Slave Empire

Title: Slave Empire – How Slavery Built Modern Britain
Author: Padraic X. Scanlan
Publisher: Robinson, 2020 (First)
ISBN: 9781472142337
Pages: 448

Britain’s raise to the pinnacle of political and economic power in the nineteenth century was marked by the two parallel streams of imperialism and slavery both of which we abhor today. Britain did not have any compunction at all in buying people from West Africa in exchange for cotton, selling opium in China and enforcing a war on them when the local government objected and displacing unsuspecting native rulers who were gullible enough to expect the British to stick to the spirit of signed treaties. Britain was the greatest beneficiary of the transatlantic slave trade. Slavery was used for labour in plantations of the western hemisphere that produced tobacco, coffee, cotton, rice and sugar. The island colonies of the Caribbean, which produced sugar in copious quantities, were among Britain’s most valuable imperial prizes. Then came Enlightenment and its ideals helped to push purely economic goals to the back and bring a moral perspective to the fore, possibly for the first time in human history. This change of atmosphere was first sensed by religious sects who lost no time in appropriating the refreshingly pristine outlook of a small, yet thriving antislavery movement. Their sustained propaganda slowly chipped away resistance and brought the regime around to share their perspective. In 1807, the parliament abolished slave trade in Britain and its colonies and in 1833, slavery itself was legislatively cast away. A staggering sum of 20 million GBP was paid to slaveholders as compensation for the loss of their ‘property’. The slaves were required to continue the same work for their previous masters for a further period of six years of apprenticeship, at the expiry of which they were free to get employed anywhere they liked as wage labourers. This book examines the closing chapter of a shameful episode in history. Padraic X. Scanlan is an associate professor in the Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources and the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. He has also held appointments at the London School of Economics and Harvard University.

Scanlan makes a survey of the beginnings of slave trade in the early part of the book. It may come as a surprise to many to learn that from 1475 to 1540, Portuguese merchants sold more than 12,000 slaves to Gold Coast in W. Africa to work in their gold mines. With the opening of sugar plantations in the New World, the direction changed, especially from the year 1580. Apart from the loss of manpower due to selling of slaves, textiles comprised more than half of the total goods offered in exchange for enslaved people. These cheap imports destroyed West African industry. Slave trade in British colonies began in 1619 in Jamestown, Virginia with the purchase of twenty African slaves by white settlers. Slave labour caused lasting changes in the agricultural profile and food habits of Western societies. Originally, sugar was a luxury item coming from Asia. With the opening of large sugarcane plantations in the Caribbean manned by slave labour imported from Africa, the prices crumbled and sugar became a staple. The book explains how the slave trade contributed to British colonial economy and helped them establish a ‘slave empire’. When ships full of enslaved captives arrived in the US and Caribbean, slaveholders would borrow money to buy enslaved workers using credit extended by British banks. More than that, insurers in Britain underwrote policies protecting plantations, slaving voyages and the bodies of enslaved people.

The pitiable condition of the slaves is visible in the narrative. Their physical circumstances might have been better in some instances when compared to poor white workers in Britain during the Industrial Revolution. But the demeaning nature of slavery was enough for its victims to wish for freedom even at the cost of a large part of their resources, such as buying one’s own freedom. A slave was not a legal person – they could not own property, sue or be sued, hold public office or marry. Slaveholders had the right to punish enslaved labourers however cruelly they wished, such as whipping, starving or branding. The murder of a slave was punished with a fine of mere 25 GBP or 3000 pounds of sugar. Penalty for killing another person’s slave was higher, because the perpetrator was destroying another man’s property. To slaveholders, the primary importance of the enslaved family was to produce a new generation of enslaved labourers. Fathers were written out of the records and not considered part of the family unit. Even in 1820 when colonial laws prevented separation of family members caused by slave sales, it defined family as consisting of a mother and her minor children. This sorrowful state of affairs was something shielded from European eyes. Rich slaveholders purchased landed assets and resided in Britain as absentee planters of the Caribbean islands and spent their money in rich abundance, forcing one thinker to caustically remark that the ‘slave empire’s splendour is at our doors, while the miseries are across the Atlantic’.

The book provides a summary picture of how slavery affected British politics and the part antislavery movement played in it. The wealth generated in the slave plantations helped to unify the otherwise divisive nations of Britain – England, Wales and Scotland. The British vowed not to become slaves themselves, but the liberty they treasured was rooted in slavery nor did it forbade them from owning slaves elsewhere in the empire. Demands to end slave trade as a moral necessity arose with Enlightenment. The number of slaves getting killed on the passage through the Atlantic was staggering. About ten per cent of the human cargo perished at sea which was only slightly better than that of horses similarly transported in the middle ages. This amounted to sheer murder. The American Revolution shaped the growing British antislavery movement. The loss of American colonies broke off some of the most powerful slaveholders in the empire. British antislavery flowed in complicated ways from Evangelicalism, Enlightenment and the rise of sensibility. A general sense that slavery was morally wrong extended even to slaveholders. In late-1780s this sentiment was harnessed into a movement to abolish the British slave trade. Law courts established that any enslaved person with the means to sue their owner in a British court would be manumitted. It does not mean that slaves had resigned to their fate to fall into passive suffering. In 1781, slaves revolted in Saint Domingue (Haiti) which was under French occupation. The British sent troops to capture the island as mainland France was in the clutches of the revolutionary regime. France abolished slavery in all its colonies in 1794 and enlisted the freedmen to fight against Britain. The British were defeated. Napoleon revoked the order of emancipation and sent force to re-annex the island. The rebels fought and decimated the French army also. The independent black kingdom of Haiti came into being in 1804 as a result.

The political process of emancipation was long drawn-out and littered with obstacles. William Wilberforce was the voice and face of the abolitionist movement. The trade in slaves was abolished through an act in 1807. Legislation was timid at first. The Dolben’s Act of 1788 merely fixed the maximum number of enslaved people who could be held captive in a slave ship. The planters readily came out in support of slavery. The argument in support of it was that the Old Testament approved of slavery and that the material comfort of the enslaved people was better than that of free British poor. Gradual emancipation was attempted through incremental reforms like amelioration of the plight of the enslaved. In the colonies, rumours widely circulated that slavery was abolished and the local masters were not honouring the legislation. Riots broke out in many places as the slaves believed that the parliamentary resolutions have granted them freedom but the white colonist has refused to carry them out. The Emancipation Act was passed in 1833 which prohibited slavery from the next year onwards. The abolitionists expected that the enslaved would accept their superior judgment in committing the newly manumitted people to continue to serve their former masters for another six years through an apprenticeship at the end of which they would be set free. This experiment failed and the intake of the former slaves as free, wage labourers also failed. The breakdown of this experiment hardened the resolve of American planters in continuing with slavery. A civil war had to be fought before the recalcitrant South saw reason. In the British case which we were examining in this book, the electoral reforms had also helped to weed out ultraconservative slaveholders from the parliament floor. The Reform Act of 1832 extended the populace’s voice in government. It closed rotten boroughs and eroded the power of slaveholders in the house. People with no landed wealth had little patience for slaveholders’ claims.

The book also looks at how slavery was wound down by adopting various measures to check an abrupt changeover. The abolitionists feared that the ‘uncivilized blacks’ could not prosper in a civilized society. They planned to leave the freed people landless, poor and politically weak so as to force them to wage labour which was thought to be having a civilizing effect on its practitioners. This envisaged a temporary period of low-wage work and exploitation. The concern was that if the wages were high, workers would quickly purchase land with their savings and would sit idle by producing their essentials from the land and thus removing themselves from the economic mainstream. In effect, after emancipation, the law would replace the whip and the slaveholders would become landlords. A severe rider on emancipation was the disbursement of compensation for slaveholders for the loss of slaves. A huge figure of 20 million GBP (which corresponded to 1.9 billion GBP in today’s money) was identified for payment. The compensation fund was amassed by perpetual bonds which were finally redeemed only in 2015 by paying 200 million GBP by the David Cameron government. The end of slavery marked Britain’s focus shifting to imperialism. By virtue of having abolished slavery, Britain was projected to have earned the moral right to take new colonies in the name of a civilization that itself had been made in the crucible of a slave empire.

Even though Scanlan makes an overview of Caribbean slavery and how it came to an end through legislative measures, the book contains a lot of references of its impact on India which was not related by ethnicity or commerce to the slave trade. The author claims that slavery existed in India too where the enslaved labourers were claimed as property by local aristocrats and not by Europeans as in the Caribbean. Here, it seems the author is confusing the caste system with slavery. While it is true that the caste system was highly oppressive and intimidating to the lower ones, it is not at all comparable to the slave system where a person could be sold to another and the rights of fathers over their offspring were not recognised. British racism on the conceptual level was different in India than in the Caribbean where workers of African descent were considered physically formidable but lazy and in need of rigid discipline in order to be put to work. Asian workers were imagined to be weak and effeminate, incapable of meeting the challenges of sugarcane cultivation. After emancipation, the sugar plantations faced severe labour shortages as the former slaves left work which was a mark of bondage. The planters then opted for indentured labour from India and Southeast Asia. Between 1833 and 1917, more than 3.5 million Indian workers went mainly to British Caribbean. The thriving societies of Indian ethnicity existing presently in these islands are the descendants of these labourers. Cotton also played a large part in the development of Indian nationalism and slavery has a direct link to it. As noted earlier, slave labour was mainly involved in cotton production in the US which was the staple commodity of British industry. As antislavery efforts picked up momentum in Britain, it extended cotton cultivation to India using cheap wage labour. This established a native cotton industry in India but it had a terrible side-effect. In some provinces, up to 21 per cent of all arable land was devoted to cotton. This rapid expansion came at a harrowing human cost. From 1876 to 1878, ten million Indians died in famines in South India. Cotton was not the only cause, but great swathes of land that might have grown staples had been converted to cotton.

With a lucid presentation style and delightful vocabulary, this book offers a pleasurable experience to readers. Enlightenment values are claimed to be behind the gradual transformation of the abolitionist outlook. At the same time, it cannot be denied that the Evangelists wanted to convert the entire slave population to their religion and thereafter did not intend them to keep them in servility. This dichotomy between the two sources is not elaborated sufficiently in the text and stands as a distinct disadvantage.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star