Britain’s commitment to slavery was more deeply entrenched than we like to admit.
We pride ourselves that from 1807 the Royal Navy took the lead in scouring the seas of slavers. But that’s barely half the story, and half the deed.
When Britain moved against the slave trade in 1807, banning shipments of humans for sale, it was not before time. Whilst 1807 banned more shipments of African chattels, what of those already enslaved in the West Indies? It took another 27 years, and a series of uprisings, of which the 1816 Bussa Rebellion in Barbados was the biggest, before the British Parliament finally made slavery illegal.
Not quite, actually, even then. True, chattel slavery was abolished for those aged under six at the time of the 1833/34 Act. But if you were already enslaved and older than that, then your status was simply changed to that of ‘apprentice’: and the terms of these ‘apprenticeships’ finally ran out in 1840. Even then, the law provided a final loophole: slavery was still permitted in territories owned by the East India Company, Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and St Helena.
That abolition took so long to arrive hints at how much was at stake for the British state and economy. It tells us unambiguously that the economics of slavery were deeply enmeshed in Britain’s 18th and 19th century economic, political and military development.
Slavery had powered the sugar empire which underwrote the great commercial and financial revolutions Britain underwent during the 18th century. As with so many aspects of this history, it’s the numbers that I find compelling, and that force us to see things we’d really rather not.
First, we need to re-learn how central the West Indies were to Britain’s international trade. Between 1713 and 1776 (American Revolution) sugar accounted for an average 16.3% of all Britain’s imports. Some portion of these imports would be re-exported - strip out the re-export trade, and sugar accounted for 29% of all Britain’s retained imports. These figures, incidentally, are almost certainly an underestimate since, first, they cannot include the pirate trade, and secondly, the taxation of sugar imports encouraged under-invoicing for official records.
Sugar is the dominant commodity in this story, but it was not the only commodity Britain imported from the West Indies. Altogether, imports from the West Indies accounted for between 20% and 25% of all British imports between 1720 and 1776. This trade dwarfed the trade done with the North American colonies, a fact which will underpin Britain’s relative lack of military commitment to those colonies during the American Revolutionary Wars. Having to choose between pinning down the North American colonies, or protecting the West Indies from the French, there was, commercially, no contest.
All those imports meant Britain’s ran massive and perpetual trade deficits with the West Indies. Since these ‘deficits’ were in fact trading revenues for West Indian planters who were British and banked in London, what these deficits record is not a drain on the UK, but rather just a portion of the repatriated profits of the sugar trade. This is emphatically not a drain of capital away from the UK, but rather a flow of silver and gold into London money markets from the plantation slave-masters of the West Indies. Between 1748 and 1765, the legal tally shows that on average Jamaica shipped £131,582 in bullion back to London every year.
Of course, the size of the trade deficit, the size of the profits repatriated to London, swung with the price of sugar. As Britain developed a serious sweet-tooth after the 1740s, to prices and trade volumes grew, as did the demand for African slaves.
Crucial to the growth of this trade was a regime of trade protections which gave the merchants of the West Indies a full monopoly on the trade of sugar and other commodities with Britain, at the cost being forced to use British shipping and paying a varying slate of customs duties on that trade. The framework of this trading monopoly was provided by a series of bills commonly known as the Navigation Acts.
The Navigation Acts got their start in 1651 with an act banning foreign ships from transporting goods from Asia, Africa and America to England or its colonies. From then until their repeal in 1849, the Navigation Acts were the foundation not only of Britain’s global trade growth, but by extension, of its merchant marine and the Royal Navy. For those c200 years, Britain was not a champion of free trade: quite the reverse.
Between 1651 and 1849, the straightjacket imposed by the Navigation Acts was repeatedly tailored to reflect the relative powers and needs of the British government, West Indian planters and traders, and West Indian and North American racketeers. (Since, needless to say, the Acts provided very fertile ground for the growth of evasion and corruption.) But the basic deal involved customs duties starting at 4.5% to be paid on all imports.
The history and evolution of the Navigation Acts is complex, and the terms of the deal fluctuated with the relative power of the West Indian merchants and the British government. The West Indian merchants loved the monopoly, but didn’t love the tariff, and resented the way it essentially barred them from shipping cheaper (because untaxed) products from non-British West Indian islands. The tariff on sugar and rum also opened the way for massive organized smuggling into and out of North American ports such as Providence, Boston and Rhode Island. We shall see later how important this racketeering was to the American Revolution. (Spoiler alert: just as Britain was not a ‘free-trader’, neither was the American Revolution prompted by rising British taxes. Very much the reverse.)
The customs duties raised by the Navigation Acts framework became central to government finance in the 17th and 18th centuries. In fact, throughout the 18th century, on average customs and excise duties brought in 68% of all government revenues. Customs and excise were, for all intents and purposes, the tax system. Customs duties levied on imported goods accounted for 24.2% of all revenues, and excise duties levied on domestic sale of goods accounted for 43.7%.
Government finances, then, depended very largely on the fruits of trade, both from the customs duties harvested from it, and then from the final sales of the goods provided. This dependence partly explains the power that the sugar & slave lobby wielded during the 18th century.
But that power was raised even further by the sheer wealth of the London-based West Indian merchants, and was cemented formally by the establishment of the Planters Club - a fighting fund formed by West Indian absentee planter and their agents, and financed by contributions of about one penny per hogshead on all West Indian imports.
This, then, is why it took so long after the official condemnation of the slave trade in 1807 for slavery in Britain’s West Indian colonies actually to disappear. The picture I’ve painted so far can be summed up like this: Britain’s involvement in the slave trade was more extensive and longer-lived than we like to think, and the financial and political power of the sugar lobby meant Britain’s role in the abolition of slavery is far less of a cause for moral complacency than we would like.
At a practical level, a good working assumption would be that every gorgeous English 17th and 18th century country house was built at least partly on the profits of the sugar business, helped as the 18th century worse into the 19th by money from India.
There’s a real value in understanding your history. The fact that this is subject to bad-faith interpretations on both sides doesn’t change that, but makes it much more challenging to approach. I hope you will keep reading, because this point will become more obvious, and more important than you might think. I think you’ll be surprised. It’s not about grifting or cringing, as you’ll discover.
Outstanding research as always