Debating the Slave Trade

Rhetoric of British National Identity, 1759–1815

Srividhya Swaminathan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317154174
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

How did the arguments developed in the debate to abolish the slave trade help to construct a British national identity and character in the late eighteenth century? Srividhya Swaminathan examines books, pamphlets, and literary works to trace the changes in rhetorical strategies utilized by both sides of the abolitionist debate. Framing them as competing narratives engaged in defining the nature of the Briton, Swaminathan reads the arguments of pro- and anti-abolitionists as a series of dialogues among diverse groups at the center and peripheries of the empire. Arguing that neither side emerged triumphant, Swaminathan suggests that the Briton who emerged from these debates represented a synthesis of arguments, and that the debates to abolish the slave trade are marked by rhetorical transformations defining the image of the Briton as one that led naturally to nineteenth-century imperialism and a sense of global superiority. Because the slave-trade debates were waged openly in print rather than behind the closed doors of Parliament, they exerted a singular influence on the British public. At their height, between 1788 and 1793, publications numbered in the hundreds, spanned every genre, and circulated throughout the empire. Among the voices represented are writers from both sides of the Atlantic in dialogue with one another, such as key African authors like Ignatius Sancho, Phillis Wheatley, and Olaudah Equiano; West India planters and merchants; and Quaker activist Anthony Benezet. Throughout, Swaminathan offers fresh and nuanced readings that eschew the view that the abolition of the slave trade was inevitable or that the ultimate defeat of pro-slavery advocates was absolute.

Chapter 1
Building a Common Vocabulary: The Language of Reform and the Slave-Trade Debates

The slave-trade debates in Great Britain both shaped and reflected the changes in culture over the last decades of the eighteenth century.1 In 1808, Thomas Clarkson published a history of abolition that characterized the success of the movement as inevitable because “liberty” could not be stifled indefinitely. This teleological reading of the abolitionist movement successfully prejudiced two centuries of historical scholarship to follow. Even while historians debated the actual contribution of abolitionist societies in effecting change, their analyses posited a specific trajectory of the nation, reinforcing the belief that abolition was inevitable given the particular economic and political trends. Though this teleology is less accepted in current scholarship, a systematic examination of the movement as a dialogue with implications for shifts in culture is still lacking.2 This study reevaluates the purpose and function of the abolitionist movement during the time of its emergence. While the stated goal was abolition, the process of attaining this goal contributed to a secondary cascade of critical transformations in British culture. The slave-trade debates occurred during a period of multiple reform movements whose putative purpose was the “betterment” of society. The well-crafted language of reform appealed to and, in essence, created a society that could be “improved” by attention to particular causes. The slave-trade debates offered an ideal issue—combining the language of reform and the rhetoric of nation—to develop a particular vision of British society.

Reform writers inundated the reading public with essays, pamphlets, poetry and fiction that challenged the status quo and instigated changes in public perceptions. The principal characteristic of the reform movements of the eighteenth century was their use of print to build and organize public support. The increased literacy of the public allowed for greater involvement in the shaping of culture by different social groups within British society. No longer was cultural character reflective only of aristocratic or elite interests. Instead, the emerging sense of public culture at the end of the eighteenth century reflected a larger cross-section of society.3 The expansion of “print culture” in the late eighteenth century enabled writers to effect significant changes or “transformations” within society. Perhaps the most profound transformation to occur in this period was the cohesion of the “modern” nation-state whose origin can be traced through the development of an “imagined political community.”4 Benedict Anderson, who first advanced this theory, described the nation as “imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion … the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal relationship” (6, 7). He further argued that “nation-ness,” a “cultural artefact” that came into being in the late eighteenth century, was disseminated through the vehicle of print, which had a profound effect on the increasingly literate European societies. In the particular case of Great Britain, this sense of national identity emerged, not from the pens of the existing power structure, but from those challenging it.

Reform movements in the eighteenth century developed a shared vocabulary to challenge the status quo and shift the balance of power. The writers from both camps in the slave-trade debates drew upon this vocabulary to craft their appeals to varying audiences. In the process, they helped to shape particular nationalist tropes that contributed to the emerging discourse of British identity. Linda Colley’s Britons examines the “patriotism” of the British people and locates the “forging” of national identity primarily from external pressures.5 The multiple and expensive wars waged against France during the course of the eighteenth century inspired a “mass allegiance” in people who subsequently “invented Britishness.” However, I would argue that British identity emerged more from internal pressures, originating in the metropole and spreading throughout the empire. Other critics, like Srinivas Aravamudan, have contested Colley’s “parthenogenetic” account of nationalism; however, they also posit broadly defined concepts (for example, “Orientalism”) to identify elements outside of the metropole as critical to identity.6 A closer analysis of a more discrete period of time reveals multiple strains of thought that merged to construct a vision of national identity. The slave-trade debates provide the perfect test case for “forging” a national identity that set Britons apart from other Europeans and created a place for British colonial identity. Twentieth-century critic Ernest Gellner emphasized the importance of a “similarity of culture” as “the basic social bond.”7 He states, “In its extreme version, similarity of culture becomes both the necessary and the sufficient condition of legitimate membership: only members of the appropriate culture may join the unit in question, and all of them must do so” (3-4). Since slavery was an inherently “British” issue, affecting the English, Scots, Welsh, and Irish equally and without regard to regional identity, participants in the slave-trade debates looked beyond regional loyalties to forge a shared national culture. Thus the “social bond” created in this literature proposed a common morality, worldview, and the idea of a national code of conduct applicable both at home and abroad. Through print, the public kept informed of social issues, negotiated positions, and actively fashioned a shared cultural identity.

This chapter investigates significant shifts in cultural context that occurred prior to and during the course of the British slave-trade debates. Many more shifts have been identified by historians, but I cover only those that have direct relevance to the language of reform and its implications for national identity formation. Burkean analysis allows for a mapping of the changes in rhetoric decade by decade with particular attention to the developing images of the Briton presented by each side. By identifying changes in social, philosophical, and economic theory, I identify the most significant factors that influenced antislavery/abolitionist arguments in both the planning phase and the active phase of the organized movement against the slave trade. Prior to the formation of the first abolitionist society in 1787, most writers focused their critiques on the problematic nature of slavery without necessarily proposing feasible solutions. I use the terms antislavery and abolitionist to indicate distinct periods in the movement against the slave trade. Antislavery refers to the period of gathering public support and abolitionist refers to the official, organized movement. Writers did not develop their arguments in a cultural vacuum; instead, they freely appropriated the discourse of concurrent movements in crafting their rhetoric. Examining the evidence of these varying rhetorical strains in the debates provides an overview of the principal arguments advanced by each side. The debate over the slave trade, which took place over roughly sixty years, represents a transformative period in British culture. Rather than argue for the inevitability of abolition, a topic that has been amply discussed in historical surveys and analyses, I wish to complicate this narrative by arguing that the interchange between proslavery and antislavery/abolitionist writers precipitated transformations in culture that exceeded the goal of abolition. I propose an alternate teleology for abolition, one that succeeded in critiquing, delineating, and restructuring the concept of both the colonial and the metropolitan “Briton.”

Cultural Shifts and the Language of Reform

In the final decades of the eighteenth century, British culture underwent significant changes both in structure and ideology. A host of structural factors, such as shifts in the economy, redistribution of wealth, and alterations in social composition, upset the established hierarchies and precipitated subtle shifts in the balance of power.8 Great Britain was moving from an agrarian to an industrial economy, which steadily valued manufactured goods over raw materials. This move diminished the clout of landed interests of the aristocracy and placed more emphasis on trade. The acquisition of colonial property in both the East and the West allowed merchants to increase the scope of their trade and their consumer base. However, the nature of colonization differed between the New World and the East Indies, a fact which would become increasingly important in antislavery arguments. The rising merchant class possessed vast and rapidly expanding economic resources that increased its social power. These shifts in social infrastructure helped to form a growing body politic that rigorously and passionately questioned the status quo. Along with these transformations, social theorists developed new ideologies to accommodate and facilitate the changes in their worlds. They reconfigured the nature of man along more optimistic and individualistic lines and scrutinized the workings of society.9 These beliefs began to proliferate throughout all levels of British society, albeit in distilled forms, and shaped the appeals of many reform movements at the end of the century. David Brion Davis commented on “the social functions of ideology” in which “shifting patterns of thought and value focused attention on new problems” and “defined new conceptions of social reality.”10 By the late eighteenth century, the issue of slavery became a new and troubling social reality that came into focus because of important changes in ideology.

Another significant development involved the shifts and changes in class hierarchy in British society. Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the great divide between privileged and under classes narrowed in perceptible ways. Studies like Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class and Hunt’s The Middling Sort trace the various social and economic changes that opened class structure to a new and empowered middle class. Kathleen Wilson’s The Sense of the People adds the development of “urban political culture” that “mitigated the harsher aspects of oligarchy” (13). Additionally, the accessibility of new political ideas and propaganda to the greater public allowed more citizens to challenge the “customs and values of patrician society”(13). Politics was no longer a practice confined to the Houses of Parliament and a social elite. “Cultural objects and practices were, in a word, polysemic, and their meanings were contingent upon the social environments in which they were used” (13). The social environment of the time produced a dynamic cultural intervention by defining the issue of slavery as anathema to the general public.

One “new problem” that needed to be established involved the institution of slavery, which was tacitly accepted by society in the early part of the eighteenth century. The British public had an awareness of the institution of slavery before any concerted and organized resistance mobilized the nation. Objections to and apologies for slave holding and slave trading had been published prior to the 1770s; however, the reading public was relatively unconcerned with either argument. Subjects in Great Britain, such as the day laborer, domestic servant, and farm worker, had limited contact with the actual practice of slavery. In fact, the African-English population in Great Britain was comparatively small and confined largely to major cities like London, Bristol, and Liverpool.11 Estimates place the population at about 15,000–20,000 in London—enough to be visible but not enough to inspire political change. These African-English existed in widely varying circumstances; however, the “labor” they performed did not differ in nature from the labor performed by white English citizens. Most slaves who accompanied their masters to England mainly performed the duties of domestic servants, so the back-breaking labor of colonial plantation life appeared only in testimonial and fiction. Early antislavery protest fell on deaf ears as the public tacitly condoned the practice of slavery in the colonies through a lack of interest in the antislavery cause. Meanwhile, proslavery interests in Parliament ensured that the institution would survive regardless of the meager antislavery protest. In the perception of slave holders and slave traders, slavery was accepted by the public as a “necessary evil” to be tolerated because of the valuable products exported from the colonies.

What factors induced decisive transformations in ideology that made the general reading public more receptive to appeals for reform? A perceptible change in receptivity occurred in the late 1760s that provided incentive for the movement against slavery and the slave trade and influenced the language of reform. Interestingly, this change came from the American colonies to the mother country. No appreciable change in public thought or public perception of slave holding and slave trading came about in the decades before this shift: Theological debates over the validity of African slavery had not been resolved; the black population in Great Britain did not significantly increase to form a more visible presence in the public eye. The changes that took place involved critical shifts in thought about the nature and responsibility of man to his society. Philosophers, economic theorists, and social reformers disseminated their ideas, and these ideas—albeit in a distilled form—encouraged the general reading public to question the hierarchies and institutions that structured British society. Antislavery ideology emerged from the nexus of significant social changes that transformed the public’s attitudes about individuality, social responsibility, labor, and humanity.

Historians have investigated the dynamic cultural climate of the late eighteenth century and isolated significant influences on public thought.12 These influences constitute the ideological precursors to effective antislavery arguments and the development of a language of reform. Histories of British slavery and abolition generally credit three important factors for the shift in cultural climate: Enlightenment philosophy, economic theory, and revolution. The social philosophy of the Enlightenment, states Ernest Gellner, “consisted, basically, of a repudiation of this world: notoriously, its ambition was to see the last king throttled with the entrails of the last priest” (19). This overturning of the ancien régime opened new dialogues between social groups and instigated a critical rethinking of tradition and identity in Great Britain. The writings of political and social philosophers demonstrated the most consistent challenge to societal structures. Beginning with Locke’s Two Treatises on Government (1690), political theorists built upon the concept of certain “natural rights” shared by all men. Locke stated, “To understand Political Power right, and derive it from its Original, we must consider what State all Men are naturally in, and that is, a State of perfect Freedom to order their Actions, and dispose of their Possessions, and Persons as they think fit, within the bounds of the Law of Nature, without asking leave or depending upon the Will of any other Man.”13 He emphasized man’s ability to reason and credited rational thought as a true marker of humanity. While he acknowledged great inequalities amongst men in their capacity to reason, he believed in a basic equality of access for the rational man to participate in society. John Locke was by no stretch of the imagination an abolitionist and he would have had serious reservations about applying his social theories to slave trading and slave holding.14 However, his theory of civil government contributed to an emerging discourse about “natural rights” and liberties shared by all men. Other social theorists had no qualms about applying Locke’s philosophies to larger and more diverse populations. Social reform movements of the late eighteenth century occurred as a result of serious philosophical questioning of the capabilities of man.

Enlightenment thinkers redefined man’s role in society and fostered a conviction in progressive social change based on innate human capabilities. Locke articulated a belief in man’s inherent ability to reason that guaranteed a “Freedom from Absolute, Arbitrary Power.” His contention carried forward into the work of other Enlightenment thinkers who collectively began to construct a new narrative of man’s position and role within society. This new narrative stressed the merits of individual autonomy and enterprise, encouraging first men then women to pursue self-interest. As the ideas began to develop, the notion of civil society broadened to include a more diverse class, gender, and racial composition. A sense of humankind’s “progress,” meaning “a belief in the movement over time of some aspects of human existence, within a social setting, toward a better condition,” emerged from the writings of both philosophy and religion.15 Rather than viewing men and women as naturally degraded or steeped in original sin, writers of the progress ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Chronology of the British Slave Trade and Empire
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Building a Common Vocabulary:The Language of Reform and the Slave-Trade Debates
• 2 Converging Arguments in British Resistance: Writing from the Colonies to Great Britain, 1759–1776
• 3 Proliferating Antislavery Arguments and the Creation of an Activist Community, 1772–1789
• 4 The Proslavery Rebuttal:Developing New Strategies of Defense, 1770–1789
• 5 Whose Victory? Abolition and the Construction of British Identity, 1788–1807
• Epilogue Towards an Imperial Briton
• Bibliography
• Index