When British planters started buying captured Africans to work the new sugar plantations in Barbados in the mid-17th century, it was nothing new, and hardly a notable development. After all, slavery was all but ubiquitous, a part of humanity’s lot since the beginning of recorded time. Every nation, every people, had suffered it, and every nation, every people, had used it, just as they had war and conquest.
Its adoption in Britain’s new West Indian colonies was therefore utterly unremarkable, and small beer indeed when set against the much larger slavery systems run by other European colonists, most notably Portugal, Spain and France.
‘At the end of the 18th century, well over three quarters of all people alive were in bondage of one kind or another, not the captivity of striped prison uniforms, but of various systems of slavery or serfdom’, writes Adam Hochschild in ‘Bury the Chains’, his account of the Britain’s struggle to abolish the slave trade.
So unremarkable was it that the leading developer of classical liberal thought, John Locke, and the most revolutionary British spiritual prophet of the time, George Fox, accepted slavery in the West Indies as simply a disappointing but inevitable expression of humanity’s creative/destructive impulses.
What changed as the colonies discovered sugar as a source of massive and rapid riches, was the scale and international implications of the slave trade. The triangular trade between Britain, the West Coast of Africa, and the East Coast of the Americas generated enough income to become the mainstay of Britain’s government finances. At the same time, the need to protect this trade brought a constant development and expansion of the Navigation Acts which built the Royal Navy into a tool of Atlantic, and then global, power. Because the nature of the sugar industry was intensive in its use of finance for investment capital, for working capital, and for trade finance, it elevated the City of London into Europe’s foremost financial force. And, of course, with all this conferred enormous political power on the sugar industry’s owners and agents, beyond even the direct power bought by their riches.
If the start of the slave trade in the mid-17th century looked merely a largely inevitable development, its massive expansion in the 18th century was something quite new. When chattel slavery became a foundation stone for global trade, global finance, global force projection and power at home, something new was afoot in the world. The cruelties and sadism of the slave owners are painful and disgraceful in a West Indian smallholding. But seen as the bedrock practice on which global finance and power is balanced, personal criminality becomes a profound national corruption.
This, it is fair to say, is something many Britons still struggle to understand. Our ancestors less so. Because quite suddenly, in the late 18th century, they woke up to it, and demanded its cessation.
If the exponential development of the slave trade during the 17th and 18th century was new, the sudden popular determination to do away with it was even more extraordinary. In the 21st century we recoil at Britain’s development of the slave industry. But that reaction is not new: it was that same disgust which ended it.
Adam Hochschild again: ‘There is always something mysterious about human empathy, and when we feel it and when we don’t. Its sudden upwelling at this particular moment caught everyone by surprise. Slaves and other subjugated people have rebelled throughout history, but the campaign in England was something never seen before: it was the first time a large number of people became outraged, and stayed outraged for many years, over someone else’s rights. And most startling of all, the rights of people of another colour, on another continent.’
‘For 50 years, activists in England worked to end slavery in the British Empire. None of them gained a penny by doing so, and their eventual success meant a huge loss to the imperial economy. Scholars estimate that abolishing the slave trade and then slavery cost the British people 1.8% of the annual national income over more than half a century, many times the percentage most wealthy countries today give in foreign aid.’
In Britain, we own the shame. But we must also own the pride at the unique, unthinkable, achievement of abolition. It is far far easier to bear the shame than to acknowledge the pride. We do the slaves descendants an injustice to be blind to the crimes of the West Indian sugar empire. But we also do an injustice to those who fought successfully for its overthrow if we fail to recognize their extraordinary achievement.
Adam Hochschild’s ‘Bury the Chains’ is a 468 page account of how first abolition of the slave trade was achieved, and subsequently emancipation of West Indian slaves. By no means a simple celebration, it has been criticized both by those who wish to hear less of abolition, and by those who fell he is dismissive of various players (including William Wilberforce) and the energy of Britain’s established church. Yet how could such a book, grappling with such a subject, escape criticism? It is highly recommended.
From that account, though, we can pick out the key moments and developments which brought the movement to life and eventual success. First, of course, was the establishment in May 1787 in a printshop of 2 George Yard, a stones-throw away from the Bank of England in the City of London, of the Abolition Committee, by 12 men, of whom nine were Quakers, and three respectable Anglicans.
The Quakers’ first committee for abolition had been working for since 1783, but achieved little success - they were simply too odd in too many ways to be taken entirely seriously. What changed in 1787 was that the nucleus of nine Quakers were joined by three Anglicans, including Thomas Clarkson, and Granville Sharp,
Perhaps the key moment was the revelation of Thomas Clarkson two years earlier in June 1785. Clarkson is perhaps an unlikely hero in the story of abolition. His engagement with slavery began when, as a 25yr old Cambridge divinity student and (relatively poor) scholar, he entered the university’s most prestigious Latin Essay contest, with the subject set as ‘Anne liceat invitos in servitutem dare?’ ( Is it lawful to make slaves of others against their will?). Winning this Latin essay prize could make your career, so Clarkson did his research carefully and energetically, interviewing British sailors with firsthand experience of West Indian slavery, and securing the papers of a recently deceased slave merchant.
What he found horrified him, and although he won first prize in the essay contest, it was this horror which set the trajectory of his life. In June 1785, on his horse heading for London, the horror finally overwhelmed him. ‘Coming in sight of Wades Mill in Hertfordshire, I sat down disconsolate on the turf by the roadside and held my horse. Here a thought came into my mind, that if the contents of the Essay were true, it was time some person should see these calamities to their end.’
As Edward Gibbon’s contemplation of Roman ruins propelled him to write Decline and Fall (first volume published 1786), so Clarkson’s roadside revelation at Wades Mill launched him onto the a lifetime of documenting the practice and abomination of slavery, accomplished by tens of thousands of miles of travel around Britain. The aim of his incessant, grueling, horseback travels was not confined to collecting and documenting what the slave trade actually was. His was also the work of setting up, organizing and encouraging scores of anti-slavery societies and committees in towns and cities throughout Britain. Back in London, his allies were worried for him, as being ‘deficient in caution and prudence’. I doubt any 21st century activist can match his seemingly limitless drive.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge called him a ‘moral Steam-Engine . . . how very highly I revere him. He shall be my Friend, Exemplar, Saint.’ We know of Jane Austen’s admiration for him, when she praised a writer saying ‘ I am as much in love with the author as ever I was with Clarkson’.
Granville Sharp was already known as a what we’d now call a human-rights lawyer. Sharp was a musician who found his true vocation as a human rights lawyer in the 1760s and 70s successfully defending a Jonathan Strong, a former slave beaten up and jailed in London as slave-hunters tried to return him to slavery in the West Indies. Sharp was not merely the leading defender of London’s black population, he was also a volcanic writer of polemics against the slave trade.
So the Abolition Committee could now add to the organizational ability and network of the Quakers, the extraordinary almost messianic energy of Thomas Clarkson and the proved and celebrated legal fire-power of Granville Sharp to be the public faces of the committee.
The power of this combination surprised even those involved, with proof coming rapidly in 1787 from the teeming industrial heartland of Manchester. If proof is needed of the essential power and determination of the ordinary British people to end the slave trade, no matter what, it is found in Manchester in 1787. At the time, Manchester was a rapidly-industrial growing town of around 50,000, whose economy was intimately bound-up with the triangular slave trade: not only were its cotton textiles materials traded for African slaves by the slave-traders, but the cotton itself was imported from the slave colonies of the Americas. In other words, when it came to abolishing the slave trade, Manchester had a lot to lose.
But in addition, its explosive industrial growth left it not only with little direct political representation, but also with a nexus of unresolved problems and crises generated by rapid urbanization and industrialization. Consequently, Manchester also harboured a clutch of businessmen and activists with a commitment to broader political and social reform. It was those reformers that Thomas Clarkson met and inspired in the autumn of 1787, and they persuaded him that Mancunians wanted to send a petition to parliament demanding abolition. So less than 48 hours after arriving in Manchester, Clarkson, remembering his Cambridge divinity credentials, mounted to a pulpit and preached to a packed church, including ‘a great crowd of black people standing round the pulpit . . forty or fifty of them’.
The text for his sermon was ‘Though shalt not oppress a stranger; for ye know the hearts of a stranger, seeing ye were strangers in the land of Egypt’. This was, incidentally, the same text George Fox had used in response to West Indian slavery. But with what a different result. Within weeks, the Manchester petition demanding abolition had gathered more than 10,000 names. - 20% of the entire population.
This is a crucial development, for it proved that abolition was no elite project. Rather, it was the demand of Britain’s unrepresented, overlooked, industrial centre, of the ordinary men and women who worked the factories. The example was taken up throughout Britain’s towns and cities: after Manchester led, no industrial town wanted to be left behind. So Sheffield, the town whose steel mills forged the chains and manacles the slave trade needed, was quick to follow. Petitions for the abolition of the slave trade snowed down on Parliament relentlessly.
The campaign hit hard partly because it was backed by some formidable design. Two images in particular got through. The careful 1787 diagram of the Brookes’ slaveship layout remains one of the most infamous images of the slave trade. You’ll certainly be familiar with it, but here it is again.
It is remarkable and unforgettable. What makes the difference is that these each of these ‘sardines’ are clearly drawn as individuals - their legs moving, almost as in a ghastly dance. (Zoom in, take a look.) These are not match-stick men, they are men.
Josiah Wedgewood in 1878 fashioned his Anti-Slavery Medallion, emblazoned with ‘Am I not a man, and a brother?’ as the seal for the Abolition Commitee. As an image it hasn’t aged so well: black slave begging for freedom from his white oppressor/saviour isn’t a good look these days. But at the time it worked excellently, with Clarkson distributing at around 500 of these medallions in Manchester alone. And Wedgewood’s seal wasn’t just on plates, it was everywhere: medallions, drinking mugs, rings, lapel pins, wax seals, thimbles (really). Carrying or wearing the medallion proclaimed unambiguously what you thought of slavery. It did good work.
Of course, it was not only white men who were fighting for abolition and emancipation. Olaudah Equiano, aka Gustavus Vassa, in 1789 published a two volume autobiography entitled ‘The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa the African’. It started with an antislavery petition to parliament and ended with an antislavery letter to the Queen, whilst the body of the book described his capture in Africa, the horrors of the middle passage, his slavery in the West Indies, and finally his precarious passage to freedom in England, and his arrival as ’an estimable black Englishman.’ He was, in effect, a living reproach to those unwilling to share respect with Africans.
The book was an immediate best-seller, and was quickly translated into German, Dutch and Russian, and reprinted in America. Since his ‘Interesting Narrative’ was self-published, Equiano spent the last five years of his life on a tour criss-crossing England and Ireland in a combination of anti-slavery campaigning and promotional book tours. His tour mobilized the same caucus of abolitionists throughout every city, as well as touring the city’s bookshops.
Reprint followed reprint, with the list of subscribers who financed Equiano’s printing costs eventually topping a thousand, with each name publicly identifying themselves with the struggle. It is still available as an e-book from Project Gutenberg, complete with a subscriber list. Even the vehemently pro-slavery Prince of Wales was persuaded to feature as a subscriber. Equiano died a rich man, a testament to the direct influence won by his combined literary and political efforts.
The second, and perhaps crucial, black man to have advanced the cause of abolition was the Toussaint L’Ouverture, the military victor of the Haiti revolution. In his case, the persuasion was very direct, unignorable, and added present threat to the case for early abolition.
On August 22, 1791 the slaves in France’s large and enormously profitable sugar/slave colony of St Domingue erupted in revolutionary revolt. The Haitian revolution fulfilled white planters’ long-held fears of burning and massacre. Toussaint L’Ouverture joined the revolt slightly late: he was a freed African slave who in his late 40s was a livestock steward and coachman at a northern plantation, (and also a slave-owner himself) who ensured the safety of plantation manager before joining the revolt.
The eight thousand plantations on St Domingue, which worked more than half a million slaves overseen by around 40,000 whites, produced more than 30% of the world’s sugar and more than half its coffee. But the cruelties upon which that output depended now produced also a war of unrestrained brutality and destruction on both sides.
It was also a war which featured a bewildering and every-changing rosta of alliances, betrayals and, within the French ranks, military fissures and mutinies - this being, after all, also a reflection of the French Revolution’s chaotic dynamics. From all this, however, Toussaint L’Ouverture emerged as the slaves’ leader, whilst the French authorities, such as they were at any one time, dickered. Finally, in 1793 the senior French official in St Domingue proclaimed the end of slavery in St Domingue; and in February 1794 the end of slavery in the French empire was announced by decree. (Swiftly revoked).
However, by that time the British had decided that it was in their interests to intervene, both as a blow against France and as a measure extinguish the dangerous precedent of black slaves achieving their own emancipation through rebellion. Consequently, in September 1793, British forces landed on St Domingue, an invasion which immediately galvanized Toussaint into renewed military activity, financed in part by a short-lived alliance with Spain, and executed by guerilla tactics pursued with ferocious courage and discipline.
Meanwhile, when not being ambushed by Toussaint’s guerillas, Britain’s army was being killed by yellow fever, malaria, alcohol and lead poisoning. A vast armada of troopships arrived in late 1795 as reinforcements. This was at that point the largest deployment in British history. It met similarly disastrous mortality. Approximately 600 died when five ships were sunk during a storm in the English Channel. In the end, the armada comprised 218 ships carrying 19,284 soldiers, mostly doomed. Of the more than 20,000 troops landed during five years of war, more than 60% lost their lives there.
Running out of manpower, the British bought some 13,400 slaves to do its fighting for it, promising them freedom after five years of service. Naturally enough, there were mass defections to Toussaint’s army.
By 1798, the British government had had enough, and Toussaint’s 14,000-strong army was closing in on Britain’s stronghold of Port-au-Prince. At this point, Toussaint negotiated successfully for a dignified British withdrawal. The British agreed maintain a trading relationship with St Domingue, whilst Toussaint promised not to invade Jamaica or spread ‘dangerous principles’ to Jamaica’s slaves. The British press rapidly discovered ‘he is a negro born to vindicate the claims of this species and to show that the character of men is independent of exterior colour.’
Maybe, but he had also demonstrated in the most direct possible way that Britain’s slave empire was living on borrowed time. Abolition of the slave trade, and subsequent emancipation, had become a race against time. This was no longer just a moral crusade, Toussaint had made it a strategic imperative.
The determination of the British people, communicated eventually to its political leaders, that slavery was an intolerable abomination which must be done away with, even at the cost of dismantling the sugar empire, was a profoundly rare, and profoundly ethical development. Nothing in previous human history suggests and obvious precedent. And yet, Britain somehow managed to grasp disgrace from this ethical victory.
Having made the determination that robbing men of their liberty and lives was an unendurable crime, the British government decided it must compensate not the victims of the slave trade, but its perpetrators - the slave owners.
The act ending slavery in the British Empire was passed in August 1833, not coincidentally in the wake of the general election which followed the Great Reform Act of 1832 . Slave owners were allocated £20mn as compensation for the loss of their emancipated slaves. A scheme to extend slavery de facto by six years of unpaid ‘apprenticeship’ was also meant to smooth the transition, but, of course, was entirely unworkable and collapsed four years later.
But what of the £20mn? How much was it in relation to Britain’s finances, and why on earth was it given in the first place?
The £20mn compensation was certainly a major commitment, given that in 1834 the entire government revenues amount to only £50.2mn, of which the majority came from customs (£17.8mn) and excise (£17.7mn) duties, much of which was attributable to the West Indian trade. In other words, it was equivalent to around 40% of government revenues, and a slightly higher proportion of government spending, which was running at £48.8mn that year.
However, we must remember that government was a relatively small part of the economy: in 1834, the UK’s GDP came to £499mn, so the £20mn compensation was equivalent to only approximately 4% of GNP. The depreciation on Britain’s capital stock alone came to £18mn.
More pertinently, perhaps, Britain’s import bill was running at around £65mn pa in declared value, and of that nearly £11mn was raw cotton, £6.6mn was sugar, and a further £2.6mn was coffee. Whether by chance or calculation, the compensation given to slave owners was almost exactly a year’s revenues the slave owners could expect from exporting the three principle slave-produced commodities to Britain. A year of grace, then, both for the slaves and for their owners.
This begins to tell us what was going on. As we have seen, production of sugar, in particular, whilst very profitable, made intensive calls on capital: capital for the windmills, rolling mills and boiling houses; working capital to finance the long delay between planting cane and shipping the sugar; capital to finance and insure the merchant navy which carried the sugar. Capital for slaves. The City of London had risen to global financial prominence precisely on extending and managing those capital demands by recycling the profits from the sugar trade. But large loans demand large security, and since balance sheet analysis of Jamaica’s plantations reveals that approximately 38% of assets were human stock - slaves - it was inevitable that they were offered as security. Slaves not only worked the land, they were mortgaged to the financiers.
Emancipation was, then, potentially a major headache for the City of London, since it removed the security upon which its West Indian loans were made.
Nor was this just a potential crisis: it was an active threat. The University College of London has the most extensive archive of compensation claims made by slave-owners. From it we can identify 1,058 claims made solely by those who worried their claims against slave-owners were going bad, or already had gone bad. (Technically, these included mortgagees in possession, mortgagees, judgement creditors, assignees, official assignees, receivers and sequestrators.) These claims, where debt recovery was deemed unlikely or impossible, came to £2.6mn, or 13% of the £20mn allocated. Not all these claims were accepted, but it hints at the potential scale of financial vulnerability generated by Emancipation.
We do not know how much debt the City had out to the West Indian slave-owners. However Bank of England’s total assets in 1834 came to only £70mn, of which £18.6mn was in government debt. The figure of £20mn in compensation tells us that stripping the West Indian loan portfolios of their security threatened a scale of loan-losses which would have been systemically threatening. Certainly enough to wipe out savings banks, which at the time had deposits of only £16.3mn, and London joint-stock banks, which even 10yrs later in 1844 had net public liabilities of only £11mn.
To put it in plain words, the £20mn compensation was an early and spectacular example of a City bailout. Buying out the planters to the equivalent to a year’s trading revenues would allow for a reset on both sides of the Atlantic of the underlying finances of the West Indian colonies.
On those terms, the compensation deal was a spectacular success: one can tell by the financial and economic serenity which ensued: yields on British government debt inched up from 4% to 4.5%, there was no spectacular outbreak of inflation or deflation, Bank of England’s balance sheet was not noticeably disturbed. Both imports and exports grew vigorously, in the five years after emancipation annual imports grew by an average 25.1%, domestic exports by 21.3% and re-exports by 29.6%. Economic growth was maintained with 1.4% growth in 1833 succeeded by 4.3% in 1834, and 5.1% in 1835.
More importantly, as the financial foundations of the West Indian trade were repaired, investment soared: in the five years prior to 1834, annual investment spending averaged £26.4mn; in the five years after, it averaged £46.8mn, a jump of 77%. During the same period, the number of patents applied for jumped from an annual average of 173 a year to 277, a jump of 60%.
Single-issue explanations for surges in economic, industrial and commercial activity are always suspect. But what economic data we have tells us quite plainly that Emancipation not only caused no significant financial crisis, but that the re-construction of sugar/slave finances via the £20mn compensation funding coincided with the starting gun for the most rapid period of Britain’s early industrialisation.
So it is to the impact on Britain’s 19th century fortunes that we must now turn.
“We” do not own the shame. I have not anything to be ashamed of. I thought collective guilt unto generation and generation had been got rid of?