Black People in the British Empire

Peter Fryer

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780745343716
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Études ethniques

'Fantastic … the most important book on Black British history' - Akala

Black People in the British Empire is a challenge to the official version of British history. It tells the story of Britain's exploitation and oppression of its subject peoples in its colonies, and in particular the people of Africa, Asia and Australasia

Peter Fryer reveals how the ideology of racism was used as justification for acquiring and expanding the Empire; how the British Industrial Revolution developed out of profits from the slave trade; and how the colonies were deliberately de-industrialised to create a market for British manufacturers.

In describing the frequency and the scale of revolts by subject peoples against slavery and foreign domination - and the brutality used in crushing them - Peter Fryer exposes the true history of colonialism, and restores to Black people their central role in Britain's past.

Part I

How Britain Became ‘Great Britain’

1. Britain and its Empire

British history cannot be understood in isolation. To make sense of what has happened in this country we have to study the histories of four other areas as well: Ireland; the Caribbean; the Indian sub-continent; and Africa. It was in those areas that the British ruling classes made their fortune and founded their empire.

England’s rulers served an apprenticeship in colonialism from the twelfth century onwards. They did so in Ireland, where they learnt how to conquer, rule and rob other nations. In 1172 King Henry II, self-styled Lord of Ireland, shared out his newly conquered Irish territories among his leading followers and turned Dublin and the area around it into a special dependency of the English Crown. This area, surrounded by a palisade, was later known as the English Pale. Only those Irish people willing to become English in speech, dress and appearance were permitted to live there. The rest were hunted down and exterminated like vermin. So fierce was their resistance that in the early seventeenth century the English thought Ireland was as ‘savage’ as Virginia, and English military maps of Ireland were being produced in great numbers.¹

Before the English invasion Ireland had been one of western Europe’s richest and most advanced countries. As England’s first overseas colony it was transformed into one of the poorest and most backward. In this, as in most other respects, it was the prototype of British colonialism.

But when Britain’s merchant capitalists, challenging their more advanced European rivals, set themselves the aim of amassing as much wealth as possible, conquest took second place to trade. Lewes Roberts, a director of the East India Company, explained in The Treasure of Traffike (1641) how his class was enriching itself: ‘It is not our conquests, but our Commerce; it is not our swords, but our sayls.’² Roberts was writing at the very dawn of the triangular trade, perhaps the most lucrative commerce of all. It was gradually being discovered that huge profits could be made from buying Africans, shipping them to the Caribbean, and setting them to work under the whip to produce sugar for sale in England. This was the earliest form of exploitation of black labour. In the second half of the eighteenth century the plunder of Bengal provided British capitalism with a further massive transfusion of wealth at the expense of black people.

There has been much controversy about these two transfusions of wealth and how important they were to the industrialization of Britain. What cannot be denied is that they came at the critical time. Britain’s industrial revolution benefited from what one historian describes as an ‘assisted take-off ’.³ Another calls the earliest forms of exploitation of black people – slavery and plunder – a ‘special forced draught’ which was ‘probably decisive for the British cotton industry, the real industrial pioneer’ and gave Britain’s capitalists ‘several precious decades of dizzy economic expansion from which they drew inestimable benefits’.⁴ A third historian has summed up these benefits as follows:

Our possession of the West Indies, like that of India … gave us the strength, the support, but especially the capital, the wealth, at a time when no other European nation possessed such a reserve, which enabled us to come through the great struggle of the Napoleonic Wars, the keen competition of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and enabled us … to lay the foundation of that commercial and financial leadership which … enabled us to make our great position in the world.⁵

Those were the words of Winston Churchill, addressing a banquet of West Indies sugar planters in London on 20 July 1939.

Thus the history of Britain and the history of the British Empire are two sides of the same coin. Neither can be understood without the other. And at the heart of their unity, interpenetration, and interdependence is the age-old black presence in Britain. That presence was the direct result of those two ‘special forced draughts’ which, above all else, put the ‘Great’ into Great Britain. Sugar planters from the West Indies and ‘nabobs’ from India, returning to Britain to enjoy their new wealth, brought with them their retinues of black household servants. By the second half of the eighteenth century Britain’s black population numbered about 10,000 – living witnesses to British capitalism’s oppression and exploitation of black people in the Caribbean and India.

2. The Triangular Trade

Just before the Second World War the young Trinidadian scholar Eric Williams completed his doctoral dissertation on ‘The Economic Aspect of the Abolition of the British West Indian Slave Trade and Slavery’, a topic suggested to him by his countryman C. L. R. James. Hoping to have it published, he took the typescript to one of the most progressive publishers of the day, who handed it back to him with the words: ‘I would never publish such a book. It is contrary to the British tradition.’¹ Challenging the British official tradition has never been easy. Williams’s book was published in the United States in 1944, under the title Capitalism & Slavery. But it was not to be published here in Britain for another 20 years.

Capitalism & Slavery caused much embarrassment to historians working within the official tradition, who had written ‘almost as if Britain had introduced Negro slavery solely for the satisfaction of abolishing it’.² It is fashionable nowadays to say that Williams’s work is discredited. The truth is far more complex. To be sure, many details have needed correction in the light of later research; of what historical work published 40 years ago can that not be said? Referring to Williams’s thesis that the slave trade and slavery were abolished for basically economic reasons, Christopher Fyfe admits that critics have skilfully unscrewed the nuts and bolts. He adds: ‘Still one wonders – has the edifice really fallen? Certainly it has not yet been replaced.’³ Williams’s thesis that the profits from the triangular trade became a major factor in the accumulation of capital necessary for industrialization has never been refuted – though another major factor, wealth obtained from the plunder of India, must also be taken into account (see pp. 17–20 below). One of the main difficulties in quantifying the multiple profits of the triangular trade is that there are large gaps in the records. As Donald Woodward has pointed out, ‘for the long-distance triangular trades the Port Books are particularly deficient and seriously understate the level of British trade. This is especially true of such trades as … the slave trade’.⁴ What has to be kept in mind is the close economic unity of Britain and its Caribbean colonies in the eighteenth century. Restating his thesis in a 1969 lecture, Williams showed how:

1) The fortunes of eighteenth-century Britain were greatly influenced by the plantation economy of the West Indies;

2) In turn, economic, political and intellectual developments in Britain had profound effects in shaping the course of West Indian history;

3) Above all, Britain’s Caribbean colonies, created by the mercantilist system to serve its ends, ‘always remained firmly integrated into the British metropolitan economy. The capital was British; decision-making took place in Britain … The economies of the sugar islands … remained an integral part … of the British economy.’⁵

Moreover, as Richard B. Sheridan has made clear, an adequate analysis of the industrial revolution entails a consideration of ‘a whole trading area of economic interactions’. The Atlantic was the most dynamic trading area and, outside Britain itself, ‘the most important element in the growth of this area in the century or more prior to 1776 was the slave-plantation, particularly of the cane sugar variety in the islands of the Caribbean Sea.’⁶

The British West Indies were a single-crop economy, and that crop was sugar, the ‘white gold’ of the New World. Barbados began exporting sugar in 1646; by 1660 St Kitts was exporting more sugar than indigo; Jamaica started planting sugar in 1664. Tobacco, cotton, ginger, cocoa and coffee were also grown but were of comparatively minor importance. Sugar was king, and its rule was never challenged.⁷

In order to grow sugar, British planters in the Caribbean needed two things. First of all, they needed virtually unlimited long-term credit to sustain them during the years it took to grow a first crop and to ‘season’ the labour. Such credit was their life-blood, and it was provided by commission agents, or ‘factors’, in the City of London. These commission agents put up the money for the purchase of plantations and slaves, and made their fortunes on the interest they charged. They became in effect the planters’ bankers. These were the fat spiders at the centre of the whole web: men like the City aldermen Sir John Bawden, Sir John Eyles, and Sir Francis Eyles – and Henry Lascelles, MP, who sucked so much wealth from the commission system, from sugar, and from outright fraud, that his successors became earls of Harewood. This credit system primed the pump, and did so very profitably indeed.

The second thing the planters needed was cheap labour to plant and tend the crops, cut the canes and process the sugar. After a brief experiment with indentured English convicts, they found the labour they needed in Africa. As The Cambridge History of the British Empire tells us, the African slave trade became ‘the very foundation of West Indian prosperity’.⁸ To pay for slaves, Britain’s manufacturing industries sent their products to the African coast. They sent textiles made in Lancashire, guns and wrought-iron goods made in Birmingham, brass goods made in Bristol, copper goods made in Swansea, Flint and Lancashire, pewter made in Liverpool, and cutlery made in Sheffield. With these products went gunpowder, bullets, tallow, tobacco-pipes, glass beads, toys, malt spirits, and beer from the Whitbread and Truman breweries – ‘very little that is not of our own growth and manufacture’, observed a writer in 1763,⁹ though reexports did include Indian textiles and Swedish iron. According to one contemporary source, the yearly value of British manufactured goods exported to Africa soared from £83,000 in 1710 to £401,000 in 1787.¹⁰ These goods were bartered for human beings on what was then known as the Guinea Coast.

‘Guinea’ was soon the popular name for the new gold coin struck in 1663 by a slave-trading company called the Royal Adventurers into Africa, whose stockholders ‘included every major figure in the Court and in the Administration, as well as every moneyed man in London and Bristol’.¹¹ For 200 years real English wealth, the sort of wealth that went with high rank and social prestige, would be measured in guineas, which is to say ‘Africas’. Some of the earliest guineas bore on the obverse, below the bust of King Charles II in profile, a tiny African elephant. In Liverpool, soon to become Europe’s major slaving port, the City fathers were less squeamish: when they built a new town hall in the mid-eighteenth century they decorated it with the heads, carved in stone, of African elephants and African slaves.

The role of Liverpool and Bristol in the slave trade, and the decisive contribution it made to their growth and prosperity throughout the eighteenth century, are well known. Less well known is how early Bristol entered the trade. There is now enough evidence to prove conclusively that the trade became ‘of prime importance’ to Bristol soon after 1630;¹² so that by 1713 the mayor was calling it ‘one of the great supports of our people’.¹³ In the eighteenth-...