A Civilised Savagery

Britain and the New Slaveries in Africa, 1884-1926

Kevin Grant

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415949002
• eBook ISBN: 9781135408718
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

In the two decades before World War One, Great Britain witnessed the largest revival of anti-slavery protest since the legendary age of emancipation in the mid-nineteenth century. Rather than campaigning against the trans-Atlantic slave trade, these latter-day abolitionists focused on the so-called 'new slaveries' of European imperialism in Africa, condemning coercive systems of labor taxation and indentured servitude, as well as evidence of atrocities.

A Civilized Savagery illuminates the multifaceted nature of British humanitarianism by juxtaposing campaigns against different forms of imperial labor exploitation in three separate areas: the Congo Free State, South Africa, and Portuguese West Africa. In doing so, Kevin Grant points out how this new type of humanitarianism influenced the transition from Empire to international government and the advent of universal human rights in subsequent decades.

CHAPTER

1

Humanity and Slavery in
All Their Forms

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, published in 1899, opens on the River Thames aboard a cruising yawl, where several men wait for the tide to turn and carry them out to sea. As the dusk falls, one of the men, Charlie Marlow, begins a tale that unfolds into the novella and, more broadly, a commentary on Europe’s scramble for Africa. Marlow’s tale is loosely based on Conrad’s own experience during a visit to the Congo Free State as a ship’s captain in 1890, an experience that prompted Conrad to question the motives and morality of Europe’s civilizing mission. In a series of reflections that precede his tale, Marlow observes:

The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it, not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea—something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to.¹

This chapter is, in part, about the origins of the idea to which Conrad referred at the turn of the twentieth century. There was actually a range of distinct, and yet related, ideas that enabled Europeans to legitimize their conquest of Africa. While Conrad generally cast an ironic eye upon the European as an “emissary of light,” he primarily leveled his criticism at traders who had lost their moral compass in their search for wealth.² Conrad, like most other critics of European imperialism in his era, was not opposed to European intervention in Africa, and he recognized the currency and power of the idea that had rendered this intervention a humanitarian calling. From the distance of over a century, historians are apt to approach this idea as a hegemonic ideology that was based on racism, capitalism, religion, or a coherent amalgam of these and other forces at work in British and European imperial culture. Conrad and his contemporaries, however, understood that the idea meant different things to different people, and that people were prepared to argue for the superiority of their humanitarian principles over the humanitarian principles of others.

The language of humanitarian debate in Conrad’s era reflected three distinctive humanitarian ideologies that provided strong moral authority to British overseas expansion. These ideologies were distinguished by their respective emphases on the political principle of trusteeship, evangelical philanthropy, and, finally, human rights. It is important to note that these ideologies developed at different times, in response to different historical circumstances. Moreover, the currency of each ideology was not constant, but waxed and waned in different political environments. Whereas the principle of imperial trusteeship originated in the political aftermath of the Reformation, evangelical philanthropy came to the fore in British humanitarian politics on the strength of the evangelical movement of the late eighteenth century. Subsequently, the politics of human rights developed in the late nineteenth century on the basis of liberal interpretations of natural rights theory, coupled with a commitment to cultural relativism derived largely from the ethnographic studies of Mary Kingsley in West Africa. This is not to say that the idea of human rights originated in Britain in the late Victorian era, but rather that a historically particular version of human rights became a significant factor in humanitarian debates over empire in Britain at this time.³ While a strictly materialist critique of empire might collapse these three ideologies into a single historical system of capitalist exploitation, it is nonetheless true that the historical advocates of these ideologies saw themselves in different camps. Their differences, as well as their common beliefs and strategic alliances, were clearly apparent in twentieth-century debates over the new slaveries in Africa.

The perception of new slaveries was nothing new to the British. This chapter couples its introduction of humanitarian ideologies with an overview of debates over the legal guises of slavery that followed the emancipation of chattel slaves in the British Empire in 1833 and predated the onset of Europe’s scramble for Africa in the 1870s. The subjects of abolitionist protest diversified throughout the Victorian era, expanding beyond the plantation complex in the Americas to include slavery under Islamic regimes in East Africa and the Middle East, as well as the international traffic in indentured Indians and Chinese. In order to combat these perceived evils, the British abolitionist movement developed new organizations at home and attempted to forge alliances with abolitionists abroad, but missionary societies soon overtook the conventional anti-slavery organizations to become the leading public authorities of British abolition by the final third of the nineteenth century. As the last section of this chapter demonstrates, missionaries were not alone in driving abolitionist debates in the years ahead. British missionaries, merchants, labor leaders, and government officials all acknowledged, decried, and exploited the problem of new slavery in the age of imperialism.

Forms of Humanity: Trusteeship and
Evangelical Philanthropy

The political principle of trusteeship was a source of moral authority and a point of contention in British humanitarian debates over empire after the late eighteenth century. Yet trusteeship remains a vague and fleeting term in most scholarship on empire in the modern era. William Roger Louis observed over thirty-five years ago that there was not an adequate history of imperial trusteeship, and this remains true today.⁴ Historians of the British Empire commonly refer to Edmund Burke’s declaration of 1783 that Britain’s rule in India was a “sacred trust,” but few have considered the earlier development of this principle, or whether this principle had changed before British imperial officials, in cooperation with President Woodrow Wilson of the United States, laid the foundations of international government as a “sacred trust” under the League of Nations after the First World War.⁵ Given that historians have not previously examined the origins of British imperial trusteeship, in contrast to the voluminous scholarship devoted to the sources of evangelical philanthropy and human rights, it is useful to take a brief overview of the development of trusteeship in order to gain perspective on changes in British humanitarianism in the nineteenth century.

The political principle of trusteeship developed in England during the Reformation of the sixteenth century, under the influence of Lutheran theology and radical Calvinism.⁶ It was a product of the rejection of divine-right theories of monarchy, and it reflected a momentous turn in ecclesiological and political theory toward popular sovereignty and the right of resistance to unjust rule.⁷ The Lutheran origins of political trusteeship are found in the principle of justification by faith, sola fide, which established the equality of the faithful in the eyes of God, regardless of worldly ranks and orders. In privileging an individual’s trust with God, Lutherans freed commoners of their dependence on the spiritual mediation of priests and monarchs, thus laying the groundwork for a new conception of self that would, under the influence of more radical theologians, reshape the political world.

Martin Luther’s foremost advocate in England, William Tyndale, articulated the relationship of faith and trust in his interpolation of Luther’s A Prologe to the Romayns, published in Tyndale’s New Testament of 1534:

Fayth is then a liuely and stedfaste truste in the fauoure of God, wherewith we committe oure selues all to gedyr vnto God, and that truste is so surely grounded and steketh so fast in oure hertes, that a man wolde not once doute of it, though he shuld dye a thousand tymes therfore. And suche truste wrought by the holy goost through fayth, maketh a man glad, lusty, cherefull and true herted vnto God and to all creatures. By the meanes where of, willingly and withoute compulsion he is glad and redy to do good to euery man, to do seruice to euery man, to soffre all thinges, that God maye be loued and praysed, which hath geuen him suche grace.⁸

Luther and his supporters in England were not advocating a new egalitarian society ordered by a common understanding of Christian duty. Rather, Luther believed that the existing social and political hierarchies were direct reflections of God’s will and Providence.⁹ He asserted that political authority was derived from God, and that rulers had a duty to rule their subjects not as they themselves wanted to do, but rather as God prescribed.¹⁰ Turning to the duty of subjects, Luther referred repeatedly to St. Paul’s injunction in his Epistle to the Romans that it was the subjects’ Christian duty to submit themselves to the highest powers, whose rule could never be legitimately resisted with violence.¹¹ Thus, the Lutherans’ commitment to a divinely ordained political hierarchy circumscribed the political implications of the principle of justification by faith, rendering it compatible with the authority of monarchy.¹²

The persecutions of Protestants in the course of the Counter-Reformation prompted other Protestant theologians to reject Luther’s deference to political hierarchy and to formulate doctrines of resistance to unjust rulers. As Quentin Skinner explains, radical Calvinists took Luther’s idea that any individual could convenant directly with God and used this idea as the basis for popular revolution.¹³ These radical Calvinists claimed that God did not ordain specific rulers, but rather the standards by which a people should select a ruler. The people therefore had a Christian duty to select a godly ruler and to enforce the ruler’s sacred trust not only to God but also to themselves. The Calvinists argued that if subjects found themselves oppressed by a tyrannical ruler, this could only mean that they had made a mistake in selecting him.¹⁴ In England, Calvinists took this point farther by drawing a distinction between a public office and the individual who occupied that office. A public official who advocated ungodly acts forfeited his public status and became a private individual, who could then be opposed lawfully by his former subjects.¹⁵ Faith therefore constituted one’s trust with God, and the equality of the faithful entailed the Christian duty to enforce the sacred trust of a ruler to govern in a godly manner.

This identification of trusteeship with popular sovereignty gained currency in England in the seventeenth century, during debates over the troubled reign of the Stuarts and in the Civil Wars that preceded the execution of Charles I in 1649.¹⁶ The king’s opponents asserted that he had broken his God-given trust with the people by indulging in arbitrary government and popish reforms. Charles, by contrast, chose to privilege his own relationship of trust with God. Subsequently, the Lord Protector and Head of State, Oliver Cromwell, used the popular idea of trust to articulate his own puritanical vision of an English republic ordained by Providence.¹⁷ Although the republic was short-lived, the politics of trust and Providence would continue to inform British government throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, assuming a central role in conceptions of trusteeship and empire under the influence of John Locke.¹⁸

Locke built upon the identification of trusteeship with popular sovereignty in his Second Treatise of Government, published in 1690. The concept of trust is fundamental to Locke’s work, constituting, in the words of Peter Laslett, “both the corollary and the safeguard of natural political virtue.”¹⁹ Locke’s theory of the state, in particular, centers upon a “social contract” through which free individuals in a state of nature agree to form a political society. Yet Locke uses the word “trust” much more often than he uses the word “contract,” and he did not, in either case, wish to invoke a formal, legal deed for government.²⁰ “Trust,” Laslett emphasizes, “is a matter of conscience, which may have its final and unlikely sanctions, but which operates because of the sense of duty which Locke dogmatically, unthinkingly assumes in every man he contemplates.”²¹

How, then, did trusteeship apply to the governance of imperial subjects who did not explicitly volunteer to form an imperial society? According to Locke, people can also give legitimacy to government through “tacit trust.”²² This tacit trust is displayed by the continued residence of people in a given imperial territory.²³ Moreover, the imperial ruler can perceive this tacit trust from the privileged perspective of “paternal power,” which prefigures political power in Locke’s analysis. Parents naturally hold authority over their children due to both their superior capacity for reason and “the Affection and Tenderness, which God hath planted in the Breasts of Parents, towards their Children.”²⁴ Parents are not to be “a severe Arbitrary Government, but only for the Help, Instruction, and Preservation of their Off-spring.”²⁵ Their reason enables them to comprehend the natural law of God and, in turn, evaluate the development of the child according to standards of behavior and forms of culture that presumably manifest this law. According to Locke, “neither can there be any pretense why this parental power should keep the Child, when grown to a Man, in subjection to the Will of his Parents any farther.”²⁶ It is, nonetheless, for the paternal authority to determine when the child, like the imperial subject, has reached maturity. As Uday Mehta has argued in a related vein regarding Locke, “Behind the capacities ascribed to all human beings there exist a thicker set of social credentials that constitute the real bases of political inclusion.”²⁷

Locke identifies the grounds upon which imperial subjects can deny their tacit trust and legitimize rebellion against their paternal governors. “The Power of the Father,” Locke explains, “doth not reach at all to the Property of the Child, which is only in his own disposing.”²⁸ The property of the child, like the property of the imperial subject or any human, is composed fundamentally of his own person and his own labor.²⁹ The arbitrary coercion of the body, or the use of coercion to extract labor, constitutes a violation of tacit trust. In A Letter Concerning Toleration Locke further explains that imperial subjects retain thes...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Humanity and Slavery in All Their Forms
• Chapter 2 Bodies and Souls: Evangelicalism and Human Rights in the Congo Reform Campaign, 1884–1913
• Chapter 3 “Chinese Slavery” in South Africa and Great Britain, 1902–1910
• Chapter 4 Calculating Virtue: Cadbury Brothers and Slavery in Portuguese West Africa, 1901–1913
• Chapter 5 British Anti-slavery and the Imperial Origins of International Government and Labor Law, 1914–1926
• Epilogue
• Appendix to Chapter 4
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index