars. A soldier posted to South Africa during Britain’s first military occupation of the formerly Dutch colony published a travel narrative in 1806, Gleanings in Africa, which portrayed the Dutch South African colonists there, like the previous images of the slave-trading Bonaparte, as self-interested, cruel and coarse. A description of a young slave who gets too near to a chained hyena elicits the following description:

[the boy was] immediately sent away by one of the family with the following consolatory reprimand, delivered in all the guttural vehemence of the language in which he spoke: ‘Was he aware, that if he chanced to be torn in pieces by the hyena, that his master would sustain the irreparable loss of five hundred rix dollars?’¹⁷

In comparison to the colonial Dutch ‘unfeeling masters’, as they were termed, British imperial rule was portrayed as thoughtful, ‘civilized’, noble and principled. The writer’s national identity was very much rooted in British constitutional liberty and ‘mild government’, which he viewed as fundamental contributing factors to Britain’s position as the ‘bulwark of Europe’.¹⁸ He suggested that as ‘Britons enjoy true rational liberty in its fullest perfection, and that liberty secured by the most excellent constitution ever devised by human wisdom’, they were the most qualified European nation to lead progress towards the abolition of the slave trade.¹⁹ A similar sentiment was advanced, again anonymously, by an abolitionist campaigner writing as the John Bull-like character ‘Alfred’ in 1814. In an article which was syndicated in local newspapers and periodicals across Britain, from Cornwall to Aberdeen, he proclaimed: ‘Let the voice of the British nation once more declare itself, and the African Slave Trade must universally cease.’²⁰

International Politics and Abolitionism Post-1814

In the context of post-1814 Restoration Europe, this overwhelmingly nationalist type of abolitionism became more difficult to pursue, as open hostility towards France or any other country was officially discouraged. This was particularly the case for such a sensitive subject as the slave trade, as Castlereagh’s warning to the abolitionists suggests. The post-1814 era of international cooperation, congresses and treaties focused on establishing a new common discourse of nation states that were deemed to share a common heritage of European ‘civilization’ and values.²¹ This more nuanced relationship between national and international political cultures fed into the abolitionist movement: collaborations begin to be rebuilt, correspondence re-established and writings translated between prominent abolitionists and their sympathizers in Britain and continental Europe. A rhetoric of shared European opposition to the slave trade was promoted by British abolitionists, despite a continued underlying belief in Britain’s ‘nicer moral feeling’ on the matter. Thus abolitionist pamphlets published after 1814 made considerable efforts to build bridges abroad, with prominent figures such as Wilberforce in Britain and Madame de Staël in France calling for continental cooperation on the issue of abolition.²²

The desire to promote European consensus and transnational cooperation on the issue is also visible in the language of the ‘Declaration relative to the Slave Trade’, agreed upon by the representatives of the major powers at Vienna in February 1815. The slave trade was described in the treaty as contrary to ‘the public voice in all civilized countries’.²³ The implications for the countries of Europe was clear – the slave trade was part of an uncivilized past of unscrupulous behaviour between European states, including enslavement, piracy, privateering and other maritime crimes that would no longer be tolerated in modern Europe by the re-established cohort of sovereign powers. The Vienna treaty also called for religious unity on the issue of the slave trade: ‘all the powers of Christendom’ should unite against slave trading, in order to ‘honour their mission, fulfill their duty, and manifest the principles which guide their august sovereigns’. The treaty focused on the unifying idea of ‘universal morality’. The assembly of leaders was seen as a microcosm of the assembled nations, and it was hoped that uniting monarchs and leading diplomats from across Europe in congress, and encouraging individuals to agree on united action would promote cooperation between the previously warring nations of Europe.

The collective statement on the issue of the slave trade at Vienna in 1815 emphasized common tr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: Slavery, Memory and Identity: National Representations and Global Legacies
• 1 'A Thoroughly National Work': The Politics of Blame and European Abolitionist Identities
• 2 From Slave Quarters to Wigwams: Native American Slaveholding and the Debate over Civilization
• 3 For Civilization's Sake: Legal Abolition of Slavery in Nepal and Sierra Leone in a Global Perspective, 1920-30
• 4 The Heritage of Slavery and Nation Building: A Comparison of South Africa and Mauritius
• 5 Picturing Slavery: The Perils and Promise of Representations of Slavery in the United States, the Bahamas and England
• 6 'History Must be Re-Written!': Revisionist Ambitions among West African Slave Descendants
• 7 Contrapuntal Memories of Slavery and Abolition in the French-Speaking World
• 8 Public Memory of Slavery in Brazil
• 9 Learning to Remember and Imagine Slavery: The Pedagogies of Museum Field Trips in the Representation of 'Difficult' Histories
• 10 Slavery and Racism as the 'Wrongs' of (European) History: Reflections from a Study on Portuguese Textbooks
• Notes
• Index