Padraic X. Scanlan - Slave Empire: How Slavery Built Modern Britain

Also by Padraic X. Scanlan:

Freedoms Debtors: British Antislavery

in Sierra Leone in the Age of Revolution

ROBINSON

First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Robinson

Copyright Padraic X. Scanlan, 2020

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

: From the JCB Map Collection

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-47214-232-0

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For Catherine

O N FRIDAY 1 August, 1845, Samuel Joseph May, a Harvardtrained Unitarian minister, gave a sermon at the First Presbyterian Church in Syracuse, New York. His theme was the eleventh anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the British empire.

Slavery, he began, was an ancient oppression, practised by many human societies. But in the fifteenth century, the trade in enslaved Africans, purchased by Europeans to meet demands for labour in the Americas, transformed the world. It was prompted by the basest and most unyielding passions of the human soul the thirst for gold, the lust of power, and the love of ease. Britain was among the great beneficiaries of the transatlantic slave trade. But Britain also had a slave empire, an archipelago of colonies worked primarily by enslaved African workers, centred on the Caribbean and stretching from the southern precincts of North America to the northern shores of South America. The slave empire was dominated by plantations that produced tobacco, coffee, cotton, rice and above all sugar, for British and world markets. The island colonies in the Caribbean, seized at the cost of blood and treasure in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were among Britains most valuable imperial prizes. The profits of both the slave trade and plantation slavery benefited even British settlements with few enslaved people. For example, cold, rugged New England prospered as a hub connecting Britain with colonies to the south.

Although slavery was profitable, its violence pricked at the British conscience. In 1772, a British court declared that the rights of colonial slaveholders over the people they claimed to own did not extend to Britain. Enslaved people could sue for their freedom on British soil. In 1807, led by Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce, Parliament passed an Act abolishing the British slave trade. In 1833 Parliament abolished slavery in most of Britains colonies. May conjured a scene in the British Caribbean of enslaved labourers waiting in silence for midnight on 1 August 1834, when emancipation laws would come into force. The slow notes of the clock fell upon the multitude, May whispered. Building to a crescendo, he continued, Scarce had the clock sounded its last note, when the lightning of Heaven flashed vividly around... Gods pillar of fire, and trump of jubilee!

May rejoiced with his congregation at freedom in the Caribbean, but he was not speaking to them as the eulogist of England, as a nation. She is a paragon of inconsistencies. He struggled to explain the relationship between the rise of British slavery and its counterpoint in antislavery; to strike the balance between her glory and her shame. The law that ended slavery in the British empire required people who had been enslaved to continue working for the people who had claimed to own them for as long as six years. Parliament called this period of forced labour apprenticeship. At the same time, British slaveholders received 20 million in compensation for their lost claims to human beings. The money sullies greatly the moral purity of the act. Cynics might even say that emancipation was accomplished not so much by the force of truth as by the power of money.

Samuel May acknowledged Britains central role in the rise of both the transatlantic slave trade and plantation slavery. He confronted self-dealing antislavery laws that compensated slaveholders and imposed years of further forced labour on freedpeople. And yet, he marvelled at British righteousness. When antislavery laws were fair, May described the British public and Parliament as speaking with a single voice. When antislavery policies were cruel or contradictory, he separated the movement from the laws. Britain was built by slavery, he argued, but antislavery was a sea change, the end of a dark chapter in British history.

May followed a script to which many politicians and historians cleaved from the nineteenth century until the 1930s. The history of the end of the British slave trade and the end of British colonial slavery was overwhelmingly told as a story of the triumph of good over evil. Britain profited from slavery, yes. But most argued that antislavery was penance enough for British sins. The 20 million in compensation paid to slaveholders was written off as a sacrifice taxpayers made to expiate their guilt. The contradictions of antislavery were resolved by pretending that everything unseemly and hypocritical in the history of the movement against British slavery was an aberration. Antislavery was good; anything that was not good could not be antislavery. If those arguments wore thin, there were other European empires against which to measure Britains virtues. Like Samuel May, many Britons believed that enslaved people in the British empire had been grateful both for freedom and for continued white domination after the abolition of slavery. By these lights, enslaved people had not used their unchained hands to wreak vengeance upon their oppressors. Instead, as May put it, they had shown a disposition to forget the past. Abolition, in this telling, healed the empire.

In the 1930s, intellectuals from the Caribbean, Eric Williams and C. L. R. James chief among them, shredded this fable of sin and redemption.Furthermore, British antislavery was not a miraculous break from the economic, political and cultural moment that gave birth to it. Instead, in Britain, antislavery was a movement led by a coterie of mostly wealthy, landed and well-connected men who their sense of justice notwithstanding stood to gain by free trade, cheap free labour and the end of the protectionist laws that shored up slaveholders profits.

The fortunes made by slavery survived its abolition. The slave empire that Britain fought to win in the eighteenth century was not disbanded. Although there were moments when it seemed on the cusp of being radical, even revolutionary, British antislavery did not usually threaten the powerful. It did not give freedpeople the liberation for which they had fought. Freedpeople were paid low wages to work land that they had made profitable under slavery but could not afford to buy after emancipation. Slaveholders used the compensation fund as a source of liquid money, which many reinvested in factories, mines, roads and railways across Britain and its growing colonial empire.