The Making of the Black Working Class in Britain

Ron Ramdin

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781786630650
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786630667
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: Social Sciences

This is the first comprehensive historical perspective on the relationship between Black workers and the changing patterns of Britain's labour needs. It places in an historical context the development of a small black presence in sixteenth-century Britain into the disadvantaged black working class of the 1980s.

The book deals with the colonial labour institutions (slavery, indentureship and trade unionism) and the ideology underlying them and also considers the previously neglected role of the nineteenth-century Black radicals in British working-class struggles.

Finally, the book examines the emergence of a Black radical ideology that has underpinned the twentieth-century struggles against unemployment, racial attacks and workplace grievances, among them employer and trade union racism.

PART ONE

The ‘Blackamoores” Presence (1555–1900)

1	Profits, Slavery and the Black Poor

The long standing presence of black people in Britain dates back to Roman times. By the seventeenth century many were employed as servants, pageant performers, court jesters and musicians. Later, this black presence would become significant as trade and economic expansion forged a fundamental connection between the demands of British capitalism and black labour. Indeed, it was argued that Negro slavery and the slave trade were responsible for providing the capital which financed the Industrial Revolution in England and of ‘mature’ industrial capitalism which, in turn, destroyed the slave system.¹ Since this thesis was propounded, it has been hotly disputed and debated by historians. The purpose here is not to pursue this argument, directly. Nevertheless, a significant consequence of the commerce and trade in slaves, cotton and sugar was that black people began to appear in England in increasing numbers. And throughout the period of slavery, and thereafter, black labour has remained a crucial factor in the development of the British economy.

The rise of African slavery

The arrival of Christopher Columbus in the New World had far-reaching consequences. England joined Spain and Portugal in their rivalry over actual and potential colonial possessions as a result of Cabot’s voyage to North America in 1497. By 1580 the English government sought to implement the principle of effective occupation in determining sovereignty. In the struggle for possession in the West Indies, the ‘Iberian Axis’ was challenged by England, France and Holland. In this struggle for a ‘place in the sun’, as Eric Williams put it, ‘The negro, too, was to have his place, though he did not ask for it: it was the broiling sun of the sugar, tobacco and cotton plantations of the New World.’²

In the ensuing years, the English claim to colonial possessions grew. The major economic determinant of prosperity in a new colony, according to Adam Smith, the English economist, was ‘plenty of good land’. Not surprisingly, by 1776, British colonial possessions were already divided into two types, the self-sufficient and diversified economy of small farmers and the colony with facilities for the large-scale production of staples for an export market. The northern colonies of the American mainland were in the first category, while the mainland tobacco colonies and the sugar islands of the Caribbean fell in the second. Given that both land and capital were useless unless labour could be controlled and disciplined, labour became of primary concern to the British colonial planter.

To achieve the maximum gains, the kind of labour required on the plantations had to be constant and able to work in co-operation. These demands resulted in a dispersal of the rugged individualist small farmers. The alternative for the Caribbean colonies was slavery. This system was an economic institution of the first importance, a key factor in large-scale plantation production. As one historian saw it:

In modern times it provided the sugar for the tea and coffee cups of the Western world. It produced the cotton to serve as a base for modern capitalism. It made the American South and the Caribbean islands. Seen in historical perspective, it forms a part of that general picture of the harsh treatment of the underprivileged classes, the unsympathetic poor laws and severe feudal laws, and the indifference with which the rising capitalist class was ‘beginning to reckon prosperity in terms of sacrificing human life to the deity of increased production’.³

While slaves and land-hunger moved in tandem, the role of the African in slavery became crucial. Although slavery in the Caribbean has been narrowly identified with the African, it is clear that a racial twist had been invented and superimposed on what was fundamentally an economic institution. For slavery was not the result of racism but rather, racism was the consequence of slavery.⁴ Before the African, unfree labour in the New World was brown, white, black and yellow. In fact, the first instance of slave trading and slave labour developed in the New World involveds not the ‘Negro’ but the Indian. Indian slavery, never sufficiently extensive in the British Dominions, did not interfere with African slavery. The planters demanded sheer physical strength for the future production of the New World staples, sugar and cotton. This, they felt, the Indians lacked. Indeed, the Spaniards had already sought in 1518 that ‘permission be given to bring Negroes, a race robust for labour, instead of natives so weak that they can only be employed in tasks requiring little endurance, such as taking care of maize fields or farms’.⁵ The epithets ‘cotton nigger’ and ‘sugar mules’ became common usage. While the supply of Indians was limited, that of the African was plentiful. Thus, with time, the system of slavery forged an inseparable link between West Africa and the West Indies.

It is important to point out, however, that the immediate successor of the Indian was the poor white, not the African. These white servants comprised indentured servants, ‘redemptioners’ and convicts. Between 1654 and 1685 a regular traffic developed in these indentured servants; ten thousand sailed from Bristol to the West Indies and Virginia.⁶ In 1683, one-sixth of Virginia’s population were white servants. As the trade in white servants prospered, commercial speculation encouraged abuses. Kidnapping in London and Bristol became part of a regular business. Convicts provided another source of steady labour. While Benjamin Franklin opposed this ‘dumping upon the New World of the outcasts of the Old’ the West Indies was prepared to accept ‘even the spawn of Newgate and Bridewell’. In effect, these colonies became the dumping ground for the ‘riff-raff’ of British society.⁷

Moreover, the political and civil disturbances in England between 1640 and 1740 helped to supply white servants. Transportation, mostly to the sugar islands, was the penalty imposed on political and religious non-conformists, such as Cromwell’s Irish prisoners who were sent to the West Indies. Transportation was actively associated with the West Indies to the extent that to ‘Barbadoes’ a person became a verb in the English vernacular.

As trading links grew stronger, the transportation of servants and convicts produced a powerful vested interest in England. Indeed, when the Colonial Board was set up in 1661 one of its more important duties was to control the trade in indentured servants. By the end of the seventeenth century, the aim of economic policy in England was the development of industry, the promotion of employment and the encouragement of exports. But, the question of emigration from the home country to the colonies produced a serious debate. In the context of the argument that ‘whatever tends to the depopulation of a Kingdom tends to the impoverishment of it’, a British population drain was costly and had to be stemmed. A policy of drawing on cheap labour from elsewhere to people the colonial plantations was under serious consideration. By then, the Royal Family had already given patronage to the Royal African Company and the African slave trade. Thus, Africa aided British capitalism in launching its process of industrialisation.

By 1680 there was already evidence⁸ (in Barbados) that the African was more suited to the demands of production than the European. It seemed clear then that white servitude had no place in a system of chattel slavery. The servant’s loss of liberty was for a short period of time, while the African was a slave for life. Furthermore, the servants’ status was passed on to their offspring, but African children assumed the status of their mother. The servants also had rights. In the final analysis, the fact that the Negro slave was cheaper proved to be decisive. The cost of securing a white man’s services for ten years could buy an African for life!⁹ The Governor of Barbados stated that ‘three blacks work better and cheaper than one white man’.¹⁰

The experience of one trade served as a rough guide for another. Not surprisingly, therefore, Bristol, the hub of the white servants trade, played the role as one of the centres of the slave trade.

The reason for the origin of negro slavery then, was economic, not racial; it was the cheapness of labour rather than the colour of the labour which was decisive. Features such as hair and colour were the subsequent rationalisations to justify the simple economic fact that to fill the vacuum of colonial labour requirements, African labour was resorted to because it was cheapest and best. Moreover, it is important to understand that where the whites disappeared, the cause was not the climate, but the replacement of the small farm by the large plantation and its consequent demand for a large, cheap and steady labour supply. African slavery’s origin can be expressed in terms of three plantation products: sugar, tobacco and cotton. A change in the economic structure produced a corresponding change in the labour supply. In the Caribbean slave society King Sugar reigned supreme. This was a society in which there were only two necessary classes – the wealthy (absentee) planters and the oppressed slaves, the exploiters and the exploited.

Profits

In comparison with the wealthy planters of the sugar islands, the planters in the tobacco colonies came a poor second. The West Indian sugar planter was among the biggest capitalists in the mercantilist era. Indeed, the West Indian (with wealth beyond dispute) was dramatised in a play at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London in 1771.¹¹ He became a familiar figure in the English social scene in the eighteenth century. But why was he lording it in England when he should have been attending to his fortune-making sugar plantations in the West Indies? The answer must be sought in absentee landlordism;¹² the ‘curse of the Caribbean’.

Absenteeism affected the prosperity of the islands. One of the more serious consequences was the mismanagement of the plantations by overseers. There was also the growing imbalance between the whites and the black slave populations. The slave population increased making the prospect of rebellions real. Nevertheless, risk-taking was incidental to the fundamental fact that slavery meant wealth.

Among the absentee landlords of the sugar plantations, the most prominent were the Beckfords, an old Gloucestershire family. Sir Thomas Beckford was among the first absentee proprietors, getting £2000 per annum net (of all charges) from his Jamaican holdings.¹³ Another member of the family, Peter Beckford, became the most distinguished of the new colonists, holding military and civil positions in Jamaica. When he died in 1710, he left ‘the largest property real and personal of any subject in Europe’.¹⁴ In 1737 William, his grandson, with the inheritance of the family wealth became ‘the most powerful West Indian planter in England’.

Another family with West Indian interests were the Hibberts. They operated as planters and merchants, supplying cotton and linen checks for the plantations and the African market. The income received from his West Indian property was enough to enable Robert Hibbert to live comfortably in Bedfordshire. The abolition of slavery brought its compensation to the Hibberts. They received £31,120 for their 1618 slaves.¹⁵

The Long family were also connected with Jamaica. When Charles Long died he left property in Suffolk, a house in Bloomsbury and 14,000 acres of property in Jamaica. His income ‘by far the largest enjoyed by any Jamaican proprietor of that period’¹⁶ entitled him to live in splendour.

Planters and merchants both reaped vast profits from the West Indian trade. The merchants were particularly fortunate. Professor Namier argued that there were ‘comparatively few big merchants in Great Britain in 1761 who, in one connection or another, did not trade with the West Indies, and a considerable number of gentry families had interests in the Sugar Islands, just as vast numbers of Englishmen now hold shares in Asiatic rubber or tea plantations or oil fields’.¹⁷ Relations between the two groups however, were not without problems. Planters and merchants belonged to separate organisations. And in spite of their common bond (credit), their interests were, at times, opposed. The basic area of conflict was the planters’ determination to maintain monopoly prices. In 1793 conflict between them increased considerably as the planters’ struggled for a grant of direct trade to Europe. Ultimately, as the capitalist class, their common interests outweighed their inter-group antagonisms. About 1780, planters and merchants combined in an effort to defend their monopoly against the gathering forces of free trade.

In the eighteenth century planters and merchants, working with colonial agents, became the powerful West India interest. Together, they exploited West Indian resources to the hilt, making large fortunes. To maintain the level of profitability in the age of rotten boroughs, the wealth of those with West Indian interests very often proved decisive during Parliamentary debates. Votes and rotten boroughs were bought. Once in Parliament their competition (and who could successfully compete against them!) increased the price of seats. Elections were no longer foregone conclusions for the English landed aristocracy. In fact, they were indignant and baffled by the West Indians at elections. This was not surprising especially when one recalls that in the 1830 elections a West Indian planter was elected in Bristol having spent £18,000.¹⁸ Money, however, could not buy every Parliamentary seat. Nevertheless, a large fortune more often than not was the barometer which measured political power and influence. The Beckford dynasty, for example, was well-represented in Parliament in accordance with their wealth.¹⁹ In addition to the Beckfords, Richard Pennant represented Liverpool, one of the Barbados Codringtons was an MP in 1737, Edward Colston held the Bristol seat from 1710 to 1713, George Hibbert represented Seaford from 1806 to 1812 and John Gladstone represented Woodstock and, later, Lancaster.

Because of the impulse given to trade and agriculture in England, Henry Goulburn in 1833 was still pleading with Parliament to look at the towns that had sprung up as a consequence of the connection with the colonies.²⁰ It was difficult to ignore the West Indians; their presence mattered. Ten out of fifteen members of an influential Committee of the Society of Planters and Merchants held seats in Parliament.²¹ In effect, the slave traders and slave-owners were entrenched both in the Commons and in the House of Lords. From these powerful positions they were able to repel attacks on their plantations and their social structure. In the balancing act of give and take, peerages were conferred in return for political support. There was a hard ring of truth in the statement that there were few, if any, noble houses in England without a West Indian.

The slave-owners not only dominated Parliament, but they had an all-pervasive effect as aldermen, mayors and councillors. William Beckf...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction to the Second Edition
• Part One: The ‘Blackamoores” Presence (1555–1900)
• Part Two: The ‘Black Man’s Burden’ (1900–1962)
• Part Three: The Black Working Class (1962–1986)
• Appendices
• List of Abbreviations
• References
• Bibliography
• Index