Pathways from Slavery: British and Colonial Mobilizations in Global Perspective: 1067 (Variorum Collected Studies) [1 ed.] 1138634646, 9781138634640

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SEYMOUR DRESCHER Pathways from Slavery

DAVID JACOBY Medieval Trade in the Eastern Mediterranean and Beyond

GILES CONSTABLE Medieval Thought and Historiography

GILES CONSTABLE Medieval Monasticism

MICHAEL J.B. ALLEN Studies in the Platonism of Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico

NELSON H. MINNICH The Decrees of the Fifth Lateran Council (1512–17) Their Legitimacy, Origins, Contents, and Implementation

THOMAS MORRISSEY Conciliarism and Church Law in the Fifteenth Century Studies on Franciscus Zabarella and the Council of Constance

H. LAWRENCE BOND AND GERALD CHRISTIANSON Reform, Representation and Theology in Nicholas of Cusa and His Age

TIMOTHY J. WENGERT Philip Melanchthon, Speaker of the Reformation Wittenberg’s Other Reformer

THOMAS M. IZBICKI Reform, Ecclesiology, and the Christian Life in the Late Middle Ages

F. EDWARD CRANZ Reorientations of Western Thought from Antiquity to the Renaissance

PAUL F. GRENDLER Renaissance Education between Religion and Politics

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VARIORUM COLLECTED STUDIES SERIES

Pathways from Slavery

Taylor & Francis Taylor & Francis Group http:/taylorandfrancis.com

Seymour Drescher

Pathways from Slavery

British and Colonial Mobilizations in Global Perspective

ROUTLEDGE

Routledge Taylor & Francis Group

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Seymour Drescher 7KHULJKWRI6H\PRXU'UHVFKHUWREHLGHQWL¿HGDVDXWKRURIWKLVZRUNKDVEHHQDVVHUWHGE\KLPLQ accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are XVHGRQO\IRULGHQWL¿FDWLRQDQGH[SODQDWLRQZLWKRXWLQWHQWWRLQIULQJH British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-63464-0 (hbk) 978-1-315-20671-4 (ebk) VARIORUM COLLECTED STUDIES SERIES CS1067

For David Brion Davis and Stanley Engerman

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CONTENTS

Foreword Preface

xi xiii

1 “White Atlantic? The Choice for African Slave Labor in the Plantation Americas,” from Slavery in the Development of the Americas, ed. by David Eltis, Frank D. Lewis and Kenneth L. Sokoloff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 31–69

1

2 “The Shocking Birth of British Abolitionism,” from Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies, vol. 33, no. 4 (2012), 571–593

41

3 “Whose Abolition? Popular Pressure and the Ending of the British Slave Trade,” from Past and Present: A Journal of Historical Studies, vol. 143, no. 1 (1994), 136–166

67

4 “Cart Whip and Billy Roller: Antislavery and Reform Symbolism in Industrializing Britain,” from Journal of Social History, vol. 15, no. 1 (1981), 3–24

93

5 “Women’s Mobilization in the Era of Slave Emancipation: Some Anglo-French Comparisons,” from Women’s Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation, ed. by Kathryn Kish Sklar and James Stewart (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 98–120

119

6 “Civilizing Insurgency: Two Variants of Slave Revolts in the Age of Revolution,” from Who Abolished Slavery? Slave Revolts and Abolitionism: A Debate with João Pedro Marques, ed. by Seymour Drescher and Pieter C. Emmer (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 120–132

141

ix

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry 7 “Liberty, Equality Humanity: Antislavery and Civil Society in Britain and France,” from The Rise and Demise of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Atlantic World, ed. by Philip Misevich and Kristin Mann (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2016), 171–195

155

8 “Emperors of the World: British Abolitionism and Imperialism,” from Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa, and the Atlantic, ed. by Derek R. Peterson (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2010), 129–149

179

9 “History’s Engines: British Mobilization in the Age of Revolution,” from The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, vol. 66, no. 4, (2009), 737–756

199

10 “Civil Society and Paths to Abolition,” from Journal of Global Slavery, vol. 1, no. 1 (2016), 44–71

219

11 “Abolition and Civil Society: East and West,” from Chattel Slavery: Re-emergence at Zones of Conflict – Middle East [in Arabic], ed. by Mansour Alnogaidan (Dubai: Al Mesbar Studies and Research Centre, 2017), 11–31

245

12 Britain, India and Bondage, Part One: Birth of the “Slow Death of Slavery”

261

13 Britain, India and Bondage, Part Two: Indentured Emigration

281

Index

301

x

FOREWORD

Pathways to Slavery is a collection of Seymour Drescher’s pioneering essays. Over a period of more than four decades, Drescher has revised our understanding of the complex process that undermined what had been the previously unchallenged Atlantic slave trade and slavery. The essays take as their starting point the initial British campaign to end the Atlantic slave trade. Although the focus of this volume is Britain (the pioneer of the abolition movement) Drescher casts his intellectual net far and wide. The result is a volume which exposes the importance of the British abolition movement (conceived in 1787) as the corrosive solvent of enslavement. But it also reveals Drescher as a master of that most difficult of historical exercises – comparative history. Each essay has its own distinctive importance, on a range of specific issues. Collectively, however, they comprise a major re-appraisal of a critical period in British (and Western) history. For the best part of three centuries, the Atlantic slave trade, and the slave societies it nurtured throughout the Americas, had yielded immense benefits to Britain and other European colonial powers. Yet within the space of a lifetime, all had been overthrown. Why and how this happened has been Drescher’s prime concern for the past thirty years. In that period, Drescher has confronted a historical conundrum which has attracted a growing number of historians – indeed some of the best historians of the past two generations. And it is in that company that Seymour Drescher has emerged as one of the most influential and most persistently original voices. Drescher’s major essays, collected here for the first time, parallel his six major books published in the same period, and offer a series of revisionary studies which circle round the history of abolitionism. Each essay has its own distinguishing, original argument, but when we consider this collection as a whole, the essays provide a coherent critique of the wider influence of abolitionism. The British abolition movement not only influenced the history of British enslavement, but provided a prototype for the mobilization of subsequent radical and reforming groups on a range of issues. The structure, methods and tactics of abolition from 1787 onwards in effect created a blueprint for a host of later campaigns, from the early women’s movement to Chartism. Moreover, the triumph of abolition became an article of faith xi

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry in the emergence of a new form of imperialism in the nineteenth century: the urge to curb slave trading and slavery globally was the hallmark of British imperial policy by the late-nineteenth century. Drescher’s essays thus take us far beyond the British Isles, and well beyond the history of abolition itself. And here lies the broader significance of Drescher’s work: this collection obliges us to look beyond the specific case studies and engage with more general historical issues. They also have a bold chronological sweep, ranging as they do from the origins of abolition in the eighteenth century, to the late nineteenth century story of imperial policy in India and beyond. These essays demand the attention of any serious student of the slave trade and abolition. Naturally enough, Drescher’s work has attracted its critics. But Drescher thrives on the give-and-take of scholarly dispute, and what follows is, in large measure, his vigorous engagement with the work of others. The end result is a bold and absorbing reassessment of abolition, and of the historiography it has generated over the past forty years. Careful readers of the following pages will close the book more fully aware of the importance of the campaign directed at the slave trade, and of the centrality of Seymour Drescher in explaining that thorny historical phenomenon. James Walvin University of York

xii

PREFACE

This collection of essays primarily considers aspects of the history of slavery and antislavery in the British Empire and beyond. Explicitly or implicitly they are responses to historians who have developed exciting new perspectives of their own in these areas. All of us entered this field in the wake of two books that disrupted a triumphalist narrative that had dominated the historiography of slavery and antislavery for more than a century. The disruptors, of course, were C.L.R James’s The Black Jacobins (1938) and Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery (1944). By the 1970s Capitalism and Slavery in particular had made it impossible to portray the histories of British imperial abolitions as the work of a small band of dedicated “saints” who raised a converted nation to a higher moral plane.1 During the past fifty years the initiators of British abolitionism were reconceptualized as agents in a far larger framework. New actors have been brought into focus, entailing re-examinations of the abolitionist process in social, economic, imperial and global frames of reference. Some of the original implicit tension between economic and non-economic interpretations have not only survived but have been read back into the beginnings of European global expansion and extended down to the present. In this volume I address a number of historical interpretations that emerged in the wake of Econocide, beginning with those scholars who sought other means of treating economic ideas and ideology, if not economics itself, as the most important factor in accounting for the rise and fall of British slavery.2 I have omitted from this collection three essays that compare other abolitionist process in the Atlantic World to the British variant. Readers may consult the following: For the Spanish Empire, “From Empires of Slavery to Empires of Antislavery,” in Slavery and Antislavery in Spain’s Atlantic Empire, ed. J. M Fradera and Christopher Schmidt-Nowara (New York, 2013). On the United States, see “Divergent Paths: The Anglo-American Abolitions of the Atlantic Slave Trade,” in Migrations, Trade, and Slavery in an Expanding World, ed. Wim Klooster (London/Boston, 2009). For multinational EuroAmerican comparisons, see “Civil Society and Paths to Abolition,” in the Journal of Global History (vol. 1, no. 1, 2016) and “European Antislavery:

xiii

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry From Empires of Slavery to Global Prohibition,” in The Cambridge World History of Slavery: Vol. 4: AD 1804 – AD 2016, ed. David Eltis, Stanley L. Engerman, Seymour Drescher and David Richardson (Cambridge, 2017), chapter 16. The last segment of this volume offers recent essays that illustrate the broadening of historiographical perspectives from the traditional predominance of the North Atlantic slave system. The first, “West and East: Abolition and Civil Society in the Middle East,” expands my comparative perspective on civil society and abolition to the Muslim World. A final double essay offers reflections on the campaigns to end slavery in, and indentured servant migration from, India. It contrasts the ebbing of British popular antislavery mobilization in the early 1840s with its reincarnation as an anti-British mobilization in the subcontinent three generations later. I hope these essays will also be recognized as signs of gratitude to many interlocutors. Collectively our conversations have extended over nearly half a century. Their identities will certainly be apparent in citations of their scholarship or as editors of volumes in which I have been privileged to participate. I owe expressions of gratitude to David Eltis, Erica Williams Connell, David Richardson, David Geggus, Pieter Emmer, Howard Temperley, Barbara Solow, Olivier Grenouilleau, Sue Peabody, Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, Derek Peterson, Frank McGlynn, Kathryn Kish Sklar, James Brewer Stewart, Jean Allain, Gert Oostindie, Walter Johnson, Joseph Inikori, Robin Blackburn, Philip Misevich, Kristin Mann, Norman Fiering, William Weisberger and Christine Bolt. I am especially obligated to James Walvin as an editor of past collections and as the contributor of a Foreword to this volume. A few individuals must be singled out for special attention. Forty-five years ago I encountered Roger Anstey while pursuing the project on British abolition that became my first book on the subject. As I wrote in my preface to Econocide, when I first arrived, Roger literally laid before me the feast of his unfinished manuscript, his years of research, his scholarly experience and his extraordinary network of colleagues. We sometimes spent days together in interchange over the course of the next three years. His home more than once afforded me a cherished family away from family in the delightful Kentish countryside. Whatever divergences of interpretation emerged in our works, the impact of his findings will be evident even in the essay entitled “Liberty, Equality, Humanity.” I had the good fortune of being able to reiterate my gratitude to Roger to two generations of the Anstey clan at the Roger Anstey Memorial Lecture in 2017. A number of the essays in this collection clearly bear witness to my longest and most continuous interchange with any historian of slavery. It began in the 1960s with my reaction to a footnote in David Brion Davis’s path-breaking Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1966). Our conversation has endured down to the closing pages of the last volume of his magisterial trilogy on The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (2014). xiv

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry My own last word must go to Stanley Engerman, who has been my critical annotator from the first draft of Econocide in 1973 to the last sentence in this volume. Almost every essay and certainly every book that I have written between the two has been submitted to his scrutiny – often more than once. If he does not bear co-responsibility for every empirical assertion therein it is only because his communications all too often come in the form of almost indecipherable scribbled marginalia. Whatever plausible deniability this allows him, my own debt of gratitude has no upper bound. Seymour Drescher

Notes 1. My evaluation of Williams’s long-term impact was offered in an essay, “Capitalism and Slavery after Fifty Years,” in my From Slavery to Freedom: Comparative Studies in the Rise and Fall of Atlantic Slavery (Macmillan Press and New York University Press, 1999), chapter 13, pp. 379–398. 2. My assessment of the economic context of the triumph of British abolitionism is most extensively formulated in two books: Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective (Macmillan Press and Oxford University Press, 1986/1987), and Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (Cambridge University Press, 2009).

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1 WHITE ATLANTIC? THE CHOICE FOR AFRICAN SLAVE LABOR IN THE PLANTATION AMERICAS

I During the course of the fifteenth century European navigators rapidly, and sometimes dramatically, conquered the Atlantic. The inhabitants of five continents were brought into the first continuous contact with each other. Over the next four centuries millions of Europeans and three times as many Africans were shipped across that ocean from their ancestral continents. Recent historiography has sought to understand these human flows both more precisely and more interactively. As we achieve increasing certainty about the timing and magnitude of the two migrations a number of historians are making efforts to more rigorously specify the fundamental causal patterns at work in those migrations. While the creation of the early modern European Atlantic long received most attention, there has been a burst of interest in the African Atlantic that dominated transatlantic migrations for nearly two centuries after the 1630’s. Assessments of demographic, political and cultural factors have been added to a traditional, and still prevailing, economic model of the development.1 One historical project has been to determine why the differential flow of people made early modern migration history the story of a black and slave Atlantic.2 The prevailing explanation has had recourse to predominantly economic motives and forces. The opening of the Atlantic invited the creation of a virtually unconstrained form of capitalism, whose beneficiaries purchased human chattels from Africa as their labor force.3 This model of untrammeled economic behavior has recently elicited a further question. Was African slavery was really the optimal source of labor for the rapid development of the Americas? In The Making of New World Slavery (1997) Robin Blackburn hypothesizes a counter-factual scenario in which free Europeans became the prevailing form of labor in the New World’s tropics after the mid-seventeenth century. Such a condition, he claims, would have produced “economic advance on a broader basis,” renewed by natural reproduction rather than by newly uprooted forced immigrants. Blackburn acknowledges that, whether 1

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry or not this white and free Atlantic would have led to a far more satisfactory long term economic outcome, it would certainly have done so far more slowly, and probably far more slowly than what actually happened. In large part, Blackburn’s benign counterfactual is a response to an earlier hypothesis, first powerfully proposed by David Eltis in 1993, and elaborated at greater length seven years later.4 Eltis challenges the prevailing model of Europe’s turn to African enslaved labor in the Americas as the epitome of unrestrained profitproducing capitalism. He posits a still more profitable option – Europeans enslaving Europeans. Had Europeans, particularly their English component, enslaved themselves or other Europeans, the American plantation system would have been still less costly and even more profitable than it actually was. Enslaved Europeans would have hastened the development of the New World and increased the income level on both sides of the Atlantic.5 Both Blackburn and Eltis propose plausible “white Atlantic” alternatives, to the one that actually took shape. Both do what counterfactuals do best, engage the reader in a thought experiment that produces an “alternative history” by changing a single variable. In one respect Eltis’s counterfactual is heuristically more challenging and rewarding than Blackburn’s vision of a kinder and gentler America. Blackburn’s scenario requires the reversal of what most scholars have taken to be the primary motive in the choices made by the planters and princes (and acquiesced in by peasants and proletarians) of Europe. Theirs were choices for maximized productivity, higher output, cheaper commodities and greater economic opportunities for Europe. Eltis repeatedly reminds us that, from the British Caribbean in the seventeenth century to the United States South into the second half of the nineteenth century, the slave plantation zone of the Americas was the site of some of the richest and most productive regions that have ever emerged in human history.6 Eltis’s simply proposes extending those very desires for wealth, efficiency and opportunity still further. Our question will also be a simple one: would the choice for a white and slave Atlantic have indeed maximized the profits of merchants and planters, the exports of the colonies, the costs of commodities to the consumer, and the standards of living and levels of income on both sides of the Atlantic? In conformity with his specifications, our analysis will consider the costs and benefits of this “whites-only” Atlantic as it would necessarily have affected the economic costs of that choice, both private and public. Eltis has made a striking number of new points, which can only briefly be summarized here. He again places Europe and its long term development at the center of the development of the Atlantic system. From a very traditional paradox in the history of the early modern world he draws bold and striking conclusions: European economic development prepared its inhabitants to reap disproportionate advantage from the naval mastery of Atlantic navigation after 1450. The development of freedom at home, including individual property rights, permitted Europeans to expand their rights in persons beyond 2

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry Europe. European freedom at home was thus the prerequisite for Europeandirected slavery abroad. They could take fullest advantage of the opportunity to combine newly available New World lands with a new and more intensive system of coerced labor. Unable to dominate or even penetrate beyond the coastal lands of tropical Africa, Europeans tapped into the existing system of African social relations to produce crops more cheaply in the Americas, and to deliver them more cheaply and massively to Europe, than ever before. A major novelty in Eltis’s approach is his focus upon Europe’s non-economic development as well as its technological or military advantages. In doing so Eltis offers an even more profound challenge to the traditional economicallyoriented historiography. He hypothesizes that, despite their more economically-opportunistic propensities, which seemed to be driven to extreme limits in the Caribbean, the choice for African labor was ultimately limited, not by economic opportunity but by European ideological self-perception. This line of argument, of course, has very significant implication for explaining why, by 1800, three out of four people landed in the New World were Africans. Eltis’s explanation is straightforward. In 1500 Europeans were the most economically attuned people in the Atlantic. In a broad band of the territories bordering that ocean, slavery was the cheapest and most efficient form of labor. Especially as developed by the English, the plantation became one of the most productive units of agriculture in the world. Its superiority was subsequently demonstrated in one area of the Americas after another between the late sixteenth and the late nineteenth centuries. By 1660 for example, Barbadian exports per person exceeded anything to be found in any European country. It is doubtful whether any previous societies in history ever matched the output per slave of seventeenth century Barbados. Eighteenth and early nineteenth-century British Caribbean slaves at least matched the productivity increase of workers in early industrializing Britain. On the eve of the American Civil War Cuban agricultural productivity per slave still exceeded that of contemporary European farmers. The sugar region of Cuba “must have ranked among the top six of the world’s leading national economies.”7 Early modern Europe’s turn to African slave labor was therefore eminently rational. Eltis, however, adds one crucial caveat to this conclusion. If slavery was the most rational choice for European capitalists in the circum-Caribbean and Brazil, were Africans really only a second-best choice? Once Europeans discovered that slavery was the optimal means of developing the plantation complex in the Americas, wouldn’t it have made still better economic sense for them to enslave other Europeans rather than Africans?.8 The direct route from Europe to the Americas was faster than the triangular voyage via Africa. Mortality and morbidity rates were lower on the North Atlantic sea lanes than in the tropics Time and money were needlessly lost in seeking cargoes on the African coast. The costs of shipping European convicts to the Caribbean were similar to those from Africa. Using the “packing” ratios allotted to cargos of slaves instead of British convicts, merchants would clearly have further tipped 3

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry the costs in favor of shipping Europeans. Convicts, after all, were cheaper to sell in the Americas only because they were bound for ten years rather than for life. At the high selling price in the New World the British, and presumably other governments, would have found ways to provide even more convicts and other undesirables. Lengthening the terms of servitude certainly would not have raised shipping costs. In other words there were no transportation-cost barriers to a European-slave substitution for Africans. Moreover, the movement of people from the coast the of Europe was even more favorable to shippers than it was from Africa. If enslavement costs in Africa were trivial, the substitution of slave status for European prisoners and prisoners of war would have been neither difficult nor costly. There were well-established networks for moving convicts across every Western European state. The rapidly developing early modern canal systems would have made the cost per migrant per mile drop throughout the entire period before 1800 without costing a single extra shilling of public or private funds. Before 1830, the hypothetical cost of an outflow of Europeans even four or five times their actual numbers would have been as sustainable for Europe, in demographic terms, as it was to Africa during the same period. Indeed, from Eltis’s perspective, other socio-economic gains would have tipped the scale even further in favor of a European slave trade. Europe’s judges were already sending English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, German, Italian, Polish and other convicts to their respective plantations zones or galleys. The poorhouses and workhouses of England and the Netherlands could easily have been emptied, and the burden of poor relief on Europeans further lightened. Europe’s abundant and burdensome harvests of ablebodied prisoners of war could have been added to the migration stream as ready-to-work plantation laborers, as indeed they were during the English Civil Wars. Many historians of seventeenth century already designate these plantation-bound workers from the British Isles as “slaves.”9 War added further justifications for coercion. One’s own people were “impressed” into compulsory military service. While pursuing the usual suspects for naval duty, magistrates could have broadened the mission to a round up of rogues, vagabonds, and beggars. In these categories, Western Europe brimmed with superfluous undesirables. Nor were Europeans squeamish about inflicting coercion and pain upon each other. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were chronicles of death, atrocities, and rapine, in war and civil conflict in Western Europe, and enserfment (and outright slavery) in Eastern Europe. The absence of European slavery in the Americas seems paradoxical indeed. Why then did the migratory stream of coerced labor to the New World consist of enslaved Africans rather than enslaved Europeans? Eltis’s short answer is that European cultural values more fundamentally determined its pattern of evolution than did its economic incentives or technologies. In a fundamental sense, early modern Europeans were culturally inhibited from 4

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry enslaving each other, while uninhibited from, and even encouraged to, enslave others. As Eltis repeatedly says, ideology “at once shaped the evolution of African New World slavery and kept Europeans as non-slaves.”10 It would indeed seem that, given the incentives to ensure coerced labor in the New World and the widespread indifference to human suffering in the Old, only a countervailing power of enormous psychological power would have been able to prevent Europeans from crossing the line to enslaving each other. All of Eltis’s references to that mental barrier are evocative of immense psychic power. The taboo against enslaving fellow Europeans was far greater than the lure of foregone wealth and power. European values “shaped the parameters of African New World Slavery”, and kept Europeans free. These values constituted an “almost tangible barrier” against even the thought of enslaving fellow Europeans. Therefore, it was “of course, inconceivable that any of the potential European labor pools (convicts, prisoners of war, vagrants, etc) could have been converted into chattel slaves.”11 Eltis is less certain of the origins and nature of these psychological and conceptual inhibitions than of their presence. They were, he notes in passing, “shadowy” and “indescribable”, as well as unthinkable, by those who were constrained by them. Perhaps he hypothesizes, they emerged from the benign, pervasive, but limited, growth of European market behavior. That market may have “worked against slavery in the long run, but in the short run there was no imperceptible diffusion of non-enslavability.” What is clear, however is that the boundary between enslavability and non-enslavability was not measurable in the infinite gradations of market relations, but in sharp identity boundaries between groups – at least until a moment, c. 1770, when the boundaries suddenly came under sustained attack. Then they began to crumble even more dramatically than they had arisen. Eltis grounds his hypothesis in the silent, untraceable and unconscious long-term workings of the market on the psyches of individuals. Both European unenslavability (before c. 1750) and the subsequent extension of unenslavability to Africans, are embedded in the expansion and intensification of market relationships. This “Haskellian” frame of reference incidentally confronts a major statistical anomaly in the history of the transatlantic slave trade. More Africans were transported by Europeans during the three generations after 1750 than in the equivalent period before. If one prefers 1776 as the pivotal moment, the same relationship holds. The appetite of Europeans for African slaves was at least as powerful in the century after 1750 as in the century before. For Eltis, however, one point is clear. Throughout the process European cultural constraints opposed the rigorous logic of European commercial rationality. Twice, in both the rise and fall of the African slave trade, psychological disincentives carried the day against economic incentives. In an elegantly countereconomic inversion of Eric William’s reasoning, “freedom, as it developed in Europe first made possible the slavery of the Americas and then brought about its abolition.”12 5

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry Eltis’s perspective is interesting for more than the light it casts upon the rise of African slavery, since it carries an implicit message of the ultimately overwhelming victory of the libertarian dimensions of European history over its counter-libertarian dimensions during the course of modern history. Before looking more closely at the transition to African slave labor in particular, it is helpful to understand the limits of that claim. If, by the sixteenth century it had become unacceptable for Europeans to enslave other Europeans, it was still quite possible to consider doing so in the mid-seventeenth century (the definitive turning point toward Africans in Eltis’s account). During the English Civil War, the Earl of Stamford suggested that royalist military prisoners who refused to join Parliament’s forces be sold to the Barbary pirates as slaves. The proposal went nowhere, but one should be clear about its implications. Sale to North Africa meant sale into full chattel slavery, and at a time when British slaves in Africa still outnumbered African slaves in the British Americas.13 Just 200 years later it was still possible for Anglo-Americans in North America to openly doubt the benefits of free labor. In the mid-nineteenth century one had only to open the books of George Fitzhugh or read public predictions, by prominent U. S. Southern politicians, that the impending social crisis of free labor societies would compel them to institute some form of white bondage.14 More relevant to our own assessment, however, is the complete shattering of the taboo against the enslavement of Europeans by Europeans in the midtwentieth century. I would hypothesize that, under certain plausible conditions, such a breach was possible in 1640 as well as 1940. Eltis notices, but immediately denies, the relevance of Nazi German slavery. He argues that neither this, nor any other twentieth-century case, resulted in “full chattel slavery for the purpose of maximizing profits.”15 Nevertheless, the German example seems more relevant to the discussion than Eltis allows. For the SS, the suppliers who sold labor to German industrial firms, maximizing profits was, of course, not their priority, least of all for those laborers targeted for rapid destruction. But how does the SS differ in this from the behavior of some primary enslavers of Africa two or three centuries before? Many Africans did not make war against their enemies primarily for economic reasons. For German armed units as for their African counterparts, “enslavement costs were trivial.” However, the German capitalists who purchased labor at 5 Zloty per day for their enterprises were acquiring and employing that labor at far below free (German) labor prices. That differential in returns to labor is among the rationales for the recent compensation settlements by some of those same industrial firms. Even the fact that a factory director might prefer to allow ill laborers to die rather than to contribute large sums for an adequate medical infrastructure, does not, given the context, constitute an economically irrational choice. The fact was that millions labored under coercion until they died. Some even pleaded to remain slaves. In Germany, as once in Africa, military power and political decisions made the purchase 6

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry of coerced labor cost-effective for businesses employing that labor, however acquired.16 My primary reason for drawing attention to this example is not to argue for a complete analogy between Atlantic slavery and its Nazi German variant. I note only that no insuperable psychological or cultural barrier to enslavement or coercion-for-life was created by an even longer term evolution of market society in Europe than the one Eltis describes for early modern Europe. At no point in the history of European-controlled transatlantic slavery were there as many African coerced laborers in all of the Americas as there were in Nazioccupied Europe in 1944–45. In terms of the centrality of the coerced labor force to the economy as a whole, war-time Germany closely approximated the traditional definition of a slave labor society. Psychologically, Germany’s rulers clearly envisioned, and partially implemented, a legalized hierarchy of free and coerced labor. Between 1940 and 1945 there were more than three times as many coerced European laborers in Europe as coerced Africans in the Americas two centuries earlier. In terms of mortality, brutality, and sheer expenditure of lives per unit of labor-time, twentieth-century Europe also had no peer in the slave Americas. Or, to put it slightly differently, more Europeans were set to forced labor by other Europeans within a period of four years than were Africans by Europeans in the Americas during the four centuries following the Columbian voyages. Europeans certainly did not find the idea of enslaving of each other to be inconceivable or difficult to imagine. Tens, even hundreds, of millions were designated as enslavable – up to half of Europe’s population. That twentieth Europeans were willing to act at least as brutally towards other Europeans as Africans or Europeans towards Africans is patently clear. So it may also be worthwhile to take a closer look at the full range of deterrents to the “Europeanization” of American slave labor in the early modern period.

II In order to properly assess the economic rationality of substituting European slaves for Africans in the early modern Americas we must begin by outlining the parameters of question. First, slavery was not the only form of labor available to employers of labor in the New World. Second, slavery was recognized as particularly important to the production of only certain outputs from mines and large-scale agricultural units, for which other kinds of labor would have been available only at prices sufficiently high to offset non-pecuniary aspects of those enterprises, either in intensity or leisure. Third, the choices for labor in the New World developed within a pluralistic political framework. There was no single political entity capable of allocating coerced labor throughout the Atlantic system. Fourth, it is necessary to analyze the process of labor transition under various rubrics. In addition to dividing population groups by geographic origin (Europeans, Africans, Amerindians) or 7

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry religion, (Christians, Muslims, Jews, Pagans, etc) one must further subdivide the trade into various national groups as they entered and dominated the Atlantic system (the Spanish, Portuguese, British, French, Dutch). Since our analysis focuses on those who dominated the transatlantic sea lanes, these intra-European regional and national subdivisions become very significant variables. We therefore follow the traditional historiography in two major respects. We divide the history of the early modern slave trade before the “Age of Revolutions”, into two major periods, the period of Iberian (especially Portuguese) domination before 1640, and the period of Northwestern European intrusion between 1640 and 1815. We must further reduce these two regions into national units, because most Europeans sailed to Africa under their national flags or participated in plantations subject to national sovereigns. Such distinctions are therefore critical in any attempt to assess the viability of substituting enslaved Europeans for enslaved Africans in the Americas. From Eltis’s perspective a glance at Euro-African migration figures from 1500–1760 (Table 1) indicates that the shift to both African and slave labor was far from obvious in 1580. Before 1580 three quarters of migrants crossing the Atlantic to the Americas were free Europeans, not enslaved Africans. Only during the following century did the migration figures swing decisively in favor of Africans. Especially in the half-century after 1492, the proportion of slaves carried to the Americas “was little different than the proportion of slaves in their own European or metropolitan areas”.17 Given the dominance of Europeans in this first wave, the implication is, that the shift towards Africans and slavery was not as clear or predetermined during the first century of the Atlantic system as it became in the second. From a “modern perspective” (or at least in hindsight) it was the Northwestern European (and more especially the Anglo-Dutch) relationships with Africans and America which determined the demographic and legal contexts of race relations that we confront in the twenty-first century. In any event, as relates to labor choices, it was not the Iberians in the sixteenth century but the Anglo-Dutch in the seventeenth, who apparently determined the form of racial and labor relations in the plantation Americas well into to the nineteenth century. We will eventually engage Eltis’s argument on his own favored ground (the English imperium), and in his own chosen time (c. 1640–1700). But a closer look at the Iberian cases may show that both slavery and Africans were far more integral to, if not as dominant in, the foundation of the Atlantic system, than Eltis’s table implies. Some historians of Latin America emphasize that slavery was the very first labor system of choice for the conquering Europeans, with native Americans as the chosen. Economically speaking, residents on the spot in the Caribbean islands were cheaper forms of labor than were more distant Amerindians, Europeans, or Africans. When demographic catastrophe ultimately made alternatives more attractive, there was resort to Africans. However, the first large coerced labor migrations in the 8

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry Table 1. European-Directed Transatlantic Migration, 1500–1700, by European Nation and Continent of Origin (in thousands) (1) Africans leaving Africa on ships of each nation (a) Before 1580 10 Spain 56 Portugal 2 Britain 68 Total 0 (b) 1580–1640 594 Spain 0 Portugal 10 France 3 Netherlands 607 Britain Total 0 (c) 1640–1700 259 Spain 40 Portugal 151 France 379 Netherlands 829 Britain Total 1 (d) 1700–1760 958 Spain 458 Portugal 223 France 1206 Netherlands 2846 Britain*** Total

(2) Europeans leaving each nations for Americas (net)

(3) Africans and Europeans leaving for Americas (Col. 2 + Col. 3)

(4) Col. 4 plus Africans shipped to the Atlantic Islands

(5) percent African migrants

239 351

9 75.7 100.0 55.0

100 58 0 158

110 114 2 226

90 110 4 2 87 293

90 704 4 12 90 900

0 84.3 0 83.3 3.3 67.4

76 50 23 13 285 447

76 309 63 164 664 1276

0 83.8 63.5 92.1 57.1 65.0

92 300 27 5 222 646

93 1258 485 228 1428 3492

1.0 76.2 94.4 97.8 84.5 81.5

Source: David Eltis, Rise of African Slavery, 9 (Table I-1); as modified by Eltis, ed. Free and Coerced Migrations: Global Perspectives (Stanford, 2002). Appendix, ch. 2, Table 1 (courtesy of the editor); and for Africans shipped to the Atlantic Islands, Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census, 20 (Table 4).

early sixteenth-century circum-Caribbean were of Indians. The isthmus of Panama and the larger Caribbean islands suffered drastic population depletion after 1500. Spanish conquering expeditions required large numbers of porters, servants, etc. As soon as Central America was successfully invaded, it became the main center of a slave trade in Indians. Perhaps as early as 1515, Indian captives were sent to Cuba, and soon after to Panama and Peru. By the 1530s, slave trading was the basic industry in Nicaragua. At the height of 9

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry that trade 10,000 slaves were exported each year to Panama and Peru. A total of 200,000 Indians, perhaps one third of the original population, had been enslaved by the mid-sixteenth century, four times more than were landed in the Americas from Africa between 1500 and 1580.18 In such a milieu it is hard to see how Spaniards, urgently required for purposes of long distance sailing and soldiering, would have been cheaper to transport to America and kept under discipline as slaves (even setting aside the costs of initial enslavement). In regions where Indians outnumbered Spaniards by 9:1, ratios as high as those ever reached by Africans to Europeans in the Caribbean, every European and even some Africans were needed for security. The highest priority of use for metropolitan Spaniards abroad was expanding and sustaining an empire. Peninsulares were regularly recruited to serve in the garrisons of Spanish Italy, from Naples to Lombardy; in the Netherlands and in Germany against rebels and heretics; in the Mahgreb against infidels; in the Atlantic, Mediterranean and Pacific oceans as naval crews; in conflicts with France and England as the sinews of war. The state’s cost per fighting man tripled over the course of the sixteenth century, with frequent mutinies over defaults in payment. The Spanish Army of Flanders, in particular, was “probably the most unruly” in Europe, with 45 mutinies between 1572 and 1609. Military loyalty was always a two-way street, even unto bondage. At Algiers, enslaved Spanish deserters expected to be well fed and cared for until ransomed by Iberian charitable organizations, dedicated to rescuing Christians from bondage.19 Civilians bound for America in prosperous sixteenth-century Spain almost never went even as indentured servants. They crossed in groups through networks of family, clientage community and locality. Kinship ties, perhaps stronger in Spain than in other countries of Western Europe, provided the cost of transportation. This phenomenon of extended chains of relations on both sides of the Atlantic, in stark contrast to their virtual total absence in the African migration stream, will be important to our final conclusions about the potential economic costs of European enslavement. In the postconquistador period, various other forms of coerced Indian labor were used. The most famous was the Mita for Indians at Potosí. In the highlands of Peru their use appears to have been far cheaper for employers than that of transported Africans, and, ceteris paribus for Europeans, whether free or bonded. Mita Indians offered employers a steady reliable stream of labor, reproduced, transported, and fed, at no direct cost to the employer. Epidemiology also seems to have favored local inhabitants over outsiders in these highlands. Thus, even in some mines, with all the apparent advantages of coerced labor, African slaves did not offer a competitive advantage in the unskilled labor force. Where Indians remained plentiful enough, neither African slaves nor Spanish convicts were cost-effective alternatives.20 The more important question to be addressed, for the “Iberian” period, is Eltis’s assertion about the relative preponderance of Old World sources 10

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry of migration in the first century following the Columbian voyages. Table I-I, in the Rise of African Slavery, seems to indicate that it was overwhelmingly Europeans, not Africans, who were on the move on the high seas until the development of Portuguese plantation Brazil toward the end of the sixteenth century. A slight adjustment, however, takes note of an undercounted African presence. If we include the c.125,000 Africans shipped to the Atlantic Isles (mostly in Portuguese ships) the picture changes. Africans, instead of representing only 24 percent of Atlantic migrants before 1580, represented almost half of the Atlantic migrants. More significantly, they represented fully twothirds of the combined total of African and Portuguese migrants. In other words the sixteenth-century Portuguese profile of Afro-European migration was closer to that of Europe as a whole during the seventeenth century. In this respect Eltis’s division of the early modern period into a pre-1640 phase of Iberian contact, dominated by Amerindians and a second phase of DutchEnglish interaction dominated by Africans is somewhat artificial. Portugal was the first country to cross the threshold of moving more Africans than Europeans on Atlantic ships. As the first major European nation to tap into African slavery via the Atlantic, the Portuguese case is of particular interest. The first groups enslaved by the Portuguese in the New World were also Amerindians, obviously the cheapest and most accessible potential laborers. The Portuguese first choice of coerced labor in the Atlantic islands was for captive labor in the vicinity – Canary islanders, followed by a mixture of enslaved Moors and African slaves. By the time Saõ Tomé began to develop as a sugar island, around the time of the Columbian explorations to the West, Africans had already become the labor force of choice. From the perspective of transportation costs this seems quite logical. It made far more sense to derive a cane cultivating labor force for Sao Tomé from the proximate coast of West Africa than from the far more distant shores of Portugal. The implications of this choice for future dependency are considerable. The epidemiological impact of African pathogens on Europeans at San Tomé was as decisive as the almost simultaneous impact of Euro-African pathogens on the Amerindian populations of the Americas. The first attempts to settle the Sao Tome island were unsuccessful because of tropical diseases. In 1493 King João I of Portugal made a successful attempt, using a combination of degredados, (convicts), black slaves from Africa, and young Jewish children, seized from their parents in flight from Spain after the expulsion of 1492. (In some Jewish accounts, the Portuguese king claimed the Jewish children as captives and “slaves”.) In any event, only a fraction of these Christianized children survived to be mated at maturity, as freemen, to Africans. A number of points about the initial context of Portuguese settlement of the Atlantic are relevant to the Brazilian transition two generations later. From the perspective of transportation costs, Portugal the pioneer of Atlantic slavery, could theoretically have been the pioneer enslaver of Europeans. However, 11

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry aside from the potential costs of enslaving themselves, the Portuguese would certainly have developed enormous problems in meeting their global manpower commitments in Brazil, North Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa, the Indian Ocean, and Southeast Asia. Portuguese expansion began in the early 1400s in the context of a concern with underpopulation. The country had certainly not yet fully recovered from the ravaging effects of the plague. Portuguese metropolitan outflows after 1450 were, to some extent, compensated for by the inflow of African slaves, whose migration peaked in the sixteenth century. Before and after the Columbian voyages of the 1490s the Portuguese imported African slaves to Europe, probably upwards of 50,000 by 1550. Ten percent of Lisbon’s population was of African descent by midcentury. No other European capital’s population ever remotely approached that proportion of Africans or slaves.21 Portugal’s absolute net gain or loss is less significant than the fact that inflows of Africans were perceived as good capital investments for a full century before the development of Brazilian plantations. One need take no position about whether Africans were imported to remedy a sustained, or only a perceived, demographic deficit. From a socioeconomic perspective the more significant issues are economic rather than demographic. It would have been relatively easy for King João to have physically expelled all Jewish refugees from Portugal, or to ship them all to Sao Tomé. However, either choice would have been detrimental to his overall colonial and metropolitan interests. To establish a new colony dominated by adult Spanish Jews would have risked producing a colonial elite without any traditional loyalty to whatever to the Portuguese crown. Iberian colonization was premised upon the isolation of new settlements from the slightest taint of religious disloyalty. The very idea of opening the colonizing floodgates to a Jewish majority to a new colony was probably still more unimaginable than the idea of enslaving them Such a deportation, whether free or captive, would also have deprived Portugal of valuable human capital at home. The Sephardic refugees of 1492 represented urban mercantile and artisanal cohorts. Portugal had better uses for these forcibly detained and converted refugees than as an underutilized and rapidlydying remnant of field slaves off the coast of Africa. Like Spain, and with a far smaller population, Portugal began its slave system in the Americas at the very moment that it was consolidating the world’s first truly global seaborne empire. Portugal abundantly illustrates the multiplicity of constraints against the enslavement of Europeans in the early modern period. On the American side of the Atlantic one can make three definitive statements about the founding of the Brazilian plantation system. There was great continuity in, and Portuguese dependence on, the transference of know-how in sugar and coerced labor models from the Atlantic islands. Brazil was also heavily dependent upon Northern European foreigners for capital, management and skilled labor. They were far beyond the reach of Portuguese legal and military coercion,. Finally, although there 12

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry were European lavoradores tilling the canefields as tenants and sharecroppers during the founding decade of Brazil’s sugar plantations (the 1530s), the massive use of Indian slaves began even before the end of that decade. Indian slavery quickly reached its peak between 1540 and 1570. In one captaincy the vast majority of laborers were already slaves by the mid-1540s. Thereafter, expansion was keyed to military campaigns and punitive raids for captives. Presumably these raids garnered captives at a far lower cost than similar actions would have harvested if unleashed against laborers in Portugal. The object of Portuguese statesmen and merchants in the world beyond Europe was to secure the economic benefits of their overseas networks without weakening the man-power available at home and abroad. A seaborne empire that had to recruit black slaves in order to meet shortages of manpower in the Indian Ocean was hardly in a position to force its European subjects into field labor on the islands on the Atlantic or the colonial frontier of Brazil. In other words, sixteenth-century Portugal was faced by the same constraints as Spain, with an even lower population base. A thin layer of Portuguese was spread across the world from Macao to Brazil, with particularly heavy manpower requirements along the shores of the Mediterranean, Africa, and the Indian Ocean. Portuguese exiles and degredados were sent forth to serve, not to sow and hoe. The Portuguese seem to have arrived at the same rough soldier/slave division of labor that all Europeans were to follow until the age of the Atlantic Revolutions. The lesson of early modern Muslim slave armies is relevant in this respect. Muslim slaves often formed the core of armies from Indonesia to the Balkans and North Africa. However, the enslaved were usually recruited as children, often as tributary levies from conquered non-Muslim peoples. They were usually not kidnaped or conscripted captured adults.22 For the Portuguese to have imitated the pattern of the Ottomans in the Balkan (i.e. kidnaping Christians within Europe) would inevitably have meant explosive conflicts with more powerful neighboring societies. After the mass roundup of Jewish children in Portugal, the next politically sanctioned mass kidnaping of other people’s children in Europe had to await the twentieth-century the Lebensborn project of a military dominant Nazi Germany. Considering the probable impact of a variety of Portuguese routes to the enslavement of Europeans draws attention a fundamental principle of institutional economics. In any complex structure of social relations one would not expect, absent total domination by one power, a once-for-all jump to full property-rights in the bodies of human groups hitherto exempt from such treatment. The Portuguese monarchs would have had two major options, to enslave their own subjects or captive Europeans. Enslaving and exporting either of those groups would have raised the cost of policing the new transatlantic settlements and of coping with the feedback of resistance from kin, class, community, or foreign rulers. I will deal more explicitly with these costs with regard to the English slave system. Here, it suffices to emphasize 13

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry that Portugal was a least-likely candidate for accumulating either prisoners of war or home-grown undesirables. Any attempt to enslave European outsiders by any of Europe’s smaller powers would most likely have been a formula for national disaster. It would have stimulated alliances designed to smash the power of any rogue prince attempting to initiate a violent appropriation of others’ subjects.23 The Portuguese metropolis would certainly have become a plausible target of retaliation. The proverbial Iberian rulers’ fears of subversive Moors and Jews peopling their thinly-policed plantation zones in the Atlantic islands, Brazil and the Spanish Main would have been intensified by the overseas presence of enslaved Christian Europeans. Their former rulers could pick off plantation areas at will, killing or even enslaving the Portuguese former masters and shipping them to North Africa. In other words, the heaviest overhead costs would have been born by the smallest innovator in the creation of property rights in Europeans. Europe’s pluralistic state system guaranteed a steep rise in the frequency, ubiquity, and intensity of violence against any attempt to deliver up to 650,000 European slaves to Brazil in its vulnerable formative period. Indeed, the clearest implication to be drawn from almost any plausible scenario of Portuguese-sponsored European enslavement is that Portugal’s initial primacy in both the transatlantic slave trade and its commercial Afro-Asian empire would have ended a good deal sooner than the 1640s. Portugal’s early pre-eminence in the slave trade and plantation slavery rested on the fact that its slaves were Indians or Africans. For Portugal, a slave trade in Europeans was not just unthinkable. It was undoable. Of course, it made economic sense for Portugal, as for Spain, to begin tropical cultivation of commercial staples by forced labor with the most proximate available populations. In Portugal’s case this meant beginning with laborer-inplace on both sides of the Atlantic. Europeans, and even some Africans, were needed for policing slaves and defending masters against external threats from others. When the epidemiological effects of intercontinental contact and coercion on Indians indicated a need for a new external source of labor in Brazil, it was most cost-effective to tap into the century-old network on the Eastern edge of the South Atlantic system. There is one final reason why a Portuguese decision to enslave fellow Portuguese would have been especially divisive, and perhaps unenforceable at any affordable price. The overwhelming majority of the enslavables (convicts and the poor) would have been “Old Christians.” A large proportion of the merchants transporting them, perhaps a majority, would have been “New Christians”. Ironically, the latter group, if threatened with deportation as slaves, might have been tempted to buy time by announcing that they were crypto-Jews, subject to incarceration in Portugal by the Inquisition, and prohibited by law from residing laboring on any Portuguese plantation. The Inquisition would have been threatened with the loss of one of its chief economic supports – confiscation of a heretic’s property, since a slave’s former 14

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry property would certainly be forfeit to the enslaver, i.e. the monarch. The Church would have had every economic motive to align itself against enslavement, allying itself with popular rage against both planter needs and royal greed. Merely the contemplation of such a bizarre and dangerous combination would probably have deterred any fantasy about “rounding up the usual suspects,” i.e. the poor and the criminals, from the ranks of the populace.

III It must be concluded that under any plausible economic assumptions, the South Atlantic lowland plantation system would still have become slave, and increasingly African, during the century or more when Iberians dominated that system.24 However, the most critical phase of the transition occurred in the last two-thirds of the seventeenth-century. During that period Africans definitively came to constitute the overwhelming majority of transatlantic migrants. The predominant terminus of that migration became that part of the Caribbean dominated by Northwestern Europeans. Within Northwestern Europe the English emerged as the principal carriers of slaves to the New World. It was this new interaction of Europeans with Africans that determined the profile of the transatlantic slave trade and the prevailing labor force for the next two centuries. For many historians the half century after Portuguese dominance of the slave and sugar trades was shattered in the 1630s and 1640s is a turning point in the Atlantic system. The Anglo-Dutch, with their combination of far more efficient economic institutions, superior organizations of credit and distribution, and their more rigorous use of slave labor, made New World slavery one of the most profitable, productive and dynamic forms of enterprise in world history.25 The period 1640–1700 also offers the best possible conditions for testing the potential of a plantation system hypothetically powered by Europeans slaves. In the sixty years before 1640 more than four out of every five people shipped across the Atlantic by Northwestern Europeans were Europeans. In the sixty years after 1700 the proportion was reversed. Four out of every five people shipped to the Americas were from Africa (see table 1). One can identify the crucial shift more narrowly. In 1580–1640, 97 percent of those carried to America in English ships were Europeans. In 1700–1760, that share fell to 22 per cent. Inhabitants of the British Isles were the largest single European group to cross the Atlantic between 1640 and 1700. England appears to be the best possible case for imagining the substitution of coerced Europeans for Africans, and on a scale that would have been large enough to have made for a more efficient economic expansion of the plantation system in the Americas. We accept the conclusion that it would surely have been cheaper ceteris paribus, for European merchants to ship Europeans rather than Africans to the Caribbean and to other ports in North America. The existing costs of transportation per capita would have become cheaper still by packing Europeans 15

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry as tightly into carriers as were seventeenth-century Africans in the Middle Passage. However, some additional costs appear once one has to consider how each segment of the system would have operated under the assumption of a European-fed Atlantic slave system from the mid-seventeenth-century onwards. Let us begin at the locus of the breakthrough – the Caribbean. Security concerns form a critical part of some explanations for the original diversion of sugar plantations from the Atlantic islands to the Americas. Islands were more easily policed by European naval powers. In order to establish and maintain high slave/master ratios working in gang labor conditions, the isolation of the labor force was highly desirable26 Eltis rightly insists on the importance of this insularity, but he writes of this naval power as a “European” force. European plantation systems, however, as all of his tables, show, were national, not “continental” units. They were established not by Europeans in general, but successively, by Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, English, and Danish sovereigns. Slave trades likewise were sanctioned by political “powers,” each with its own navy and merchant fleet. What was the contextual situation of these plantation-founding states during the second phase of the Atlantic system? I note only three important conditions. According to a recent study of the incidence of war in European history, the years between 1500 and 1700 were the most warlike in modern times: in the proportion of years of war under way (95 percent); of frequency (nearly one every three years); of average duration; of extent and magnitude. Even more explicitly we must consider the relations between the three major naval powers of Western Europe, the Dutch, English and French fleets. Their governments sponsored the great non-Iberian flow of slaves to the sugar islands. During the founding period of their slave colonies (c. 1640–1713), when they were in rough military equilibrium, at least two of those three powers were almost constantly at war with each other. For the first time in world history high seas navies were capable of operating as long-range permanent fleets. Even when the balance-of-power was momentarily upset by a naval victory, the guerre de course made ample amends as a disruptive force. Between 1689 and 1697, for example, French privateers captured some 4,000 enemy vessels, despite the crushing defeat of France’s major battle fleet in 1692. During this “savage and prolonged naval rivalry” armed ships could operate in the Pacific, the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean. This became the age, par excellence, of the privateer and the buccaneer.27 The impact of this conflict on trade may be gauged not only from the litany of planter complaints but from the freight rates per ton paid by the Royal African Company. During the prolonged warfare after England’s “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, annual rates often doubled, tripled, and sometimes quadrupled (Table 2). Another dimension to the oceanic aspect of this maritime violence must be fully appreciated in order to consider the costs of Europeans enslaving Europeans. Most transported Africans were captives and prisoners of war. 16

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry Table 2. Freight rates per ton paid by the Royal Africa Company for homeward shipment of sugar (Annual Average, %’s)

1678 1679 1680 1681 1682 1683 1684 1685 1686 1687 1688 1689 1690 1691 1692 1693 1694 1695 1696 1697 1698 1699 1700 1701 1702 1703 1704 1705 1706 1707 1708 1709 1710 1711 1712 1713 1714 1715 1716 1717

Barbados

Jamaica

5.2 4.0 3.5 3.5 4.0 3.6 3.5 4.8 5.2 4.4 4.2 6.1 10.1 7.5 7.8 7.7 7.2 9.5 11.2 12.5 6.4 3.1 3.2 2.8 2.5 3.6 9.6 10.1 8.4 7.6 7.5 9.6 7.5 6.0 5.3 5.4 4.0 3.5 3.3 3.4

6.5 6.6 5.8 6.1 6.1 5.0 5.1 4.6 4.2 4.0 4.0 5.6 7.8 14.0 16.9 12.0 12.0 17.5 18.0 25.9 16.2 9.9 6.7 6.9 8.0 13.6 16.0 18.0 20.5 16.8 17.2 18.6

9.6 8.9 10.0

Source: Ralph Davis, The Rise of the English Shipping Industry in the 17th and 18th Centuries (London: MacMillan, 1967), 283.

17

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry Table 3. Combined Anglo-Dutch Slave Trades in Peace and War, 1679–1712 Peace/War

Period

Average Annual Transports

% Difference

Peace War Peace War

1679–1688 1689–1697 1698–1702 1703–1712

11,198 p.a. 7,059 p.a. 16,029 p.a 10,529 p.a.

– −41 +127 −34

Sources: For the English slave trade, David Eltes, “The British Transatlantic Slave Trade before 1714: Annual Estimates of Volume and Direction,” in The Lesser Antilles in the Age of European Expansion, ed. Robert L. Paquette and Stanley L. Engerman, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996, Table 10-1, pp. 199–200; for the Dutch slave trade, Johannes Menne Postma, The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade 1600–1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), Tables 2.2, 2.3, 2.4; pp. 35, 45 and 48.

Like all other slave societies, Africans had boundary definitions of enslavability. Warfare in Africa might ensure a large flow of slaves. It could also severely disrupt such flows. The potential impact of war on the flow of slaves did not, of course, end at the African Atlantic coast. During the wars of the 1690s deliveries of slaves from Anglo-Dutch shippers often dropped by more than 40 per cent below their peacetime levels of the 1680s. Any cost benefit analysis however, must go one step further. The actual volatility of slave transits from Africa to the Caribbeans is likely to underestimate the hypothetical impact of predation were slaves loaded in European ports bound for the West Indies. Privateers operating out of their home ports in the offshore waters of Europe or the Caribbean would have made the transhipment of Dutch, English, Irish or French captives more hazardous. A similarly heightened risk would have attended re-exportations en route from Guadeloupe or Jamaica or Barbados or Curaçao. The brutality of such naval encounters would have increased. Crews on slavers would not only have been fighting for their cargoes but resisting their own appropriation as cargo. As Eltis demonstrates for Africans, the costs of resistance must be factored into the costs of Atlantic crossings. They are as necessary for calculating putative European slave migrations. Europeans were far more familiar with, and less terrified by, their floating prisons than were their less experienced African contemporaries. Whereas African identities did not become subcontinental until after the ending of the slave trade, Europeans would have come on board slavers able to communicate almost immediately.28 Prisoners of war would have been equally familiar with the weapons of their captors. If the cost of taking unwilling people from Africa was almost one-fifth higher than the costs of transporting free laborers, one can be sure that the cost of shipping enslaved over unenslaved Europeans would have been correspondingly enhanced after 1640.29 Much more significant than the costs of surveillance on board would have been the costs of policing in the slave colonies themselves. Slave islands 18

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry would have been converted from isolated prisons for Africans into permanent European targets of opportunity. The actual transatlantic slave trade depended upon the combined inability of Europeans to project their domination into Africa and their ability to preserve the severance of African ties with their original communities. Just the opposite would have occurred between Europeans and Europeans. For example, when war broke out in Europe in 1666, the French seized the English part of the divided island of St. Christopher. They appropriated 400 blacks and deported 5,000 white settlers.30 In a world of enslavable enemy Europeans it would have been far more profitable for them to appropriate the deported 5,000 as well. The implications of this incident are as clear as they are inescapable. Raiding Caribbean islands would have offered an abundance of seasoned slaves, cheaper to deliver to other islands or anywhere in the circumcaribbean, in far shorter sailing times, at lower mortality rates, and in far better physical shape than could be matched by any slaver from Africa or from Europe. The smaller islands would have made ideal slave barracoons, just as they were ideal plantation zones. In venturing to the islands a prospective planter would, of course, have had to consider that he was risking his liberty as well as his wealth. In such a situation he was virtual capital as well as an actual capitalist. There are other probable security consequences to the enslavement of Europeans in the islands. In 1689 St. Christopher’s Irish servants rose up in the name of deposed King James and sacked the English sector.31 The French again invaded the English part of the island. Consider this picture: multiethnic islands, filled with French, or English, or Dutch, or Irish, or Scots, or Spanish prisoners, each awaiting armed and mobile rescuers. Such a prospect would, at a minimum, have raised the overhead costs of preventing interisland communication, whether in anticipation of foreign fleets, or rumors of domestic plots. The same considerations that made Iberians rigorously exclude Muslims and Jews from their vulnerable colonies would have been intensified by slave populations consisting of hardened veterans of European warfare. Settled in African/European ratios, European slaves would have outnumbered their militarily inexperienced masters by ratios of up to eight or nine to one. Even as indentured servants the Irish were considered as entirely untrustworthy as militia. The degree of danger might be considered to rise in direct proportion to the certainty of the coerced that theirs would be a lifelong condition. I will not lengthen the risk list with the probable extra hemorrhage of slave laborers in mainland North America. Nor is it necessary to stress the precariousness of the British Isles themselves in the face of French military threats between 1689 and 1815. As we will see, military recruitment against other Europeans, and European others, trumped the marginal utility of enslaving other Europeans.32 We must go beyond imagining the higher costs of containing slaves in place in the Caribbean, to the far steeper costs of innovating. Would the costs of transporting and sustaining European slavery in a politically riven Caribbean 19

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry have been able to compete with the already established African plantation slavery in Brazil? Could the costs of innovation, whatever the potential outcome if the system, be sustained through the fragile period of foundation? The islands would not have been the central problem for innovators. Eltis rests a good deal of his case for the great success of the Northwestern Europeans on the fact that they had not only moved further along in developing a culture of civil liberty for their fellow citizens, but had created the infrastructure for enhancing economic development. Here the Dutch were recognized pioneers. They had developed a legal and institutional framework which allowed them to maximize the organization of labor and capital afforded by staple production in plantations. The Dutch, c. 1640, not only had an edge in a “Northwestern” economic organization, but a technological lead in sugar cultivation. Yet of all the European slaving powers between 1450 and 1870, the Dutch were the least likely to have made a transition to any form of slave labor but African. This was because the Dutch, unlike all other Europeans colonizers in the Americas, began their plantation system with African slaves in place. When the West India Company conquered part of Northeastern Brazil in the 1630s they became rulers of a fully furnished plantation system, complete with European masters and African workers. In wresting control of most of the African coast from Portugal, by the early 1840s, the Company was also assured of an immediate source of fresh slave labor. Whatever the relative cost of transporting people from Europe and Africa to America, it is inconceivable that it would have been less costly or more profitable for the WIC to reverse the ethnic composition of their Brazilian plantations, and to begin amassing a new European labor force, even one drawn from a Europe embroiled in the Thirty-Years War.33 After losing Brazil in 1645–51, the WIC began again in the Caribbean. Now they had an African supply network in place with no place to deliver them. They also lacked one element which at least one of their successful colonizing competitors had in abundance – Europeans ready to make the transatlantic crossing as voluntary settlers. From the beginning, the Netherlands required non-nationals to sustain both its metropolitan development and its overseas empire. Unlike the Portuguese, the Dutch sought and found an abundance of Europeans willing to come to the Netherlands to work, to serve in its armies, and to move on to one part of the overseas empire. At times, 60 percent of the soldiers in the armies of the Netherlands were foreigners.34 The Dutch, more than any other Northwest European nation, needed soldiers and sailors in the Old World far more than slaves in the New. The Dutch East India Company mobilized a voluntary overseas movement of up to a million Europeans. It is difficult to see the Dutch risking this efficient recruitment system by attempting to impose forced labor in order to help the Dutch West India Company successfully colonize Suriname. By contrast, the WIC was a trading company that had to bargain, through intermediaries, with Livorno’s poorest Jews, refugees from Spanish North 20

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry Africa, to resettle in the Caribbean. Such an enterprise was in no position to attempt to kidnap foreigners in European ports to fill its colonial labor needs.35 Enslaving foreigners would certainly have endangered the foreign voluntary networks which operated much like other European overseas voluntary migration chains. What about Dutch home-grown convicts, their unemployed and the poor? The Dutch standard of living in 1650 was the highest in Europe, their underemployment or unemployment probably the lowest, and their pool of “usable” convicts for serious crimes far too few to stock colonies on the scale achieved by their competitors. In terms of carrying Europeans to the Americas between 1640 and 1700, the Dutch ranked a poor fifth among the five major colonizing nations. They transported fewer than one-third of the next lowest metropolis (France). In other words, between 1640 and 1700, for every European leaving a Dutch port for America (even including foreigners) twenty were leaving from England. The Dutch/English ratio for the two centuries before 1760 is less than 3 to 100.36 Could the Dutch have easily multiplied the number of native-born serious offenders twenty or thirty-fold, in order to generate a full quota of slaves? We can address that question more closely when we turn to the more abundant English potential pool of coerced laborers. In the meantime, minting Dutch slaves for Suriname plantation gangs while foreigners voluntarily signed up for more pleasant, if unhealthy, service in the East, moves the counterfactual hypothesis of an exclusively Dutch domestic coerced labor force towards the bizarre. Two more observations suffice to show the difficulties entailed in the “home grown” hypothesis. Eltis concludes that Dutch resistance to enslaving each other did not primarily derive, as in the English case, from a societal concern for the individual. The Netherlands, with its many non-Calvinists as well as non-Dutch residents, he says, had a more acute a sense of the “fragility of the social compact.”37 I believe it would have been a good deal more fragile if native Netherlanders, like Portuguese “Old Christians,” had found themselves in the peculiar position of enjoying fewer protections against lifetime bondage than outsiders coming into their own land. In a decentralized nation like the Netherlands it is implausible to imagine that the same local authorities who afforded their communities the best welfare system in Europe could have been induced to allow a small sector of mercantile interests reorder the labor relations of the Republic. Dutch “fragility” went far deeper than its domestic pluralism and its decentralization in the seventeenth century. The Dutch Republic was frequently fighting for its very existence against the seventeenth century’s two most formidable land armies, – the Spanish army of Flanders before 1648, and the armies of Louis XIV after 1672. In such a situation the advantages entailed in accumulating coerced laborers for the West India Company rather than in mobilizing the citizenry for national survival must have been self-evident to every last West Indian investor and overseas planter in the Dutch Atlantic empire. 21

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry This takes us too far from our economic analysis, and the English case offers us the last and best candidate for developing a plantation system with a white and coerced (recall the Earl of Stamford) European labor force. As indicated above, only one out of three migrants to the English Americas was an African slave as late as the 1650s. By 1700 three out of every four arrivals were African. Until well beyond mid-century, English labor, much of it involuntary, was still available for long term hire, with enough credit and institutional faculties available to deliver them at a profit. More than any other colonizers, British capitalists founded their plantation economy with a mainly European workforce. The exodus from England actually peaked just before the turn to Africa, with more than one hundred thousand people departing from England.38 In the 1640s and 1650s England produced the whole range of possible sources of bound and coerced labor: servants, prisoners of war, convicts, social undesirables, prostitutes, sturdy beggars, and vagabonds. One must agree with Eltis that, if convicts and prisoners of war had been condemned even to lifetime service, let alone chattel slavery, planters would have paid a higher price for them, one probably competitive with what was being offered for Africans. At this premium, concludes Eltis, “the British government and merchants might have found ways to provide more convicts” – presumably enough ways to raise the numbers of lifetime bondsmen to the annual quota of 10,000 laborers demanded by colonial planters each year by the beginning of the eighteenth-century. All could have been shipped as, or more, cheaply than the Africans actually landed in the English Americas.39 One should also bear in mind the fact that lurid descriptions of Europeans’ willingness to torture, rape, kill, and to incarcerate other Europeans in galleys, occurred at a moment when England was more saturated by the “rhetoric” of liberties than was any other contemporary society.40 Setting this observation aside for the moment, we emphasize that the English Civil Wars of the 1640s and 1650s produced a surge of prisoners of war, domestic and foreign. They also co-coincided almost precisely with the peak of enforced migration to English America. What restrained Englishmen from taking the extra step to creating a condition of hereditary servitude for many of the inhabitants of the British Isles, given the temptations of war-induced captives and religion-induced hatred on the one hand, and surging planter demands for cane cultivators on the other? Eltis ascribes it to a powerful cultural barrier. The line to slavery was not crossed primarily because of the fundamentally psychological inability of Europeans to cross it, or (the Earl of Stamford aside), to even contemplate crossing it. It was a “shadowy,” almost preconscious market-generated barrier. Of all Europeans, the English (and the Dutch) were least likely to subject their “own” to slave-like conditions. Eltis is not quite so sure about the Dutch. They were apparently a bit less fully committed to the ultimate importance of the rights of the individual citizen than their fellow Europeans across the North Sea.41 22

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry I would venture that the decision to limit the boundaries of enslavability did not occur first, or primarily, within the conscience of individual English men and women, simultaneously and silently deciding to not to submit fellow islanders to the extreme forms of bondage that they observed across the Atlantic. Politics of course cannot be discounted. For decades England was wracked by violent upheaval and ideological escalation. The polarized language of liberty and slavery permeated political discourse. Freedom from slavery was central to, if not the exclusive component of liberty in the Civil Wars. Radical rhetoric against slavery reverberated from the early 1630s down through the end of the century. Until the peace of Utrecht the destiny of England, as all of its Western European neighbors, hung on the outcome of a military struggle with unprecedented financial burdens.42 Yet ideology alone might not have sufficed. Englishmen were as aware of the fragility of their own political institutions in practice as were their Dutch neighbors. It was not just concern for individual rights that deterred a major negative redefinition of legal rights, but the concrete costs to the political and social fabric of such an innovation. At the level of labor flows all potential streams of migrants flowing to the New World from the British Isles were not interchangeable. For indentured servants, overseas migrations represented only the last step in a sequence of options that ran from the local to the overseas markets. Mobility was tied to contract.43 The extension of an alternative market, tied entirely to coercion, would have brought disruption to the voluntary labor streams. The history of impressment offers an inkling of just what might have occurred with a massive switch by rulers to coercive labor. Impressment was an extraordinary extension of (not a substitute for) the voluntary labor market. Very few volunteers in Cromwell’s navy were willing to serve in the Caribbean once news about the mortality rates there filtered back. Outside the capital city “the press” faced enormous difficulties. Parish constables were often afraid to carry out their recruitment orders. When a government had to threaten recalcitrant constables with impressment for non-fulfillment, one can glimpse the sharply rising cost of enforcement even in and for a national public emergency like war. If planters had offered “higher prices” for the government to provide them with convicts on demand, shipping costs alone would not have interfered with the process. On the contrary. But what of “onshore” costs? Would they have been “trivial”, in establishing what Eltis calls “a properly exploited system”? Could they provide 10,000 forced migrants each year from localities without raising serious enforcement costs to the local magistrates who were supposed to implement the system? In the formula of North and Thomas, what would this new institutional arrangement, introduced to create new property rights for a very small group of private investors located on of distant islands, have cost? At a time when royalists and parliamentarians were desperately competing for popular loyalty, locality by locality, could such an activity conceivably have brought the private rate of return close to the social rate of return?44 23

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry In many parts of England impressment brought near paralysis. Some magistrates deliberately failed to “press” a single man for Cromwell’s navy. If the failure to enforce payment of ship money to the king had produced imprisoned martyrs for liberty, what would imprisonment or deportation for failure to generate English slaves for Barbadian planters have generated? The only alternative to local enforcement would have been bureaucratic expansion. Government press gangs arriving to pick up even legitimately convicted petty thieves destined for sugar gangs might find their prey gone and themselves in flight under a hail of stones. It was precisely the enduring strength of local self-government, a distinctive characteristic of English administration, that would probably have made the conversion of England into a zone of enslavement for its own citizens more expensive than almost anywhere else in Europe.45 Perhaps a glance at a New England incident in 1850 will cast light on the potential administrative costs entailed in introducing enslavement and coerced migration into England in 1650. The successful return of Thomas Sims, a black fugitive, from Boston to Georgia in 1851, cost the U.S. government $20,000. This must have been at least ten times Sims’s market value in Georgia. Throw in the cost of all the unsuccessful attempts at deportation in 1851–1855, and a historian is forced to conclude that the forced migration of large numbers of enslaved Englishmen would probably have been prohibitively expensive, except in a permanently authoritarian state.46 Eltis may be correct in asserting that the impact of epidemiology on Europeans going to the Americas is less than most scholars assume. Yet is equally erroneous to assume that it played no role at all in calculating Northwest European choices for African slaves. Differential mortality was probably decisive in the Portuguese choice of Africans for Sao Tome in the late fifteenth century, and for Brazil in the late sixteenth. Epidemiology it would probably have weighed upon English decision-makers too. At the very least, a sugar island destination would have increased resistance at the initial point of enslavement in England. We already have the evidence that resistance to impressment into Cromwell’s navy increased dramatically when the West Indies was the anticipated the destination for the fleet. When British convict transportation to the Americas was regularized in the eighteenth century it was directed towards the Chesapeake, not the Caribbean. At a minimum, there would have been an additional incentive to create a parallel flow of African slaves to the Caribbean. Warfare within the British Isles might have offered a more promising path to coerced transatlantic migration. Battles generated prisoners – sources of transported forced labor. Perhaps as many as 12,000 Irish, English and Scots royalists were thus transported. This was not, however, an economically viable mode of recruitment. Armies raised to crush rebellions on either side of the Civil War were intended as short term (because enormously expensive) human mobilizations. Deportation was almost always used as a deterrence 24

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry (pour décourager les autres), that is, a short term terror tactic, not a long term labor supply strategy. The prospect of deportation often accomplished the political aim of pacification as effectively as its implementation. A long and expensive war of attrition in Scotland was brought to an end by just the threat of shipping to “slavery in Barbados all those captured in arms.”47 Further North, the lifelong coerced labor of seventeenth-century Scottish colliers, whether regarded as serfdom or slavery, clearly fixed colliers in place and in community. Given its function as an employers’ response to a local labor shortage, it was the opposite of an institutional precedent for coerced migration to plantation America.48 A “long-distance serf trade,” as Eltis aptly notes, would have been an oxymoron in Scotland as well as in Poland. The Scottish example did not even prove to be contagious within the of the Scottish economy. In Ireland, communities harboring killers of English soldiers would often given a few hours to surrender the suspects or face mass deportation. The ratio of threats to actions is not given, but the policy was obviously aimed at pacifying the British Isles, not populating the Caribbean. The “fragility of institutions” was evident in every potential enslavement. Had Cromwell considered enslaving those resisting naval recruitment he might still have rejected the idea out of hand. Too many British sailors escaped the press by fleeing to Dutch ships. Such volatile human capital was far too valuable to squander on clearing tropical islands or awaiting welcoming enemy fleets, which would welcome their skills. Nor can one ignore the fact that foreign loans were needed to continue warfare within England, not very likely if the fellow citizens of Amsterdamers were being hauled off to harvest cane in the Caribbean. Finally there was the alternative of ransoming. Sending affluent captive to the tropics might well reduce their value by raising their chances of dying. The war did generate a flow of prisoners to the West Indies. But the benefits to the planters were hardly commensurate with the costs of accumulation. England lost a higher percentage of its population between 1640 and 1660 (190,000) than in either of the twentieth century’s two world wars. Scotland may well have lost 6 per cent (60,000), and Ireland 41 per cent (660,000). Civil wars are not good times for institutionalizing slavery, and often they are the reverse. The stakes are so high that contending parties often engage in competitive bidding in order to avoid defeat. Civil wars are thus times for large-scale military manumissions in slave societies, rather than for enslavements in non-slave societies. Calculations based on the opportunity costs of delivering English or African laborers to the Western Isles would have incorporated the high risks of war-time alienation. More important than the putative long-term appreciation for individual rights created by a market society was the more tangible short-term risk of forfeiting loyalty in a revolutionary situation. Brutality against white servants in the West Indies raised fears in Parliament that “our lives will be as cheap as those negroes.”49 25

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry Consider the economic implications of the choice to use enslavement, not as a one-off threat to induce pacification, but as an ongoing policy designed to ensure an adequate flow of slaves to the Caribbean. Ireland and Scotland would have become lands of marronage, perpetually awaiting, as they did in the aftermath of the English Revolution of 1689, the arrival of French armies and Stuart pretenders to stir insurrection on an ever-broader and more virulent scale. A turbulent countryside in Ireland ran quite counter to the needs of English landowners for agricultural labor in a devastated and depopulated country. Would those needs of proximate Ireland have been subordinated to the needs of planters in peripheral Barbados? To these costs we must add the cost of regenerating the coerced labor of Englishmen abroad. The problem of negative slave population growth in the Caribbean would have had to be addressed. The ratio of females to males in the actual convict flow across the British Atlantic during the eighteenth centuries fell far short of that reached with enslaved Africans during the same period. The potential reproductive deficit of European bondsmen in the Caribbean would therefore certainly have been worse than that of the actual Africans. Moreover, if only lifetime service had been introduced, the natural reproduction rate of servile labor would have been nil, requiring still greater imports than was the case with African slaves. It would have taken even the Southern colonies of North America generations longer than it did for a natural increase of slaves to make their slaves self-sustaining. Therefore one can presume that a much higher net flow of Europeans to the Americas would have been required to assure the same sized slave population in 1760 or 1800 as achieved by its actual African counterpart.50 This would not, however, have been the only cost to the European colonization in the Americas. English indentured servants bound for America would almost certainly have been terminated. The Redemption system for foreigners would have been stillborn. What European, without prior full funding for himself or his family, could offer his labor in exchange for passage, outbidding slaves who were being delivered to British docks at statesubsidized rates, and then packed into vessels at two or three to a ton? The slave trade would certainly have discouraged the waves of skilled Continental religious refugees, as well as the impoverished Continentals who otherwise found asylum in England or the Americas. The “best poor man’s country” would soon have become the “worst white man’s country”. One can hardly imagine a Sir Josiah Child contrasting the failed colonization policy of Spain with that of England. In 1699 Child boasted that, in just fifty years, England had gained more subjects in its colonies by prosperity, freedom and religious tolerance than had Spain in two hundred. When plantations belonged to “Mother-Kingdoms or Countries where Liberty and Prosperity is better preserved, and Interest of Money restrained to a Low Rate, the consequence is, that every Person sent abroad with the Negroes and Utensils he is constrained to employ . . . eight or ten Blacks for one White Servant . . . [so] 26

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry Every England-man in Barbadoes or Jamaica creates employment for four men at home.”51 In short, the best that might be said for the enslavement of Britons, from even the narrowest commercial perspective, is that the Middle Passage, i.e., the direct transportation of Europeans from Bristol to Barbados, would have been cheaper per capita, than the shipment of the same number of African slaves from Bristol to Barbados via Benin, under the same conditions.

IV One of the major contributions of Eltis’s assessment of the early modern Atlantic is the degree to which he has brought Europe back into the story in strikingly new comparative terms. His story is fundamentally rooted in the evolution of European civil and economic relations during the centuries before and after the Columbian voyages. More systematically and cogently than ever before, he shows the plantation system to be an offshoot of European capitalism, and not visa versa. That system arose from the severe limitations imposed upon European control of labor in either Africa or Europe, and the wider latitude allowed to Europeans over labor in the Americas. Eltis further and compellingly argues that European industrialization after 1750, like Caribbean slavery after 1650, owed its impetus primarily to economic, patterns of behavior and capital amassed in Europe itself. The Rise of African Slavery puts the economic significance of New World slavery into a diminished perspective. Despite the outstanding productivity and per capita value of Britain’s slave colonies, even their gross product equaled that of a small English county by 1700, and still only a slightly wealthier county by 1800. In light of the above analysis, my addition to Eltis’s assessment of the choice for Africans is that the Rise is still insufficiently Eurocentric. Contrary to the implications of his own premises about European centrality in the process, he reaches less deeply into Europe than he does into Africa and America. The agency costs and constraining conditions of Africa and the Africans are more carefully enumerated and quantified. The analogous costs and benefits of labor choices are left relatively underdeveloped for Europe. I therefore conclude by focusing upon two aspects of European development which are only separately addressed in Eltis’s study, but which must be brought together for purposes of analytical clarity. The first concerns the fundamental distinction between the basis of European wealth compared with that of many other parts of the world in the centuries after 1500. Slaves were the principal form of revenue producing capital recognized in African law. By contrast, in European legal systems, “land was the primary form of private revenue-producing property.” Even in Iberia, slaves were a relatively minor form or property. Further North, slaves were virtually or completely unrecognized in law. As Eltis aptly emphasizes, European property rights, especially in one’s own labor were vested in the individual, even in occupations still widely 27

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry regarded as “servile”. Control over labor was thus exercised through property rights in other means of production, in land or fixed capital. This entailed different aims for collective violence. In Africa wars and raids for slaves were equivalent to wars of conquest. European rulers of the seventeenth-century aimed at conquering territory as a principal means of expanding their realm’s wealth and power. A principal aim of conquest was to keep people productively in place. This was true despite the fact that warfare was endemic to the European continent during the sixteenth and seventeenth-centuries; despite the fact that wars were frequent enough to have ensured an abundant supply of captives throughout that century; and despite the fact that the economies of Europe evolved “against all the obstacles that could be reared by war, hostility and jealousy between the rival nation states”.52 In seeking territory, rulers assumed that the benefits of conquest could best be reached by keeping peasants and artisans on site and doing business as usual. When Louis XIV, the pre-eminent war lord of the second half of the seventeenth-century, invaded the Dutch Republic in 1672, he distributed a message to all the communities he could reach: “His Majesty has been obliged, only with displeasure, to carry the War into the Lands possessed by the Dutch, and his design is only to punish those of the government, and not to ruin the populace . . .” His Majesty further promised to pay his army punctually, to keep them in order, to have them feed themselves, to allow civilians and their goods free passage into towns, to provide towns with inexpensive protection against marauders.”53 The thrust of European war policy was toward the rationalization of civilian payments to armies and toward a minimization of civilian insecurity and mass flight. Even the pillaging and terrorizing of resisting towns by Cromwell’s armies were deemed extraordinary disruptions of the everyday functions that should properly produce obedient subjects and taxpayers. States strove to lighten the burden of an acquiescent populace. Winning the compliance of one’s own nationals was still more important the rulers, especially in regimes where active consent of the governed was assumed. Towards the end of the seventeenth century the fate of the European powers was more dependent than ever before on a military struggle lasting for a full generation. England’s costly and incessant warfare against Louis XIV required a “financial revolution,” repeating the process of innovative state-building first achieved a century before by the Dutch in their long war of liberation. As the unprecedented national debt of England attested, the war was best fought using more rational mobilization of economic resources. No group in England, mercantilist or otherwise, conceived of giving priority to the labor needs of remote island economies over the threat from Europe. When the jails of England were emptied it was in order to conscript the inmates for action across the Channel, not the Atlantic. National consent and domestic tranquility trumped the need for private coercion abroad. In the words of William Penn: “’tis the great interest of a Prince, that the People 28

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry should have a share in the making of their own Laws . . . [because] it makes Men Diligent, and increase the Trade, which advances the Revenue: for where Men are not Free, they will never seek to improve, because they are not sure what they have, and less of what they get.”54 Such aims could hardly have been better achieved by dividing the nation into free and enslavable subjects. Eltis’s assertion, that “hardening attitudes towards the poor were seen throughout Western Europe,” and especially early in Protestant Europe, does not strike me as compellingly documented for the second half of the seventeenth century. It seems dubious as applied to England after 1655, when both population and voluntary overseas migration fell. Both developments coincided with a probable rise in wages, and with a wave of charitable foundations for the poor. Voices demanding houses of discipline for the poor did not go unchallenged. As Dudley North noted, as early as 1691, workhouses were proving impossible of rigorous enforcement. Although they fell well short of slavery or bondage in exile, “our Natures” were “too soft and pittyful” to “hold one and another to hard labor.” North proposed doing away with the entire Poor/Workhouse system, and allowing unfettered freedom of movement for labor. It was simply “not possible to force a free people to work for less wages than will produce sufficient sustenance for them and their families.”55 Introducing broad measures of enslavability into a system that no longer allowed for them would have created far more turmoil than did the purchasing of Africans. The costs of enslavement did not begin in the barracoons of Benguela. They could not have ended with barracoons in Bristol. Even the line between enslavable Africans and unenslavable Europeans was not as clear as Eltis implies: “Clearly, the British viewed black slaves, including the few who lived in England, as British chattels rather than British citizens, if they saw them at all.”56 Quite the contrary. As early as the end of the seventeenth century, Chief Justice Holt unequivocally held that, in England, “the law took no notice of a Negro.” As far as I know, popular commentaries generally denied that any resident of England could be a chattel. The only consensual statement that one can make about black slaves brought to England was that their status there remained disputed. Justice Holt’s categorical statement for Blacks remained contested because it threatened the legal framework of economic development on the other side of the Atlantic. Any attempt to widen the network of enslavables to incorporate freeborn Englishmen, however, would probably have produced a clear decision, reaffirming the metropolitan Common Law tradition “in favor of liberty,” a century before the Somerset decision of 1772. An analogous debate over Aryan-Jewish differentiation among Germans, in 1933–35, may again be relevant here. A “narrow” definition of Jewishness, was favored by bureaucrats. It won out over a wider definition of pollution favored by Party ideologues. The bureaucratic argument was that the larger the proportion of the degraded, the lower was the likelihood of popular acquiescence. 29

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry The significance of countervailing power as an inhibitor is also illustrated by another choice of this same European power. Poison gas was massively used as a weapon for killing enemy soldiers between 1915 and 1918. Between 1939 and 1945 it was used by only one side, and against defenseless noncombatants. David Ben Gurion posed the relevant question to the allies: “If, instead of Jews, thousands of English, American or Russian women and children and aged had been tortured every day, burnt to death, asphyxiated in gas chambers – would you have acted in the same way?”57 Mutatis mutandis, the implicit answer to this twentieth-century question offers one reason why Europeans were not substituted for African slaves in the seventeenth. If one views the possibilities from the perspective of European economic institutional development, (re-) introducing slave law into Northwestern Europe would have been, even for reasons of political economy alone, detrimental to European economic development. For the political and economic elites of 1650 to 1750, by what other criteria would European economic policy have been formulated? Is it accidental that Adam Smith, in 1776, justified both Europe’s division of labor, and its inequality of wealth, by a comparison of Europe with Africa? At the end of the first chapter in his Wealth of Nations he concluded: “Compared, indeed, with the more extravagant luxury of the great, his [the very meanest person in a civilized country] accommodation must no doubt appear extremely simple and easy; and yet it may be true, perhaps, that the accommodation of a European prince does not always so much exceed that of an industrious and frugal peasant, as the accommodation of the latter exceeds that of many an African king, the absolute master of the lives and liberties of ten thousand naked savages.”58 It is not clear to me that many frugal peasants or industrious authors in Europe would have disagreed with Smith, either in 1776, or a hundred years on either side of that date. To the bottom line then: could most Europeans have done still better, economically speaking, by coercing other European laborers to, and in, America? My inclination is to paraphrase one of the late-seventeenth century’s leading philosophers. From the perspective of economic development Europeans were having the best of all possible New Worlds. Their imperial economic interests were well served by creating a house divided, with free labor at home and slave labor beyond the line, in America. As Eltis repeatedly has shown, as long as the slave trade lasted the plantation slave societies were among the wealthiest and most productive areas of the world. The consequence was that the most optimal division of labor led to the Africanization of the plantation Americas. In the still longer run, Western European rulers of the seventeenth century also seem to have made a very judicious economic decision by not converting their home territories into zones of involuntary servitude for export. We have noted the almost certain impact that enslavement procedures would have had on the transatlantic networks of voluntary labor. 30

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry We must also envision the impact of enslavement upon the internal labor systems of Northwestern Europe as a whole. The strong, if uneven, growth of labor markets of the five centuries before 1650 would certainly have been stalled, if not reversed, by the turn to slaving on every shore of the Atlantic. Would the industrial revolution have eluded England or France, as it certainly did Portugal the Netherlands, Japan and China, for a longer than it did? Widespread slavery in Europe would have subverted the premises of Smithian growth, that “the creation of efficient institutions, legal frameworks, law and order, the protection of property rights, the mobility of capital and labour can lower transaction costs, promote commerce and exchange and thereby lead . . . to an accumulation of capital and population growth with gradual rises in real incomes per capita.”59 An imperial economy part slave and part free could long endure, as demonstrated by the whole early modern Atlantic. But  extending the zone of enslavement throughout Western Europe would, at a minimum, have raised transaction costs, disrupted law and order, reduced property rights in one’s own person and created a reign of terror, at least for a significant minority, and perhaps for all of Western Europe’s inhabitants. At the beginning of the twenty-first century most countries placed in the Low Human Development category of the United Nations Human Development index are in Sub-Saharan Africa, the classic zone of enslavement in the Atlantic system. They remain the lowest twenty-five of the 170 nations recorded on the index, all in the “Low Development” category. Those New World areas which relied heavily on slaves, but were not zones of primary enslavement, offer a more mixed picture. The USA, exceptionally, is among the top three on the index. The rest are all within the categories of High Human Development (from Barbados at #30) and Medium Human Development (to São Tomé at #132). Haiti alone (at #150) is within the category of “Low Human Development.” Was it the peculiar culture of Europeans that led to this outcome – a culture that maximized economic gain and maximized moral or ethnic barriers to enslaving fellow Europeans? I think we may infer that the institutional and political barriers to European enslavement were far more important. Given the virulent stew of religious and ethnic hostility within Europe during the century after 1550, one or another European polity, fully dominant on both sides of the Atlantic, might well have been tempted to make the breakthrough to European reenslavement (as happened in the twentieth century) or at least to lifetime servitude in the New World.60 The political and economic constraints to such an innovation were fairly clear in Europe’s pluralistic frame of reference. The balance of power and retaliation acted as a solid deterrent against bondage for Europeans (and often of Amerindians) in the American plantation zone. No power had sufficient omnipotence to ignore the risks of creating zones of euroslavery in the Americas. We get a faint echo of the significance of Europe’s pluralistic 31

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry constellation of power in faraway Virginia at the beginning of the eighteenth century. A 1705 Act Concerning Servants and Slaves declared, “that all servants imported and brought into this country, by sea or land, who were not Christians in their native country, (except Turks and moors in amity with her majesty, and others that can make due proof of their being free in England, or any other Christian country, before they were shipped in order to transportation hither) shall be accounted and be slaves, and as such be bought and sold notwithstanding a conversion to Christianity afterwards.”61 The cultural taboo against European servitude might or might not have sufficed to overcome formidable economic incentives to gang labor in the Caribbean. Europeans’ choices remained more obviously constrained by the actual and potential costs of Old World laborers, slave or free, than by cultural taboos in Europe or economic opportunities in the Americas.

Notes 1. The most systematic censuses of the early modern transatlantic migration may be found in the following works: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-Rom, ed. David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson and Herbert Klein, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999) is the culmination of a long series of slave trade censuses first stimulated by Philip D. Curtin’s, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969). On the European migration, see also New perspectives on the Transatlantic Slave Trade, a special edition of The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. LVIII:1 (January 2001); David Eltis, “Free and coerced transatlantic migrations: Some Comparisons”, American Historical Review, 88 (1983), 251–80; Colonialism and Migration: Indentured Labour Before and After Slavery P.C. Emmer, ed. (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1986); Magnus Morner, “Spanish Migration to the New World prior to 1810: A Report on the State of Research,” in Fredi Chiapelli, et al, eds. First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), Victorino Magalhaes-Godinho, “L’emigration portuguaise du Xveme siecle a nos jours:Histoire d une constante structural”, in Conjoncture economique – structures sociales: Hommage à Ernest Labrousse (Paris: Mouton, 1974); Leslie Choquette, Frenchmen into Peasants: Modernity and Tradition in the Peopling of French Canada (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Jan Lucassen, Dutch Long Distance Migration: A Concise History 1600–1900 (Amsterdam: IISG, 1991); David Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial America: An Economic Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); and Henry A. Gemery, “Emigration from the British Isles to the New World, 1630–1700: Inferences from Colonial Populations”, Research in Economic History, 5 (1980): 179–232. 2. See, inter alia, John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and The African Diaspora: Interpretive Essays, ed Martin L. Kilson, and Robert I. Rotberg (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1976). On a cultural plane see Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 3. See, inter alia, K.G. Davies, The North Atlantic World in the Seventeenth Century (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1974), 211–15, and an exhaustive

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4.

5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

survey of the contents of articles listed under “slave trade” in Historical Abstracts, an electronic index. Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern 1492–1800 (London: Verso, 1997), 350–363: “Alternative to Slavery?”. Blackburn also suggests that seventeenth-century could have anticipated the indentured servitude of the mid-nineteenth century and signed up “Africans and Asians for freedom or indentured service with the right of return after their terms of service”. This moves the argument even further from any economic rationale for the choice of labor in the Early Modern period. David Eltis, “Europeans and the Rise and Fall of African Slavery in the Americas: An Interpretation”, American Historical Review, 98, (December, 1993), 1399– 1423, esp. 1422–23; and idem. Rise of African Slavery, 63–70. See also, ibid., 70 n.32, for Eltis’s economic critique of Blackburn’s alternative. For another study premised on the idea that African slavery in the Americas was not an inevitable occurrence, see Russell R. Menard, “Transitions to African Slavery in British America, 1630–1730: Barbados, Virginia, and South Carolina,” Indian Historical Review [India] 1988–89 15 (1–2), 33–29. See Eltis, ibid., 203–4; 211–12; idem., “The Slave Economies of the Caribbean: Structure, Performance, Evolution and Significance”, in General History of the Caribbean, Vol. 3, The Slave Societies of the Caribbean, ed Franklin W. Knight (London: UNESCO publishing, 1997), 105–37; esp.  122–24; Eltis., Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 235–236; Robert W. Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), chap. 3 and 4; and Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974) ch.6. See Eltis, Rise of African Slavery, 7, and 203–203: and “Slave Economies of the Caribbean”, 121–123, on Cuba. For the British West Indies, see J. R. Ward, British West Indian Slavery, 1750–1834: The Process of Amelioration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 262. Eltis, Rise, 66. See, e.g. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), 123 on the Irish; Charles Carlton, Going to the Wars: The Experience of the British Civil Wars 1638–1651 (London: Routledge, 1992), 327 on the Scots, and, ibid., 337, on the English and some foreign mercenaries, all (too) loosely characterized as having been sent as “virtual slaves” to Barbados. We note that the dichotomy European/non-European was never the sole determinant of policy vis-a-vis the limits of slavery. In early seventeenth century London, “Parishes included the poor soldiers and sailors who fought in distant battles with European and Ottoman rivals in the category of the deserving poor, out of gratitude and fear . . . Manifestations of suffering exhibited by poor strangers and soldiers – physical marks of captivity, tongues cut out, brands, and assorted infirmities – punctuated their supplications . . . Henry Clare appeared in St. Michael Bassishaw in 1619–20, a ‘poore Captive being branded in Turkey . . . St. Benet Paul’s Wharf gave 12d to nine men . . . who had their tongues cut out by the Turks’”. Fractures within Christian Europe, on the other hand, legitimated some affiliations between Protestants and Muslims. Some London parishioners supported the ‘barbarryens’ of Morocco who had been captured by Spaniards in 1615–16. “’John Rasheley, mariner, ‘taken by a French Pirott & his tongue cut out’, received 12d. The Court of Aldermen also helped ‘barbarians’ by funding their transportation out of London and back to Barbary . . . St Olave Jewry,

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10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

for instance, gave 12d to a “moore taken by the Turks’”. See Claire S. Schen, “Constructing the Poor in Seventeenth-Century London,”Albion, 32:3 (Autumn, 2000), 450–463. Eltis Rise, 2,16, 83ff. Eltis “Europeans and The Rise and Fall”, 1408; Rise, 70. There is a substantial scholarly literature attempting to relate the rise and prevalence of antislavery in the West to economic change. See, inter alia, David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution 1770–1823, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Thomas Bender, ed., The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a problem in Historical Interpretation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992; and Seymour Drescher, “Review essay of The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation”, History and Theory, 32:3 (1993), 311–329. See Ibid. 78–80; 272–74; and compare with Eltis, “The volume and structure of the Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Reassessment”, William and Mary Quarterly, 58 (2001), 17–46; esp.  44, Table II, “Volume of Transatlantic Slave Departures by Region.” One can also envision the same anomaly in geographic terms: more territory in the Americas was put under slave cultivation in the century after 1750 than in the century before. Carlton, Going to the Wars, 253. An earlier English proposal to exchange captives in the custody of North African pirates for “harlots and the idle and lascivious portion of the female sect [sic]” met with no success. See N.A.M. Rodger, The Safeguard of the Sea: A Naval History of Britain, 660–1649 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), 384. See Eugene D. Genovese, The Slave holders’ Dilemma: Freedom and Progress in Southern Conservative Thought, 1820–1860 (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1992), 106: idem., The World the Slaveholders Made: Two essays in Interpretation (New York: Pantheon Books, 1969), Part Two. Eltis Rise, 61n. See, inter alia, Christopher R. Browning, Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 62, 97; Ulrich Herbert, Hitler’s Foreign Workers: Enforced Foreign Labour in Germany Under the Third Reich, trans. William Temple (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Albert Speer, The Slave State: Heinrich Himmler’s Master Plan (London, 1981). According to Ulrich Herbert, by 1944, one third of the German workforce was forced foreign labor (the proportion in agriculture was more than half), many under conditions with which leading Nazis were charged with enslavement both at Nuremberg and in subsequent litigation. All occupants of conquered Eastern Europe were under legal obligation to work for the conquers. Herbert estimates the total number of forced foreign laborers under the Nazis at 12 million; the International Tracing Services in Arolsen, Germany claims to have 15 miles of files from World War II concentration and labor camps, containing 17 million name cards of coerced laborers (Noted in Dateline World Jewry (February 2001), p.  2. Among the numerous discussions of the treatment of these laborers from a employers, perspective, see, inter alia; Reinhold Billstein et al, Working for the Enemy: Ford, General Motors, and Forced Labor in Germany During the Second World War (New York: Berghahn Books, 200), 54–57. In Stalinist Russia, perhaps 18 million people were incarcerated (between 1 and 2.6 million prisoners per year) in the period 1936 to 1953. See, Edwin Bacon, The Gulag at War: Stalin’s Forced Labor System in the Light of the Archives (New York: New York University Press, 1994), p. 37 and 125–126. It should be emphasized that, in the process of building their slave system, certain groups (e.g. the SS captors) behaved more like the

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17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

23.

warriors or raiders at the African end of the Atlantic system than as planter capitalists. Descriptions of Nazi actions were often quite analogous to Atlantic precedent: “entire villages were surrounded by press gangs”, or other places where large groups of people assembled. A Nazi official described such raiders as using “‘the whole bag of tricks’ used by Arab slave hunters among the Negroes of Africa in previous centuries.” There is ample evidence that Hitler envisioned the area between the Vistula and the Urals as a zone in which any native would be classified as inferior to the lowest German stable boy. Native labor would be used solely to serve German economic needs in vast development and colonization project. See Norman Rich, Hitler’s War Aims: The Establishment of the New Order 2 Vol. New York: W.W. Norton, 1974), 326–32, and 342–43. Within Germany itself, “the regime and the organization did not hesitate to lengthen the working week for foreigners to the limits of total exhaustion”. See Tila Siegel, “Rationalizing Industrial Relation: a Debate on the Control of Labor in German Shipyards in 1941”, in Reevaluating the Third Reich, ed. Thomas Childers and Jane Caplan, (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1993), 147. On the preference for bondage over death, see Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 3 vols., (New York: Homes and Meier, 1985), II, 529. Eltis, Rise,17. See Murdo J. Macleod, Spanish Central America: A Socioeconomic History 1520– 1720 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 48–56. Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise the West, 1500–1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 57–59. Jeffrey A. Cole, The Potosi Mita, 1573–1700: Compulsory Indian Labor in the Andes (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1985), 4. Even in new Spain, where African slaves formed a small proportion of the population, they outnumbered the Spaniards. (See Colin A. Palmer, Slaves of the White God: Blacks in Mexico, 1570–1650 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 2–3. On the Spanish Atlantic migration network, see B.H. Slicher van Bath, “The absence of white contract labour in Spanish America during the colonial period”, in Colonialism and Migration, 19–31, esp.  27–30. In the case of Africa judicial enslavement of one’s own subjects probably did not account for more than a few percent of total exports. Military action was by far the most significant source of slaves (See Thornton, Africa and Africans, 99; and Martin A. Klein, Slavery and Colonial Rule in French West Africa (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 4. Although I consider both types of enslavement for Europeans, it is unlikely that their mix of captives would have been notably different. A.C. de C.M. Saunders, A Social History of Black Slaves and Freedmen in Portugal 1441–1555 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 59–88. See, C.R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415–1825 (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1969), 52–57. The great majority of sixteenth-century migrants from Portugal went to Old World destinations. For military needs, see Parker, Military Revolution, 125. It is significant that two thirds of the “New Christians” exiled to Brazil from Portugal were women. Many men were sentenced to forced labor in the Mediterranean galleys. Geraldo Pieroni, “Outcast from the Kingdom: The Inquisition and the Banishment of New Christians to Brazil”, in The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450–1800, ed. Paolo Bernardini and Norman Fiering (New York: Berghahn Books, 2001), 242–251, esp.  245–46, Table 12.2. Even more significantly, of the very small number of Portuguese banished to Brazil for Judaizing (311), only four were sent to the new colony of Brazil during the initial century of colonization. See Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society,

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24.

25.

26. 27.

28. 29. 30.

31.

32.

1550–1835 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Blackburn, in his Making, 356, imagines a scenario in which European powers would have ganged up on any initiator of slavery in the Americas. This seems highly improbable if Africans alone were the labor force. However, I find it more improbable that European rulers would not have acted, singly or collectively, against such an innovator when their own subjects were being enslaved. Eltis seems to hedge on the applicability of his European slave counterfactual as applied to the Iberian tropical lowlands: “The fact that African slavery in the Americas took longer to evolve than any European counterpart would have done – at least in North America – is accounted for by the greater cost of moving people from Africa as opposed to Europe” (Eltis, Rise, 70) (My emphasis). Eltis does not offer any estimate of comparative potential costs in shipping European slaves from Lisbon to Brazil, as opposed to the route from London to Barbados, and both relative to the African alternative. I agree, of course, that the Sao Tome African slave system was created for economically sound reasons. Eltis also seems to imply that Portuguese productivity gains in the movement of sugar to from Sao Tome to Brazil in the 1540s were not as great as those entailed in the move from Brazil to Barbados in the 1650s (198 and n). Would this have further reduced Portuguese incentives to attempt to absorb the risk costs of switching from Indian to European rather than to Africans in the second half of the sixteenth century? See, inter alia, Pieter Emmer, The Dutch in the Atlantic Economy, 1580–1880, (Ashgate: Varcorum, 1998), chapter I, on the “Second Atlantic System”. Most historians, including Blackburn and Eltis, view the periods of Iberian and Northwest European domination of the Atlantic system as distinctive in important economic respects. See Arthur L. Stinchecombe, Sugar Island Slavery in the Age of Enlightenment: The Political Economy of the Caribbean World (Princeton: University of Princeton Press), ch. 2; and Eltis, Rise, 161. See, inter alia, Parker, Military Revolution, 103. On the comparative level of European warfare from 1500–2000, see Jack S. Levy, War in the Modern Great Power System 1495–1975 (Lexington KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1983), 88–91 (table 4.1), and 141–42. See Eltis, Rise, 231. Ibid., 159. Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), 124. On seventeenth-century colonial dissatisfaction with convicts in North America, see A. R. Erkich, Bound for America: The Transportation of British Convicts to the Colonies, 1718–1775 (Oxford 1990), 134–40. See a similar argument in Edmund S. Morgan’s, American Slavery, American Freedom (New York, 1975. Dunn Sugar and Slaves, 133–34. For another glimpse at the probabilities, when Nevis was attacked by the Spanish in 1629 the planters were deserted by their English servants, “who swam out to the Spanish ships leaving cries of ‘Liberty, joyful Liberty’ blowing in the wind.” John C. Appleby, “English Settlement in the Lesser Antilles during war and Peace, 1603–1660”, in The Lesser Antilles in the Age of European Expansion, ed. Robert L. Paquette and Stanley L. Engerman (Gainesville, Fl: University Press of Florida, 1996), 86–104, esp. 93–94. See Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 160, for Jamaica; and Hilary McD Beckles, “A ‘Riotous and Unruly Lot’: Irish Indentured Servants and Freemen in the English West Indies, 1644–1713”, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series vol. XLVIII (October, 1990), pp.  505–22, for the West Indies as a whole. On the

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33.

34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

persistence of French and Catholic threats to British policy makers, see Linda Colley, “Britishness and Otherness: An Argument” Journal of British Studies, 31 (October 1992): 309–329. On Anti-slavery as an aspect of British nationalism, rather than European humanitarianism, before the second third of the nineteenth century, see Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation: 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 350–360; and Paul Michael Kielstra, The Politics of Slave Trade Suppression in Britain and France, 1814–1848: Diplomacy, Morality and Economics (Houndmills, Hampshire: Macmillan, 2000), 1–21 and 261–67. In their search for servile labor neither the Dutch, nor any other Northwest Europeans could have looked further East to enserfed Central Europe for their supply. In areas depopulated by the thirty years war (1618–1648), lords were making every effort to immobilize their workforces by rigorously enforcing statutes against migration. It is highly improbable that the magnates of depopulated Bohemia and Hungary would have risked simultaneously undermining their own enterprises and increasing the probability and costs of peasant uprisings by depriving their own labor force of its primary reason for enduring serfdom, i.e. hereditary security of tenure. A “long-distance serf-trade” is not only, as Eltis notes, an oxymoron, but a recipe for exploding innovation costs. (See W. E. Wright, “Neo-Serfdom in Bohemia”, Slavic Review, 34 (1975), 239–52, esp. 243; A. Klima, “Agrarian class structure and Economic development in pre-industrial Bohemia” Past and Present, 85 (1979), 50–53; and B. K. Kiraly, “Neo-Serfdom in Hungary”, Slavic Review, 34 (1975), 269–78. J. L. Price, Dutch Society, 1599–1713 (New York: Longman, 2000), 192–193. See, Van den Boogaart and P. C. Emmer, “Colonialism and Migration: An Overview”, in Colonialism and Migration, pp.  3–4. On Livorno’s Jewish refugees, see Mordechai Arbell, “Jewish Settlements in the French Colonies in the Caribbean”, in Jews and the Expansion of Europe, 297–298. Eltis, Rise, 9, table I,1. Ibid.,83. Ibid.,49. See also, E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England: A Reconstruction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), Table A 3.1, pp. 528–29. Eltis, Rise, 67. On rhetoric, see Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles: Seventeenth Century England’s Political Instability in European Context (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).In actuality, as Eltis emphasizes, the division between temporarily indentured white servants and black “perpetual servants” was made explicit in metropolitan registration regulations in 1664. The Barbados Servant Code of 1661 had anticipated this metropolitan distinction. (See Sharon V. Salinger, ‘To Serve Well and Faithfully’: Labour and Indentured Servants in Pennsylvania (Cambridge, 1987), 9–10; Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 239–240. Eltis, “Slave Economies,” 108; idem. Rise, 83. Scott, England’s Troubles, 274, and final chapter. B. S. Capp, Cromwell’s navy: the fleet and the English Revolution, 1648–1660 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), ch. 8. See Douglass C. North and Robert Paul Thomas, The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 7–8. Ibid., 213–17; 265–291. The shift in European policy along the coast of Africa sheds some light on the choices available for labor recruitment in the Plantation Americas. In Africa itself it was armed deterrence, not ideological or religious inhibitions, that induced Europeans to switch from their “raid-and-trade” policy in the Atlantic islands to an almost exclusive reliance on purchasing slaves. Within

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pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry Africa institutional power also influenced vulnerability to enslavement. Large warrior-dominated societies had no monopoly on enslaving and many groups in small or decentralized societies developed their own niches on the predatory side of the slaving equation. The uneven distribution of political and military power, however, meant that the upper echelons of centralized states reaped disproportionate allocations of human chattel. See, inter alia, Thornton, Africa and the Africans. 38–39, 89–93, 108–109; Klein, Slavery and Colonial Rule, 4; the articles by Walter Hawthorne, Andrew Hubbell and Martin A Klein in the Section, “Decentralized Societies and the Slave Trade,” Journal of African History 42 no 1 (2001), 1–65; Klein, “The impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on the Societies of the Western Sudan” in The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on Economies, Societies, and Peoples in Africa, the Americas, and Europe, Joseph E. Inikori and Stanley L. Engerman eds. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992), 25–47; and W.E. Evans and David Richardson, “Hunting for rents: the economics of slavery in pre-colonial Africa,” Economic History Review, XLVIII, 4 (1995), 665–686. 46. Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slave Holding Republic, ed. Ward M. McAfee (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 234. It is an open question whether some judges in late seventeenth-century England might have been tempted by higher prices to favor rechanneling “capital” offenders to the plantations in huge numbers. “Hanging judge” George Jeffries was quickly reconciled into becoming a “shipping judge” by the Royal prospect of obtaining £10–15 per head for 800 captives, following the failed Monmouth rising against James II in 1685. One must, however, carry the hypothesis beyond the commercial calculations of courtiers and merchants. The overall rate of conviction for capital (i.e. also transportable) crimes per population remained the same in “transportation-friendly” eighteenthcentury England as it had been before the rise of transatlantic colonization. Convictions still required the aquiescence of judges and local jurors who reaped no profit from them. The close social relationships that characterized rural England were still embedded in structures of paternalism and deference that encouraged intervention on behalf of community members. Would efforts at wholesale convictions have satisfied the functions of such personalized justice? The social compact implicit in trial by jury was worth more than a mass of overseas slaves. On conviction rates see Philip Jenkins, “From Gallows to Prison? The Execution Rate in Early Modern England,” Criminal Justice History 7 (1986), 51–71. On the context and function of convictions, see J. M. Beattie, “Crime and the Courts in Surrey 1736–1753,” in Crime in England, 1550–1800, ed. J. S. Cockburn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 154–186, esp.  179–182. At the very moment Chief Justice Jeffries was conducting treason trials for over 1000 prisoners, he himself accused the mayor of Bristol of kidnaping and selling local destitutes to the West Indies. Jeffries obviously drew the line of transportability between traitors and indigents. See Robert Clifton, The Last Popular Rebellion: The Western Rising of 1685 (London: St. Martin’s, 1984), 237. Armed rebels were, of course, far less frequent than indigents in seventeenth-century England. Enslavement was not even the issue. But Jeffries nevertheless was branded as the epitome of evil by the successful rebels of 1688. The convicts’ utility overseas was unquestioned. They were pardoned by the new regime, but the colonial governors successfully lobbied for the power to force them to remain in the Caribbean. 47. For a discussion of disease and the slave trade, see Philip D. Curtin, “Epidemiology and the Slave Trade,” Political Science Quarterly 83:2 (1968), 190–216. On the intensity of disease in Barbados c. 1650, see Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 76–77. 48. Charles Carleton, Going to the Wars: The Experience of the British Civil Wars 1638–1651 (London: Routledge, 1992), 327–28.

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pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry 49. On Civil War losses, see Carleton, Going to the Wars, 341–42. On the Parliamentary Comparison of Europeans and Africans as “slaves” in Barbados, see Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), 134–35. 50. Calculated from Eltis, Rise, 98, table 4-3: “The Sex and Age Structure of Free and Coerced Migration of the English Americas, 1651–99”. 51. Josiah Child, A New Discourse of Trade (London: 1698), 190–191. 52. See Thornton, Africa, 74, 102; and Eltis, Rise, 21–65. At a later period, in the earliest years of French rule in the Western Sudan, slaves represented 60–70% of the trade by value and probably most of the accumulated capital of the region. See Klein, “Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade,” 41. 53. Myron P. Guttman, War and Rural Life in the Early Modern Low Countries, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 61–62. 54. Scott, England’s Troubles, 488. 55. Andrea Finkelstein, Harmony and Balance An Intellectual History of SeventeenthCentury English Economic Thought (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 200), 195. On the burst of philanthropic foundations at the end of the seventeenth century, see Joan Lane, Apprenticeship in England, 1600–1914 (New York: Westview Press, 1996). 56. Compare Eltis, Rise, 16; and Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, ch. 2. 57. Yehuda Bauer, Jews for Sale? Nazi-Jewish Negotiations, 1933–1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 195. The closest approximation to domination over most of Europe prior to 1941–1944 was achieved by Napoleon Bonaparte at the beginning of the nineteenth century. He was certainly not averse to slavery, and re-enslaved the freedmen and women of France’s tropical colonies in 1802. It seems extremely unlikely that he would have dreamt of replenishing the labor forces of those colonies with Europeans, even had he held on to St. Domingue in the bloody conflict which cost him that colony. By 1803 Europe’s preeminent war lord was more conscious than any previous imperial ruler about the costs entailed in conscripting Europeans to the tropics. He was, moreover, as dependent upon Europeans for his military ventures as were any of his predecessors during the previous three centuries. Fully half of the Grande Armée invading Russia in 1812 was composed of reluctant non-French “allies”. Introducing a system of enslavement in restive central Europe, not to speak of the guerilla opposition in still unconquered Iberia, would have escalated policing costs on both sides of the French Atlantic empire. In Europe, such a policy would have subverted Napoleon’s principal appeal to newly conquered areas of the Continent, where his new Civil Code promulgated individual equality and freedom of labor: “Contracts legally formed take the place of law for those who have made them”(Robert B. Holtman, The Napoleonic Revolution (New York: Lippincott,1967), 90. Napoleon’s overseas colonies were even more completely vulnerable to enemy assaults than were his mainland territories. 58. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations 2 vols. (Indianapolis::Liberty Fund, 1976), I, 24. 59. At the beginning of the twenty-first century most countries placed in the Low Human Development category of the United Nations Human Development index are in Sub-Saharan Africa, the classic zone of enslavement in the Atlantic system (See Table 4). They remain the lowest twenty-five of the 170 nations recorded on the index. Those New World areas which relied heavily on slaves, but were not zones of primary enslavement, offer a more mixed picture. The USA, exceptionally, is among the top three on the index. The rest are all within the categories of High

39

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry Human Development (from Barbados at #30) and Medium Human Development (down to São Tomé at #132). Haiti alone (at #150) is within the category of “Low Human Development.” 60. One cannot assume that Medieval developments created a once-for-all ideological boundary of unenslavability by 1500. In fifteenth-century Valencia, Christians were still buying and selling Greeks and Slavs. See David Brion Davis, “Slavery White, Black, Muslim, Christian,” New York Review of Books, July 5, 2001, 51–55, esp. 52. As late as 1600 there were some Greek and Slavic slaves in Cuba (from information kindly provided by Professor Davis). 61. “The Virginia Slave Code, 1705”, excerpted in Stanley Engerman, et al, Slavery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 119. Seventeenth Century Europeans cut with equal ease through the European /non-European lines of otherness. For Dutch Protestants fighting for their independence a century earlier, “liever Turcx dan Paus (better Turkish than papist)” seemed self-evident. Half a century later, Amsterdam’s Jewish merchants hardly needed to remind the settler-starved Directors of the. West India Company that “the more loyal of (sic) people that go to live” in New Amsterdam the greater would be the economic benefits to both colony and Company. (See James Homer Williams, “An Atlantic Perspective on the Jewish Struggle for Rights and Opportunities in Brazil, New Netherland and New York”, in Jews and the Expansion of Europe, 369–93.

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2 THE SHOCKING BIRTH OF BRITISH ABOLITIONISM

The emergence of the British abolitionist movement has often been conceived as a direct response to the trauma of the American Revolutionary War. There is little evidence that the British public embraced abolitionism as a response to such a loss – either politically, culturally or psychologically. On the contrary, British anti-slavery mobilisation against the slave trade emerged and flourished in moments of national optimism and confidence. It is therefore as important to understand the contextual pressures that operated in accounting for the emergence of this powerful political movement as it is to understand the motives and methods of its entrepreneurs. Prior to the last quarter of the eighteenth century, all societies accepted slavery as a legitimate social institution. For most polities, the institution was recognised both within and beyond their own jurisdiction. For a few areas in northwestern Europe, it was highly desirable within parts of their empire, even as they proclaimed themselves to be juridically free of slaves at home. Millennia of continuous commentary on the ubiquity of the institution in the eastern hemisphere were reinforced by centuries of transcontinental transfers of captives to the Americas. How did the world begin to move from a general acceptance of slavery as an inevitable institution to an international consensus that identifies it as a gross violation of human rights and a crime against humanity? Many historians identify a major shift against the institution in Great Britain’s campaign to abolish its transatlantic slave trade. Within a generation, that campaign had been expanded to mobilise the Western world against the slave trade. Within less than a century, the world’s major nations had collectively dedicated themselves to the elimination of the institution. The point of departure for this global movement has naturally attracted considerable scholarly attention. Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery identified a combination of British industrialisation and the American War of Independence as the prime stimuli in the emergence and triumph of British abolition. Although Williams’ own linkage of British economic development

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pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry to the process has been challenged, scholars have continued to explore the Anglo-American conflict of 1775–1783 as the essential catalyst for the British abolitionist breakthrough.1

The American Revolutionary War and British anti-slavery One historiographical tradition emphasises the sheer loss of Britain’s North American colonies as costing the empire half of its imperial slaves. An alternative hypothesis relies on the psychological trauma of Britain’s humiliation at the loss of an important segment of its empire. In this scenario, defeat precipitated a sea change in British attitudes towards the empire in general and towards the slave trade in particular. The ‘shock of defeat’ converted what had been pre-existing qualms about slavery into political action against its major source of fresh labour.2 The loss of America further precipitated a general and persistent demand for domestic and overseas reform. In this version, abolitionism was a response to a deep crisis in British liberty. The conflict and its outcome stimulated anti-slavery as a political and ideological means of shoring up the increasingly questioned authority of elites in the British Isles.3 A counterfactual posed in Christopher Brown’s Moral Capital allows us to more closely scrutinise the impact of the American War on both incipient abolitionists and in the larger British public sphere. Brown makes us aware of a paradox. The final years of the American War, he writes, represented’an ideal moment to launch an antislavery movement, if such a movement required a loss of confidence in the established order’. By the fifth year of the conflict, Britain seemed to be at bay. An imminent cross-channel French invasion was feared; the entire British Caribbean was threatened; and other European states either fully aligned themselves against Britain (Spain and the Netherlands) or formed a League of Armed Neutrality effectively favouring the Americans (Russia, Sweden and Denmark). British overseas trade and domestic credit were impacted. The closing years of the war, as Brown observes, ‘would seem to have been an opportune moment for an atonement for national sins’.4 Robin Blackburn goes still further. In his perspective, the shock of British defeat ‘changed everything’. The British monarchy and the empire faced a crisis oflegitimacy, providing openings to attack the most ‘corrupt, cruel and conservative elements’ of the ruling oligarchy. Abolitionism offers a major benchmark on the British journey from the crisis of the 1780s to the crisis of the 1790s, when, once again, the events in Saint-Domingue ‘were to change everything.’5 Thus, political abolitionism burst forth exactly midway between the incipient insubordination of post-war Britain and the incendiary insurrection of slave Saint-Domingue. It is clear why Brown marks this moment as counterfactual rather than actual. Britain’s worst moment was exactly when the pre-war voices against slavery nearly fell silent. Even more significantly, given Britain’s appeal to liberated African Americans, the pre-war flurry of condemnations of slavery 42

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry virtually ceased in the British wartime press. ‘Historians have marveled’, writes a historian of British newspapers, ‘at how the history of Black participation in the Revolutionary War has been “lost” . . . but it was never seriously chronicled in Britain in the first place’, either by pro- or anti-war commentators. The investigator finds the absence of discussion ‘too glaring to ignore’, since ‘Britain was less than a generation away from abolishing the lucrative African trade’. His astonishment speaks directly to our point. In the great conflict and the great crisis of losing America, where are the harbingers of the great abolitionist breakthrough? The historian’s disappointment actually speaks to the power of retrospective great expectations. There was no lack of events on the ground. At war’s end, the evacuation of thousands of ex-slaves among the evacuating loyalists was duly noted – but not in ‘the same moving language that described the anguish of whites’.6 This should tell us something about the empathic distance that still separated the British metropolitan public from overseas populations. At the level of parliamentary discourse, the perspective on the slave trade remained a market perspective. To reiterate Brown’s point, there never was a better moment or a better sector of Britain’s seaborne empire from which a British government could contemplate disengagements. By 1778–1780, 80 per cent fewer Africans were being landed in the British colonies than at the outbreak of the Revolution. This was, of course, a matter of serious parliamentary concern. Their deliberations and decisions were available to the public. When the Committee of Supply for the African forts submitted its dreary report in 1778, the government was attacked primarily for its neglect of a trade that should at least have been compensating Britain for the loss of its American trade. Edmund Burke used the occasion to express pleasure at the decline of an inhuman trade. Another Member of Parliament displayed the shackles that were to provoke a national wave of emotions a decade later, in a Parliament finally aroused. However, in 1778, the motion to accept the report was carried without a division.7 Nor did the parliamentary discussion evoke any flurry of correspondence or editorials in the newspapers. When Gustavus Yassa (Olaudah Equiano) applied for the position of missionary to Africa in 1779, his memorial mentioned nothing about the abolition of the slave trade among his motives. Neither the prospective missionary nor his prospective employers would have expected such a suggestion. It was the abolitionist surge a decade later that would allow Gustavus Yassa to achieve international fame as Olaudah Equiano, the African abolitionist.8 When the wartime press did turn its attention to the West Indies, where slaves constituted upwards of 80 per cent of the British colonial population, the reporting was also uniformly commercial, more so than when it dealt with events in North America. With the continental colonies slipping irretrievably away, the possible loss of the entire transatlantic empire loomed. By the end of 1779, the odds at the Royal Exchange were more than 2.5 to 1 that Jamaica 43

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry would fall to France in the upcoming year. The mood of the press changed overnight with the news of the Royal Navy’s decisive victory over the French fleet in the Battle of the Saintes on 12 April 1782. Parliament and almost every newspaper in the nation were ecstatic. A year later, there was general agreement that the continental colonies were lost, but that neither a decisive shift in the European balance of power nor the dismemberment of the rest of the empire was at hand.9 The Battle of the Saintes ensured that the press did not take the terms of peace as evidence of a crushing defeat. The West Indian sugar islands and the Afro-Caribbean complex remained a primary consideration of imperial policy and a central arena of commercial and military activity. The abolitionist breakthrough in 1788 came when the British West Indian and Africa trades accounted for more than a fifth of British overseas trade, one-eighth of its merchant tonnage and its most valuable cluster of colonies. Their defence absorbed more than half of Britain’s total expenditure for colonial security. ‘After the loss of the North American colonies, the West Indies stood as easily Britain’s biggest overseas capital investment, no longer simply the jewel in the crown of the British empire, but now virtually the crown itself.’10 The American Revolutionary War crisis therefore produced a good deal of shock, but almost nothing by way of arousal against slavery or the slave trade. Indeed, the British victory over the French West Indian fleet in 1782 prompted more than public euphoria. It revived confidence in prospects for the retention of the West Indies and an assurance about Britain’s position in the Atlantic. The press confidently concurred that if America was to be independent, Britain would retain its position as a premier European imperial power. The public certainly did not receive the peace treaty negotiated in 1782–1783 as evidence of a ‘crushing defeat’. Indeed, ‘Britain’s late military success explains the lack of national soul searching in the press at the war’s conclusion’.11 The place in which Britain’s principal transatlantic victory occurred probably ensured that Britain’s Atlantic slave complex would not necessarily become the site of complaints about what had gone wrong.

Post war The immediate post-war moment offers evidence that the war had some bearing upon the emergence of abolitionists. Christopher Brown has elaborately illuminated the process by which the British Society of Friends – hitherto ‘passive observers’ – was drawn into political action by its American counterpart at the end of the conflict. On 16 June 1783, 273 Quaker men presented a petition to the House of Commons asking Members of Parliament ‘recovering from the shock of a lost empire’ to consider an abolition of the slave trade.12 The politicians perhaps shocked the Friends with their friendly response. Lord North, who had presided over the loss of the continental colonies, 44

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry gently complimented them for their generous feelings and administered a cool dose of policy. Unfortunately, he replied, all Europe’s maritime powers had to make use of the African trade. Perhaps more significantly, none of the future parliamentary champions of abolition rose to dispute the policy assumption of Lord North, either on that day or for four years thereafter. Indeed, the allusions to its inhumanity and barbarity in the 1778 wartime discussion of the African trade found no echo in the discussion of the Friends’ petition.13 The petition’s reception in the press was much the same. Although many newspapers detailed the petition’s presentation, there was no extensive editorial commentary or any flurry of readers’ correspondence. The Quakers did not rest there. They canvassed Members of Parliament. They distributed tracts and sermons to bankers, insurers, investors, clergy, officers, local magistrates and headmasters of schools. They printed classified notices and details of the trade in the London and provincial press through 150 provincial agents. They even wrote a letter signed ‘A West Indian’ and published pamphlets anonymously, in order to conceal their sponsorship. In other words, ‘with unusual guile’, they tried ‘to create the impression that hostility to slavery was widespread’.14 What was the impact of this three-year advertising campaign? By the end of their first publicity campaign, they had evoked (in their own words) ‘an approbation of our benevolence . . . but little prospect of success’. On the very eve of the formation of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, they reiterated their frustration. Ministers still complimented their action, but ‘thought the time was not yet come to bring the affair to maturity’. They still imagined that there was, as yet, little prospect of success. From a slave owner’s perspective, there was equally little to fear. In 1785, when Richard Price admonished Americans on the need to end their ’odious slavery’, South Carolina’s Henry Laurens confidently referred Price to the outcome of the Quakers’ intervention: ‘Was not Parliament lately petitioned to prohibit the slave trade, did they show the least regard to the petition?’ As might be inferred from Laurens’s dismissal of the petition, the slave interest was to be the one most stunned by the abolitionist surge three years later.15 How salient had the slave trade become? How closely did their message tap into a British loss of confidence in the conflict with America, or angst over a diminution of its prestige as the standard-bearer of liberty? Not much, as far as one can tell. Their publications stressed neither the significance of the Anglo-American conflict as a cause of divine disfavour nor any British faltering in the cause of liberty in comparison with the new American republic. Whatever their achievements as catalysts, the Friends were to play their most significant role in British abolitionism as the core organisers of the London Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1787 and as cadres of the provincial movement thereafter.16 The second catalytic group analysed by Brown in terms of the immediate post-war years was a cluster of British evangelicals – above all James Ramsay 45

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry – during the period between 1783 and 1787. Ramsay’s Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies (1784) produced a long and well-informed polemic on the nature of British slavery in the West Indies. Unlike the Quakers, Ramsay made a frontal attack against West Indian slavery itself. In the mid 1780s, it achieved greater notoriety than any other anti-slavery publication, although it stirred no controversy in the newspaper world. Hardly two years after the jubilant celebration of the victory at the Saintes, it was improbable that a sustained assault on the plantation complex itself would find much traction in post-war Britain. Forty more years would pass before even British abolitionists would decide to undertake that struggle.17 There is probably no better evidence of the difficulty of politicising the abolitionist message after the silence of the war years than the muted public reaction to the Zong atrocity. In 1781, the captain of the slave ship Zong threw 132 African captives overboard en route to the West Indies. Only because the ship’s owners claimed insurance for the lost cargo did the event come before the courts two years later – as an insurance claim. The court case was reported by a single London newspaper just three months before the Friends’ petition reached Parliament. The item noted that ‘the court narrative . . . of this cold-blooded mass killing seemed to make every person present shudder.’18 Two months later, when the decision on damages was appealed, Lord Justice Mansfield underscored the point that the question at issue was a matter of chattel property: ‘the Court of Appeal had no doubt (though it shocks one very much) that the case of the slaves was the same as if horses had been thrown overboard’.19 Despite the initiative of Gustavus Yassa (Olaudah Equiano) and an enormous effort of Granville Sharp to get the legal system to treat the event as a case of murder, not merchandise, the case was not reopened. The British public could read very little on the matter before 1787. The Zong massacre became notorious after the mobilisation of abolitionism. It was the slave ship Brooks that became the mass-produced icon of the abolitionist movement in 1789.20 Perhaps the fragmented and isolated elements of anti-slavery activism in the immediate post-war period are best evidenced in the testimony of Thomas Clarkson, who became the indefatigable organiser of the national abolitionist network in 1787–1792. While writing his prize essay against slavery at Cambridge in 1785, Clarkson knew nothing of the achievements of Granville Sharp. On arriving in London the following year, he was astonished to find that the Quakers had long since formed an anti-slave trade committee with the intention of arousing the public. At that point, the Friends had already spent three years disseminating literature to the elite by placing paid advertisements in the press. Christopher Brown argues that their placements ‘profoundly affected the political and cultural landscape’. The Friends themselves considered ‘that they had little prospect of success’. Brown concludes that the Quaker circulars ‘had failed to capture the public imagination.’21 46

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry

Figure 1. Reports on the Slave Trade, 1700–1900. Sources: For the years 1700 to 1800, 17th–18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers. Detroit: Gale, Last Updated July 22, 2010. http://www.gale.cengage.com/. For the years 1801 to 1900, 19th Century British Library Newspapers: Part One and Two. Detroit: Last Updated July 22, 2010. http://www.gale.cengage.com/.

Is it possible to measure the cumulative impact of the Quaker publicity campaign and the polemical controversy aroused by James Ramsay? Two quantitative measures may allow us to address this question more precisely. The recently digitalised Burney collections of eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury newspapers at the British Library allow us to display the frequency of references to the ‘slave trade’ and ‘African trade’ in the London press. Figure 1 measures the relative frequency of appearances of the terms related to the slave trade. It is apparent that there was a small upsurge of appearances prior to the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War. This was followed by a drop during the late 1770s. The frequency of attention to the slave trade during the period 1783–1786 actually remained slightly lower than the earlier level. The real explosion of attention clearly occurred in the period 1787–1788. The great spike first comes, without a prior surge, in 1787. Alternative searches show the same breakpoint for the combined terms ‘slave trade’ + ‘abolition’ + ‘humanity.’ These findings comport with an earlier frequency tabulation that used only The Times of London as a proxy for British attention to the slave trade and 47

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry Table 1. Reports on the Slave Trade in The Times, 1785–1789. I Total reports Reports on Reports on ‘normal’ mora, or slaving activities political activity against slavery Jan.1785– 15 Oct. 1787–Dec. 1788 4 Sept. 1787 6 Jan–Dec. 1789

4 136 74

19 140 80

‘Abolitionist’ reports as percentage of total reports 21 97 92.5

Source: New index of The Times (1786–9).

abolition (see Table 1). This survey compares the periods January 1785 to September 1787, October 1787 to December 1788, and January to December 1789. Anti-slavery items increased from only four in the first period to 136 in the second. The two data sets point to the same conclusion: compared with all prior periods, that of late 1787–1788 witnessed an explosion of interest in abolition.22 Christopher Brown clearly delineates the way in which the Quaker and evangelical cohorts of activists formulated appeals that finally converged in abolitionism in 1787. Nevertheless, he cautions that historians will never know how many of the anti-slavery statements in the British press between the summer of 1783 and the spring of 1787 resulted from the Friends’ publicity.23 However subtly the Friends may have altered the cultural landscape between 1783 and 1787, they did not increase the public salience of the issue in any way comparable to the  period following the launching of the petition campaign at the end of 1787. To conclude: the ending of the war was a moment when a small and diverse group of activists was stirred to launch a variety of attacks on the British slave system. Whether impelled by the larger conflict or particular incidents like the Zong massacre, they became more persistent in their efforts. They had not yet inclined the British public or their legislators to regard the abolition of any element of the slave system as a matter of urgency.

Post-war Britain and America What was it about the condition of Britain that fostered the emergence of political abolition when it did occur? The final years of the war and the immediate post-war years engendered a good deal of soul-searching and public discussion of political and imperial reform. Abolition of the slave trade and anti-slavery were not, however, among the more prominent targets of public concern. Did the ignominious loss of the American colonies serve as 48

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry a principal source of anxiety and self-reflection? Had the new republic, with its more egalitarian and universal values, shaken the image of Britannia as an iconic bearer of liberty? The British public seems to have been far less disoriented by the loss of the colonies than some historians have argued. The more salient point is that the trajectory of British self-esteem moved in precisely the opposite trajectory between 1783 and 1787 than the logic implied in the trauma theory of British abolitionism. In fact, there was a rapid diminution of concern with America. John Adams, America’s first ambassador, reported that the United States was regarded with ‘contempt’, and there was little willingness to learn from America’s example. By the mid 1780s, it was clear that the United States was in serious trouble. American goods were being denied free access to French and Spanish Caribbean ports. American vessels were being seized and confiscated by the French in Guadeloupe. Havana was shut to American ships.24 The British steadfastly refused to exempt American ships from the application of the Navigation Acts. American economic difficulties overseas were compounded by a political crisis within the American confederation. In the same week that the London Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was founded in 1787, William Grenville introduced a new bill in Parliament to regulate trade between the United States and the British West Indies. He emphasised that the provisions had to be temporary because it was difficult to decide whether Americans were ‘under one government, whether they consisted of many discordant governments, or whether they were under no government at all’.25 The British public had already been reading of a downward trend. In the two years prior to 1787, the British press offered an unending flow of bad news from New England to Georgia: mercantile distress and rebellion in New England; merchants ruined and trade depression in New York and Pennsylvania; the slowing down of British migration to America. Developments in relation to slavery were also scrutinised. Legal constrictions or prohibitions of transatlantic slaving by individual states were noted, but the public did not forget that some British generals had freed slaves during their military campaigns in America and had refused to return or compensate Americans for them. As for the slave trade, it was clear by 1785 that American ships were extending their slaving activities. In general, the results of the American experiment seemed uninspiring.26 As regards slavery itself, it was clear that progress was uneven. By the mid 1780s, essayists were still condemning American slavery and celebrating British free soil. An English traveller did not hesitate to describe an auction of European redemptioners in Philadelphia as resembling a slave market. The comparison was made easier by the fact that the United States no longer allowed convicted British criminals to be transported to America. Even erstwhile defenders of America and future supporters of the abolitionist mobilisation like Richard Price positively compared post-war liberty in Britain with the United States.27 49

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry Another event of significance occurred in the same week as the organisation of the British Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Across the Atlantic, a convention opened hoping to write a new constitution for the American confederation. Its convocation and completion were noted without much editorial comment in the British press. Given the surge of prohibitions on the importation of slaves into a number of states, there was some curiosity about whether the convention would act to consolidate these initiatives. The public was initially informed that the Pennsylvania Anti-slavery Society would appeal to the delegates to make abolition of the slave trade a part of their deliberations. This did not occur. One newspaper reported that the convention was to be asked to suspend imports for 25 years. A few days later, another item noted that the new federal government would actually be prohibited from ending the slave trade for another 20 years. While this could have been construed as a positive intention, the British abolitionist movement apparently did not consider the American Constitution a document to be widely publicised as an incentive to the acceleration of their own cause. Just before the petitions began to roll into Parliament, a newspaper casually referred to the new American system as one in which the poor Africans would have to wait another 21 (sic) years for relief. Two decades were to elapse before incipient American abolition was evoked in Parliament as an additional reason for immediate British action. Successful ratification was not known in Europe until the end of the 1787–1788 parliamentary session. The ongoing American transatlantic slave trade continued to be chronicled.28 America actually became more negatively linked to slavery during the post-war years. Its reactivation of the African slave trade was only one way. The second was the new vulnerability of Americans to enslavement in the Mediterranean. Nothing was more dramatic than their loss of immunity from Maghreb corsairs. British newspapers described how American seamen were now demanding higher wages to offset the rising risks. United States ship owners and merchants doubled their insurance premiums. Some American vessels were reported as attempting to evade attack by flying British colours, thereby eliciting closer Algerian scrutiny of their papers; British seamen were, of course, warned not to sail under the Stars and Stripes. A month before the American constitutional convention, a British newspaper thus summarised the situation: To what a pitiful condition are the worthy sons of American liberty reduced! They are forced either to fly from the Barbarians of Africa or to become their slaves. A changed state of things indeed from that which they enjoyed while dependent on this country. Then our naval thunder frightened the enemy from them.29 British immunity invited American conspiracy theories. In May 1787, ‘A Hater of Incendiaries and a Lover of Humanity’ described the British Consul 50

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry in Algiers as a benefactor to enslaved American seamen: ‘The Algerines have shut the Mediterranean to them’. Americans were chided for accusing Britons of ‘stirring up the Algerines, while the British Consul feeds them’.30 Newspapers did not hesitate to report the prices demanded by the Dey of Algiers for Americans: £600 for the master of a vessel, £400 for a mate and £200 for each common man. Americans were no worse off than most Europeans. The press routinely reported the capture of vessels of all flags: Neapolitans, Danes, Tuscans, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Venetians and subjects of the Pope himself. Corsairs defiantly cruised within gunshot of Marseilles.31 The British flag alone enjoyed exemption from corsair predation. The Morning Chronicle portrayed the dramatic fate of one British captain seized by an Algerian ship and taken to the slave market. The Dey ordered the pirate’s head to be severed from his body.’The English captain interceded but the Dey refused to listen’ because ‘the Englishman had shown his passport’ to the corsair. The head was raised on a pole for three days in the marketplace.32 Even those who cautioned fellow Britons against gloating over American enslavement did so from a position of confidence in British liberty. ‘A Lover of Humanity’ in that busy month of May 1787 began his letter by observing that the American captives were humanely treated by the Algerians, ‘who tho’ unenlightened heathens’ did better than many European nations – including those who had held Americans as prisoners of war in the recent conflict. The writer concluded that slavery was a curse susceptible of little mitigation. One should lament all those who in any circumstance or in any part of the world, are forced to suffer it. We who enjoy the blessings of a free government in the greatest perfection, are particularly called upon to sympathize with those who are less happy, and to extend a fellow feeling to those who are distressed in all parts of the globe.33 The fact that England was ‘flourishing, rich and prosperous’ was no reason to disparage Americans, suffering great difficulties after their War of Independence. Sometimes, the stark differences were not immediately known to those living on opposite sides of the ocean. While the delegates at the American constitutional convention adjourned to hear the tenth anniversary oration on the Declaration of Independence on 4 July 1787, a London newspaper reflected on the achievement of Britain’s current government. Prime Minister William Pitt’s own ‘greatness’ seemed assured, and his ministry would ‘mark the present area as being distinguishable for more prosperity and tranquility than any former period in British history’.34

51

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry Post-war Britain and Europe What was noted about Britain’s relations to the United States between 1783 and 1787 was even more frequently affirmed in regard to Europe. In 1783, the British public felt itself fortunate to have survived a coalition of military and diplomatic hostility that extended along a great arc of European polities from the Russian to the Spanish empires. Four years later, the entire international scene had been transformed. Britain’s most feared and formidable rival was sliding into fiscal insolvency – a bankruptcy accelerated by its decisive intervention in the Anglo-American war a decade earlier. British self-confidence in its own economic stability and superiority had reached such a point in 1787 that the press scoffed at a rumoured French plan to send another contingent of troops to the East Indies: even if French finances allowed for such a project, the British could now choose rather to encourage agriculture and manufacturing ‘when the exigencies of the State do not call for foreign expeditions’. Early the next year, a newspaper pointedly observed that for the previous year, England’s treasury had registered a surplus of nearly £1 million while France’s deficit was almost £8 million.35 The British press noted every fascinating step of the descent of the French monarchy: the revolt of the notables; the defiance of the Parliaments; the mobilisation against absolutism; the gathering intellectual assault on privileges; the state-sponsored administrative revolution against the old intendancy and the whole judicial system. News items registered other economic consequences of British stability. Inhabitants of France, Holland, Austrian Flanders and the United States were depositing portions of their wealth in London for safekeeping or even coming to England themselves for personal security. The press took note of the utterly transformed balance of power: ‘a singular change and strange reversal of politics’ enveloping ‘the various enemies of Great Britain who were unnaturally leagued against her honour, independence and very existence in the last war in this envied country’. London was now ‘full of Flemish, Dutch, French and American refugees’.36 As abolitionists presented their first collective appeal to the British nation, the international situation appeared to be unbelievably favourable. By 1787, the French government was in no condition to engage in hostilities against Britain in any part of the globe. At the depths of its troubles, the British had been barely able to fend off a near disastrous coalition. Britain’s international position was now transformed. Verging on bankruptcy, France could not even threaten to forestall a Prussian intervention (with British support) into a Dutch republic mired in revolution. The Netherlands’ civil war was described by one newspaper as a just retribution for the Dutch attempt to foster disunion in Britain’s dominion. The press described Britain as ecstatic to have come out of the conflict so much stronger and with its old enemies so much weaker without any further conflict whatsoever.37 52

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry Equally important was evidence of a much headier prospect: the possibility of an indefinite end to the military conflict between the two rivals. In retrospect, the hostile Treaty of Utrecht was judged to have left Europe with a legacy of national prejudices and 70 years of exhausting warfare. What had France gained by a century of ambition and taxation? The military weakening of France appeared to present possibilities of a new Anglo-French relationship and the reduction of warfare throughout Europe. The most significant development in Anglo-French relations in 1786–1787 concerned the negotiation of a new trade agreement, lowering the barriers to commerce between the two countries. Initially opposed by the British political opposition, the experiment had silenced most dissent by the end of 1787. British newspaper readers may have been additionally assured that the treaty was not detrimental by a letter on the French reaction to the treaty: All over France nothing is to be heard but cries against M. Calonne [the king’s minister] and the Commerce Treaty . . . a treaty by which Britain has gained more benefit than ever she did by the most successful contests. In every town British goods are to be seen in vast quantities to the great detriment of French Manufacturers . . . Britain has little to fear from the rivalship of the French.38 The treaty was hailed as the ‘coup de grace’ to ‘discomfiture and defeat’. The surge in trade was envisioned as a first step towards ‘universal benevolence . . . cementing the too-long divided bonds of peace . . . embracing the interests and happiness of Europe . . . and perhaps of the civilized earth’.39 As prospects of the ‘end of conflict’ in Europe seemed to rise, the question of ending the brutal conflict and inhumanity that fed the slave trade was easily tagged onto the agenda of public discussion. If the boundless carnage of fellow creatures was to be prevented in Europe, the ‘question of blood’ in Africa remained to be agitated. Britain was faring well against other commercial rivals. In addition to their domestic political troubles, the great Dutch trading institutions – the Dutch East and West India Companies – were foundering. As the Morning Herald summarised it: ‘The Dutch West India Company is in as bad a plight as the Eastern one; they have been, like the latter, obliged to beg alms at the door of the States of Holland and – How are the mighty fallen!’ The Danish West India Company also announced its insolvency and had to be restructured with a direct loan from the monarch.40 Regarding the United States, the British felt no pressure to modify the terms of the Navigation Act and allow American ships their old free entry into British ports. The British West Indies was a prime export market for United States corn, flour, biscuits and other commodities. Portugal, Spain and France had also restricted post-war American goods on mercantilist principles. The Mediterranean was closed to American trade by pirates.41 53

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry By no means did this imply a relative decline in the lure of the British Afro-Caribbean slave complex. At the very moment that the rulers at The Hague and Copenhagen were coming to the rescue of their overseas trading companies, new ones were being launched. At Leghorn (Livorno), a group of merchants attempted to form a private company in order to tap into the rapidly expanding Afro-American plantation complex. Another company was launched at Stockholm by the king of Sweden, which was oversubscribed in four months. Spain, too, began to reinvigorate her Caribbean colonies. The Atlantic port merchants of Ostend in the Austrian Netherlands strove to maintain the foothold in the African slave trade that wartime neutrality had opened up for them. This was, after all, the peak decade of the transatlantic slave trade.42 Slightly more captives (7 per cent) were landed in the French than the British colonies in 1784–1788, and the French colonies were clearly in ascendance as colonial economies. They dominated in the production of sugar and even more in the rapidly expanding production of coffee and cotton. During the first two post-war years, the British anxiously watched the dynamism of the French on the coast of Africa and in the Caribbean. By 1787, however, the press appeared to be as optimistic about the economic situation in the Afro-Caribbean as it was about Europe. The optimism generated by the new trade link with France was complemented by a similar British trade success in the French and Spanish Caribbean. New markets for the British transatlantic slave trade were opened by both French and Spanish merchants in the British Caribbean free ports. Vessels were arriving in Jamaica from Havana with tens of thousands of dollars to be laid out for the purchase of African slaves and British goods. Kingston, Jamaica, reported unprecedented numbers of foreign vessels in its harbour. They so increased demand that ‘even indifferent negroes command very handsome prices’. French attempts to open a competitive free port at Tobago were not successful. Meanwhile, British slavers in Liverpool were bidding to deliver Africans directly to the Spanish dominions.43 The press’s perspective on the success of the Caribbean free ports in 1787 was officially confirmed in the metropolis. They clearly provided a funnel through which British manufactures and African slaves could penetrate the otherwise protected markets of foreign colonies in exchange for cotton wool. In the words of Inspector General Thomas Irving, the Caribbean free port system permitted the empire to enjoy the trade of foreign colonies without the ‘expense of protecting or defending them.’44 By 1787, the free port system was viewed as another way for the West Indian planters and merchants to recuperate all of the losses that they had endured during the harsh years of the war. The value of sugar, the main economic enterprise of the British West Indies, remained as high as ever. In 1785–1789, both real sugar and slave prices were at their highest point since the Peace of Utrecht 75 years earlier.45 In its last pre-abolitionist statement on the value of the West Indies, the government’s 54

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry attitude was unequivocal. Two months before the founding of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, Lord Grenville summarised the government’s policy towards the sugar colonies: ‘The West Indies supported a species of our commerce highly useful to our nation’, annually entailing 50,000 tons of shipping and 4000 seamen. Moreover, ‘the commerce of our colonies was growing’ and ‘promised a rapid increase, a circumstance that could not but prove extremely beneficial to the merchants and planters of our West India Islands’.46 What the minister could not, of course, foresee in the spring of 1787 was that during the next two decades, he would become the most prominent advocate of slave trade abolition in the House of Lords and would ultimately lead the government to achieve abolition in 1806–1807. The parliamentary assessment of the West Indies was vociferously echoed in the press during the crucial period before the establishment of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1786–1787 and the opening of parliamentary debates on the subject in 1788. Jamaica’s vast undeveloped frontier was viewed as the most obvious area for agricultural expansion. The fact that West Indian exports of rum to the United States exceeded pre-war figures was equally encouraging about the long-term British dominance of the United States’ markets. By 1787, exports to the United States stood at levels not seen since 1774. Newspapers also reported the overwhelming dominance of British goods in the former continental colonies. In 1787, news of the prospect of a fine crop and large remittances from many of the sugar islands also continued to flow into Britain. The prosperity of the colonies was not lost even on those who calculated abolitionist chances of success at the end of 1787: ‘the revenue and the present subsistence of many upon the produce of the Plantations and the labour of slaves, seem to damp the hopes their exertions might have raised, but the end is to be prayed for:47 Britain’s international economic position was improving across the globe. Trade with East Asia stood at record levels in 1785–1788. Britain dominated entrepots from China to Saint Petersburg, to the United States, all duly noted in newspaper items and confirmed in the government’s official statistics. ‘In 1787, Britain’s centres of power were well on their way to controlling the lion’s share of non-European resources and markets’ and, on the eve of the French Revolution, ‘its colonial trade with three continents had acquired a seemingly decisive pre-eminence’.48 At home, the cotton industry was expanding at the fastest decadal rate that it would ever achieve, as its product became one of the iconic industries of the British Industrial Revolution. The Morning Post, on 17 April 1788, noted that 55

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry ‘the value of the manufactured cotton goods amounted to £2,000,000 in 1782 and £7,000,000 in 1787.’ Average real wages in Lancashire reached their triennial peak in 1786–1788. Jamaica’s fine weather had more than its counterpart in Britain. The newspapers brimmed with items about the finest harvest in living memory. Looking back at the beginning of 1788, one newspaper correspondent begged ‘leave to remind his countrymen, that the year 1787 has given to this island two hundred dry days without one drop of rain. Compare this blessing with the earthquakes, the storms, the tempests of the nations around us, and be grateful to God for the fertile land and temperate climate’.49 While national income was rising at a record rate in the decade after 1782, national expenditures dropped dramatically in the mid 1780s.50 The number and tonnage of ships built in Britain in 1787–1788 was not again equalled until the next century. Similar statistics can be found for outputs and exports of coal, metals and paper. Customs reported record imports of raw wool, raw silk, cotton wool, tea, sugar and wine. The population would appear to have reaped some of the benefits of this dynamism. Reported instances of collective work stoppages were for higher wages, not defensive attempts to forestall the lowering of wages. This would seem to indicate a good market for labour that accompanied the buoyant newspaper reports. During the 1780s, net migration rates from England reached their record low for three centuries.51

Towards humanity Christopher Brown has richly detailed the way in which blacks were woven into the British metropolitan consciousness in a new way following the American War. Prior to the conflict, most blacks had entered the metropolis singly, in the tow of captains or masters. The freedom offered to American rebel-owned slaves and those loyalists who came to Britain with servants deposited a new cohort of blacks on the island of Britain. Not having been born in England, they were not eligible for parish relief when unemployed or disabled. News items appeared with some frequency describing suffering blacks who were offered legal support in claiming damages for being treated cruelly or denied wages. There was a story of an ill black man carted from one parish to another before his expected death in order to avoid the expense of a burial.52 A new stage of concern was reached when the problem of indigence was addressed as a social problem woven into the British war effort. A correspondent to the Public Advertiser drew the public’s attention to the fact that most of the impoverished blacks had served the country fighting under the British flag. Having deserted their masters and placed themselves under a British commander, they were now left to perish by famine and cold. They were entitled to the benefit of British ‘gratitude, humanity and policy’.53 Two important results came out of this initiative. A Committee to Relieve the Black Poor published a plea for subscriptions. Its extensively published 56

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry lists of prominent contributors gave the intended beneficiaries more public prominence and commentaries than any previous group of blacks had ever enjoyed.54 A new narrative also incorporated past ‘moments’ when ‘the promise of freedom was dishonorably abandoned’; the ex-slaves were ‘most shamefully given up to their cruel masters [when] Lord Cornwallis surrendered himself and his gallant army’, and the ex-slaves were made to suffer hanging, whipping, mutilation and death. The writer called upon Cornwallis to support the remnant in England with compensation for life in reparation for his earlier abandonment. Even if charity began at home, that is where it now began for metropolitan ex-slaves and ex-servicemen of the empire.55 The hundreds of influential gentlemen and ladies who contributed to the rescue fund made a personal connection to a new transatlantic diaspora. The Sierra Leone settlement project that grew out of the Black Poor rescue project was a further illustration of an expanding and optimistic linkage of domestic and imperial concerns that simultaneously emerged in the late 1780s. As Philip Curtin observed, the Sierra Leone project grew out of the more optimistic British mood of the mid 1780s. It fostered projects not only for a new, but for a better empire: ‘The eighteenth-century faith in man’s potential reached its British peak in the decade 1783–1792’. In this context, a number of new African projects began to emerge.56 One must be fully alert to this expansiveness of British domestic and imperial discourse in the second half of the 1780s. The organisation of expeditions to the coast of Africa and Australia, and the impeachment of Warren Hastings for misrule in India were simultaneous reflections of a new sense of reforming humanity on a global scale. On the eve of the emergence of mass abolitionism, the public was urged to be wary about cultural and aesthetic misrepresentation of the most distant peoples. Old contradictions received new effusions of publicity: between sentimental sympathy for the brutally mistreated and the enjoyment of the commodities that prolonged it; between the protection of legal rights in England and the use of the whip – a form of torture – by East India Company officials to extort confessions of wealth; the rationalisations of the African slave trade and Indian coercion, both excused as impenetrably embedded in traditional cultures; between Gloucester convicts, en route to transportation and chained like dogs, or slaves and John Howard, the international prison reformer, ill of a fever contracted in the Lazaretto of Venice. Every exposure called for new reformers for fresh ills: for more John Howards or John Hanways to devise new schemes to rescue seduced and prostituted young women. The slave trade was part of an extraordinary range of targets.57 In short, when abolitionism burst on the scene late in 1787, both the external and internal conditions of Britain had never seemed so favourable. Its century-long rival had ceased to seem a menace. More astonishingly, a flattering cultural ‘Anglomania’ had taken hold across the channel as France’s internal 57

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry movement for reform accelerated. The British press took note that English language and literature studies were even being institutionalised in France in societies like ‘The Friendly English Club’. English gardens, furniture, horses and amusements, as well as philosophers and politics, were suddenly in vogue. Many French revolutionaries-to-be of 1789 ‘thought that, far from teaching the English, they were finally acquiring the liberties and political means of freeborn Englishmen’.58 It seemed only natural to Britons, as the news of slave trade abolitionism spread through Britain early in 1788, that its French counterpart, the Amis des Noirs, should be founded in Paris. Ironically, the French society was only given permission by the royal censor to publish news about abolitionist activity on the English side of the channel. Despite the formation of a French society of the ‘Friends of the Blacks’, the British abolitionists were well aware of the considerable difficulties it faced. In February 1788, the Marquis de Lafayette offered Wilberforce best wishes for his campaign, noting Wilberforce’s advantages – ‘the powers of an able senator [Pitt] and the blessed advantages of a National Assembly.’ Even in 1788, a French national assembly ‘seemed so remote as to preclude the citizens of France from uniting in expressions of philanthropy’. Only because the wealth of the colonies lay in the sum of their production was Lafayette hopeful. Perhaps in France, free labour could compensate for the absence of free institutions. Slave products would be better produced by a hired man and the plantation owner than by slavery. Lafayette had already begun a plantation experiment in the colonies.59 Security abroad heightened the sense of security at home. Britons believed themselves to be at a blessed moment in their history. ‘A day of thanksgiving was never perhaps . . . more necessary’, wrote one newspaper. ‘In France, they witnessed ‘the most serious dispute between King and Parliament (sic) ever known. In Flanders insurrection, in Holland the sword drawn’. Blush Britons, if ye do not pour forth your songs of gratitude for a situation so opposite to theirs; in a state as worthy of envy as the most glorious days of our Williams, Henrys, or Edwards. Peace, plenty, security. Deo solo Gloria in excelsis fiat!!!60 The newspapers of 1787–1788 were awash with national euphoria. The sentiment was echoed in many news items. Comparing their own nation to the Continent, and enjoying a fertile, unoppressive, financially sound country ‘while a neighbouring kingdom shudders’, the press welcomed petitions against the slave trade’s national stigma on this people in this ‘liberal age’.61 58

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry The sense of general well-being also meant that any urgent pressure for political reform was in abeyance. William Pitt, the popular young prime minister, was viewed as a wunderkind who had simultaneously increased trade, balanced the budget and won the peace. He could even allow his modest proposal for parliamentary reform to lapse without further ado. As the Reverend Christopher Wyvill observed to him: ‘the prospect of happier times had produced a disposition to acquiesce’.62 Within Britain, confrontation appeared to be at an ebb. Popular rioting as a barometer of social discontent was at a low point. As with other indices, those of violent collective contention offer further evidence of quiescence. The Home Office papers for the late 1780s reveal only sporadic outbursts of violence. There were certainly none to rank with the great Gordon Riots of the war year 1780. Britain was also luxuriating in an emerging technological and industrial lead, which was to be labelled, in retrospect, as the Industrial Revolution.63 It is as important to understand the contextual pressures that operate in accounting for the emergence of a powerful political movement as it is to understand the motives of its entrepreneurs. One sign of the times in 1787 was the palpable and noted decline in the production of political pamphlets. Another, and perhaps the most significant indicator of the political climate, was the reception of the King’s Speech opening the parliamentary session at the end of November 1787. It concluded with remarks on the flourishing condition of the country in both commerce and revenue. There was no challenge whatsoever to the government’s description of the state of the nation. The Address to the Throne in 1787 and the year that followed were both carried nemine contradicente (‘without dissent’). The question of abolition came before Parliament and the nation in a rare state of political equilibrium.64 Poetry was also a barometer of the expansive mood. Already a year before the inauguration of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, Z.A.’s ‘Ode to Philanthropy’ in the London Chronicle captured the prevailing public spirit: England: what bliss, unrival’d soil is thine! Plenty, plenty triumphs here – Hill and valley, wood and plain, All proclaim fair freedom’s reign Then, turning beyond England, Z.A. wrote: A cloud comes and speaks – Philanthropy: See where on Afric’s groaning coast, The nation praised so high, Say wilt thou yet that nation boast? These fellow – mortals buy? Exil’d from all that gladdens life Friends, parents, country, children, wife, See thou not the drooping band, Lo, they drag them to the strand! Wailing – happy they who feed the sharks etc. 59

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry Turn next to Eastern climes they view, Oh climes remote in vain! Ev’n there thy sons 0 Albion too Pre-eminence maintain; But’tis in frauds’ felonious feats, But’tis in rapine’s blood-stained seats, Lo where the strangers tread Grim extortion rears his head; Ravenous pillage sweeps the plain etc. At year’s end in 1787, an ‘Ode for the New Year’ concluded, ad absurdum, on the condition of Britons: ‘0 happy, happy, happy, happy Reign!’65 Precisely midway in this decade of domestic dynamism and international calm came an opening for many political movements to make claims for certain human rights in a more global perspective.

Conclusion The question remains: Was it the shock of imperial defeat or the shock of resiliency and security that most contributed to the dramatic burst of abolitionism into the public and parliamentary sphere in 1787–1788? The record of public discourse and national statistics towards the end the 1780s seems to indicate that British abolition did not emerge as a political force in an atmosphere of political crisis. Nor did Britain proceed in the process of eliminating its slave trade, and in time the institution itself, because of some post-partum syndrome of national defeat reinforced by rising social discontent. Nor did Britons picture themselves to be a declining nation trying to regain its tarnished reputation as a haven of liberty. Nor was its elite motivated by a defensive sense of internal social crisis or external threat. The cumulative public record evidences a people and its rulers entering the abolition process primarily because they wanted to sustain their national momentum in a situation where they already felt themselves to be leaders in coalescing international movements for human amelioration. Nor was the abolitionist point of departure a unique moment. During the half-century that followed the breakthrough, abolitionism remained the most durable national social movement in Britain. Its victories never came at moments of acute internal or external crisis. They came at moments of relative calm, before or after Britain had successfully weathered severe threats – in 1806–1807, 1814, 1823, 1833 and 1838. In turn, abolitionism endured moments of quiescence when Britain was depressed late 1810s, the Reform Bill political crisis of 1831–1832 and, finally, in the long deep economic crisis after 1838.66 From beginning to end, the British governing elite was not defensively compelled to take up anti-slavery to parry existential threats. Moving in the same direction, Linda Colley puts the emphasis on elite serenity even more unequivocally than I would: 60

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry Nor did it succumb helplessly to the momentum of public pressure at home, though extra-parliamentary agitation certainly had some impact. Britain’s rulers ended the slave trade and freed the West Indian slaves primarily because they wanted to . . . Successful abolitionism became one of the vital underpinnings of British supremacy in the Victorian era; offering – as it seemed to do – irrefutable proof that British power was founded on freedom and on moral caliber, not just on a superior stock of armaments and capital.67 After the fact, the abolition of the slave trade and slavery served British rulers in many imperialist – and sometimes quite violent – ways. But the fact that it could never divert popular agitation during a crisis demonstrates the severe limitations of abolitionism’s utility as an elite’s ‘hegemonic deflector’. Indeed, it was at moments of rising crisis that its detractors, both at home and abroad, most effectively branded abolitionism as a hegemonic hoax. We must bear in mind that apart from the Quakers, many of those who became abolitionists in 1787 had other objectives as their highest priority. As Christopher Brown perceptively observes, as late as the summer of 1787, when Thomas Clarkson began his famous tour of England’s slave ports and industrial Manchester, Wilberforce was busy criss-crossing England to generate support for another cause – the Society for Enforcing His Majesty’s Proclamation against Vice and Immorality. On the very eve of abolitionism, Wilberforce’s chief concern was the threat of excess that comes with the moments and pleasures of abundance, rather than those of hardship and hunger.68 As with the Zong and Equiano, it was abolitionism that transformed Wilberforce and it was the tide of petitions in the affairs of men and brothers, and women and sisters, that swept British abolitionists onto the national agenda.

Acknowledgements I express my gratitude to Stanley Engerman and Holger Hoock for their comments, to Steven Pitt for statistical work on the Burney newspaper collection and, above all, to an anonymous reader of the manuscript for Slavery and Abolition.

Notes 1. See Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (1944; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 15. For some of the major landmarks in the debate, see Howard Temperley, ‘Eric Williams and the Birth of a New Orthodoxy’, in British Capitalism and Caribbean Slavery: The Legacy of Eric Williams, ed. Barbara L. Solow and Stanley L. Engerman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 229–258; David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell

61

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry

2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

11.

University Press, 1974); Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Heather Cateau and S.H.H. Carrington, eds., Capitalism and Slavery Fifty Years Later: Eric Eustace Williams – A Reassessment of the Man and His Work (New York: Peter Lang, 2000); Seymour Drescher, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 238–249; Andrew O’Shaugnessy, An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). See, especially, Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery 1776–1848 (London: Verso, 1988), chap.  4 and 158n1; reiterated in Robin Blackburn, The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights (London: Verso, 2011), 162–165. Cf. Brown, Moral Capital, 27, 391–433; Reginald Coupland, The American Revolution and the British Empire (1928; New York: Russell and Russell, 1965). Brown, Moral Capital, 182 (original emphasis). See, especially, Blackburn, American Crucible, 162–169; Blackburn, Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 133–144. See Troy Bickham, Making Headlines: The American Revolution as Seen through the British Press (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009), 209–214 (quotes on 210 and 211). In contrast American Indians received considerable coverage. See Public Advertiser, 14 May 1778. When Granville Sharp canvassed the bishops in the House of Lords in 1779, the great majority expressed ‘a great abhorrence of that trade and a desire to suppress it’. Apparently, none of them spoke out in Parliament against it. James Walvin, The Zong: A Massacre, the Law and the End of Slavery (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 169. See Vincent Carretta, Equiano the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), 237, 255–273. Bickham, Making Headlines, 164–167. See Michael Duffy, ‘The French Revolution and British Attitudes to the West Indian Colonies’, in The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean, ed. David Barry Gaspar and David Patrick Geggus (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 78–101 (79). A persistent historiographical hypothesis suggests that the separation of the United States removed half of Britain’s slaves from the empire, opening the possibility for British legislators to attend to Africa’s sons and daughters. This overlooks the countervailing fact that a large proportion of slaves in the new nation lay within those former colonies that agitated for the end of slave importations before the Declaration of Independence. Even more colonies had legally prohibited further imports before abolition became an issue in the British legislature. Not only a majority of Americans, but even a majority of American slaveholders would probably have supported a parliamentary initiative to extend an imperial prohibition to the Atlantic empire. In this regard, see David Brion Davis, ‘American Slavery and the American Revolution’, in Slavery and Freedom in the Age of Revolution, ed. Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983), 262–282. Bickham, Making Headlines, 126–128, 164–167, 177–181, 246–247. Maya Jasinoff identifies a post-war British ‘Spirit of 1783’ (ch. 1). It combined the reaffirmation of a hierarchical imperial vision with a new humanitarian dimension. One of the outcomes of this ‘spirit’ was a post-war British imperium that gave

62

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry

12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

24.

25.

freedom to thousands of black American loyalists while facilitating the transfer of an even greater number of loyalist-owned American slaves to the Caribbean. Maya Jasinoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York: Knopf, 2011), 358 (Appendix: ‘Slave Exports’). See also Cassandra Pybus, ‘Jefferson’s Faulty Quarterly 3rd ser. 62, no. 2 (2005): 243–264. Brown, Moral Capital, 423. See ibid.; Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, 62. Brown, Moral Capital, 430. Quoting Laurens to Price, See Anthony Page, ‘A Species of Slavery: Richard Price’s Rational Dissent and Antislavery’, Slavery and Abolition 32, no. 1 (2011): 53–73, 61. As late as 1787, William Pitt was ‘a great favorite’ with the West India interest. William Wilberforce was able to make his early inquiries into the slave trade ‘amongst the African merchants’, who freely supplied him with details of their business. See also Trevor Bernard, ‘Powerless Masters: The Curious Decline of Jamaican Sugar Planters in the Foundational Period of British Abolitionism’, Slavery and Abolition 32, no. 2 (2011): 185–198; for the Quakers’ evaluation of their campaign see, Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, 64–65, quote on 63. See also Ibid. 207–214. See Judith Jennings, The Business of Abolishing the Slave Trade 1783–1807 (London: Frank Cass, 1997); J.R. Oldfield, Popular Politics and British AntiSlavery: The Mobilization of Public Opinion against the Slave Trade 1787–1807 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), chap. 5; Brown, Moral Capital. See Brown, Moral Capital, 372–373, and, especially, Folarin Shyllon, fames Ramsay: The Unknown Abolitionist (Edinburgh: Cannongate, 1977). Morning Chronicle, 18 March 1783. Walvin, Zong, 153. See Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Viking Press, 2007), 308–342; Oldfield, Popular Politics, 99, 163–166. The first trial for the murder of a captive aboard a slave ship came in 1792, in the wake of full-blown political debate of a bill to abolish the slave trade. See Srividhya Swaminathan, ‘Reporting Atrocities: A Comparison of the Zong and the Trial of Captain John Kimber’, Slavery and Abolition 31, no. 4 (2010): 483–499. Swaminathan concludes that the Zong atrocity became more important after 1788 than before. Both Quobna Ottabah Cugoano and James Ramsay commented upon the Zong massacre before the onset of abolitionist petitioning. Neither identified the name of the vessel, which might have given the massacre a name. Cugoano’s reference to it as occurring ‘about the year 1780’ may indicate how uncertainly the memory of the incident was recalled, even by its most articulate African publicist. Brown, Moral Capital, 431–432. See also Roger Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition 1760–1810 (London: Macmillan, 1975), 230; Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, 64–65, 207, 213. See Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, 208. See Brown, Moral Capital, 431. Newspapers are an imperfect indicator of broader political opinion. Still, they may offer better evidence of the breadth of public attention than the number of pamphlets or books on slavery in the 1780s. Moreover, the impact of newspapers is more compelling as evidence when they are aligned with statistical sources from other data sets (see below). John Cannon, ‘The Loss of America’, in Britain and the American Revolution, ed. H.T. Dickson (London: Longman, 1998), 242. For newspaper perspectives on American ‘anarchy’ as early as 1785, see Morning Chronicle, 19, 27 September 1785; Public Advertiser, 19 April 1785. Morning Chronicle, IS March 1787.

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pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry 26. See General Advertiser, 17 February 1786; Public Advertiser, 18 February 1786; Morning Chronicle, 21 February 1786; Morning Herald, 13 June 1787. 27. Morning Chronicle, 21 March 1787; Brown, Moral Capital, 201. 28. For the full text of the new constitution, see Morning Chronicle, 12 October 1787, 6 February 1788; World, 29, 31 October 1787, 1, 2 November 1787. There was also, of course, the additional uncertainty about whether the new constitution would actually be ratified (see Bath Chronicle, 22 May 1788). Morning Chronicle, 12 October 1787. 29. Morning Chronicle, 24 April 1787. 30. Quote in Public Advertiser, 4 January 1787. For other notices, see, inter alia, Morning Herald, 30 December 1785, 26 January 1786, 4 May 1787; Public Advertiser, 25 January 1785. 31. Public Advertiser, 2, 3 March 1786; Genera/Advertiser, 3 March 1786; Morning Herald, 1 June 1787; Morning Chronicle, 6 February 1787, 4 April 1787, 8, 14, 18, 28, 31 May 1787, 5 July 1787, 2 August 1787, 13 October 1787; London Packet, 23–25 April 1787; London Chronicle, 10–12 May 1787. 32. Morning Chronicle, 24 February 1786, 23 February 1787. 33. Ibid., 14 May 1787. 34. Ibid., 4 July 1787. Across the Atlantic, within a week of the American convention’s adjournment to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, James Madison reminded the delegates that the principal divide between American states lay in their degree of involvement with slavery. 35. Morning Herald, 18 January 1787; Morning Chronicle, 10 May 1787; Morning Post, 3 April 1788. 36. Public Advertiser, 2, 6 September 1787. 37. See ibid., 20 July 1787; Morning Herald, 17 January 1787; Morning Chronicle, 16 August 1787, 4, 6 December 1787; London Chronicle, 9–11 October 1787,352. 38. Morning Chronicle, 13 November 1787. On French fears of the superiority of the English, see ibid., 12 February 1787. See also ibid., 10 January 1787. 39. See Public Advertiser, 21 January 1787; Morning Chronicle, 21 March 1787. 40. Morning Herald, 2 March 1786. See also Morning Herald, 3 March 1786, 10 December 1786; London Chronicle, 7–9 June 1787. 41. Stockdale, Parliamentary Debates, 1786, vol. 1, p. 141 (speech of Jenkinson). 42. See http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces. In the five years between 1784 and 1788, half a million Africans were landed in the Americas. See General Advertiser, 17 March 1786; Morning Chronicle, 2 January 1787; London Chronicle, 19–21 May 1787; Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, 171–172. The leading national carriers of slaves remained the French and British traders. 43. Morning Chronicle, 11, 28 May 1787; London Chronicle, 20–22 September 1787. 44. See Drescher, Econocide, 56, 236n. 45. See David Eltis and David Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 3 (Table 1). 46. Morning Chronicle, 13 March 1787. 47. Ibid., 17 December 1787. See also Universal Daily Register, 12 January 1786; Morning Chronicle, 27 February 1786, 2 March 1786, 6 March 1787, 4, 11 May 1787, 5, 8 August 1787; Public Advertiser, 27 February 1786; London Chronicle, 2, 3–6 March 1787, 1–3 May 1787. 48. Javier Cuenca Esteban, ‘Comparative Patterns of Colonial Trade: Britain and Its Rivals,’ in Exceptionalism and Industrialisation: Britain and Its European Rivals, 1688–1815, ed. Leandro Prados de la Escosura (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 36, 47. For press reports, see, for example, Morning Chronicle, 11 July 1787. For official statistics, see B.R. Mitchell, British Historical

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49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57.

58. 59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

Statistics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 495 (Table 14: External Trade). For revised values, see Ralph Davis, The Industrial Revolution and British Overseas Trade (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1979), 88–125. Public Advertiser, 19 January 1788; Mitchell, British Historical Statistics, 155. See Mitchell, British Historical Statistics, 419; Patrick K. O’Brien and Philip A. Hunt, ‘The Rise of a Fiscal State in England, 1485–1815’, Historical Research 66, no. 160 (1993): 129–176 (esp. 175–176, Table 5). E.A. Wrigley and R.S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1451–1871: A Reconstruction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 531–535 (Table A3.3). I have elsewhere examined the commercial and industrial context in which abolitionism was launched in the 1780s. See Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, 67–75. ‘If 1788–91 was not a period of industrial crisis, the political situation clearly provided the basis for . . . a wide variety of political radicalisrns’, which would manifest themselves in 1792, at the very end of the breakthrough years (ibid., 142–143). See, for example, Gazetteer, 1 December 1784, 3 May 1785, 5 January 1786. Public Advertiser, 19 January 1786. See ibid., 1, 19, 26,27 January 1786, 11, 15, 17, 18, 21, 24, 27,28 February 1786, 1, 4, 15, 21, 22, 27 March 1786; Morning Herald, 1 February 1786; Morning Chronicle, 3, 13, 24 February 1786, 10, 16,23 March 1786; Genera/Advertiser, 8 February 1786. Public Advertiser, 17 February 1786, letter from ‘A Citizen of the World’. See also ibid., 19 January 1786. See Philip Curtin, The Image of Africa: British Ideas and Action, 1780–1850 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964), 88, chap.  4; Brown, Moral Capital, 294–295,314–322. See London Chronicle, 1 December 1785; Public Advertiser, 18 January 1785, 17 February 1786, 2, 10 March 1786, 12 March 1785; Morning Herald, 28 February 1786; London Packet, 27–30 April 1787. Leo d’Anjou uses the emergence of British abolitionism as exemplary in understanding the impact of modern social movements on cultural change. See Leo d’Anjou, Social Movements and Cultural Change: The First Abolition Campaign Revisited (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1996). See also Charles Tilly and Sidney Tarrow, Contentious Politics (London: Paradigm, 2007). Charles Tilly, Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758–1834 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 197; Public Advertiser, 6 September 1787. See Lafayette to Wilberforce, Paris, 25 February 1788, Wilberforce Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford. The foundation of the Arnis des Noirs was in response to London’s invitation. See Marcel Dorigny, ‘Mirabeau and the Societe des Arnis des Noirs: Which Way to Abolish Slavery?’, in The Abolitions of Slavery from L.F. Sonthonax to Victor Schoelcher, 1793, 1794, 1848, ed. Marcel Dorigny (New York: Berghahn Books, 1998), 121–132. Public Advertiser, 6 September 1787. Morning Chronicle, 9 January 1788. Wyvill to Pitt, 29 July 1787, quoted in Brown, Moral Capital, 202. For further discussion of Home Office reports and newspaper assessments in 1787–1788, see Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, 249. Morning Chronicle, 28 November 1787. London Chronicle, 23–25 March 1786; Morning Chronicle, 31 December 1787. See also Gazetteer, 5 March 1788. See Seymour Drescher, ‘History’s Engines: British Mobilization in the Age of Revolution’, William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 66, no. 4 (2009): 737–756;

65

Seymour Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), chap.  8–9. When radical versions of abolitionism developed, they tended to stay focused upon alternative strategies for addressing the problems of the slave trade and slavery. Their later success was more often an inspiration for other reform programmes than a fulfilment of a diversionary function suggested by some historians of anti-slavery. See Seymour Drescher, ‘Cart Whip and Billy Roller: Antislavery and Reform Symbolism in Industrializing Britain’, Journal of Social History 15, no. 1 (1981): 3–24. 67. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 358–359. The rhythm of publications, as expected, quite closely matched anti-slavery activity in and outside Parliament: in 1788–1789, 1791–1792, 1807 and 1823–1833. See David Turley, The Culture of English Antislavery, 1780–1860 (London: Routledge, 1991), 51. 68. Brown, Moral Capital, 385–389.

3 WHOSE ABOLITION? POPULAR PRESSURE AND THE ENDING OF THE BRITISH SLAVE TRADE

I The last decade and a half has been one of the liveliest in the historiography of slavery and abolition. The ending of the British slave trade has occupied a distinctive place in that literature. If the dismantling of the Atlantic slave system from the 1780s to the 1880s constitutes one of the most extraordinary processes in history, the shift in British public behaviour beginning in the late 1780s constitutes one of the most dramatic events in that story. The pessimism of an Adam Smith or an abbe Raynal regarding the durability of slavery in the 1760s and 1770s was transformed by the second decade of the nineteenth century. As late as 1780 Edmund Burke was discouraged from presenting a plan for ameliorating slavery by a sense of the power of the West Indian interest, and viewed the idea of the abolition of the slave trade as a “very chimerical object”.1 The interruption in the expansion of New World slavery as a result of the St Domingue revolution and the abolition of the British slave trade, however, generated expectation of a speedy end to the institution of slavery itself. Historians now routinely conceive of British abolition as part of a long-term structural process, involving variables of demography, economics, political economy, ideology, class relationships, popular organization and slave resistance. The principal issues now revolve around the causal weight to be ascribed to different long-term and short-term variables, and the significance of countervailing tensions and ecological constraints on actors, timing and outcomes.2 Despite a general acknowledgement of Britain’s early success in ending the transatlantic slave trade, historians have generally hesitated to accord public opinion a large role in the passage of British abolition in 1806–7.3 In this regard they are heirs of a venerable tradition. Thomas Clarkson’s initial chronology of 1808 was entitled The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament. It moved from a survey of initial individual reservations about slavery, through an exhaustive account of the operations of the central abolitionist organization in London. Clarkson concluded with a chronicle of almost annual legislative 67

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry motions, detailing the interaction of the “Saints” and the parliamentary leadership. Only in discussing the national campaign of 1792 did he pause to elaborate on the nature of public opinion in the country at large: “Of the enthusiasm of the nation at this time”, wrote Clarkson, “none can form an opinion but they who witnessed it. There never was perhaps a season when so much virtuous feeling pervaded all ranks”. With a single exception, Clarkson thereafter wrote only of action within a narrow circle of London abolitionists and parliamentarians.4 Historians have remained quite faithful to this aspect of Clarkson’s narrative. The impact of the popular mobilizations of 1788–92 is now generally appreciated, especially in comparison with antislavery elsewhere in contemporary Europe and the United States. Yet there remains a good deal of hesitation about allowing much significance to popular, extra-parliamentary pressure after 1792. The rapid diminution of popular mobilizations in general during the “anti-Jacobin” repression of the 1790s, and the “cyclical” intensity of abolitionist popular campaigns during the next two generations, have encouraged a pervasive scepticism about the role of public opinion during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic era. Even those who allocate a role to abolitionist opinion at the opening and closing moments in the destruction of British slavery envision the continuity of abolitionism almost exclusively in terms of the “Saints” and parliament. The abolitionist victories of 1806–7 in particular are treated as elite transactions. Clarkson’s most recent biographer, Ellen Wilson, succinctly captures the general historiographical consensus: “the last chapter in the struggle to abolish the slave trade was written mostly in Parliament and no large-scale effort was undertaken to stir up vehement public pressure”.5 For most historians, the absence of any nation-wide petition campaign between 1792 and 1814 constitutes prima facie evidence that public opinion played no role in the ending of the British slave trade. Given this long gap in national petition mobilizations they conclude that there was little or no continuity in popular anti-slavery between the mid-1790s and the early 1820s. The “crucial antislavery measures from 1800 to 1823 were not the result of public pressure”, and there was a “prevailing public apathy and ignorance”, in the years before the slave trade was abolished.6 This assumption has also influenced assessments of causes and effects. Explaining abolition’s passage entails a careful and ima ginative analysis of the well-documented motives and behaviour of a handful of leading actors. The consequences are similarly analysed in terms of ruling-class uses of the abolitionist victory. The same elites that successfully removed the national blemish of the slave trade were able to neutralize a variety of social and political threats to their dominance. In effecting the prohibition of a distant evil, British rulers simultaneously pre-empted domestic agitation and forged a formidable new weapon of nationalist mobilization against the Napoleonic menace.7 68

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry II One might begin by asking whether the absence of national petition campaigns is conclusive evidence of public apathy. For the decade prior to abolition in 1806–7, James Walvin concludes, “public feeling had not been permitted to express itself on [abolition] or other matters”.8 To be silenced and to be silent may be two very different things. More empirically, however, one may question the dominant premise of abolitionist apathy and indifference during the early 1800s and thus offer a fresh approach to the whole question of popular continuity in British abolitionism. First, let us take a closer look at the story of British abolition. In the parliamentary session of 1805, the final year of Pitt’s administration, an abolition bill failed for the eleventh time in fifteen years. Regrouping after the defeat, the London Abolition Committee decided that renewed popular pressure was essential to breaking the stalemate. Thomas Clarkson was dispatched on another tour of the country to revive the local committees. He reported on the relative ignorance among the younger abolitionist cohorts in the provinces. But he also noted the very opposite of apathy: When however I conversed with these . . . I discovered a profound attention to what I said; an earnest desire to know more of the subject; and a generous warmth in favour of the injured Africans, which I foresaw could soon be turned into enthusiasm. Hence I perceived that the cause furnished us with endless sources of rallying; and that the ardour, which we had seen with so much admiration in former years, could be easily renewed.9 In the wake of the anti-Jacobin repression of the 1790s, however, the London Abolition Committee remained wary of mass public meetings or national petition campaigns. They switched to more localized pressure tactics. As early as 1805 the slaving interest began protesting that abolitionist mobilizations in Yorkshire, Lancashire and London were threatening the trade by working up “violent propaganda”. As they had done during the earlier wave of abolitionist popular appeals, the metropolitan West India Committee revived its propaganda subcommittee. West Indian legislatures also officially protested that popular pressure was becoming a serious deterrent to new capital investment in their region. This phase lasted until the passage of the Foreign Slave Trade Abolition Bill in May 1806.10 A second and more visible stage of popular mobilization came during the parliamentary elections of November 1806, when a new technique was added to the abolitionist repertoire. Abolitionist demands for campaign pledges became a new dimension of popular pressure. A third surge of popular intervention occurred in the spring of 1807, in the wake of abolition, following the formation of a new administration. Some of its members were notoriously 69

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry hostile to the measure, and abolitionists feared that planter protests might persuade the new ministry to undermine the act before it came into effect in January 1808. The most hotly contested local election, for the seats of Yorkshire, was widely viewed as an indicator of national popular sentiment on abolition. The final major episode of popular pressure against the slave trade occurred seven years later, in the summer of 1814. In a decisive move to internationalize the prohibition of the Atlantic slave trade, abolitionists launched one of the most extensively signed petitions in British history. Each of these interventions deserves separate analysis. The first stage offers interesting evidence against the assumption that public opinion was largely apathetic to the progress of abolition before the first victory of 1806. If the absence of mass petitioning has been urged as a decisive indicator of apathy and disinterest, what might have happened had the abolitionists decided to solicit a mass petition? Would they have been confronted by a level of apathy and ignorance sufficient to embarrass those soliciting it? In fact, just such a mass petition was presented to the House of Lords in May 1806. Of all the parliamentary motions in favour of abolition between 1788 and 1807, the one least likely to have stimulated popular mobilization, or even to have stirred the popular imagination, was the Foreign Slave Trade Abolition Bill of 1806. As noted by Roger Anstey, this was a parliamentary insiders’ bill par excellence: “After nearly twenty years the appeal to humanity and justice still had not brought success; perhaps more could be done behind the cloak of national interest”. The bill was not introduced in the usual manner by Wilberforce, but by Attorney General Piggot. The legislation supposedly represented only a statutory strengthening of an order-in-council of 1805, curtailing the supply of slaves to newly conquered colonies. Abolitionist support in the Commons was more muted than for any bill in two decades of debates. Prominent abolitionists sat in silence through the early stages of the debate. Wilberforce evaded a challenge to speak. The initial success of this low-key approach was demonstrated by the meagre attendance and extreme brevity of the discussion for the first two readings in the lower House.11 By the final reading, however, the anti-abolitionists began to discern the broader implications of the measure and to attack it as a form of abolition in disguise. An alarmed Sir Robert Peel declared that he had been lulled into not attending the initial stages. He vigorously opposed the bill on the grounds that it would injure the interests of the cotton industry. As the bill passed to the upper House, the opposition moved away from parliament itself. A petition was circulated in Manchester among those whose trade interest was threatened. It received more than four hundred signatures, the city’s largest single petition against abolition to be sent up to parliament since the campaign of 1792. Faced with this sudden anti-abolitionist move, Clarkson countered with an emergency call for an abolitionist petition from the same city. The petition had to reach the Lords in time for the second reading. Within a matter 70

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry of hours more than 2,300 names were gathered and dispatched to London. The Manchester abolitionists wrote to Clarkson that they could have doubled the number of signatories with even one more day at their disposal, a claim repeated in the Lords. Even as it stood, the supporters of abolition in Manchester had outsigned their opponents by a margin of more than five to one, a clear indication to the Lords that the anti-abolitionists represented by Peel spoke for a minority of both the city and the cotton industry.12 I have identified about a quarter of the names on each petition in terms of occupation (596 of the 2,354 abolitionists; 114 of the 439 anti-abolitionists). In each of the 135 occupational categories with more than ten signers the abolitionists were in the overwhelming majority. (See Table.) The two slightly underrepresented categories in support of abolition were the ones associated with the cotton textile interest. Other categories, whether artisanal, mercantile or gentlemanly, tended to be overrepresented among the pro-abolitionist petitioners. In relatively undersupporting the abolition of the foreign slave trade, the cotton merchant-manufacturers did not, of course, play the vanguard role conventionally assigned to them by capitalist theories of antislavery. But even Table Occupations of Signers of Two Petitions on the Slave Trade from Manchester in May 1806* Occupation

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Bookkeeper Bootmaker Corn dealer Gentleman Grocer Joiner Shopkeeper Tailor Warehouseman Textile worker (weavers, cutters, printers, dyers, etc.) 11 Merchant-manufacturer 12 Total number of signatories 13 Total number of occupationally identifiable signatories

Pro-Abolition Signers

Anti-Abolition Signers

Pro-Abolition Signers as a Percentage

16 17 10 11 13 25 23 15 37 75

3 3 0 1 0 2 2 1 5 27

84 85 100 92 100 93 92 94 88 74

101 2,354

25 439

80 84

596

114

84

* Source: House of Lords Record Office, London, Petitions on the Slave Trade, 13 May 1806; Manchester and Salford Directory (Manchester, 1804). My thanks to Michael Drescher and Ellen Wimberg for deciphering and collating the signatures and Directory entries. It should be noted that the Directory was more likely to capture the names of the more settled and affluent members of the community, while the petition-signers would have been drawn from a broader social spectrum. However, the proportions of 12 and 13 are almost identical in any event.

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pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry they responded to the abolitionist call of May 1806 by a margin of four to one. The evidence for popular pressure did not stop at Manchester. Immediately after the passage of the act, James Stephen (its principal backstage manager through parliament) wrote a memorandum to Prime Minister Grenville, then contemplating calling a general election in order to strengthen the government’s position. Stephen argued that “an early dissolution of Parliament will strongly influence in our favour many Members of the House of Commons who have been instructed by large bodies of their Constituents to vote for an abolition of the Slave Trade”.13 To what extent, then, are we justified in using the concept of popular intervention to describe activities which some might view in terms of “elite” abolitionists orchestrating pressure from below? One must, at the very least, account for widespread public action early in 1806 rather than its absence. In view of Stephen’s standing among contemporaries as the chief parliamentary strategist of abolition, and among historians as a principal authority for determining the political and ideological significance of British abolition, Stephen’s assessment is interesting as testimony to popular pressure as early as the spring of 1806.14 But the M.P.s who rallied overwhelmingly in favour of total abolition in February 1807 were not just belatedly responding to memories of outside pressure during the previous spring. In the autumn of 1806 there were still wider and more visible manifestations of public opinion in favour of immediate abolition. In October the government called a general election. For the first time in the history of abolition the slave trade became a real election issue. In one of Britain’s foremost (and erstwhile slaving) ports Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal published the following item under the headline “SLAVE TRADE”: The friends of the oppressed African race will be pleased to learn that during the course of the election in various parts of the kingdom the popular sentiment has been very strongly expressed against the continu ance of that traffick in human flesh, which to the disgrace of this enlightened country, is still permitted, if not encouraged, by our laws.15 The article called special attention to the electoral campaign in Yorkshire. In contrast to more restricted suffrage districts, Yorkshire was often cited by politicians as a bell-wether of national sentiment. In the election of November 1806 Wilberforce faced potentially powerful opposition there. He was running, as usual, as an Independent. Henry Lascelles, a Pittite, was the other incumbent. Fawkes, a Whig, was the new challenger. Both Wilberforce and Lascelles had just been embroiled in a bitter conflict between two powerful county interests, the woollen manufacturers and the clothiers. The distressed (and enfranchised) clothiers, who operated a cottage industry from 72

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry their homes, had petitioned for legislation restricting the use of new mechanized production methods. Wilberforce and Lascelles both sat on the parliamentary Woollen Trades Committee which adjudicated the dispute and the clothiers’ appeal. Lascelles bluntly refused to place limitations on industrial innovation. Wilberforce initially hesitated because the clothiers argued that morality was injured by the installation of new machinery in the mills. Nevertheless, he finally voted to reject the petition on the grounds that general prohibitions on innovation would result in the flight of the woollen industry from Yorkshire. The clothiers’ bitterness convinced Fawkes that his prospects for one of Yorkshire’s two seats in the election were good.16 Abolition was considered to be a major factor in the alignment of Yorkshire’s electors. Two printed letters by “some of the principal members of a Religious Denomination in Leeds” made “exertions to procure an Abolition of the Slave trade as a ground for parliamentary support”. In response, Fawkes promptly offered to make an exception to his general opposition to pledging in the case of abolition. Fawkes’s supporters made sure that his campaign song (to the tune of “Rule Britannia”) spoke of breaking the chains of Britain’s “Sable Brethren”. Lascelles’s situation was more desperate. He was associated, by virtue of inheritance, with his father’s Barbadian slave plantation. Lascelles’s attackers also delighted in pointing out that as an M.P. he had never gone on record against the slave trade. A counter-attack published on his behalf evasively rebutted the charge that Lascelles “uniformly supports the slave trade”. His supporters deplored the “furore”, virulently attacked the association of Lascelles’s name with the slave trade, and even insisted that he was an abolitionist. While Lascelles’s supporters avoided focusing on the West Indian connection, his opponents gleefully claimed credit for directing public attention towards the slave trade.17 Wilberforce’s own campaign song (to the tune “Hearts of Oak”) made the slave trade its centre-piece. The most striking part of the song was its closing stanza, which evoked the prominent support of Wilberforce by the most thoroughly disenfranchised cohort in Yorkshire-women: The Fair, whose soft Bosoms are Sympathy’s Shrine, This Foe of the Woman-born traffic will join. 0 muster your Charms on Humanity’s Side, Your invincible Legion the Cause will decide. Chorus For resist you who can,’s more or less than a Man, Then BRIBE all you light on, The Statute inspite on, And Women and Wilberforce conquer again!18 After some testing of the public mood Lascelles withdrew, sparing himself the roughly £50,000 that the uphill contest promised to cost him. 73

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry Yorkshire was not alone in giving the slave trade a prominent role in the election of November 1806. In the south-east of England the Kentish Gazette recorded speeches by all three county candidates, who outbid each other in identifying with the abolitionist cause. In Northampton W. R. Cartwright, a solid “Church and Constitution” man, ended his appeal for support by “contradicting a report that he was against the abolition of the slave trade”. He confessed that he had “formerly expressed himself unfriendly to that measure, preferring a gradual to an immediate abolition, yet he now held it in as total detestation and abhorrence as any gentleman present”. Further north, where the abolitionist Sir Ralph Milbanke was running uncontested for re-election in Durham, the Newcastle Courant nevertheless urged a large turnout by abolitionists. Durham was not satisfied with campaign promises alone. When abolition came before the Commons the M.P.s for Durham received a letter, authorized by the mayor and aldermen of the city, noting that abolition had encountered “unexpected” opposition in the upper House: “I have therefore to request you will attend and please to give your utmost support to the bill”. At the Cumberland nominations, the electoral gathering unanimously adopted a resolution that “Members to be elected for the County of Cumberland be requested vote for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, whenever this question is discussed in the Commons . . .”19 The election of Liverpool’s William Roscoe, an abolitionist, electrified the country. His victory was interpreted as a change of heart in Europe’s principal slave-trading centre. In London, Britain’s other major slaving port, James Paull, a candidate for Westminster (another broad franchise constituency), also pledged himself to prevent the continued existence of the slave trade, although domestic political reform was by far the major issue of that particular campaign. A post-election benefit dinner for both Paull and Francis Burdett was attended by notable radicals. The defeated Paull offered as consolation a toast to the citizens of Liverpool, who had elected “the celebrated Roscoe on whose banner was inscribed – ’No Slave Trade’”. For Paull, the Liverpool election was “a splendid proof that among Englishmen Reformation in favour of Liberty, whatever be the prejudices and selfinterest by which oppression may have been upheld, will finally triumph so long as our country shall furnish champions of established character and wisdom”. “Drunk with enthusiasm”, Paull’s toast was noted as far afield as Ireland.20 Reaction to the abolitionist revival was not confined to Britain. As with antislavery initiatives to come, a slave plot was uncovered at the end of 1806 in Jamaica, although intelligence of the resistance did not reach Britain until after the parliamentary votes on abolition. One Jamaica correspondent had no doubt that there were “similar schemes going on in every different parish”, stimulated by local “imprudence” in discussing the abolitionist activity in Britain. “The Negroes”, concluded the correspondent, “conceive that the Government of Britain will support them in making themselves free, and look 74

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry upon it that it would be highly grateful to many people at home, that all the white inhabitants here should be exterminated”.21 The results of the November election strengthened the abolitionist forces for the final push. We do not have to rely upon newspaper reports or abolitionist assessments alone in order to measure its cumulative impact. General Gascoyne, the Liverpool M.P. who opposed the abolition bill to the end, complained in parliament: every measure that invention or art could devise to create a popular clamour was resorted to on this occasion. The Church, the theatre, the press, had laboured to create a prejudice against the slave trade. It had even been maintained from the pulpit that “England could never expect to be victorious in war while she persisted in such an abominable traffic” . . . The attempts to make a popular clamour against the trade were never so conspicuous as during the last election, when the public newspapers had teemed with abuse of this trade, and when promises were required from different candidates that they would oppose its continuance. There had never been any question agitated since that of Parliamentary reform, in which so much industry had been exerted to raise a popular clamour and to make the trade an object of universal detestation. In every manufacturing town and borough in the kingdom all those arts had been tried.22 Given the “clamour” of November 1806, it is no wonder that many first-time M.P.s, who had pledged to vote for abolition, stepped forward to fulfil their promises during the highly charged second reading of the abolition bill in the House of Commons on 23 February 1807. Never before had the sentiment for abolition appeared to be so overwhelming. Every telling expression was applauded. As one speaker sat down, six or eight more would “spring to their feet eager to hammer their own nail into the coffin of the Trade”.23 Hitherto prominent opponents of the bill remained silent or absented themselves from the House altogether. One can understand why the West Indian interest complained that popular enthusiasm had permitted the movers of the bill to place the terms of debate within the framework of emotion rather than of rational argument.

III The power of popular antislavery was again demonstrated in the wake of the act’s passage. In March 1807 the government fell over the issue of Catholic disabilities. The new administration called a general election for the second time in six months. Wilberforce’s position initially seemed secure. He was at the height of his reputation, his humanity contrasted with the military despot 75

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry of Continental Europe. He had been accorded a triumphal ovation unequalled by any M.P. within living memory. His Yorkshire following had been carefully nurtured for more than two decades. Wilberforce’s two rivals for the Yorkshire seats, the Whig Lord Milton, and the Pittite Lascelles, were bitter partisan opponents of each other. Lascelles still bore the double burden of clothier resentment and his West Indian connection. He again tried to evade the stigma of slaveholding by publishing handbills and verses entitled “Lascelles and Liberty”. For his part, Milton was suspected of Whig softness on Roman Catholic disabilities – the very issue which had occasioned the resignation of the Grenville ministry.24 Yet Wilberforce unexpectedly now found himself in a more difficult position than before the passage of abolition. The aristocratic families of his opponents were ready to lay out £200,000, a considerable fortune in 1807, to assure their scions of Yorkshire’s two prestigious seats. Both grandees launched a national canvass in order to bring eligible electors to the polls from everywhere in the kingdom. For their part Wilberforce’s abolitionist supporters organized a national campaign which raised £65,000 (more than half of which was ultimately returned to the contributors) in order to prevent their candidate from being swamped by his opponents’ money. At short notice, abolitionist “Friends of Wilberforce” throughout the country pledged funds and personal support. Yorkshire freeholders were urged to get to the polls. “Friends” requested funds from the petition-signers of 1792.25 Wilberforce’s second obstacle was more formidable. Ironically, it arose precisely from the intense public feeling against the slave trade. Both of Wilberforce’s opponents initially produced electoral songs to solicit one of each elector’s two votes – ”Wilberforce and Milton for ever” and “Wilberforce and Lascelles for ever”. So desperate was Lascelles to escape the stigma of slaveholding that he went even further in his antislavery commitment than Wilberforce. If the restoration of the slave trade were so much as moved in parliament, Lascelles affirmed, he would vote for slave emancipation, a motion that Wilberforce himself had just refused to support in parliament. Lascelles’s supporters also publicized the fact that Earl Fitzwilliam, Milton’s father, and Dundas, his father-in-law, had both opposed abolition. Yorkshire electors were faced with the spectacle of two candidates disavowing their family histories and appropriating Wilberforce’s mantle. Lascelles’s industrial policy compounded his problem of credibility. At Leeds, before an audience of four to five thousand, he was assailed by the clothiers’ cries of “Out, Out, No Lascelles, No Slavery”. The Miltonites developed a more effective strategy. They spread the story that Wilberforce had worked out a deal to split his electoral support with the “slave-driving” Lascelles. Accusations of conspiracy, of a “Monstrous Coalition” between the “advocate of Freedom” and the “Negro Dealer”, between the “Dearest Saint!” and the “West Indian”, began to undermine Wilberforce’s support. The clothiers, who had been neutralized six months before, denied 76

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry Wilberforce hundreds of their votes by plumping for Milton. The accusation took its greatest toll towards the end of the polling period, when the rivals’ accusations reached their climax. The York Herald marvelled that: “nothing since the days of the REVOLUTION has ever presented to the world, such a scene as has been for FIFTEEN days and nights passing within this great County. . . [It was] a struggle of such strength and perseverance, as has never, at any period, been equalled at any County Election in the Kingdom . . . “. In York the turnover of transients required two thousand beds a day. There was a daily printing of new handbills. “’The FAIR SEX’ were the best canvassers for Wilberforce”, but hired mobs shouted down his daily poll speeches with cries of “No Coalition! No Coalition!”.26 Voters on the hustings claimed that some local Wilberforce agents were urging joint votes for Wilberforce and Lascelles. When late returns showed Wilberforce slightly in the lead, Lascelles close behind, and Milton running third, the accusation of “the Unnatural Alliance” began to seem credible. Even late-arriving abolitionist Quakers gave votes solely to Milton, “so disgusted were all honest people” by the fear of “deceit”. On the twelfth day of the canvass the naturally fragile Wilberforce collapsed, ill and exhausted. He managed to finish at the top of the poll, with 11,800 votes to Milton’s 11,177 and Lascelles’s 10,989. Wilberforce, interrupted by hecklers even in his victory speech, bitterly estimated that the “coalition” rumour had cost him nearly 8,000 additional votes, or more than 40 per cent of his potential support.27 The Yorkshire election was more than simply evidence of the significance of abolition to the electorate. Neither the “Saints” in London, nor Wilberforce and his opponents, had been able to “orchestrate” popular antislavery. At the zenith of his national popularity, abolitionism’s national leader barely survived the charge of betraying the cause within his own constituency. In antislavery, all of York’s elite discovered that they had a tiger by the tail. Abolition also played a part in the other most vigorously contested campaign in 1807, the Sussex election. Stephen Fuller, the county’s representative in the three previous parliaments, was also the Agent for Jamaica and a leader of the opposition to abolition for two decades. Even with the full backing of the new administration Fuller found himself on the brink of defeat after the first five days of polling. Fuller counter-attacked with an advertisement focused on two points. First, he supported the present government and “our good King in the Hour of Need” against the Roman Catholic Relief Bill. Secondly, and at far greater length, he acknowledged that he was condemned for having opposed the “IMMEDIATE Abolition of the Slave Trade”. Fuller took refuge in human frailty. “If he erred (and who is always free from Error?)”, he had done so in the honourable company of noble lords and “many others the ablest and most virtuous men”.28 In the following days Sussex almost matched Yorkshire in the intensity of canvassing among its far smaller electorate. Qualified electors flocked in from surrounding counties. The transportation system was pushed to its limit. 77

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry The final day, said the local newspaper, was a scene worthy of portrayal by Hogarth. The margin of victory was 57 votes out of 2,500 cast for each of the second- and third-place candidates. Fuller was declared re-elected. His opponent appealed to parliament on grounds of voting fraud. The mob rioted.29 At Liverpool, violence took the most serious turn, this time against the abolitionists. Rioters forced Roscoe to withdraw his candidacy after occasioning the one fatality in Britain that can confidently be attributed to agitation over the slave trade. One way or another, apathy was no more characteristic of the abolition process in May 1807 than it had been in May 1806.30

IV The elections of 1806–7 also cast light on novel aspects of the relationship between popular antislavery and the social system as a whole. In delineating this linkage it has been asserted that abolition primarily functioned to strengthen the forces of stability by reinforcing the hegemony of the aristocratic system. The victory enhanced the power and prestige of a capitalist elite threatened by both internal and external enemies during the early stage of Britain’s industrial revolution. The moral capital accrued through enactment of abolition of the slave trade served to insulate British consciousness from the plight of the domestic labour force and from the newer forms of exploitation by industrial capitalists. To put it in its most functional terms, abolition’s triumph created barriers to empathy and a perceptual insulation against otherwise analogous forms of human suffering within Britain itself.31 We have already seen that the elections of 1806 and 1807 cast serious doubt on antislavery’s power to stifle conflicts directly produced by industrialization. Henry Lascelles obtained no relief from the hostility of the clothiers in 1806–7, despite his earnest protestations of conversion to abolitionism. And Wilberforce found himself facing a serious case of combined clothier and abolitionist hostility within weeks of his canonization as the saint of abolitionism.32 Moreover, the debate over abolition coincided almost to the day with a major parliamentary motion for poor-law reform. It was the last such attempt before the end of the French wars. Thus the climactic discussion of abolition in the winter of 1807 tended to draw attention towards, not away from, domestic poverty, and to encourage a linking of the two problems. The militantly abolitionist Sheffield Iris characteristically went furthest along this line. Reflecting on the bill’s landslide victory on its second reading, the editors linked the abolition bill, the anticipated reformation of the poor law, and the “revolution” of Scottish court procedures as marking a milestone in national history: “Since Britain existed as an independent and undivided nation her legislative councils were never at one time employed on objects of more inestimable value and magnitude . . . pregnant with incalculable consequences of both immediate interest and influence on the condition of posterity”.33 78

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry Other aspects of British society besides those related to poverty and industrial conflict have been historiographically linked to the hegemonic functioning of abolition in 1807. The abolitionist victory supposedly met a pressing political need to promote patriotic feeling and national cohesion, just when most of the continent of Europe lay at Napoleon’s feet. It was, after all, Sir Samuel Romilly’s dramatic moral comparison of the life-saving Wilberforce with the life-consuming Emperor of the French that brought the House of Commons roaring to its feet during the second reading of the abolition bill. Yet it would be an exaggeration to see abolition as having played so significant a role as the foregoing might suggest in lifting patriotic morale in a despondent Britain. Napoleon’s future in Europe seemed more precarious during the passage of abolition than it had been at any time since the renewal of hostilities in 1803. His army was tied down in Poland, waging an indecisive winter campaign against an undefeated Russia. For the first time in years British newspaper reports were filled with excited anticipation: “The French have been checked by the Russians”; “French Army repulsed”; “Bernadotte defeated at Mohringer”; and, finally, in boldest headlines, “RUSSIAN VICTORY”, at the battle of Eylau.34 The British correctly perceived that Napoleon was closer to total military disaster at Eylau than at any moment since the Haitian war of independence, and his armies remained on the defensive until well after the passing of the abolition act. As evidenced by the press coverage, the British public’s most immediate concern in the two months of debates over abolition was whether the instrument of deliverance might turn out to be a Russian general on the Vistula, “whose name has never been heard of till now . . . “.35 Neither parliament nor the British press in February and March 1807 made any attempt to link the favourable military turn in the Franco-Russian conflict with parliament’s decision to end the slave trade. Internal events also conspired to keep coverage of the final stages of the abolition bill off the pages of most newspapers. When the act was signed by the king on 25 March, there was exceptionally little editorial comment. Often the fact of its passage simply went unrecorded because of the crisis over the sudden resignation of the Grenville administration on the issue of Catholic disabilities. The London Times casually alluded to the royal assent in an item on the proceedings of the Sierra Leone Company. Only the most militantly abolitionist newspapers like the Sheffield Iris drew attention to its passage.36 Not until the first anniversary of abolition did the abolitionists get around to publicly commemorating the passage of the act. It was not just that the passage of abolition was overwhelmed by the press of military events abroad and a constitutional crisis at home. Other factors worked against a national apotheosis of abolition and its heroes. Neither the Whigs nor the Tories initially seemed interested in inventing a consensual myth through which abolition symbolized unanimity between ruler and ruled. A sense of finality was impossible when the backlash was so intense. On New Year’s Day 1808, the day that the act took effect in the colonies, 79

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry British newspapers were informing their readers that Jamaica’s assembly had dispatched a protest to the government denouncing abolition and requesting remedial legislation to save the colony from impending ruin.37 There was certainly no rush to claim ruling-class credit for abolition. The Tory Leeds Intelligencer insisted that “the? Country”, not the ministry, had “carried the abolition, by almost generally insisting, at the late election, on pledges from those who were about to be vested with the Country’s voice”. The Whiggish Edinburgh Review agreed on that point. The pressure for passage had been from the governed to the governors. Further down the political scale, abolition did little to dampen extra-parliamentary dissent. The summer of 1807 brought Napoleon from the brink of disaster to the peak of his power at Tilsit, and British prospects on the Continent to their lowest ebb in fifteen years of warfare against French expansion. At that juncture it was precisely those areas of earlier intense abolitionist agitation that became the most fertile soil for a new cycle of mass peace petitioning: The Yorkshire and Lancashire petitions of 1807–8 had as their background parliament’s refusal to regulate the woollen industry in 1806, the cotton weavers’ renewed demands for a minimum wage bill and the elation of Dissenters and Methodists at the abolition of the slave trade. These feelings had run particularly high in the Yorkshire election of May-June 1807 . . . In the face of solid governmental hostility and even a disapproving Wilberforce, the “Friends of Peace” reassured themselves with recollections of the effect of earlier peace and abolition petitions: “A vigorous repetition of similar endeavours may terminate a still greater evil”.38 There was, however, an ideological nexus into which abolitionism could reasonably have become integrated with a consensual patriotic rhetoric. Linda Colley has effectively argued that “the apotheosis of George III” was a fusion of elite and popular royalism and loyalism during the French wars. As the scale and tempo of British royal celebrations grew after 1789, manifestations of patriotism were increasingly celebrated in praise of the king.39 As with abolitionism, the connection between nationalist mobilization and popular participation made the British ruling classes nervous: “the only outlet for popular nationalism which the British government felt able safely and consistently to encourage during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars was the cult of the monarchy”. Also, as with abolitionism, it was the landed class in the House of Lords which was most reluctant to encourage popular nationalism, and a broad spectrum of aspiring social groups who found the language of patriotism most congenial.40 Coming less than two years after the implementation of abolition, the jubilee of George III was a milestone in national mobilization. It was celebrated on the same day throughout Great Britain in October 1809. The 80

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry “jubilee”, with its biblical connotations of social renewal, liberation, the rights of labour, and its historic resonance in Anglo-American religious discourse, provided fertile soil for a rhetorical linkage between abolition and the anniversary of the accession of George III. In terms of reinforcing elite hegemony, the jubilee of 1809 has been characterized as a landmark in the process of “capturing” the millenarian implications of the jubilee for loyalist patriotism, a process analogous to the “class hegemonic” interpretation of British slave-trade abolition.41 What could be more natural, then, than “that credit for the humanitarian achievement [of abolition] was soon extended to the king himself ”, during the celebration of the jubilee?42 In fact, however, this apparently logical fusion failed to occur. To date, the evidence for any such transfer of abolitionist moral capital to the king is almost nil. At the Durham Cathedral jubilee sermon the abolitionist Samuel Romilly heard that the ending of the slave trade should be credited to the monarch. However, among the dozens of loyal addresses that were issued by communities throughout the country during the jubilee celebrations, only the city of Leeds included any reference to abolition in its message of congratulations.43 Otherwise, not a single report of England’s Jubilee Day celebrations mentioned the abolition of the slave trade. Scotland matched England, at least iconographically. Notice was taken of abolition in one transparency, erected at the Register Office in Edinburgh. In a tableau eighteen feet long by fourteen feet wide, a portrait of the sovereign was surrounded by emblematic figures of his three kingdoms. In other parts of the scene “vanquished Europe” implored King George’s protection against “the usurper” (Napoleon). At the periphery, representing one of the other three quarters of the globe, the figure of Africa lay “prostrate on the ground, his hands concealing his face, and his chains lying beside him, at a loss in what terms to express his gratitude to our worthy sovereign for having given liberty to his countrymen”.44 Not that the jubilee lacked evocations of liberty and slavery. But in October 1809 freedom was peculiarly metropolitan. So said Samuel Elsdale: On all alike Freedom her gift bestows, No slave can breathe the air which o’er her Island blows; Soon as he springs on England’s sacred shore, His chains are broken, Slav’ry galls no more. Beyond its privileged shores “Slavery” evoked the fate of Europe. For Britons in 1809, galling slavery was supremely Gallic: The murd’rous Corsican, with furious mind, To death or bondage dooms all human kind; Where’er his sanguinary hordes advance, By force or fraud subdued, all bow to France.45 81

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry Liberty flourished in fortress Britannia, asylum of liberty, and of national independence. British liberty remained insular even when portrayed expansively. Liberty meant legal freedom, now assured to all black migrants, or freedom of worship for Dissenters and other religious minorities. One of the most extensively reported events of the jubilee of 1809 was an account of a Jewish jubilee service in London. Even the Quakers, the denomination most closely indentified with antislavery appeals, made no effort to incorporate abolition into their widely reported jubilee activities. Like their fellow subjects, they focused instead on the needs of the metropolitan poor, and donated funds for the release of inmates from debtors’ prisons.46 The absence of the slave trade from the language of royal patriotism was neither confined to the jubilee nor constrained by the context of the French military threat. Five years later, in 1814, another national jubilee was commemorated in Britain, combining peace festivities with the centenary of the accession of the Hanoverian dynasty. This second jubilee featured a huge architectural tableau in London’s Green Park. As with the local “illuminations” of 1809, the royal exhibit of 1814 omitted abolition from its list of dynastic achievements. The clue to this curious distance between royalty and abolition may be gleaned from Romilly’s recorded reaction to the jubilee sermon in Durham. He was astonished and outraged by the mere attribution of abolition to George III, because the king had been a notorious supporter of the slave trade for almost twenty years. He had opposed ministerial sponsorship of abolition during Pitt’s long tenure as Prime Minister. Romilly therefore held the king personally responsible for the deaths of thousands. To the very last, royal princes had been conspicuous in their canvassing against the bill in the Lords. Royalty’s relation to the slave trade did not become a divisive public issue because there was simply no attempt to reinvent abolition as a royal measure.47

V Coming seven years after abolition, the slave-trade petition campaign of 1814 has also been portrayed as a harmonious interaction of ruling and abolitionist elites. The evidence points to a more contentious scenario. In June 1814 Castlereagh, the Foreign Secretary, at an unparalleled peak of prestige, returned to London after negotiating the Treaty of Paris on behalf of the United Kingdom. Like Wilberforce in 1807, he was given a parliamentary ovation. Castlereagh’s descent from euphoria was even more rapid than that of his predecessor. Wilberforce himself rose to denounce the “Additional Article” to the treaty, which sanctioned the resumption of the French slave trade for a further five years. He bluntly accused the minister of bringing not peace, but the “death-warrant of a multitude of innocent victims, men, women and children” to Africa. George Canning chimed in, reminding parliament 82

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry that all but two members of the Cabinet that took office before George III signed the bill of 1807 were among those opposing abolition. Castlereagh, a member of that ministry, had opposed the bill as late as its final reading.48 The Foreign Secretary’s response was that five years was the best he could get from France in exchange for a promise of abolition. His best was not good enough. The abolitionists appealed once more to their network of local contacts. The outcome was one of the (if not the) most extensively signed petitions in the country’s history. More than three-quarters of a million signatures were gathered from hundreds of localities. The abolitionists were careful not to attack the Foreign Secretary or the entire treaty directly. The petitions denounced only the article sanctioning France’s renewal of the slave trade. It was possible to interpret the campaign as a move to strengthen the future resolve of the government. It was equally plausible to interpret it as an attack on Castlereagh, his prerogative powers in the formulation of foreign policy, or even as a threat to the hard-won peace. What was clear was that just weeks after the ending of fully a generation of war, abolitionists were casting a dark shadow over the peace. Many High Tory defenders of the ministry chose to interpret the campaign as an antiministerial challenge. In Nottingham the virulently anti-Luddite Nottingham Gazette called the slave-trade petitioners fomenters of a new war and opponents of the government. One of its correspondents, a “Whig of the Old School”, denounced the “rage for petitioning”, in which over-heated quixotic “public enthusiasm” was substituted for discreet diplomacy. At Bury rumours circulated that the abolitionist petition was calculated to renew hostilities with France. At least one group of clerical “inhabitants of a Cathedral Close” near Cambridge unanimously refused to sign the petition on the grounds that it was drawn up by abolitionists for party motives. Other loyal subjects were furious that their gratification at Britain’s total victory over France was being spoiled by those very dissidents who earlier had sought a defeatist peace with Napoleon. Outside parliament the political meaning of the petitioning was decided locality by locality. The question affected activities beyond the petition meetings and signings themselves. Each town and county had to determine whether a pro forma “congratulatory address” to the Prince Regent on his victorious peace was also to contain its own “additional article” of incomplete satisfaction with that peace. Quakers refused to participate in the general peace “illuminations” of private dwellings because of the slave-trade clause. The Liverpool Mercury attributed the restoration of the French slave trade to the “false policy” laid down by Pitt and his ministerial successors. At Hull’s slave-trade petition meeting the language of the Whig ministers of 1807 was favourably compared to the excuses of Castlereagh. The meeting quickly escalated into a sharp partisan division.49 In some towns the issue of the slave trade threatened to spoil the victory celebration. A meeting called in Bedford to congratulate the Prince Regent 83

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry on the “Happy Restoration of the Peace”, soon had administration supporters up in arms. They moved a counter-address, in order to exclude language tainted by “party views” – that is, any reference to the slave trade. After a stormy debate, the edited version prevailed, but ill feeling created by the debate carried over into the petition campaign. The Bedford “counter-addressers” protested against the local slave-trade petition. Elsewhere decisions had to be made as to whether or not to incorporate images of newly enchained African slaves into peace festivals or the peace sermons which inevitably preceded the eating, drinking and charity feasts. Rugeley’s thanksgiving ceremony for peace drew attention to the slave trade by means of a picture of an African in chains. At York abolitionists introduced a motion for a slave petition at the meeting convened to organize the peace celebration.50 Local abolitionists tried to counter charges of divisiveness from their opponents by emphasizing the right to petition in their newspaper advertisement. They turned the tables on ministerial partisans by declaring party feeling to be inappropriate. It was probably sheer numbers that finally caused the abolitionist frame of reference to prevail. Soon after the petition campaign began, newspapers reported that the signatures were being totted up in the hundreds of thousands: “No measure for many years past has excited so much public attention, and met with such universal condemnation as that article in the Definitive Treaty which allows France to continue that hateful Slave Trade for five years to come . . .”. Slavery intruded upon the festivities at Beverley. A transparency showed Britannia on the right, France on the left, and between them “a son of Africa in chains”, imploring Britannia while France held the shackles. An African in irons was also iconographically represented at Wollingworth in Suffolk.51 The popular response to the call for signatures was so over-whelming that supporters of the government ultimately decided to interpret the petitions as strengthening the government’s hand at the forthcoming Congress of Vienna. Abolitionist leaders publicly concurred. Privately, however, Clarkson warned the Foreign Office that unless the government maintained pressure to effect the annulment of the “obnoxious article”, “both houses of Parliament, as well as the newspapers will be let loose against you”. So, within a matter of weeks, a government which had looked forward to gloriously presiding over a major peace dividend of tax relief and reduced foreign expenditure was instructing its ambassadors to offer loans and overseas territories in exchange for promises to curtail other nations’ slave trades.52 The most dramatic impact of the 1814 petitions occurred out-side the United Kingdom. The duke of Wellington, Britain’s military hero and her first postwar ambassador to France, spent his first months in Paris trying to renegotiate the slave-trade provisions of the treaty with Louis XVIII. Wellington, unwilling to propose the ceding of German territory to obtain immediate abolition of the French slave trade, was instructed to offer Trinidad or a substantial monetary compensation to the French instead. If Wellington was no 84

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry abolitionist, still less so was his great military rival Napoleon Bonaparte. Yet Napoleon was also aware of British public opinion. He decreed the abolition of the French slave trade upon his triumphal return to Paris from Elba, in an attempt to drive a wedge between Britain and her allies.53 The petitions were a catalyst to British postwar foreign policy. In 1814 the two major slaving nations of Europe were Portugal and Spain, Britain’s most dependable and dependent allies during the last five years of the war against France. As late as spring 1814 Britain’s ambassador at the Portuguese courtin-exile in Rio de Janeiro warned the Foreign Secretary: I think that I should hold out very unfounded expectations, were I to encourage your Lordship to believe that any further step will ever be taken by this Court, towards the abolition of the Slave Trade . . . It is only upon this point that I have ever seen anything like a general National Feeling exhibited by these People . . .54 Although committed to an abolitionist policy herself the British government did not put pressure on the Portuguese to outlaw the slave trade until the end of the conflict with France. Only in the wake of the petition campaign was the British ambassador “so convinced of the strength and prevalence of sentiments which are felt upon [slavery] throughout the British Empire” that he risked exceeding his orders and threatened the Portuguese government with naval action unless it acceded to British demands to limit its participation in the slave trade. It was public opinion that compelled Castlereagh to make the slave trade a major issue at the Congress of Vienna, “and to use both threats and bribes” to secure at least abolition of the slave trade in Africa, north of the Equator.55 In spring 1814 the marquis of Wellesley, British ambassador at Madrid, was also proceeding at a deliberate, though not urgent, pace to put abolition on the Anglo-Spanish agenda. When he suggested to the Spanish a treaty article prohibiting Spanish subjects from slaving he correctly and philosophically anticipated its outright rejection. The first newspaper accounts of parliament’s reaction to the French treaty, however, induced him to suggest to the Spanish at least a joint “humane declaration” against the trade. Castlereagh’s private report on the petition campaign increased the pressure: You must really press the Spanish Government to give us some more facilities on the Slave Trade . . . the nation is bent upon this object, I believe there is hardly a village that has not met and petitioned upon it; both Houses of Parliament are pledged to press it; and the Ministers must make it the basis of their policy. The duke of Wellington added his own brotherly assessment of the new situation on the eve of his departure for Paris: 85

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry I was not aware till I had been some time here [London] of the degree of frenzy existing here about the slave trade. People in general appear to think that it would suit the policy of this nation to go to war to put an end to that abominable traffic . . .56 It is not surprising that Wellesley’s first act, after receiving the reports on the domestic situation, was to see the Spanish minister and “to point out to him the hopelessness [of financial aid to Spain], in the present temper of Parliament and the Nation on the subject of the Slave Trade . . .”. Any Spanish loan required “a stipulation for the total and immediate abolition of the slave trade”. By the time the last of the petitions were reaching both Lords and Commons a chastened Foreign Minister had become the willing conduit for the first abolitionist appeal to the Pope to align himself against slave-trading by the Catholic states of Europe. Whatever orchestration of national opinion the government may have undertaken after June 1814 was based upon careful attention to a popular theme.57

VI In the abolition process, there was popular pressure in Britain both before and after its ending of the slave trade. There were frequent calls for wellaimed local political interventions, as well as for a national mass mobilization. Nor was abolitionism at the disposal of the nation’s elite, abolitionist or otherwise, as both Wilberforce and Castlereagh discovered. Only because of the certainty of public opinion could abolitionists confidently appeal to it at short notice in order to prompt the Lords or a Foreign Minister to further action. There is far too much evidence to the contrary to conceive of antislavery opinion as having virtually disappeared between the late 1790s and the mid-1820s, or to speak of its absence from the political spectrum during a supposedly elite stage of the abolition process.58 What really requires explanation is not the resurrection of popular abolitionism in 1823 or even in 1814, but its long-term prominence in Britain, and its eclipse in the decade after 1794. The explanation for the latter phenomenon seems to be the traditional and straightforward one. Anti-Jacobin fear in Britain cast a general pall of suspicion over all suggestions of, much less agitation for, major change. The slave revolution in St Domingue and the anti-British cast of emancipation rhetoric in revolutionary Paris further identified antislavery with uncontrollable violence and enemy propaganda. Yet, even in the 1790s, antislavery was already too embedded in Britain’s own national agenda not to outlast the French Revolution itself. An indigenous antislavery emerged in the context of the “British miracle” of the 1780s. It reflected Britain’s restored political, economic and ideological confidence in the wake of the lost war of American independence. Abolitionism became Britain’s popular reaffirmation of its status as the 86

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry world’s standard-bearer of liberty, alongside a parallel, but necessarily less national, movement in the new American republic. Even at the height of the anti-revolutionary reaction in the following decade, abolition found sanctuary at the core of the British political system. During the decade after 1793, albeit without the support of the Cabinet or the sovereign, a British Prime Minister routinely spoke out in favour of abolition. Sanctuary, however, was not victory. Napoleon, after seizing power, removed one restraint on the revival of British abolitionism by his restoration of French slavery. Still, British elites remained wary of agitation, or of damaging any major economic networks in a time of peril. In 1805–7, as in 1791–2, pressure from without was used to break an elite stalemate. In the wake of Linda Colley’s compelling account of mobilizations in wartime Britain, the existence of widespread activity during the decade before Waterloo should no longer seem anomalous. In a very tangible way, antislavery, both as ideology and as action, bridged the gap between power and change. It had more general tacit approval at the top of the political order than any other reform, but it entailed real economic and political risks that were absent from the more ritual royal celebrations, militia musterings, religious convocations, or acts of collective charity. Abolition was a powerful example of both the gains and risks of popular mobilization over the long term. Any overall assessment must acknowledge that antislavery was a durable element of public contention between the late 1780s and the 1840s. The popular mobilizations and innovations of the 1780s and early 1790s had crystallized the modern social movement.59 Abolitionism resembled other contemporary social movements in being silenced during the decade 1795–1804, but it became the first great reform movement of the 1780s and 1790s to revive in the country at large. Less than any other movement did abolitionism need to be reinvented after the revolutionary era. Abolitionism’s comparative vitality is shown by what Clarkson could expect from the British people in 1792, 1806 and 1814. No contemporary could match that response on the Continent. Twice, in 1789 and again in 1814, Clarkson himself crossed the Channel to stimulate an abolitionist mobilization. Twice he failed utterly.

Notes * I wish to thank David Eltis, Stanley L. Engerman, Joseph Inikori, Sidney Tarrow and Charles Tilly for their helpful comments. 1. On the extent of interest in slavery and abolition, see inter alia Roger T. Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760–1810 (London, 1975); Seymour Drescher, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (Pittsburgh, 1977); David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (New York, 1984); David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Ithaca, 1975); David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, rev. edn (New York, 1988), esp. pp. 153–64; David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the

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2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York, 1987); Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (London, 1988); Robert W. Fogel et al., Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery, 4 vols. (New York, 1989–92). On the debate over capitalism, slavery and antislavery, see Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill, 1944); Howard Temperley, “Capitalism, Slavery and Ideology”, Past and Present, no. 75 (May 1977), pp. 94–118; James Walvin, England, Slaves and Freedom, 1776–1838 (London, 1986); Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective (London, 1986); James Walvin (ed.), Slavery and British Society, 1776–1846 (London, 1982); Barbara L. Solow and Stanley L. Engerman (eds.), British Capitalism and Caribbean Slavery (New York, 1917); Christine Bolt and Seymour Drescher (eds.), Anti-Slavery, Religion and Reform: Essays in Memory of Roger Anstey (Hamden, Conn., 1980); David Turley, The Culture of English Antislavery, 1780–1860 (London, 1991); Thomas Bender (ed.), The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation (Berkeley, 1992). For recent summaries of historiographical trends, see Seymour Drescher, “Trends in der Historiographie des Abolitionismus”, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, xvi (1990), pp. 187–211, part of a special issue on “Sklaverei in der modernen Geschichte”, ed. H.-J. Puhle; Thomas C. Holt, “Explaining Abolition”, Jl Social Hist., xxiv (1990), pp. 371–8; Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1938 (Baltimore, 1992), pp. 21–33; Michael Craton, “The Transition from Slavery to Free Wage Labour in the Caribbean, 1790–1890: A Survey with Particular Reference to Recent Scholarship”, Slavery and Abolition, xiii (1992), pp. 37–67; Seymour Drescher, “The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation”, History and Theory, xxxii (1993), pp. 311–29. See, for example, Davis, Slavery and Human Progress, pp.  108–9, 175, 198–9; Eltis, Economic Growth, pp. 17–18; Fogel et al., Without Consent or Contract, i, pp. 213–16; James Walvin, “Abolishing the Slave Trade: Anti-Slavery and Popular Radicalism, 1776–1807”, in Clive Emsley and James Walvin (eds.), Artisans, Peasants and Proletarians, 1760–1860 (London, 1985), pp. 32–56. Thomas Clarkson, The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament, 2 vols. (London, 1808), ii, pp. 352, 502–3. For the first abolitionist mobilizations, see E. M. Hunt, “The North of England Agitation for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1780–1800” (Univ. Manchester M.A. thesis, 1959); Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, ch. 4. See also Davis, Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, pp. 439–53; Anstey, Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, chs. 13–16; Turley, Culture of English Antislavery, pp.  64–7; Walvin, England, Slaves and Freedom, pp.  113–22; Ellen Gibson Wilson, Thomas Clarkson: A Biography (London, 1989), p.  106. For elite-centred analyses, see Abraham D. Kriegel, “A Convergence of Ethics: Saints and Whigs in British Antislavery”, Jl Brit. Studies, xxvi (1987), pp. 423–50; Eltis, Economic Growth, ch. 2; Fogel et al., Without Consent or Contract, i, pp. 213–18; Dale H. Porter, The Abolition of the Slave Trade in England, 1784–1807 (Hamden, Conn., 1970). Blackburn’s Overthrow of Colonial Slavery differs from other approaches in setting the revival of active abolitionism within a general radical revival. But he adheres to the historiographical tradition in portraying the passage of abolition as an elite-forged lightning-rod, whose passage legitimized oligarchical power while deflecting further middle-class reform (pp. 295–315). For Davis’s most recent assessment of the question, see David Brion Davis, “The Perils of Doing History by Ahistorical Abstraction”, in Bender (ed.),

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7.

8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14.

15.

Antislavery Debate, pp. 290–309; David Brion Davis, “Capitalism, Abolitionism and Hegemony”, in Solow and Engerman (eds.), British Capitalism and Caribbean Slavery, pp. 211–12. Concerning British abolitionism Davis is even reluctant to apply the term “movement”. British abolitionists produced an “illusion of continuity – of an unbroken and persevering ‘movement’ “ from the 1780s to the 1830s, and gathering “cumulative sanction from ‘the people’s voice’”, and so on. On the contrary, “burdened by despair, defections and distractions, the ‘movement’ virtually disappeared in the late 1790s, the late 1810s and the late 1820s”. Davis, Slavery and Human Progress, p. 175. The movement’s periodic wanings are conceptually equivalent to successive vanishings; however, its frequent disappearances (late 1790s, late 1810s, late 1820s) would require postulating similar disappearances and resurrections for every other major social, religious and political reform movement of the same period. For a similar devaluation of popular abolitionism, see J. R. Oldfield, “The London Committee and Mobilization of Public Opinion against the Slave Trade”, Hist. Jl, XXXV (1992), pp. 331–43. Davis offers the most elaborate analysis of the function of antislavery in early industrial Britain. See his Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, chs. 8–9, as well as the discussions by Eric Foner, Stanley L. Engerman, David Eltis and Howard Temperley in Bolt and Drescher (eds.), Antislavery, Religion and Reform, pp. 254–93, 355–66; Betty Fladeland, Abolitionists and Working-Class Problems in the Age of Industrialization (Baton Rouge, 1984), pp. ix–xi; Seymour Drescher, “Cart Whip and Billy Roller: Antislavery and Reform Symbolism in Industrializing Britain”, Jl Social Hist., xv (1981), pp.  3–24; Holt, “Explaining Abolition”, pp. 371–8; Barbara L. Solow and Stanley L. Engerman, “Introduction”, in Solow and Engerman (eds.), British Capitalism and Caribbean Slavery, pp. 1–23. Walvin, England, Slaves and Freedom, p. 122. Clarkson, History of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade, ii, pp. 502–3. See also Robin Furneaux, William Wilberforce (London, 1974), p. 246. See Judith Jennings, “Joseph Woods, ‘Merchant and Philosopher’: The Making of the British Anti-Slave Trade Ethic”, Slavery and Abolition, xiv (1993), pp. 162–84. The West Indian counter-propaganda subcommittee that had been created to fight the “first wave” of popular abolitionism was also reconstituted in 1814 and in 1823, in response to subsequent abolitionist mobilizations. See also Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, pp.  89–90, 223–4; Peter F. Dixon, “The Politics of Emancipation: The Movement for the Abolition of Slavery in the British West Indies, 1807–1833” (Univ. Oxford D.Phil. thesis, 1971), pp. 31–7. See Anstey, Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, pp.  367–70; Drescher, Econocide, pp. 214–18. For a quantitative analysis of the aborted subterfuge, see Seymour Drescher, “People and Parliament: The Rhetoric of the British Slave Trade”, Jl Interdisciplinary Hist., xx (1989–90), pp.  561–80, esp. pp.  576–7 and table 5. St John’s College, Cambridge, Clarkson Papers, box 1:2; Cowdroy’s Manchester Gazette, 10 May 1806; Leeds Mercury, 31 May 1806; Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, p. 223. Drescher, Econocide, p. 218 (emphasis added); Hereford Jl, 23 Apr. 1806. For discussions of the role of James Stephen and his family in the process of British antislavery, see Davis, Slavery and Human Progress, pp. 170–80; Anstey, Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, chs. 14–15. Palmerston was defeated in his first bid for Cambridge’s parliamentary seat in February 1806 because of abolitionist opposition: see Kenneth Bourne, Palmerston: The Early Years, 1784–1841 (New York, 1982), pp. 60–1. Felix Fairfax’s Bristol Jl, 22 Nov. 1806.

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pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry 16. Leeds Mercury, 24 Oct., 1, 8 Nov. 1806; see also John Pollock, Wilberforce (New York, 1977), pp. 205–7. 17. Leeds Mercury, 25 Oct. 1806; Leeds lntelligencer, 27 Oct., 3, 10 Nov. 1806. 18. Leeds Mercury, 14 Nov. 1806. By 1807 women had already been active for two decades: see Hunt, “North of England Agitation”, pp. 73–4; Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, pp.  215–16, 221–2, 260–1; Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, 1992), pp. 277–9. 19. Kentish Gazette, 8 Nov. 1806; Dixon, “Politics of Emancipation”, pp.  113–15; Northampton Mercury, 8 Nov. 1806; Courier [London], 19 Nov. 1806. 20. Morning Chron., 29 Oct., 29 Nov. 1806; Belfast News-Letter, 25 Nov. 1806. Abolition remained a contested issue. “Official” London continued to be a stronghold of the slave interest as it had been for two decades. See James A. Rawley, “London’s Defense of the Slave Trade, 1787–1807”, Slavery and Abolition, xiv (1993), pp. 48–69. 21. Courier [London], 23 Mar. 1807. 22. Hansard, 1st ser., viii (15 Dec. 1806–4 Mar. 1807), cols. 718–19. 23. Fumeaux, William Wilberforce, p. 251. 24. Ibid., pp. 263–4. 25. See, inter alia, Ipswich]/, 23 May 1807; Newcastle Courant, 23 May 1807; Leicester Jl, 22 May 1807; Bury and Norwich Chron., 27 May 1807; Aris’s Birmingham Gazette, 18, 20, 25 May 1807. The slave trade remained a live issue in a number of constituencies. In Lincoln the radical Major Cartwright denounced Lieutenant Colonel Ellison as a friend to the slave trade, and asked the freeholders of Lincolnshire to “take care of chains and whips and torture”. Ellison, the administration’s candidate, lost in the first contested Lincoln election in eighty years. See Lincoln, Rutland and Stamford Mercury, 22 May 1807. For other manifestations of abolitionist sentiment at elections, see Gloucester Jl, 11 May, 1 June 1807; Norfolk Chron., 9, 16,30 May 1807; Nottingham Jl, 23 May 1807; Ipswich Jl, 23 May 1807; Iris, or Sheffield Advertiser, 7, 12 May 1807; Morning Chron. [London], 11, 26, 27, 29 May, 2, 6, 8 June 1807; Hereford Ji, 25 May 1807. 26. Leeds lntelligencer, 11, 18, 25 May 1807; Hull Packet, 12, 25 May 1807. For evidence of the high priority given to the slave trade by Lord Milton, see the 1807 electioneering bills in the Fitzwilliam Papers, Sheffield City Libraries. 27. Furneaux, William Wilberforce, p.  270; Pollock, Wilberforce, pp.  217–18; York Herald, 6 June 1807. For Surrey, see Friends House, London, Antislavery Collection, microfilm reel 14, no. 177, “Election of 1807”. The Morning Chronicle, 26 May 1807, surveyed the elections involving “infamous” M.P.s “who were found in the House of Commons to stand up for it [the slave trade] as a positive good”. 28. Sussex Weekly Advertiser, 18 May 1807. 29. Ibid., 1 June 1807. 30. On Liverpool, see F. E. Sanderson, “The Liverpool Abolitionists”, in R. T. Anstey and P. E. H. Hair (eds.), Liverpool, the African Slave Trade, and Abolition (Bristol, 1976), pp. 196–238. 31. Davis, Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, p.  349; see also Blackburn, Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, pp. 314–15. 32. See letters from “A Yorkshire Freeholder”, in York Herald, 30 May 1807, and from “Another Freeholder”, ibid., 20 June 1807. 33. Iris, or Sheffield Advertiser, 24 Feb. 1807; see also Felix Farley’s Bristol Jl, 28 Feb. 1807; Sussex Weekly Advertiser, 2 Mar. 1807. 34. Times, 25 Jan., 3, 25 Feb., 9 Mar. 1807. On Eylau, see D. G. Chandler (ed.), Dictionary of the Napoleonic Wars (New York, 1969), pp. 144–7. 35. Times, 9 Mar. 1807.

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pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry 36. Iris, or Sheffield Advertiser, 31 Mar. 1807. 37. Felix Farley’s Bristol Jl, 2 Jan. 1808; Morning Chron., 1 Jan. 1808; Glasgow Herald, 4 Jan. 1808; Norfolk Chron., 9 Jan. 1808; Examiner [London], 10 Jan. 1808. The appeal fuelled abolitionist fears that colonial and metropolitan interests might reopen the question. 38. Leeds Intelligencer, 20 Apr. 1807; Leeds Mercury, 26 Mar. 1808; Edinburgh Rev., Apr. 1807, pp. 205–6; Rockingham and Hull Weekly Advertiser, 6 Feb., 17 Mar. 1808; J. E. Cookson, The Friends of Peace: Anti-War Liberalism in England, 1793– 1815 (Cambridge, 1982), p. 192. 39. Linda Colley, “The Apotheosis of George III: Loyalty, Royalty and the British Nation, 1760–1820”, Past and Present, no. 102 (Feb. 1984), pp.  94–129. Colley entertains the notion of abolitionist displacement but dates its occurrence half a century after the trade’s abolition: Colley, Britons, p.  360. See also Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, pp. 131–4. 40. Linda Colley, “Whose Nation? Class and National Consciousness in Britain, 1750–1830”, Past and Present, no. 113 (Nov. 1986), pp.  97–117 (quotation at p. 109). 41. See Malcolm Chase, “From Millennium to Anniversary: The Concept of Jubilee in Late Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century England”, Past and Present, no. 129 (Nov. 1990), pp. 132–47, esp. pp. 132–41. On the jubilee of 1809, see also Colley, Britons, pp.  217–25. On later uses of the “jubilee” by British abolitionists, see Davis, Slavery and Human Progress, pp. 120–4, 205, 223, 229. 42. Davis, Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, p.  446. Cain and Hopkins also blend the “ideological refurbishment” of monarchy and the outlawing of the slave trade into an example of hegemonic displacement: see P.]. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion, 1688–1914 (London, 1993), pp. 76–7. 43. See Memoirs of Sir Samuel Romilly, 3 vols. (London, 1840), ii pp. 297–8 (25 Oct. 1809); Davis, Slavery in the Age of Revolution, p. 446 n. For the texts of jubilee addresses to the king, see Public Record Office, London (hereafter P.R.O.), H.O. 42/98–9 (microfilm box 186), 784; London Gazette, 24–8 Oct. to 18–21 Nov. 1808. The one English loyal address alluding to abolition, in Leeds, generated a diatribe against “a system” that lost the continent of America, pillaged the subcontinent of India, kept the nation at war for thirty out of forty-nine years of the reign, lost Continental Europe to the enemy, multiplied the national debt sevenfold, and quintupled the number of paupers. In the accounts of the reign, abolition did not begin to compensate the country for its litany of disasters. Leeds Mercury, 28 Oct., 4 Nov. 1809. 44. Edinburgh Evening Courant, 25 Oct. 1809. 45. Samuel Elsdale, “Jubilee”, in The Jubilee of George the Third, ‘The Father of his People’ (London, 1887), p. 215. Only at the periphery of the empire, in Bombay, was abolition prominently commemorated in June 1810. 46. Jubilee of George the Third, p. 6. 47. Romilly was amazed to see to “what excess of flattery priestly ambition will sometimes have recourse”: Memoirs of Sir Samuel Romilly, ii, pp. 297–8. Perhaps Romilly was alluding to a very specific motive for abolition’s appearance in the sermon at Durham Cathedral. The day before the jubilee commemoration the Attorney and Solicitor General submitted to the government their “Report on the Claim of the Bishop of Durham as to the Right of Nomination to the Prebend of Durham and Mastership of Shirbourn Hospital”. P.R.O., H.O. 43/17, 24 Oct. 1809. 48. See, inter alia, Davis, “Capitalism, Abolition and Hegemony”, pp.  211–12; Drescher, Econocide, p. 152; Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, p. 261 n. 80;

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49.

50.

51.

52.

53. 54. 55.

56. 57.

58.

59.

Betty Fladeland, “Abolitionist Pressures on the Concert of Europe”, Jl Mod. Hist., xxxviii (1966), pp. 355–73. Liverpool Mercury, 24 June, 1 July 1814; Nottingham Gazette, 8, 15 July 1814; Salisbury and Winchester Jl, 4 July 1814; Hampshire Courier, 11 July 1814; Bury and Norwich Post, 29 June, 6, 13, 20, 27 July, 24, 31 Aug. 1814; Carlisle Jl, 6 Aug. 1814; Courier [London], 23, 28 June, 5 July, 3, 4 Aug. 1814; Edinburgh Advertiser, 1, 8 July 1814. Times, 17 June 1814; Rockingham and Hull Weekly Advertiser, 2 July 1814; Hull Advertiser and Exchange Herald, 2 July 1814; Northampton Mercury, 25 June 1814; West Briton of Cornwall, 15 July 1814; Roy. Cornwall Gazette, 2 July 1814; Derby Mercury, 30 June 1814; Manchester Exchange Herald, 12 July 1814; York Herald, 9, 14 July 1814; Wheeler’s Manchester Chron., 2 July 1814; Bury and Norwich Post, 31 Aug. 1814. Cowdroy’s Manchester Gazette, 2, 9 July 1814; Hull Advertiser and Exchange Herald, 2 July 1814; Ipswich Jl, 15 July 1814. For the impact of the petition campaign on Liverpool, see Seymour Drescher, “The Slaving Capital of the World: Liverpool and National Opinion in the Age of Abolition”, Slavery and Abolition, ix (1988), pp. 128–43. Clarkson to Vansittart, 7 Sept. 1814: British Library, London, Vansittart Papers, Add. MS. 31,231, fos. 145–6, quoted in Dixon, “Politics of Emancipation”, p. 145. The contemporary historian Theophilus Camden declared the administration “condemned for having acceded to a condition so inimical to the nation”, its honour, religion and morality: Theophilus Camden, The Imperial History of England, 2 vols. (London, 1811–14), ii, p. 738. Fladeland, “Abolitionist Pressures on the Concert of Europe”. Strangford to Castlereagh, 20 Apr. 1814: P.R.O., F.O. 63/167 (Portugal), dispatch no. 40, fo. 267. Strangford to Castlereagh, I, 21 Oct., 28 Nov. 1814: P.R.O., F.O. 63/169 (Portugal), fos. 11, 12, 81, 109; see also Leslie Bethell, The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade: Britain, Brazil and the Slave Trade Question, 1807–1869 (Cambridge, 1970), p. 12. Wellesley to Castlereagh, 17 June, 6 July 1814: P.R.O., F.O. 72/160 (Spain), dispatch nos. 50, 60, fos. 90, 145; David R. Murray, Odious Commerce: Britain, Spain and the Abolition of the Cuban Slave Trade (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 52, 340 nn. 13–14. Wellesley to Castlereagh, 25 Aug. 1814: P.R.O., F.O. 72/160 (Spain), dispatch no. 71, fo. 214; Castlereagh to C. Stuart, 30 Aug. 1814: P.R.O., F.O. 27/96 (France). Members of the government were quite aware that the national mobilization had sharply curtailed their diplomatic leeway: see Wilberforce to Liverpool (private), 31 Aug. 1814, and Liverpool to Castlereagh, 9 Dec. 1814: Brit. Lib., Liverpool Papers, Add. MSS. 38,566, 38,578. See Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, pp.  156, 261 n.; Davis, “Capitalism, Abolitionism and Hegemony”, p.  212; lain McCalman, “Anti-Slavery and Ultra-Radicalism in Early Nineteenth-Century England: The Case of Robert Wedderburn”, Slavery and Abolition, vii (1986), pp. 99–117. See Colley, Britons, pp.  237–363; Charles Tilly, “Britain Creates the Social Movement”, in Jonathan Schneer (ed.), Social Conflict and the Political Order in Modern Britain (New Brunswick, 1982), pp. 21–51; Charles Tilly, “Contentious Repertoires in Great Britain, 1758–1834”, Social Science Hist., xvii (1993), pp. 253–80; Sidney Tarrow, “Modular Collective Action and the Rise of the Social Movement: Why the French Revolution Was Not Enough”, Politics and Society, xxi (1993), pp.  69–90; Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Collective Action, Social Movements and Politics (Cambridge, 1994), ch. 2.

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4 CART WHIP AND BILLY ROLLER: ANTISLAVERY AND REFORM SYMBOLISM IN INDUSTRIALIZING BRITAIN The emergence of colonial slavery as a central political issue in British history virtually coincided with the great acceleration in industrialization toward the end of the eighteenth century. Scholars have increasingly sought for broad connections between abolitionism and the larger framework of evolving British society. One historiographic tradition has emphasized antislavery’s linkage to greater egalitarianism in ideology, in techniques of agitation, and in religious organization. Historians such as Coupland, Anstey and Walvin stress the role of humanitarianism and evangelical antislavery in the general expansion of individual rights which ultimately made government more responsive to underprivileged outsiders. In this respect antislavery emerges as one of the consequences of general material progress and the expansion of civil, religious and political rights. Overseas slave emancipation is a counterpoint to various domestic “emancipations.”1 Alongside this dominant pattern of British antislavery historiography runs another, more skeptical about the positive correlation of abolitionism and domestic reform. Drawing from both Conservative and Radical perspectives on the role of the antislavery movement in the early nineteenth century, it is suspicious of abolitionist motives and of their relation to domestic social change. From this second perspective, abolitionists had little to do positively with domestic democratic and libertarian reform, or even (consciously or unconsciously) diverted attention and energy from social problems at home. The premise is that antislavery was at best eccentric and debilitating to the movements of popular reform. Historians with this more critical stance have also tended to emphasize the conservative function of antislavery in shoring up the domestic social hierarchy during a period of intense social change. For Eric Williams, “the abolitionists were not radicals. In their attitudes to domestic problems they were reactionaries,” openly contemptuous of the working class.2 This view is empirically fortified by a review of the domestic role of Wilberforce and many of the other “Saints” who presided over the early antislavery movement. lf Williams exaggerated in characterizing Wilberforce as an expert in transatlantic cruelty who ignored domestic exploitation, the most sympathetic 93

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry biographer becomes uneasy over some of his subject’s political positions. From the Sedition Acts of 1795 through the Combination Acts and the repressive post-war Acts and beyond, Wilberforce supported restrictive legislation.3 It is easy to see why contemporary Radicals charged Wilberforce with hypocrisy. The charges against Wilberforce were later extended to antislavery forces as a whole.4 One of the most important achievements of this critical perspective has been to focus attention more precisely on the specific domestic social context in which abolition arose and emancipation occurred. No historian has done more in this respect than David Brion Davis in the first two volumes of his magisterial study of antislavery. His The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1966), and The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (1954),5 also constitute the most sophisticated statement to date in support of antislavery’s conservative and controlling function in domestic politics. Davis attempts to connect the development of antislavery with the general evolution of British industrial society. In doing so he explicitly questions the representation of antislavery as part of a wider egalitarian and liberalizing movement. Davis stresses British antislavery’s obsessive idealization of a hierarchical social order which coincided with an attack on the remnants of protective legislation against market forces. “A denunciation of colonial slavery,” he therefore maintains, “implied no taste for a freer or more equal society.”6 His central conclusion is that antislavery selectively impelled its adherents’ vision away from rather than toward increasing domestic oppression. Davis notes that antislavery symbols could also ultimately sharpen the awareness of domestic oppression, as exemplified by the vision of Frederick Engels in the 1840’s. But the general social thrust of antislavery was to narrow the reformist horizon by psychological displacement rather than to promote sensitivity towards metropolitan exploitation. Davis thus posits a class-linked function for antislavery. Although his detailed account so far runs into the 1820’s, both his temporal frame of reference and his evidence on this point extend through the period of the Reform Bill. His supporting evidence also reaches as far back as the earliest West Indian rejoinders to abolitionists. They too suggested that there was more than enough to do among the poor at home without distracting the attention of British subjects to overseas problems.7 Davis’s analysis is conceptually grounded in a “hegemonistic” model of social control. He subtly uses the politics and ideas of both the Clapham Sect and more secular intellectuals to portray antislavery as an ideological vehicle which combined the economic doctrines of Adam Smith and his successors with a form of philanthropic social engineering by middle- and upper-class leaders. Abolitionism thus helped the entire society to displace concerns for evils nearer home by sympathies with sufferings which did not threaten the immediate comfort or power of the ruling class.8 In this respect antislavery was primarily a screening device. It was used by abolitionists in a far less 94

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry premeditated way than West Indian polemics often implied, but ultimately with the same distractive social and political function and impact. I propose to test this hypothesis by treating as problematic certain premises. I will re-examine the kind of evidence which has hitherto been used to place antislavery firmly in the capitalist “middle-class” sector of British society, serving in Davis’s words, to screen out and even to strengthen bonds at home by focusing on more visible ones abroad. It should be clear that I am not primarily interested in reviewing Davis’s account of how the abolitionist leadership may have helped to displace its own energies in the direction of overseas reform. I am rather concerned with his extension of the displacement function to the nation as a whole from the elites whose writings he sensitively studied.9 The analysis of such a sweeping extension requires consideration of the meaning of antislavery to other articulate segments of society. The analysis proceeds in several steps. First, we must ask how fully the intellectual proponents of classical political economy actually seized the opportunity to explore the putative advantages of the free labor system by extensive theoretical comparison with its slave labor counterpart. Stated as straight-forwardly as possible, was antislavery one of the principal symbolic arsenals of laissez-faire ideologists? Secondly, was antislavery a movement by and for the “middle class?” Did its ideology actually deflect reforming energies in favor of groups too remote to threaten the “emerging hegemony of capitalists and Evangelical reformers” in Britain? The next question is the one most closely related to Davis’ refinement of the traditional critical position. Did antislavery and its ideological offensive divert or dissipate sensitivity to problems of metropolitan labor? Here the class composition of the movement is less significant than the symbolic interchange between abolitionism and movements to reform industrial capitalist society. I will focus primarily on this relationship in the dynamic industrial regions of Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire, and on the domestic issue which most closely coincided with the emancipation campaign of the early 1830’s. One could and should, of course, go further afield in testing the displacement model, but the heartland of British rapid industrialization should delineate the relationships most decisively. Davis himself briefly tenders the example of the political alignment of the city of Leeds in 1832, in the wake of Parliamentary reform, as an example of the divergent streams of the reform impulse under the impact of industrialization. Having examined the relationship of antislavery ideology to industrial discontent, one can then very briefly discuss its implication for the class-hegemonistic model of social control which lies behind the displacement theory of antislavery. Before looking into the use of antislavery, one can narrow the problem by referring to one important way in which it was not used. We have drawn attention elsewhere to the fact that Adam Smith’s heirs in classical economics, from the end of the eighteenth century through emancipation and the abolition of colonial apprenticeship in 1838, were somewhat less than enthusiastic 95

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry in attempting to argue for the virtues of the free labor market by analyzing slavery.10 The contemplation of the comparative cost and efficiency of the free laborer over the slave apparently tempted no major economist to enter the fray in detail on the abolitionist side. Malthus, of course, issued a widely publicized denial that this theory argued for the continuation of the slave trade, but only in rebuttal to hearing his work cited in Parliament by its defenders.11 None of the classical economists between Malthus and John Stuart Mill, well after emancipation, devoted much time or analysis to the debate over the comparative costs of free labor and slavery. J.R. McCulloch made a brief comparison, but came to conclusions rather different from those of the abolitionists in relation to tropical colonial situations, as did J.B. Say in his major study. Collectively, the whole constellation of political economists from 1788 to 1838 produced fewer explicit assertions on slavery versus free labor than did Smith in the Wealth of Nations (1776). Some analysts of colonization actually stressed the necessity of restraints on free labor as functional equivalents of slavery. Toward the end of the crusade for emancipation Herman Merivale emphasized that, while in equilibrium conditions slave labor was more costly than free, in colonial circumstances wage labor was more expensive, thus echoing Say’s numerical calculations.12 In 1833, at the peak of the clamor over emancipation, Mountifort Longfield devoted scant space to the subject in his inaugural lecture in the Chair of Political Economy at Trinity College Dublin. He cautioned his audience that the question was too complicated and too agitated “to be a fit subject for a Professor’s chair.” Diffident as he was, Longfield could, however, assure them ex cathedra, “that when it is said that free labour is cheaper than that of slaves, or the contrary, the proposition must be considered false if taken universally. . . “13 Strong affirmations of the comparative value of free labour might safely be left to political gatherings, to popular moralists like Harriet Martineau, or to positions anonymously taken in journals like the Edinburgh Review. At the level of political economist propaganda, whatever peripheral validating attraction “free labor” had as a general term, no economist even attempted a comparison of the colonial plantation with the factory or the poor house. Perhaps economists sought a low profile at the height of the controversy over colonial slavery because they were as likely to be identified as agents of dehumanization as West Indian slaveholders. The staid Times felt free to conflate political economists and planters. An editorial on Jamaica casually referred to the fact that “the slave-owner will do nothing to raise the negro in the scale of being; he regards him as some of our equally humane ‘economists’ in this country have looked upon the British labourer for the past 30 years – as an instrument of production, as a piece of ready organized mechanism, – a subordinate appendage to the sugarmill, nothing worse nor better.” The abolitionists’ own propaganda piece on the superiority of free labor during the emancipation agitation included no citation of any work 96

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry of a British economist that had been published in the previous thirty years.14 Whatever may account for the fact that the prophets of laissez-faire made so little effort to validate the free-labor market by analyzing its antithesis, one must conclude that they certainly did not dote on the economic inferiority of the slave labor system. When abolitionists sought for unequivocal support from orthodox political economists, they had little to choose from beyond the generation of Adam. If this much can be said of emergent classical economics, what of antislavery itself ? Was it a middle-class movement? Most scholars who discuss the movement along such class lines describe it in terms which seem to or explicitly exclude the working class. In support of this view there is clear evidence that much of the central apparatus addressed itself to the respectable local notabilities in the expectation that they would pull along the rest of their community simply through social deference. The propaganda organ of George Stephen’s Agency, which coordinated popular agitation in 1832–33, was clearly directed more at the buyers than the sellers oflabor.15 However, it is misleading to suppose that support for antislavery was solely a middle-class phenomenon. The existence of a popular commitment to abolitionist principles even in the 1780’s and 1790’s is well enough known, although not always emphasized either in general histories of abolitionism or of the British working class. Its continuity is rarely alluded to after the reaction of the 1790’s. Yet both indirect and direct evidence points to the fact that there was a large working-class element in the support for abolition even at the climax of antislavery in the 1830’s when it was supposedly absorbed by middle-class, laissez-faire evangelicalism. The quantitative evidence is indirect and partial but quite credible. We have indicated elsewhere that one large denomination, the Wesleyan Methodists, accounted for about one sixth of the 1.3 million signatories of emancipation petitions to Parliament in 1833. Given the extraordinary completeness of the Wesleyan subscription, working-class identification with antislavery must have been substantial, especially in the industrial regions closely associated with Methodism.16 On the other hand, both West Indian and some radical polemicists argued that emancipation should be postponed until charity began at home and metropolitan labor was relieved. Patricia Hollis shows that radical leaders sought to divert working class sympathy from abolition. They denounced misplaced benevolence for a far-otT “black hide, thick lips, and a wooly head.”17 The attack, however, certainly infused no life into the counter-abolitionist petition campaign. No more than an insignificant fraction of the 5,000 signatures on petitions to parliament in 1833 requesting postponement of (or compensation for) emancipation, represented those without vested capital in the system.18 It might, of course, be argued that the working-class signatures in favor of emancipation (and the lack of such signatures against it) were simply confirmation of Stephen’s “deference” hypothesis. Therefore we will have to look more closely at evidence of independent working-class attitudes with regard 97

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry both to slavery and to other domestic issues. The aggregate figures can give no idea of whether or how strongly antislavery loyalties were felt by the industrial classes or linked to other reforms. Some evidence for the character of working-class participation in the antislavery movement and ideology is impressionistic but very indicative of the attitudes of even its class-conscious members at the time of emancipation. In 1832, just after the passage of the Reform Bill and in preparation for the campaign for his election, William Cobbett told a working-class rally in Manchester of his willingness to pledge himself to emancipation.19 Given Cobbett’s background of thirty years of antipathy to Wilberforce, to abolitionism, and toward blacks, this was startling enough. What is even more interesting is that he acknowledged that his conversion came not in response to new moral arguments for emancipation, but to the identification of the West India Interest with anti-reformism and in deference to the wishes of his Manchester working-class supporters. Since Cobbett simultaneously attacked the whole local middle class to the cheers of his audience, it is unlikely that the workers at the meeting were fulfilling the deferential role assigned to them by George Stephen’s Agency. Even more than the inference drawn from the petitions, this evidence indicates a strong independent antislavery commitment in the very heart of the industrial working class. The massive support given by the Manchester working class when abolitionism was launched in 1787 still existed on the eve of emancipation. A few months later in Parliament, Cobbett, sitting for Oldham, supported emancipation strictly on grounds of his constituents’ demands. This, however, still leaves unresolved the question of whether or not antislavery ideology had the effect of “displacing” energies away from domestic reform. Even if the entire working class were represented on the petitions in proportion to its relative strength in England this might only demonstrate that displacement was just as effective below as within the middle class. We must attempt to get some insight into just how the symbols of antislavery were channeled into, or away from, demands for domestic reform. Davis’s approach from an intellectual history perspective assumes that leaders somehow “mirrored” the society as a whole. More concretely, he assumes that antislavery symbols were pre-eminently the preserve of a powerful group able to draw general social perceptions in a proprietary and defensive direction. This hegemonistic premise can, however, be tested by investigating some of those collective documents which might reveal popular inferences from antislavery. We emphasize that we are, like Davis, interested in how ideas were reflected in society generally. Davis, drawing largely from a conservative and formal intellectual literature, demonstrates one use of antislavery symbols and ideology. We believe that we can demonstrate other uses of antislavery which come closer to the perceptions of popular audiences. Passing over the abundant evidence of radical abolitionism in the 1780’s and 1790’s as part of a North Atlantic popular movement, we turn to a number of illustrative examples 98

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry from the period in which middle-class evangelical and capitalist “hegemony” is broadly identified as having clearly emerged, grasping the antislavery banner in its hands.20 One may begin by looking at the use of antislavery ideology in relation to the various pleas for social change illustrated in the petitions for domestic relief from 1823 to 1833. Theoretically, antislavery could have been used to deny the relative urgency of other reforms. The contrary seems to be overwhelmingly the case. With every wave of abolitionist petitions after 1823 the popular reformist imagination turned easily and naturally to slavery as a symbolic weapon. Even during the Napoleonic wars it is possible to find workingclass assertions that Parliament could relieve physical distress in England, as it had alleviated it in Africa by the elimination of the British African slave trade. But the linkage intensified with the popularization of the movement for emancipation. Right on the heels of the first emancipation petitions to Parliament in 1823, a Manchester political Reform petition urged that exclusion from representation was as truly the mark of a slave’s degradation “as the visible brand on the person of a bought and sold negro, or as the brand of ownership on a sheep . . .,” and that property itself was vested in things produced by the labor of one’s hands, “those who labour being the only productive classes in the community.” In the same session a protest against the game laws invoked the same image of slavery in England, unmatched “in any other country in the world.”21 In other words, antislavery propaganda triggered images of deprivation which were contagious. The cordwainers of Leicester asked for the repeal of the Combination Laws on ground of “equal, perhaps in some instances, greater privations, than are the merciless portion of the Negro Slaves of the West Indian Colonies.” The cordwainers did not feel it necessary to affirm that colonial slave conditions were relatively enviable but stated that both conditions were appalling. Accounts of Negro slavery served to intensify rather than to screen the image of working-class privation of rights. The next year the female parishioners of Wily in Wiltshire opened their case for relief by expressing their understanding that since even Negro slaves were on the agenda of Parliament, they no longer thought it “improper even for females to petition the House.” The Wily petition also demonstrated the utility of the colonial/metropolitan comparison where the condition of the British poor was explicitly or implicitly posited as worse than that of black slaves. The women of Wily were prepared to pursue the image in detail. The petition referred to the garden allotments given to slaves, “free of charge.” They compared hours worked by slaves and free Englishmen, of meat eaten and livestock owned by Negroes. They compared black slaves with the Irish poor. Close on the heels of these Wily women came the spinners of Stockport. They also claimed to be enduring “all the horrors of a sullen and hapless slavery,” one harsher than that of slaves of the West Indies. On the other side of the metaphor, journeymen bookbinders of London invoked British liberty against the Combination 99

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry Laws inspired by Wilberforce. As for factory children, to be dealt with below, the Rochdale journeymen cotton-spinners petition invoked the precise parallel with slavery in the session after the first emancipation campaign. Similar analogies were made in a Bolton petition against trucking and in others from workers in Stafford and in Gloucester.22 Precisely as emancipation moved to the center of political discourse after 1823, its incorporation by other reform movements intensified. The petitions were merely emphasizing an analogue already embedded in the language of the press and politics. In one way or another “slavery” was being used to highlight a whole range of discontents, from agricultural distress to cruelty to animals, and to characterize all of England under the unreformed Parliament. The impetus, of course, came through the immediacy and repetition of the concept in the massive emancipation agitation itself. The day after a large antislavery meeting at Leeds, in 1830, another was called to celebrate the July Revolution. The liberty of the nations of Europe was joined, amid cheers, to the previous day’s denunciations of the “most disgraceful and servile bondage” in the colonies. And note was taken of the Mayor’s refusal to attend the second rally as he had done the first.23 Between 1830 and 1833 the intrusion of “slavery” into political rhetoric became almost reflexive. A Bolton Reform election parade five thousand strong, involving a whole range of trades, marched with banners calling for the “abolition of slavery,” as well as denouncing taxes and the political economists. At the front of the hustings at the Oldham election won by Cobbett hung a large banner with the representation of a negro in chains, intended, “as an incitement against the two candidates connected with the West Indies.” Election abolition banners were also noted at the Salford election.24 The linkage also worked in reverse. The connection between emancipation and political reform has been noted too often to require detailed elaboration. From Cobbett and George Stephen on one side to the West Indian interest on the other, the dependency of slavery on the bulwarks of the old system was clear. By 1832 most abolitionists believed that the destruction of the rotten boroughs had become a prerequisite for bringing down slavery. For the ultratories of Blackwood’s, antislavery was just one more nursery “of jacobinical agitation” useful “to unsettle men’s principles, and to disturb and sacred foundations of property.” For the Westminster Review, slavery’s demise was also another stone drawn from the crumbling wall of the old constitution.25 If anything, the Parliamentary crisis over political reform momentarily eclipsed antislavery in 1831–32. But with the passage of the Reform Bill the abolitionists assumed that their time had come. A festive crowd at Accrington welcomed the Reform Act as a harbinger of Black emancipation.26 Voters enfranchised by the Reform Act were urged to sanctify their new electoral rights and to break with corruption by a non-partisan commitment to antislavery candidates. Non-conformist ranks were affected by the issue: the very conservative Jabez Bunting was the only Methodist to be denounced by 100

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry name in the religious press for voting in favor of an unpledged (pro-Planter) candidate at Liverpool, in 1832, shortly after Bunting had signed a clerical declaration advising his flock to vote antislavery.27 A political displacement was taking place in precisely the wrong direction for a worried conservative clergyman writing to the Anglican Record. His former lively interest in antislavery was now transformed into a concern that people were lately reasoning that “the downfall of the Established Church is as desirable as the downfall of slavery.” On the eve of the first reform election, the Tory Preston Pilot, reflecting on the same pattern, felt that the one hope for the West Indians lay in the possibility that the antislavery movement would overreach itself by extending its attack to the Established Church.28 The staunchly Anglican, but increasingly timid antislavery periodical, The Record was terrified of a radicalization of abolitionism by political reformers: “To send unprincipled, irreligious, Profligate men into the House of Commons, because they pledged themselves to the immediate abolition of slavery, was one of the most inane, improper, and unscriptural proceedings that well meaning men, professing to be guided by Christian principles, were ever guilty of.” The fear of radical contamination continued throughout the parliamentary struggle of 1833, while The Record pined for the supposed good old days when Wilberforce and company had led the movement.29 Antislavery was hurrying Christian doctrine into a marriage with dangerous dogmas of “inalienable rights,” and the mutual infatuation had “ripened with tropical rapidity.” The trend finally led The Record to resurrect the biblical arguments for the legitimacy of slavery (in arguing for compensation) and to reverse its support for emancipation-pledged candidates.30 Some other hostile conservatives also viewed antislavery pledging as a radical-dissenting plot.31 While conservatives agonized over the contamination of abolitionism by affiliation with popular radicals, some newspapers addressed to the working class feared just the opposite – the distraction of reforming energies from metropolitan concerns. Yet the more widely the details of West Indian slavery were disseminated, the more they seemed to suggest domestic parallels, even among their own readers. The process is strikingly illustrated in a letter addressed to the virulently anti-abolitionist working-class paper, The Poor Man’s Advocate. The correspondent was among the crowds who flocked to hear the abolitionist lectures. He freely acknowledged the feeling of disquiet aroused in him against the “infamous, inhuman, and debasing traffic in human flesh,” and described the pleasure with which he had heard lecturers like Thompson and the Reverend Knibb. Yet their very technique of recounting cases of slaves forced to purchase their freedom in installments compelled the writer to remark that no laborer in Britain could possibly have accumulated such high premiums for any purpose whatever.32 Far from attracting public awareness away from domestic conditions, antislavery offered fresh food for discontent. I am not referring to the possibly unconscious motivations of the antislavery 101

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry leadership, but to the measurable impact of their political discourse.33 In considering responses to the immense volume of propaganda it is this dynamic transference of the antislavery idiom in public petitions, newspaper accounts and public rallies which must be considered. Rather than continuing with the abundant but dispersed evidence of the mutual ideological reinforcement of colonial and domestic reform, it might be best to look more systematically at antislavery’s relation to agitation for the specific industrial legislation which simultaneously reached a peak of its own in the years 1830–1833. This was the campaign in behalf of regulated shorter hours for child laborers. The “Factory Movement” also has the heuristic advantage of being the single most commonly cited domestic counter-example used by both sympathetic and critical historians of British abolitionism. Scholars as diverse in their judgment of antislavery as Edith Hurwitz, P.F. Dixon, Patricia Hollis, E.P. Thompson and David Brion Davis identify the split between emancipationists and factory reformers as a litmus test of the displacement function of antislavery with regard to social reform in Britain. One may begin with the most eminent example. In all of E.P. Thompson’s bumper harvest of nine hundred pages on working class culture and behavior from 1790 to the first Reform Act, one gleans a single needling footnote concerning antislavery’s relation to industrial reform. This is an allusion to the “deformed sensibility” of Jabez Bunting and his fellow Methodists, whose vision was displaced, or worse, from the factory children at their own doorstep: “The only humanitarian cause to which Methodists like Bunting gave consistent support was Anti-slavery agitation; but as the years go by, and the issue is trotted out again and again, one comes to suspect that it was less a vestigial social conscience than a desire to disarm criticism which propped this banner up.”34 (We have already seen something of Bunting’s consistency.) Davis also uses the split between slavery and factory reformers as a prime example of his displacement theory, when his model and evidence are extended to the antislavery climax of the early 1830’s. David presents antislavery as a middle-class reform, personified in the 1832 electoral triumph of T.B. Macaulay, son of the abolitionist leader, at Leeds. In opposition stood Michael Sadler, the Tory champion of the Ten Hours Bill for factory children, supported by William Cobbett and working-class radicals.35 The ideological and class lines are drawn around the candidates. This dividing line is offered in evidence of antislavery as the symbolic vehicle for the dominant economic doctrine, and for the deformation or diversion of domestic social consciousness. Patricia Hollis also invokes the Tory-Radical vs. Whig split in the North as illustrative of the dichotomized priorities of the antislavery and working class movements around 1832. Sadler, Oastler, Cobbett, O’Brien, et al. are joined against the middle classes and their spokesmen, Macaulay and the Leeds journalist, Edward Baines.36 These battle lines are not drawn just by historians who are cool towards abolitionism. Both Edith Hurwitz and P.F. Dixon 102

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry contrast the concern of a Sadler or an Oastler for the victims of industrialization with abolitionist indifference. In this Leeds alignment, antislavery is therefore assigned to the middleclass laissez-faire clientele, while the Tory-Radical strands of English political life are designated as pledging allegiance to the issue of domestic welfare. The ideological dialectic between the two movements first demands our attention. The factory, or “short time,” movement first emerged as a mass movement in the West Riding of Yorkshire, the heartland of Wilberforce’s abolitionist empire. Richard Oastler, the Clarkson of the factory agitation was converted to the cause of the factory children in the midst of working for Negro emancipation. His famous Manifesto, “Yorkshire Slavery,” was written during the 1830 mobilization of Yorkshire antislavery.37 It attempted to play directly on that ideological commitment. Oastler continually reminded his audiences that he served his novitiate in the antislavery crusade as a youthful supporter of Wilberforce.38 Other leaders had a similar background. Michael Sadler, the parliamentary champion of factory legislation in the early 1830’s, laid claim to impeccable antislavery credentials. The Reverend George Bull, the third major orator of the factory movement, had served as a missionary in the colony of Sierra Leone. He claimed to be one of the few antislavery fighters who had actually suffered physical debilitation in serving the cause. He also moved from collecting antislavery signatures one day to stumping for factory children the next.39 The leaders therefore came out of a tradition saturated with the acceptance of antislavery ideology and experience. Of equal significance is the fact that the conversion process worked in both directions. Probably the most widely distributed antislavery tract to appear in conjunction with the Emancipation Bill was Henry Whitely’s Three Months in Jamaica, in 1832. 200,000 copies were distributed within a few weeks, and long sections were read aloud at public meetings.40 Whitely was a friend of Oastler, a Methodist, and a member of the Central Committee of the Factory movement in Leeds, at the hard core of proprietary resistance. As a lifelong resident of a manufacturing district near the city, Whitely’s concern had always been for the “slavery of the poor factory children at home.” He was convinced that “there was more real slavery in England than in any of her colonies,” and was quite willing to accept the Planter image of the relatively pampered black slaves. That judgment was shattered in Jamaica by his personal observation of perpetual whippings and the wholesale sexual exploitation of women. For our purposes, the most significant aspect of this conversion is that it neither displaced nor reversed his commitment to the factory movement. Three months ended with an emotional plea for legislation on both issues. Thus the most widely disseminated antislavery tract of 1833 was almost certainly the most widely disseminated plea in favor of factory reform as well. In this context one wonders how far either the regional voices of laissez-faire abolitionists like Baines or Macaulay at Leeds, or anti-abolitionist London radicals could compete with the symbolism of Whitely.41 103

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry The range of symbolic linkages is reflected in their frequency and context in popular agitation. The Manchester Factory rally of 10,000 strong in 1832 showed the ease of working class symbolic transferrence and reinforcement. First among the banners carried by participants was the slogan: “No infant slavery,” followed by similar banners. The iconography of the rally also drew upon fifty years of antislavery propaganda: a child kneeling in chains with the motto “the little white slave,” while that most distinctive instrument of slavery, the whip, was born aloft with the inscription: “look at this and weep.” In their speeches Oastler and Sadler cited slavery and factory child labor as analogous evils requiring action, as they drew upon the evidence to show that in important respects the children’s condition was worse than that of adult colonial slaves.42 In 1832–33 it was almost impossible to find a meeting, petition, or tract in favour of the Ten Hours Bill which did not borrow from antislavery. Sadler produced verses substituting a factory girl for blacks. A story in Yorkshire dialect concluded: “I’m sure from what my Cousin Jemmy says they’re worked warse nor t’Neager Slavees i’t West Indies.”43 Antislavery was clearly the polar star by which the early factory movement steered its ideological course. At the West Riding’s culminating Factory meeting on Wisby Low Moor, the first banner, noted by numerous reports, was inscribed: “Sadler and the immediate abolition of slavery both at home and abroad.”44 The attractiveness of the antislavery precedent to the factory agitation can be seen at every turn. Oastler, supporting Sadler’s re-election at Leeds in 1832, insisted that no real friend of the children would wish his defeat, any more than “a real friend of the Negro slave” would have so acted against Wilberforce. Oastler marshalled support of the factory legislation from both the London Friends and London Antislavery against their reluctant West Riding counterparts.45 Noting the conspicuous absence of the proprietors at short-time rallies, the textile operatives of Leeds made the same point. If factory operatives were convinced by antislavery agents of the utter necessity of immediate emancipation, how was it that owners could refuse to see the analogy between the cart whip and the billy roller? 46 In terms of ideological vulnerability, it is significant that factory rallies always made points from the black slave/infant slave analogy. Equally significant, the primary riposte of the factory interest was analogous, not to that of the abolitionists, but of their West India antagonists. The first line of defense usually consisted, like that of the Planters, in proclaiming the importance of the industry for the economy and the threat of regulation to private property.47 As in the West Indian defense of slavery, many of the rebuttals to Oastler’s “Yorkshire slavery” analogy focused attention on other domestic abuses among English agricultural laborers, artisans and colliers. It was obvious that accusations of displacement from “real” problems was one game any number of groups under fire could and did play. What is analytically more interesting is the fact that Oastler, in pressing the analogy to West Indian 104

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry slavery, was not widely accused of displaying attention away from blacks in the colonies. Such reluctance leads us to infer that factory proprietors did not wish to fight the battle over the factory hours on the black/child analogy, Oastler’s chosen ground. Real tensions arose from the fact that despite the almost desperately identical symbolism, antislavery had an additional constituency among the proprietors and their social allies that the factory movement could not attract in 1830–33. In the Ten Hour campaign of 1833 Oastler bitterly recalled to a cheering Bradford audience that the abuse of factory children was winked at by the town’s antislavery society, its missionary society, its bible societies and its Quakers. He was apparently most bitter that even the Bradford Wesleyans, from whom he obviously expected more, had refused their chapel to the Factory Meeting. Another speaker, however, rebutted the final charge. George Beaumont, stunted from having begun working fourteen hours a day at age seven, was both a trustee of the chapel in question and secretary of the local antislavery society. He insisted that the refusal of the chapel had not been due to congregational hostility to the Factory Movement, and that the Methodists there were swinging in favor of the Ten Hours Bill. He further insisted that he was still for emancipation, to which Oastler immediately interjected “So am I.” For neither speaker was there any apparent conflict about dual allegiance. At the same moment the Methodist Missionary Society, meeting in Manchester, was endorsing both reforms. Oastler continued to link the two emancipations, drawing loud cheers from a mass Ten Hours meeting by denouncing the government’s Negro apprenticeship plan.48 Local tensions did occasionally erupt. In Bolton, the Factory movement was forced to meet in the Primitive Methodist chapel when the Wesleyans denied their premises. Of that rally the Bolton Chronicle reported that “the most orderly and unanimous [meeting] witnessed for some time” ended with three cheers for “the Poor West Indian black slaves, and three for Mr. Oastler’s poor subjects, the factory children.” Yet resentment must have persisted. A short time later an antislavery meeting was interrupted from the audience by a denunciation of the speakers’ misplaced sympathy for overseas blacks, against the real needs of white slaves. In rebuttal the speakers pointed out that every individual on the stage was in fact a publicly declared Ten Hours supporter, and that the Bolton Friends were personally canvassing for it. Perhaps even more interestingly, the Chronicle reported that the “general body of spinners” of Bolton had authorized the newspaper to declare that the spinners did not in any way countenance “the shameful interruption” of the antislavery proceedings, and that the heckler “was not, nor never had been an operative spinner.”49 Thus one of the few reported cases of disuption of a slavery meeting seems to have resulted in a working-class repudiation of the intervention. The intimate cross-fertilization of antislavery and factory agitation was nowhere more visible than at Bradford, a hometown of the Factory 105

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry Movement. In 1830 Bradford was Britain’s most rapidly growing city. It was also the showpiece of mass abolitionism. Thomas Clarkson singled out the parish of Bradford as the exemplar of mass pressure on Parliament for unconditional emancipation. In the fall of 1830, the vicar of Bradford, the Reverend Henry Heap, presided over the resolution of its antislavery petition. Three years later the same chairman convoked “the very numerous and respectable” meeting at the Primitive Methodist chapel in favor of the Ten Hours Bill. Two months later the vicar was back at an antislavery meeting, being cheered for his opposition to “slavery and degradation of all kinds whether black or white.” At another factory rally the same evening the Reverend Bull reminded his audience that he had begun to act in behalf of the local factory children while canvassing for antislavery, despite the fact that proprietors denounced him as a renegade.50 Given the evidence of continuous social and ideological interchange, perhaps it is not coincidental that Bradford was one of the few towns in Britain where there remained some working class response to the American Freedman’s Aid appeal following the Civil War.51 The merger of both slavery and factory spokesmen and arguments is striking. Allowing that abolitionism possibly served a displacement function for proprietors themselves in reacting to ills within their own factory yards, it is difficult to see how its ideology served the same social function for those not immediately interested in opposing factory legislation. On the contrary, the West Riding, drenched in antislavery symbolism from 1830 on, may have been more sensitive to the claims for children than other industrial areas.52 Only detailed regional analysis can ultimately determine this. In the metropolis antislavery does not seem to have inhibited Ten Hours support although apathy was more general. The London Short-Time leadership showed a heavy cross-over from antislavery, and Oastler taunted recalcitrant Yorkshire capitalists with his support from London. We have already noted the Anti-Slavery Society’s sponsorship of Whitely’s pamphlet. To be sure there were attempts even outside the West Riding to turn the working class against abolitionism. In the wake of the widely denounced Compensation and Apprenticeship terms attached by the Government to emancipation, the Blackburn working-class political union in Lancashire condemned the emancipation bill as a diversion. It is also likely that in some towns even potential radical antagonism dissuaded antislavery locals from holding public meetings prior to emancipation petitions. The Tory Leicester Herald surmised that such a strategy was adopted in its town for fear that radicals would be likely “to move an amendment upon the present state of White Slavery in this country.”53 The most famous case of a symbolic clash between the two “antislaveries” occurred in Birmingham in April 1833. At the climax of the emancipation campaign, a Birmingham Antislavery petition meeting was invaded by a hostile contingent, led by the chairman of the Birmingham Political Union. It succeeded in disrupting the meeting and forcing an adjournment. Two features of the event are of special significance 106

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry for our analysis. First, the antislavery meeting clarified concern with domestic distress, since some abolitionist spokesmen insisted on their prior support of domestic reform and challenged their disrupters to call a special meeting for that purpose. Secondly, in the wake of the clash the Birmingham Political Union, at its own meeting, decided against the chairman’s position and voted by three to one to send a petition to parliament in favor of immediate emancipation.54 The Union’s own debate underscored the role of antislavery as a source of deep and general commitment against injustice. The mover of the emancipation petition movingly recalled that his political consciousness had emerged in adolescence, when his father laid the famous plan of a slaveship before his children and explained the middle passage to them. Another supporter emphasized that it was “the working men of the colonies” whose cause they were considering, and that emancipation formed part of the common cause of “the working men of the whole world.” The scorn expressed by the petition’s opponents for the “non-political” men, who only came into the public arena on behalf of black slaves, could not carry the day against the broader symbolic appeal for unity. A short while later at the great Birmingham meeting sponsored by the Political Union to demand the resignation of the Government, the front banner had a “negro slave in one corner and a Pole in fetters in the other.” The largest rally in post-Reform Birmingham using the famous symbol of the keeling black slave was not even an abolitionist gathering in the strict sense.55 In all of this, both at the interrupted meeting for emancipation and the sequels at the Political Union, the displacement function was clearly subordinate to the dynamic linkage entailed in antislavery symbolism. Thus the historiographic creation of a dichotomy of social symbols divided along the lines of domestic and overseas labor legislation seems to be misleading. Neither general religious deference nor specific antislavery commitment sufficed to save hostile capitalists from denunciation by the working class. Thus antislavery was not sufficient to win a labor audience. The radical and generally antiabolitionist Voice of the West Riding gleefully reported that the attendants of Houses Chapel, near Kirkheaton, determined not to hear David Shaw, the Huddersfield antislavery delegate, preach one Sunday, because of his hostility to the working class. When he attempted to approach the pulpit, the congregation “took up their hats and coats, and left the place, taking the Sunday School children along with them,” leaving Mr. Shaw to speak to the pews.56 In the Reform election of 1832 parliamentary opponents of the factory movement in Yorkshire felt the full force of public linkages with antislavery, however much they might later compromise in the House of Commons. At a great election meeting in Leeds, Lord Morpeth, the Whig candidate of the factory owners, announced that he wanted to put a stop to the “accursed system of slavery.” He was immediately greeted by a mixture of cheers and cries of “slavery at home.”57 At Bradford, immediately after Morpeth was 107

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry cheered for pledging to end slavery, Reverend Bull pursued him on his unwillingness to apply unequivocally the same labor-time standard to factory children. Candidates who refused to acknowledge the parallel at Huddersfield were heckled mercilessly.58 As office seekers roamed about the West Riding the factory/slavery analogy was continuously invoked by them or prompted by their audience. Finally, regarding the famous Leeds election, it is not clear why historians have dubbed T.B. Macaulay as the representative of antislavery. As a second generation abolitionist, he did defer to his father and showed “a moderate amount of zeal for the cause,”59 but his enemies at Leeds chided Macaulay for indifference to both slaves and children. Compared even with other Whig candidates in industrial Lancashire and Yorkshire, his references to the issue of colonial slavery were perfunctory. Meanwhile, his opponent appeared at antislavery as well as factory reform rallies, presenting motions for “the extinction of slavery throughout the empire” to cheering working-class audiences.60 Macaulay himself, like Jabez Bunting, was an imperfect example of an abolitionist displaceman, and his case highlights the need for caution in using the Saints, much less holy families, as illustrative of regional or class attitudes within abolitionism.61 The radical press of the West Riding was vociferous in denouncing the opening speech of the King for its failure to say a word on the West Indies, and scorned “the phrenzy of the West Indian Planters” for demanding compensation. They joined in the antislavery threat to turn out MP’s who would not press for emancipation in the first session of the Reformed Parliament.62 It was not the Whig or Tory organs but the radical Leeds Times which insisted that whatever the bitter divisions between political parties and religious groups, one uniform point of union between all the “intelligent, patriotic and benevolent in the land” was upon “the absorbing question of negro emancipation – emancipation immediate-emancipation complete – emancipation forever.” On this “neutral ground”all acted as men and brothers.63 The concept of neutral ground did not of course, neutralize conflict beyond the line of colonial slavery. Antislavery developments consistently goaded supporters of the Ten Hours Bill themselves into a “phrenzy” over the double-standards of welfare displayed by factory owners or their political allies who refused to accept the analogy between British factory children and West Indian slaves.64 One final example must suffice. The day the Government’s emancipation plan appeared in Leeds, the Leeds Intelligencer placed an editorial paragraph immediately below it: “It will be seen that the Ministerial proposal for putting and end to slavery prescribes TEN HOURS A DAY as the just extent of negro labour. Surely this is a strong and solemn adoption of the Ten Hours Bill. If care be taken of the adult negro, how can the same principle be refused to poor little British Children, who are no more free agents than negro slaves?”65 The editors of the Intelligencer needed no dialectical acuity to discern that the 108

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry Emancipation Bill had bequeathed them the precise formula for the ShortTime act. If the factory owners won a temporary victory in 1833, it had to do with the weight of their economic prognostications about the minimum needs of the textile industry. In this case their arguments were akin to those of the West India economic interest of 1792 rather than to those of the abolitionist coalition of 1832–33. The test in determining the displacement role of an ideology must be, of course, how it functioned in its social context. Did it defuse tensions which would otherwise have surfaced along lines of domestic antagonism? The answer for the West Riding of the early 1830’s as for the earlier petitioners analyzed above, seems to be no. If such a theory implies a successful diversion, one must determine just who succeeded in deflecting whom. Nowhere in the industrial heartland did antislavery function as an opiate of factory grievances. Domestic protest was not dispelled by the rattling of slave shackles or the recitals of exotic forms of brutality. On the contrary, the greater the number of detailed analyses presented to the national audience the easier it was to see that in certain respects the condition of specific groups of laborers was not superior to that of colonial slaves. Symbolically, the extensive use of the term “slavery” quickly encouraged the language of British domestic conflict to be converted into the most extreme dualism (masters/slaves) in the lexicon of power relationships. This was not of course a new pattern. Even during the earliest debates over the slave trade, supporters of the system drew attention to the factory-plantation analogy. From the industrial capitalists’ perspective the whole political discourse contained a counter-productive element from the very outset. In threatening the very economic survival of another substantial and amply endowed capitalist interest, abolitionism instantly triggered a West Indian scramble for horrific analogues and increasingly extensive domestic muckraking. Every major antislavery offensive raised the spectre of an ideological counter-attack. By the early twenties the symbolism of “white slavery” was already well-rooted in political discourse. Long before Oastler’s child labor manifesto on “Yorkshire Slavery” Cobbett was parodying the first great popular thrust for emancipation along lines suggested by West Indian sarcasm. In his widelydisseminated Weekly Register he conjured up a happy chorus of “fat and lazy and laughing and singing and dancing negroes” in the West Indies, whose discarded dishes and bowls white British “wage slaves” would be happy to lick after the blacks had “breakfasted, dined, or supped.”66 “Slavery” had been a conventional weapon in British political rhetoric long before the beginning of the movement against overseas chattel slavery. As the colonial slave emancipation campaign reached its popular peak in the early thirties there seems to have been an intensification of its application to metropolitan conflicts. The novelty of 1830–1833 lay not merely in the greater use of antislavery symbols by domestic reformers but in the more widespread incorporation of the plantation-factory linkage by abolitionists themselves. 109

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry We need not look any further than the great London antislavery rally at Exeter Hall which launched the final campaign for petitions on the eve of the Emancipation Bill. Fowell Buxton’s keynote address not only began with a direct reference to Whitely’s pamphlet, but emphasized Sadler’s endorsement of its author as a factory children’s advocate. By this time a virulently abolitionist newspaper like the Sheffield Iris did not hesitate to headline an article, “Sadler’s Factory Bill – British Slavery.”67 In an almost casual way it revealed an acceptance of this new metaphorical deposit on antislavery’s central term, a legitimization of its use for industrial conditions by abolitionists themselves. An interlocking set of metaphors does not of course, imply an identical power base of support for antislavery and the more regionalized Short-Time agitation. The less extensive movement for factory reform sought the symbolic authority of the more inclusive one. By 1833 antislavery had already built a nation-wide constituency and mitigated the proprietary anxiety which both movements aroused. Here one might reasonably close the reassessment of the traditional juxtaposition of factory and antislavery movements. Without a similar scrutiny of the idiom of other contemporary agitations it would be unwise to hazard similar conclusions about the displacement function of British antislavery. Yet, with this caveat in mind we can hint at some plausible implications of our initial sounding. Clearly, Davis’s or some other variant of displacement theory retains great heuristic value for certain segments of British antislavery at all stages of its development. Regarding earlier periods (1787–1822) which are thus far the principal focus of Davis’s published work, the assumption that elite writings are indicative of antislavery as a whole reflects the scarcity of evidence on more popular opinion, especially between 1795 and the defeat of Napoleon. On the other hand the relative dearth of antislavery symbolism linked to demands for social change might be more parsimoniously accounted for by the political throttling of reformist activity. One form of explanation does not preclude the other, but it should be emphasized that a robust popular abolitionism was evident at the foundation of the movement and did not filter down for the first time in the 1820’s. Therefore, what is treated as a “conservatizing” antislavery hegemony for the earlier period may well reflect only the outcome of differential repression. It remains to be investigated whether the conservative nexus of the antislavery of the Saints ca. 1800 is properly ascribed to the whole society or to the political nation. What of the period following the Emancipation Act in 1833? Here Davis affords the most concise statement of the implications of his analytical model in relation to the passage of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. In class terms, Davis ascribes its passage conjointly with Emancipation, to the political triumph of the middle class in 1832. And in its religious-ideological component, “it is hardly coincidental that Anglo-American asylums and penitentiaries emerged from the same Quaker-evangelical milieu that gave rise to abolitionism; or that in 1834 the newly reformed British Parliament not only 110

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry transformed West Indian slaves into ‘apprentices’ but enacted a New Poor Law which required British paupers to be incarcerated in workhouses where the regimentation, surveillance, and separation of families would surpass the ‘social control’ of the most notorious West Indian plantations.”68 The reference to the Poor Law Amendment Act is another illustration of the hegemonistic model of social control. However, the apprenticeship system, an impetus to overseas “social control” which Davis ascribes to the abolitionists, may well belong more to their opponents than themselves. The simultaneous outcomes of Negro apprenticeship and the new Poor Law may hardly be coincidental, but the connection of either with the abolitionist milieu in particular should not be taken for granted. At the Parliamentary level, abolitionist MPs were over-represented against, not for, the Poor Law Amendment Act, especially on the question of ending outdoor relief. It was the political economists, inaudible on slavery (and audibly suspicious of the Short-Time Bill in 1833) who were charged with engineering the demise of the old Poor Law system. Finally, “apprenticeship,” was not part of the popular abolitionist program in 1833. It was the Government’s explicit concession to the slave interest and met with opposition from popular abolitionism.69 The greater the commitment to immediate emancipation the greater, apparently, was the opposition to Negro apprenticeship. The mass movement to abolish apprenticeship in 1837–38 arose out of the same milieu that supported emancipation. Although the question requires far more detailed research, thus far it seems that the “social control” model is leading historians to define antislavery too narrowly in terms of class, and to ascribe to abolitionism outcomes to which it reacted relatively negatively. The Antislavery movement was a powerful political and cultural force but the temporary triumph of Negro apprenticeship in 1833 probably requires an analysis including those groups who were least favorable to immediate emancipation. Two important points seem to be worth reiterating in our review of the interplay of antislavery and industrial reform. First, as it emerged in English public discourse in 1830–1833, abolitionism was less a means of universalizing a single capitalist, middle-class perspective of the world than it was of providing a standard of humanity against which arguments opposing captialist exploitation could be devastingly employed in quite specific terms.70 Abolitionism was certainly for some a means of self-congratulatory escape from other potentially pressing social issues. On the other hand, for anyone who attended the public meetings or read the local newspapers, the attack on colonial slavery was continually fueling symbols of oppression and liberation for other movements. Although regional or cross-cultural analysis may suggest a different conclusion for other times or places, the plausibly suggested diversionary function of abolitionism does not seem to apply to those areas where it is supposed to have been soothing the birth pangs of the industrial revolution. 71 Antislavery’s sacralizing72 power may, however, explain the propensity of the nineteenth-century abolitionist epigone to treat antislavery as their own 111

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry movement, in a process of heroic expropriation. As each great levy of mobilization receded, those at the center of antislavery organization and propaganda allotted to themselves the residual non-pecuniary rewards. The first great surges of abolitionism made Wilberforce a national saint and opened the door of Westminster Abbey to his remains. Apportioning the heroic inheritance led to the usual unseemly squabbles over the share to be allotted to Pitt, Fox, Clarkson, Wilberforce and others. Where brief acknowledgement was extended to the chorus it was the middle-class notables of antislavery locals who were annointed as chosen people of humanity. After emancipation this perspective was strengthened by the corps of aging abolitionists who sustained the movement during its long and stately descent from mass movement to avocation.73 By the end of the American Civil War British antislavery was fading, like the Cheshire cat, into a smile of benevolent non-conformity.

Notes Research for this essay was begun under the auspices of a Guggenheim Fellowship. It was written at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study Center. I would like to thank Stanley Engerman, Robert Fogel, Hugh Kearney, Joseph Lee, Richard Oestreicher, and Dorothy and Edward Thompson for their helpful comments. 1. See especially R. Coupland, The British Anti-Slavery Movement (London, 1933); Roger Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition. 1760–1810 (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1975) “Conclusions and Reflections;” James Walvin, “British Popular Sentiment for Abolition, 1787–1832,” in Christine Bolt and Seymour Drescher, eds. Anti-Slavery, Religion and Reform (Folkstone, 1980), pp. 149–162; and Howard Temperley, “Anti-Slavery,” in Patricia Hollis, ed., Pressure from without in Early Victorian England (London, 1974), pp. 27–51. 2. Eric E. Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, (Chapel Hill, 1944) p. 181. 3. See, inter alia, Anstey, Atlantic Slave Trade, 179–181; R. Coupland, Wilberforce: A Narrative (London, 1923), 163–64, 342–43; John Pollock, (New York, 1977) Wilberforce, 132–136, 166–169; Robin Fourneaux, William Wilberforce (London, 1974) pp. 193–194, 363–366. 4. See the brief summary in Anstey, Atlantic Slave Trade, 411. Most recently, David Eltis reaffirms the traditional dichotomy, pointing to the “parallel” between antislavery leaders’ attitudes toward colonial and domestic labor control: “Abolitionist Perceptions of Society after Slavery,” pp. 4–5, forthcoming in James Walvin, ed. Slavery and British Society 1787–1838. Professor Eltis kindly sent me an advance copy of his essay. See also Edith F. Hurwitz, Politics and the Public Conscience: Slave Emancipation and the Abolitionist Movement in Britain (London, 1973), pp. 42–43. 5. Both published in Ithaca, N.Y. 6. Davis, Slavery in the Age of Revolution, p. 377. 7. Ibid., pp. 346–47, 350, 467–468. While Davis’s second volume stops generally in the early 1820’s, his key questions about the social system as a whole concern the entire period 1790–1832, (Davis, Slavery in the Age of Revolution, pp. 348–349). Another historian, Patricia Hollis, details a formidable roster of English Radicals, from William Cobbett through the Radical working-class press of the 1830’s, who took a similar position. See her “Anti-Slavery and British Working-Class Radicalism in the Years of Reform,” in Bolt and Drescher, Anti-Slavery, pp. 294–315.

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pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry 8. Davis, Slavery in the Age of Revolution, pp. 13, 365–366, 361–62, 381–85. 9. Ibid., pp. 13, 365–66, 450–54. In Davis’s psychological model, social concerns for the relative fates of colonial chattels and metropolitan wage earners competed in a universe of limited sympathy. He emphasizes the post-1820 period as the time when abolitionism filtered down to working-men as a symbol of mobility and as a model of radical organization. 10. S. Drescher, “Capitalism and the decline of slavery: The British case in comparative perspective,” in V. Rubin and A. Tuden, eds. Comparative Perspectives on Slavery in New World Plantation Societies, published as Vol. 292 of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences (1977), pp. 132–142. 11. Cobbett’s Parliamentary Debates, VIII (1806–07), pp. 987, 993; IX (1807), p. 118. 12. See J.R. McCulloch, The Principles of Political Economy, (4th ed. 1849) Part III, ch. II, sec. II, pp.  437–39. See also Stanley Engerman and David Eltis, “Economic Aspects of the Abolition Debate” in Bolt and Drescher, Antislavery, pp. 272–293, esp. pp. 284–288. Abolitionists, not political economists, categorically promised the planters that free labor would not only cost them less than slaves, but that the change would quickly yield treble profits to the planters even when wages were higher than slaves had received. See Charles Stuart, The West India Question: Immediate Emancipation (1832), pp.  40–42; Joseph Phillips, Outline of a Plan/or the Total, Immediate and Safe Abolition of Slavery (London, May 1833), p. 14. See also Robert Torrens and the Evolution of Classical Economics (London, 1958), pp. 156–57; Philip D. Curtin, “Slavery and Empire” in Comparative Perspectives, pp. 3–11; Herman Merivale, Lectures on Colonization and Colonies (new edition) (London, 1861); and E.G. Wakefield, A View of the Art of Colonization (reprinted New York, 1969). Marx used Wakefield as evidence that classical economy itself had discovered the underlying analogy of class relationships in the metropolis as well as the colonies. Karl Marx, Capital (Moscow, 1961), Vol. I, ch. 33. 13. Mountifort Longfield, Lectures on Political Economy (Dublin, 1834), p. 71. West Indian supporters seem to have acknowledged that free labor was more productive than slave labor in England, but like McCulloch, denied the validity of the assertion in the West Indies (See J.R. Grosset, Remarks on West India Affairs (London, 1824), p.  76). For their part political economists sometimes affirmed that slavery undermined both welfare or propensities for economic development in the long run, but they did not challenge the rationality of capitalist slaveholders in their choice of labor use. 14. The Times, Dec. 25, 1832. Joseph Conder’s Wages or the Whip: An Essay on the Comparative Cost and Productiveness of Free and Slave Labor (London, 1833), cited a pride of eighteenth century lions, Adam Smith, David Hume, Benjamin Franklin and Edmund Burke. Only an early work of Henry Brougham (1803) might be pressed into service as a representative of British economic thought. But the real propagators, great and small, of classical doctrine between 1803 and the Emancipation Act, are conspicuous by their total absence. 15. See, inter alia, Hollis, “Anti-slavery and British Working Class Radicalism,” pp. 294–296, P.F. Dixon, “The Politics of Emancipation: the Movement for the Abolition of Slavery in British Politics,” pp. 208–211; Hurwitz, Politics, pp. 48, 79, 81; Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, p.  181; Davis, Slavery in the Age of Revolution, pp.  357, 361–365, 385, 421, 450; George Stephen, Anti-Slavery Recollections: Ina series of Letters (London, 1854 rpt. 1970), pp. 158–159. 16. S. Drescher, “Two variants of anti-slavery: religious organization and social mobilization in Britain and France, 1780–1870,” in Bolt and Drescher, Anti-Slavery, pp. 43–63,esp.pp.48,58.

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pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry 17. From The Poor Man’s Guardian, Nov. 17, 1832, quoted in Hollis, “Anti-slavery and British Working Class Radicalism,” p. 299. 18. Most of the petitions were submitted in behalf of specific interests, and some signatures were duplicates because of repeated requests at different stages of the emancipation Bill. On the role of petitioning see also S. Drescher, “Public Opinion and the Abolition of Colonial Slavery,” in James Walvin ed. Slavery and British Society 1787–1848 (forthcoming). 19. Manchester Guardian, Sept. 8, 1832. Further north, at Carlisle, a pro-Cobbett candidate also pledged himself to emancipation, while the conservative candidate was denounced for equivocating on both black and white slavery. Carlyle Journal, Dec. 15, 1832. In Parliament Cobbett was still more explicit. He supported an emancipation Bill merely to fulfill his promise to his constituents, although he was certain that Negroes were better fed and clothed than those whom he represented. Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates 3rd series, XVI (Mar. 1833), Mar. 18, pp. 729–30. 20. Davis, Slavery in The Age of Revolution, pp. 349–50. 21. Votes and Proceedings of the House of Commons, (1823) Printed petition no. 387, p. 313. Ibid., no. 404, p. 325. It must be noted that only a selection of petitions to Parliament are accessible in these volumes, severely limiting the number of linkages which might be observed from a fuller register. 22. Ibid. (1823), no. 751, p. 582–3; (1824), no. 106, pp. 63–64; no. 511, p. 289, no. 512, p.  290; no. 667, p.  388; no. 933, p.  590. A similar domestic fallout occurred in connection with the campaigns of 1830–31 and 1833. Correspondingly, the “abolitionist petitions of the years 1826–32 were steeped in the political vernacular of what had once been artisan radicalism.” Walvin, “British Popular Sentiment for Abolition,” p. 155. 23. Leeds lntelligencer, Sept. 30, 1830. 24. Manchester Courier, Dec. 8, 15, 16,1832. 25. Some of the links of Parliamentary Reform to the antislavery movement are discussed by Michael Brock in The Great Reform Act (London, 1973), pp.  80–81, citing the quotations in Blackwood’s, XXVIII (November 1830), p. 729, and in the Westminster Review, XII (January 1830), p. 232. Other details of the Reform connection are discussed in P.F. Dixon, “Politics” pp. 318–325, and in Roger Anstey’s rough draft of a chapter (a sequel to his study on abolition) entitled: “Reform and Anti-Slavery 1830–1832.” We have been deprived of a judicious judgment on this subject by his untimely death. See David Davis’s posthumous appreciation in Bolt and Drescher, Anti-slavery, pp. 11–15. 26. Blackburn Gazette, Aug. 29, 1832. 27. The Record, May 27, 1833; The Christian Advocate, Nov. 19, Dec. 31, 1832; Leeds lntelligencer, Jan. 24, 1833. 28. Sept. 22, 1832. 29. Jan. 10, May 23, May 27, July 4, 1833. 30. May 16, July 4, 1833. 31. E.g., The Cumberland Pacquet, Aug. 28, 1832, “West lndia Slavery.” 32. The Poor Man’s Advocate, Aug. 3, 1832. 33. Davis, Slavery in the Age of Revolution, p. 361. 34. The Making of the English Working Class (Penguin rev. ed., 1977), p. 390n. 35. Davis, Slavery in the Age of Revolution, p.  357–358n. Davis feels that Walvin’s attempt to show a continuing appeal of antislavery to working-class leaders is exaggerated (Ibid., 368n). Two preliminary distinctions seem to be necessary in dealing with this question. As with all large groups, leaders may differ between themselves as well as from their followers. It is striking that when Davis

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36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

concludes his argument for British antislavery’s hegemonistic role with a brief discussion of its radicalizing potential, his ultimate examples are Cobbett and, above all, Engels (Ibid., pp.  467–468). The former authored the most continuous stream of anti-abolitionist and racial invective in early British popular journalism. The latter reached England well after Emancipation. Both approached “slavery” from European tradition rather than overseas concerns. Their radical perspectives were at least once removed from the shared abolitionist experience. This seems quite consistent with Davis’s thesis about the central tendency of that experience. Hollis, “Anti-slavery and British working-class radicalism,” pp. 296–301. Cecil Driver, Tory Radical: The Life of Richard Oastler (New York, 1946), pp.  19–41; Samuel H.G. Kydd The History of the Factory Movement (London, 1857), I, ch. VII. Driver, Tory Radical, pp. 6–35. Leeds lntelligencer, Feb. 23, 1833; Driver, Tory Radical, p.  133; J.T. Ward, The Factory Movement, 1830–1855 (London, 1962), p. 87. Manchester Times, Apr. 13, 1833. Three Months, p. 2. Significantly, an appendix contained a letter of reference by Oastler, attesting to Whitely’s character and his work in behalf of the factory children. It would be equally interesting to know to what extent the arid homilies of Harriet Martineau on the superiority of free over slave labor competed for popularity with Whitely’s emphasis on the parallelism of these ills in 1833. In any case, it was Whitely’s comparison which was quoted on public platforms and reproduced in the press during the slavery/factory agitation. Manchester Courier, Sept. 1, 1832. Ward, The Factory Movement, pp. 64–65. Leeds lntelligencer, July 6, 1833; Driver, Tory Radical, photograph opposite p. 231. Leeds lntelligencer, Feb. 11, Mar. 9, 1833. Ibid., Mar. 16, 1833. The “billy roller,” a detachable cylinder, was the source of intense controversy between operatives and owners in the wollen industry because of its use as an instrument of punishment for children. Manchester Guardian, Mar. 2,1833. Leeds lntelligencer, Apr. 13, 1833; Manchester Courier, Sept. I, 1832; Preston Chronicle, Mar. 30, 1833; Manchester Times, Apr. 13, 1833. Bolton Chronicle, Apr. 13, 1833. Leeds lntelligencer, Apr. 13, 1833. For Clarkson’s use of Bradford see Letter to the friends of the slaves on the new Order of Council (London, 1830), p. 16. See Christine Bolt, The Anti-Slavery Movement and Reconstruction (London, 1969), p. 67. Leeds lntelligencer, Oct. 21. Nov.4, Nov. 11, 1830. Leicester Herald, Apr. 10, 1833. On Blackburn, see Hollis, “Anti-slavery,” p. 302. Aris’s Birmingham Gazette, Apr. 20, 1833, The Birmingham Journal, Apr. 20, 27, 1833. Ibid., Apr. 27, 1833; The Times, May 21, 1833. Voice of the West Riding, Vol. I, no. 4, June 29, 1833. Halifax and Huddersfield Express, Dec. 8, 1832. Ibid., Dec. 15, 1832. John Clive, Macaulay: The Shaping of the Historian (New York, 1973), p. 60. Leeds lntelligencer, Sept. 16, Dec. 13, 1832; Jan. 17, Jan. 24, 1833. In Parliament Macaulay felt “plagued” out of his life by Stephen’s Agency, venting his annoyance with the stanza:

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pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry “The Niggers in one hemisphere The Brahmins in the other Disturb my dinner and my sleep With An’t 1 a man and brother!” (See The Letters of Thomas Babington Macaulay, ed. T. Pinney [London, 1974] II, p. 242, letter of May 21, 1833.) 62. Leeds Patriot, Feb. 9, 1833; Leeds Times, Mar. 28, Apr. 4, 1833; Sheffield Iris, Apr. 23, 1833. 63. Leeds Times, May 16, 1833. 64. Leeds lntelligencer, June 22, 1833. See also the Manchester and Safford Advertiser, June 15, 1833, denouncing the fraud of compensation. On the Birmingham symbolism see The Times, May 21, 1833. See also the Leeds Patriot, Jan. 26, 1833; Samuel H.G. Kydd, The History of the Factory Movement 2 vols. (London, 1857), I, p. 12; Report of the Committee on Public Petitions (1833), no. 218, p. 191. The editor of the Leeds “Patriot” recalled at a Huddersfield Ten Hours rally, that he opposed West Indian Slavery at great personal sacrifice and had the right to single out the double standard hypocrites within abolitionism. (Leeds lntelligencer, August 16, 1832). The linkage reverberated throughout England and might be triggered by a discussion of either slavery or factory children. In Cumberland, Viscount Lowther, arguing for “due consideration of the vested interests of the country in West India property,” was greeted with shouts of “We’ve too many white slaves at home.” 65. Ibid., May 18, 1833. London adopted this analogy as easily as Leeds. “The children, wrote the Times, are driven to the crowded factory as slaves in the West Indies are driven to a cane-field.” (Apr. 8, 1833). The analogy appeared continuously on the pages of the Times while the national petition campaign continued (see Ibid., Apr. 10, May 22, and May 28, 1833). On May 23 the Times simply reprinted the Leeds lntelligencer equation of child labor and black emancipation in favor of the Ten Hours Bill. 66. Pollack, Wilberforce, p. 287. 67. See The Times, Apr. 3, 4, 18, 1833, and the Sheffield Iris, Jan. 22, 1833. The antislavery majority in the Birmingham Political Union acknowledged the common justice of the cause of the factory children, a spokesman emphasizing that it was feeble casuistry to suppose that “West Indian cruelty can feed the starving children at home.” (Birmingham Journal, Apr. 27, 1833). 68. Davis, “The Crime of Reform,” New York Review of Books, June 26, 1980, Vol. 27, (II), p.  14, and Slavery in the Age of Revolution, pp.  357–360. In a similar way David Eltis points to the coincidental passage of the new Poor Law and Apprenticeship as evidence of the abolitionists’ ideological receptivity to “coercive” modes of labor control (“Abolitionist Perceptions,” p. 5). Eltis’s own account implies that there was tension between leaders and followers on this point. 69. On the eve of emancipation the only plan for emancipation excerpted by The Tourist was one which called for a one year indenture to ex-masters. It assumed that free market bargaining for annual indentures and wages would be satisfactorily regulating the disposable labor within two to three years. See Joseph Phillips, West India Question: Outline of a Plan for the Total, Immediate and Safe Abolition of Slavery (May. 1833). Apprenticeship was inspired by the Planters, being “demanded by the Colonial Party and granted by the Government, as an integral part of the compensation they were to receive for the ultimate loss of their slaves. This was distinctly stated by Mr. Stanley, the late Colonial Secretary, to

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pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry a deputation of the Anti-Slavery Society and the delegates in town, during the progress of the measure . . ., (The Abolitionist I, No. 2, Nov. 1834, p.  50). The Abolitionist referred to the apprenticeship clause of the Emancipation Act as the “odious” clause, and (reworking the favorite epithet of anti-abolitionists) the “Humbug,” passed by Parliament to defraud the slaves of their freedom. (Ibid., I, No.1, pp. 25, 26, 58, 66). The Times, in arguing in favor of the government’s plan acknowledged that objections to the apprenticeship system came from the abolitionists. This was no delayed reaction. The plan was made public only two days before the editorial appeared (Times, May 16, 1833). For a provocative analysis of the relation of antislavery and New Poor Law votes in the House of Commons, see Stephen B. Webb’s, “Saints or Cynics: A Statistical Analysis of Parliaments’ Decision for Emancipation in 1833” (manuscript version to be published in Fogel & Engerman, eds., Without Consent or Contract, and kindly sent by the author), Table 3. The evidence in this table, concludes Webb, “shows that opponents of the New Poor Law, both in the division on the entire bill and in a division to amend one of its harshest provisions, had significantly above average antislavery indices.” However one interprets the individual or collective motivations, Webb’s analysis seems to indicate that one should not infer that the antislavery nexus was more especially conducive toward pressing for the New Poor Law and its harshest innovations in 1834 than it was toward pressing for Apprenticeship the year before. 70. See, for example, the intervention of Joseph Mitchell, at a Preston antislavery meeting. Preston Chronicle and Lancashire Advertiser Apr. 2, 1831. If, as Davis rightly notes, “the key questions concern the relationship between antislavery and the social system as whole,” I am less certain that the “paramount question” is still “how antislavery re-enforced or legitimized (class) hegemony.” Slavery in the Age of Revolution (pp. 348–49). 71. Slavery was frequently invoked during the December 1832 elections for Parliament in the Metropolitan area as well. From the Times’ accounts of the campaign in London and surrounding counties in November-December I have counted thirtylive candidates who made one or more speeches in favor of emancipation, fourteen candidates (some overlapping here with the first group) who cautiously stressed the need to maintain property rights and order in the colonies, five who in varying degrees opposed the rush to emancipation on various grounds, and eight who refused to take a stand or whose reference to the problem may have been so muted as to escape the attention of the Times reporter. From colonial slavery’s location and prominence in the speeches I have the impression that, while the issue surfaced in almost every campaign, it aroused somewhat less excitement in the London area than in the industrial North. In four campaigns it did generate serious exchanges. Babbage in Finsbury, Brougham in Southwark, and Hume in Middlesex found it worthwhile to fend off charges of insufficient commitment to emancipation. In Tower Hamlets the prominent abolitionist Lushington used the issue against his sugar-coated opponent Marryat. Otherwise the bulk of antislavery statements formed one of a variety of reformist positions. In these cases antislavery was part of an assumed consensual accord. The symbolic bonding of antislavery with specific industrial issues was far less evident in the London area than further North. With the factory children there was no cross-over. Campaigners did not discuss factory legislation during the 1832 campaign, whatever their position on slavery. However, even The Times was an unequivocally “Ten Hour” as Sadler and Oastler by early 1833. It made the same use of the child/slave image at the height of the Factory Movement agitations as the Leeds lntelligencer. 72. Davis, “An Appreciation of Roger Anstey,” in Bolt and Drescher, Anti-Slavery, pp. 11–15.

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pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry 73. This vision of antislavery might also have its attractions for the critical tradition. If the abolitionists were distilled and marketed as a band of “saints,” by their own epic tradition it is but a small dialectic step to emphasize antislavery as the preserve of capitalist evangelicals, not as part of a broader popular and democratic heritage.

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5 WOMEN’S MOBILIZATION IN THE ERA OF SLAVE EMANCIPATION Some Anglo-French Comparisons

Opportunities for women’s participation in the public arena expanded in the period of the French Revolution. Voices in favor of European women’s rights and against Atlantic slavery became more distinct and more sharply focused on demands for action. It is less clear, however, that challenges to women’s subordination and black slavery in the Americas became equally salient or “inextricably paired”1 even during the Revolutionary era. A comparative perspective on two leading sites of agitation, Britain and France, may prove helpful in this regard. We must ask just how much public attention converged upon these two causes, and how salient each was for the other. We may then assess the impact of women’s mass mobilization against the Atlantic slave system. Was it also as significant in the history of women’s political empowerment as were the metaphors and movements more explicitly directed against the subordination of women to men? Finally, the essay will briefly consider women’s involvement in antislavery as symptomatic of the long term trajectory of Western civil society.

I Before Mobilization Historians inclined to infer a logical or historical convergence between demands for an end to the oppression of slaves and for the empowerment of women are faced with the same contextual and analytic problems that have engrossed the attention of scholars of Atlantic slavery in general. By the time that the rulers of Spain and Portugal had established their overseas slaves systems Western Europeans were regarded as unenslavable by other Europeans. When Northwestern European states joined the Atlantic slave system in the seventeenth century, their juridical traditions held that slavery could not exist in the air or on the soil of their nations.2 Nevertheless, for three centuries after 1492 slave economies were successively founded and encouraged beyond the line of free soil Europe, and slaveholders claimed unabated rights to the property in persons that they had purchased or inherited abroad. For that long period historians of slavery are struck by a disjunction. Most of those who wrote critically about transatlantic slavery and the slave trade 119

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry had virtually nothing to say about any parallel with conditions of contemporary European women. The same appears to be true of those Europeans who focused on the conditions of women in their own societies. If the analogy of marriage and slavery provided a springboard in advocating for women’s rights, as Karen Offen indicates, they did not appear to have extended the slave analogy to incorporate conditions of Africans in the New World. If future research uncovers an obscure example or two of such a linkage, that is unlikely to alter the general picture. The analogy of Afro-American slaves with European married women was unarticulated for long after it was thinkable. British and French critiques of marriage-as-slavery long continued to confine their analogies to more Eurocentric or Eurasian locale.3

II The First Wave of Mobilization I begin with two events that occurred almost simultaneously in Britain and France. Claire Midgley has perceptively identified the British campaign to abstain from slave-grown sugar as a major event in both the history of antislavery and of women’s action. It helped to create a popular identification of sugar consumption and the Atlantic slave system. The campaign was also a major stepping stone in the development of female activism within the abolitionist movement. Abstentionism was launched in 1791, partially in reaction to Parliament’s decisive defeat of Wilberforce’s first motion to abolish the British slave trade. It was an attempt to overcome a failure in politics by action in the spheres of civil society and the market. The initiators of the movement believed that women were both susceptible to the message and essential to the campaign.4 Abstention did not overtly intrude into public space. It was an organized, unobtrusive and non-violent form of collective action. It did not even require the contentious gatherings that preceded other forms of antislavery agitation like national petitioning. The movement operated through private encounters, door to door, family to family, and dinner table by dinner table.5 In 1791–92, Thomas Clarkson, traveling the length and breadth of England and Wales in pursuit of a second mass petition, estimated that 300,000 persons of “all ranks,” party preferences and denominations were participating. The boycott received press coverage in every major provincial town. The efficacy of women in linking sugar to slavery was widely recognized.6 Just as British abstentionism was peaking, in the winter of 1791–1792, women in France were also taking a prominent position in the sugar market. In January and February of 1792 Parisian citizens of the Faubourg SaintMarceau, began a taxation populaire. They seized goods from a warehouse and sold it to members of the gathered crowd at the traditional “just price”. The major novelty in this particular taxation populaire, which had heralded many gatherings to come, was the principal item seized and sold – colonial sugar from the French Caribbean. This “sugar riot” triggered a chain of 120

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry confrontations, arrests, trials and debate, from the local Assembly to the national Legislature. For our purposes, what distinguished the Parisian action was not its violent means, but its goal, to maximize popular consumption of a product that contemporary abolitionist women were trying to get fellow Britons to renounce.7 The Parisian crowd, “above all the women, were most enraged” against having to pay double the price for an item that they had come to regard as an essential part of their consumption. Its use in colonial coffee kept them going until their late afternoon main meal. At the more exalted (and affluent) Jacobin Society a speaker responded to the journée by asking his fellow patriots to take a collective patriotic oath to abstain from sugar, except in cases of illness, until the price fell to its normal level. According to one account, the galleries rose and cried with one voice: “Yes, yes we make this same commitment”, and the Society ordered that this patriotic act be given an honorable mention in the minutes. What the crowd redistributed the patriots renounced. What neither they, nor anyone in the local or national assemblies, discussed, was the fact that the price rise had been caused by an unprecedented rising for liberty, in the world’s most dynamic sugar colony. So silent are the sources on this theme that the most eminent historian of French Revolutionary crowds did not even mention the words slavery or slave revolution in his accounts of the sugar riots of 1792.8 In Britain a similar price rise occurred at the end of 1791. It stimulated much press criticism of the sugar merchants and the “overprotected” planters. The latter, of course, had little need of immediate protection in the wake of the St. Domingue uprising. The British abstention campaign was not aided by the rise in the price of sugar. In fact, St. Domingue sounded the death knell for abstention as an effective political tactic, because many of the erstwhile consumers of French slave sugar on the Continent more than compensated the British sugar business for any loss of abolitionist consumers. British anti-saccharites were also more highly selective than their counterparts across the Channel. Their movement primarily targeted the slave trade. And they selected only one tropical product to boycott. They never gave primacy of place to price.9 At no point during the next half-century of battles against Atlantic slavery did British abolitionists, let alone its women’s organizations, agitate for a free trade in sugar in order to maximize benefits to consumers. Sugar abstention was a strategically chosen target, designed to put maximum pressure on the British slave interest without doing irreparable harm to the British domestic economy. During Clarkson’s campaign mobilization tour of 1791, Katherine Plymly, a sympathizer, responded to the call for a slave sugar boycott by asking why there was no parallel mobilization against cotton. Clarkson replied that the livelihood of a vast number of wage laborers depended upon its continued importation, whatever the source. Targeting cotton would have undermined the movement in all of the textile manufacturing towns of Lancashire, a hardcore antislavery county. Clarkson 121

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry could hardly have considered turning on the very men and women of all classes who had transformed abolitionism into a national mass movement.10 In the 1820s abolitionist women would make a symbolic gesture to extend the boycott to cotton by stuffing antislavery pamphlets into workbags made of East India (“free labor”) cotton, but sugar remained the main target of the movement. Only in the post-emancipation era, after the victory of free trade over free-labor produce as a national policy, did a dedicated, but now marginalized, women’s antislavery movement expand the boycott movement to include cotton as well as sugar – to little effect. In none of these phases or variations did the abstentionist movement against slavegrown produce ever have any parallel in France.11 By 1792, then, the “problem of slavery” was already embedded in British political culture.12 Women had been present at the creation. In the fall of 1787 scattered sentiment against the slave trade was being transformed into public action. In Manchester, the pioneer urban center of that process, a special appeal to women was first launched. Ladies were targeted as, and credited with, having an inherent sensitivity to the sufferings of slavery, especially its female victims. This male-sanctioned feminization of the abolitionist appeal may well have been designed to forestall an anticipated counterattack from Manchester’s slaving interests. Yet, as Claire Midgley aptly concludes, the “feminization” of Manchester’s abolitionist appeal was a theme that would remain integral both to women’s mobilization and to the rhetoric of antislavery in general.13 In contrast, the Société des Amis des Noirs, established in Paris 1788, was never able to replicate either the popularization of abolitionism within France. In Britain antislavery petitions flooded Parliament in 1788, and accounted for more than half of such documents. A comparison between the first British petition campaign and the Cahiers de doléances of 1789 underscores this disjuncture. In France, calls for taking any action whatsoever on the question of Atlantic slavery appeared in only a handful of general cahiers. Demands for women’s rights were absent from the thousands of local cahiers drawn up by the peasantry. One would certainly not expect even the national cahiers to be dominated by slave-related items in documents voicing all the grievances in France. Nevertheless, concern with overseas slavery lagged far behind almost every other form of unfreedom: prisons, galleys, serfs, corvees, etc. The only group that seems to have attracted even less concern in the cahiers was women. Gilbert Shapiro and John Markoff ’s exhaustive investigation of the cahiers ranked enfranchising women at the bottom of the table of subject frequencies: 1088 for the parish cahiers, 1121 and 1125 respectively for the Third Estate and the nobility. (See Table 1)14 The comparative weakness of French antislavery is starkly revealed by the outcome of Thomas Clarkson’s first visit to Paris in 1789. He was attempting to stimulate the Amis to more vigorous public action. Clarkson hoped to set in motion a French national petition campaign on the English model. He 122

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry Table 1 Revolutionary Demands in the Cahiers de Dolánces of 1789 Rank of Document – Level Frequency of Each Subject for Each Estate (Rank 1 is highest) Subject

Parishes

Third Estate

Nobility

Serfdom women’s franchise slavery slave trade Royal corvée Corporal Punishment (military) Galleys Labor Services (Seigneurial) Jews

285 1088* 1088* 1088* 6 1088* 891.5 51 367

364 1121* 533 745.5 64 307 621 24 492.5

539 1125* 419.5 836.5 164.5 81.5 753 380.5 470

* indicates least frequency Source: Gilbert Shapiro and John Markoff, Revolutionary Demands: A Content Analysis of the Cahiers de Dolánces of 1789 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), Appendix I.

was dismayed to discover that his Parisian counterparts placed their hopes in a petition to the new French National Assembly from the people of Britain. Clarkson correctly anticipated that such external pressure would expose French antislavery to the charge of submission to foreign influence. It was a charge that enemies of abolition were to use to good effect for the next half century.15 Despite the fact that the ideological basis for French women’s emancipation stemmed from the same revolutionary principles that drove analogous demands for the rights of Jews and blacks, the fate of women’s emancipation in France diverged sharply from that of colonial slaves. Before and after the sugar riots, small women’s groups escalated demands for equality. These were far more aggressively and publicly pursued than anything that occurred across the Channel. French women were more militant than either their British or American counterparts. For almost four years they were in the forefront of parades to the National Assembly demanding government-aided subsistence. They had spectacularly marched to Versailles and brought the royal family to Paris as virtual prisoners in 1789. They began to enter political clubs in 1790. They did not sit quietly in the galleries of political assemblies. They petitioned, they contributed to journals, they joined the mobilization of the nation in 1792 in arms; and they formed fifty women’s Jacobins Clubs in 1791–93. On the opposite side of the Revolution other women demonstrated against revolutionary religious and civil festivals. They boycotted the nationalized clergy. They repaired churches, they defended the traditional observance, and they ultimately helped to swing the tide against revolutionary radicalism. The majority of radical male revolutionaries, however vocal their commitments to civil equality, did not support equal political rights for women. 123

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry One vociferous segment of the women’s movement was briefly tied to the same political group that had founded the Amis des Noirs, reconstituted as the Circle Social. Unfortunately that group, the Girondins, was destined to perish under the attacks of the radicalized Jacobins in 1793. One of the charges against J.P. Brissot, a Girodin leader of the Amis, was that he had fomented rebellion in the colonies. By the Fall of 1793 most of the former Amis were imprisoned, guillotined, or in flight. Almost simultaneously the Jacobins closed all women’s clubs and outlawed their autonomous collective activity.16 Thus, by the time the Revolutionary Convention dramatically decreed colonial slave liberation in February of 1794, the action had nothing to do with the defunct Amis or public support by women’s groups. Emancipation was the ratification of a successful revolution by the slaves of Saint Domingue.17 When Napoleon Bonaparte moved to restore slavery in the French colonies in 1802, the freedmen of Haiti would again have to ratify their emancipation by another bloody conflict with the French. After 1802 France’s only ex-slaves were those who had maintained their status by force of arms. The violence of the French Revolution therefore left both French antislavery and women’s activism with a heavy legacy. At the end of the Revolution, the position of French women was in some respects worse than it had been before 1789.18

III Continuities The first half of the nineteenth century continued the dual pattern. Further cycles of brief revolution and long reaction, had a similar cyclical effect on French antislavery and women’s movements. Between the late 1790s and the early 1830s there was no organized antislavery movement in France. The Abbé Gregoire, one of the few surviving supporters of blacks and women, was treated as a political pariah until his death. Only under considerable British pressure did the twice-restored Bourbon monarchy (1814, 1815) reluctantly agree to prohibit the slave trade. French enforcement was consequently begrudging. Abolitionist pressure on the French government was minimal. The Bourbons, and their Orleanist successor in 1830, were intent on minimally accommodating the British and minimally rousing nationalist resentment against an overseas policy identified with foreign hegemony.19 In the wake of British slave emancipation in 1833, however some French politicians deemed it imperative to prepare for an emancipation on their own neighboring colonial islands. A French Society for the Abolition of Slavery was formed a few months after the implementation of British emancipation in 1834. It remained the preserve of a small group of notables meeting annually in Paris, in tandem with the sessions of the French Chamber of Deputies. Until pressured by more radical and provincial individuals in the late 1840s, the Society confined its activities to parliamentary interventions 124

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry and participation in official investigating committees. Its members made no effort to found provincial branches or to organize large scale propaganda campaigns.20 The first half of the nineteenth century reinforced the differential pattern foreshadowed by the initial divergence between British and French antislavery. While Napoleon was forcing a second slavery on the French tropical colonies, British antislavery began to revive. The abolition of the British slave trade was achieved in 1807. In 1815, under further British pressure, the great powers at the Congress of Vienna issued a joint declaration in favor of slave trade abolition at the Congress of Vienna.21 In 1823, the British Parliament resolved on the gradual abolition of its overseas slave system. It fulfilled that commitment in 1833 and 1838. Popular antislavery was integral to each British legislative advance against the slave trade and slavery. Abolitionists selectively and successfully intervened in the general elections of 1806 and 1807, helping to seal the fate of the slave trade. Mass petitioning was revived as a mode of national collective action in 1814. The movement developed more permanent local and national associations in the 1820s. Formal structures of communication, fund raising and agitation helped to maintain antislavery societies for generations after the formal ending of British slavery in the 1830s, and of the transatlantic slave trade in the 1860s. The British antislavery society thus became the world’s oldest and most enduring non-governmental organization monitoring human rights.22 The women’s component of this movement evolved in tandem with the growth and development of British antislavery. As Clare Midgley has abundantly demonstrated, women proceeded to feminize the British antislavery movement, organizationally, symbolically and ideologically.23 Women participated only peripherally in the submission of early petitions, the hallmark of antislavery’s distinctive power as a national and popular movement. The first generation of abolitionists clearly retained a well-founded fear that female signatures might be used to delegitimize popular petitions. Women felt freer to participate as canvassers for signature and votes long before they could participate more directly in other political forms of agitation. By the time of the passage of slave trade abolition in 1807, women’s canvassing was a signature activity of the movement,24 but the evidence for the process of feminization is abundant from the earliest mobilizations in 1787–92. It continued through the boycott campaigns of the mid-1820s and the multiform activities of the 1840s and 1850s. The formation of autonomous women’s locals is indicative of a growing feminine presence in the movement. What had been a family movement in the 1790s gradually became a more gendered associational division of collective labor by the 1820s. The rate of institutional growth on the eve of the climatic political mobilizations of 1830–1833 is especially impressive. In 1826 the ratio of male to female associations was eight to one. By 1831 it was only two to 125

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry one. There is evidence that women’s impact reached its peak in the final “antiapprenticeship” campaign of 1837–38. Thereafter, during antislavery’s declining decades of the 1840s and 1850s ladies associations remained more active than their male counterparts. British women also radicalized antislavery. They were major actors in the transformation of abolitionism from “gradualism” to “immediatism.”25 The most decisive evidence for the acceleration of women’s participation lies in their takeover of British antislavery’s signature institution, the mass national petition. From 1788 to 1838 British abolitionists set the standard for what constituted a mass petition. They set the records in terms of numbers of petitions, numbers of signatures and, above all, in their ability to outmobilize their opposition. That was the fundamental reason why the nation’s newspapers universally acknowledged that public opinion had spoken definitively at each stage in the dismantling process. During the first four national petition campaigns (1788, 1792, 1814, and 1823) the signers were almost exclusively male. Thereafter, the direct participation of women became massive and decisive. The final breakthrough came in 1830, when national Baptist and Methodist organizations began to welcome, and soon to plead for, women’s petitions. Separate signings obviated charges of illegitimacy previously raised against mixed gender petitions. Women also innovated brilliantly in the presentation of petitions by maximizing the visual impact of their signatures. In May 1833, on the day scheduled for the introduction of the Emancipation Bill to the House of Commons, the largest single antislavery petition in British history arrived at the doors of Parliament – “a huge featherbed of a petition.” It was “hauled into the House by four members amidst shouts of applause and laughter.” It bore 187,000 signatures “one vast and universal expression of feeling from all the females of the United Kingdom.”26 As with the establishment of women’s local societies, the proportion of women’s signatures increased with each successive campaign. Probably 30 percent (c. 400,000) of the 1.3 million signers of the 1833 petitions for immediate emancipation were women. In 1837–1838 the 700,000 female signatures “addressed” to the Queen amounted to more than two-thirds of the 1.1 million signatures reaching the House of Commons. The female “Address” from England and Wales, carrying 400,000 signatures, was again the most broadly signed address ever sent up from the country.27 In terms of an Anglo-French comparison, the number of British women’s signatures gathered in each of those two years was probably greater than the total number of signatures on all reform petitions presented to the French Chamber of Deputies between the first motion for slave emancipation in 1838 and its Revolutionary implementation ten years later. The contrast between French and British popular antislaveries was still greater. Two modest French campaigns in 1844 and 1847 gathered about 21,000 signatures. In Britain the rate of women’s antislavery signatures per thousand was well over twenty times the rate of Frenchmen and Frenchwomen combined. The large national 126

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry antislavery women’s petition of 1833 alone probably accrued nearly ten names for every antislavery signature in France between the re-establishment of France’s second slavery in 1802 and the second emancipation in 1848.28 If British women’s antislavery petitioning was overwhelming by comparison with that of French antislavery as whole, a woman to woman comparison is still more striking. The impact of English women’s petitioning was not unknown in France. One of the earliest French women’s political journals took brief note of the mobilization against British Negro Apprenticeship in 1838. Individual French women attempted to use the right to petition one of their few political rights.29 The organizers of the working-class antislavery petitions of 1844 welcomed female signatures. Their subscription lists included laundresses, dressmakers and milliners. One of the antislavery petitions contained the names of, what one French colonial agent disparagingly dubbed, “one hundred maidens.” Obviously the evidence for women’s participation in 1844 was minuscule in proportion to the massive effort undertaken during the British antislavery campaigns of the 1830s.30 In the French campaign of 1847 another small “Petition from the women of Paris” was sent to the Chamber of Deputies. This document consciously followed the English precedent. Its male organizers used the rationale of empathy with enslaved female counterparts to legitimate female participation. Victor Schoelcher, a prominent abolitionist and leader of the campaign, welcomed the petition. He took note, however, of the small number of signers, and complained that French women hesitated to compromise themselves by “too eccentric” an act. They apparently did not wish to seem guilty “of putting themselves forward.” Schoelcher urged French women to rival their British sisters.31 The women’s petition of 1847 was therefore an exception that underscored the difference between the roles of women on opposite sides of the Channel. If French antislavery had two minuscule women’s petitions to its credit, its organizational history was still bleaker. From the formation of the Amis des Noirs in 1788, to the second emancipation sixty years later, there was no women’s antislavery organization in France, nor any women’s presence in the French Abolitionist Society. Schoelcher reprimanded the Catholic wife of a good friend for her lack of commitment to the abolitionist cause, again in sharp contrast to the example of British and American women.32 The Revolution of 1848 brought no closing of the gap between antislavery and the women’s movement. Schoelcher convinced the Revolutionary Government to preempt another colonial slave revolt by making preparations for immediate emancipation. The decree was issued on March 4, 1848. The following day the government decreed universal male suffrage as the source of constitutional authority in the new French Republic. A women’s political club was quickly formed and petitioned for voting rights in the wake of the decrees. There was apparently no political interaction between the newly formed Comité des Droits de la Femme and the Club des Amis des Noirs. Neither club petitioned in support of the emancipatory demands of the other. 127

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry The women’s Comité was certainly not among those petitioning Schoelcher’s emancipation committee in March and April of 1848. As far as I can tell, the women’s rights club grounded its demands for the suffrage on the basis of the government’s action in favor metropolitan of proletarians, not colonial slaves. For its part the revolutionary Provisional Government clearly stated that its obligations to French men and overseas slaves differed from what was due to women. The Government instituted the immediate abolition of slavery and universal male suffrage by revolutionary decree and on its own authority. In responding to the women’s Comité, however, the government maintained that only the National Constituent Assembly, elected by all adult male citizens, could alone decide on the enfranchisement of women.33 There were significant differences between the political situations of the three affected groups. Schoelcher rushed to publish the of emancipation proclamation on behalf of the slaves, before the opening of the National Constituent Assembly. He openly admitted that he did so in order to forestall its possible postponement by the new Assembly. In February of 1848, largely unenfranchised Parisian males overthrew the monarchy and demanded a republic. Although there was little evidence of broad national support for freeing the slaves, emancipation had been on the French legislative agenda for a decade before 1848. The petition campaigns of 1844 and 1847 reinforced the impression that there was at least some popular momentum in favor of emancipation. More importantly, in February 1848, supporters of colonial slaves, like those of the workers of Paris, posed a credible threat of collective violence to an insecure revolutionary government. Radical women had no prior presence, no record of recent public agitation, and no threat of violence. Nor, from the existing political record, could they make a case that they represented the demands of French women at large. When women did rise in revolt in Paris, it was alongside men after Paris’s National Workshops were closed in June 1848. The prior governmental closure of all women’s clubs earlier that same month triggered no such mass resistance.34 As in 1793–94 the confirmation of French slave emancipation coincided almost precisely with a parallel suppression of autonomous women’s political activity.

IV Aftermath The post-emancipation pattern of women’s relationship to antislavery in Britain and France continued the general pattern established over the halfcentury before their respective emancipations. Organizationally, French antislavery ceased to exist when the French Abolition Society suspended its operations. Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup d’etat of December 2, 1851 insured that many radical former leaders were once again dispersed into physical or internal exile. A revival of antislavery sentiment had to await the coincidence of the American Civil War and the gradual liberalization of the Second French Empire in the 1860s. The French Protestant clergy launched 128

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry a collective letter of support for the North, and after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, some Catholic Bishops urged their flocks to pray for American slaves. Immediately after President Lincoln’s assassination a French public campaign was launched in favor of a commemorative gold medal to be presented to his widow. When the campaign quickly attracted 40,000 subscribers, the government became alarmed over its potential domestic implications. The 40,000 names represented the largest mobilization in French history for a cause connected to antislavery.35 A second venture, organized in the wake of the conflict, was the formation of a fund-raising drive on behalf of the ex-slaves. In forming a French Freedman’s Aid Society women’s leadership finally came to the fore. The movement’s largest meeting was held in Paris on November 3, 1865. At an antislavery rally of 1,000 people, women finally stood and spoke on the podium. Clarisse Coignet called for a national mobilization to be led by females. In England, she noted, it was estimated that one woman was worth 13½ men for propaganda and charitable purposes. French women, could not yet, of course, match the capabilities of their more highly organized British sisters. French Freedman’s Aid collected about $10,000 as opposed to $800,000 in Britain. Nevertheless, in this still more charitable than political, campaign, Frenchwomen assumed roles of national organizational leadership on behalf of newly freed slaves.36 The antislavery and women’s rights groups again briefly converged in 1872 when Victor Schoelcher became a leading speaker at the first women’s rights banquet of the Third French Republic. Organized British antislavery continued to exist and to play a role in the generation following colonial slave emancipation. The British and Foreign Antislavery Society, the major organization of the British movement, relied heavily on the local ladies’ associations. These had proven to be more durable and active than most of their male counterparts, which underwent a serious decline in the 1840s and 1850s. The areas in which females had predominated, such as fund-raising, boycotts and mobilizations for international activities such as support for American antislavery, became the main focus of British abolitionists.37 Women were also responsible for the most massive antislavery action in Britain during the 1850s. In response to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s triumphal visit to Britain, British women launched two Addresses to “. . .Their Sisters, the Women of the United States of America”, in November 1852. One of the addresses was criticized by the established antislavery movement for its failure to insist on immediatism and both were criticized by most of the British press for their interference in the explosive politics of another nation. Yet these addresses constituted the major abolitionist popular mobilization of the post-emancipation generation. No addresses or petitions in Britain remotely approached their combined number of more than 750,000 women. This last great harvest of hundreds of thousands names on behalf of antislavery was 100 per cent female.38 These addresses and the multiple lesser actions of women in support of antislavery policies in America, Africa, and Asia had 129

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry no parallel in France. Indeed, in its broad international focus, British women’s antislavery had no parallel in any other nation during the half century after 1820.

V Antislavery and women’s movements A comparison of women’s national mobilizations within the framework of antislavery helps to illuminate a number of important historical issues. Women’s entry into public space in modern Europe was inevitably conditioned by gendered asymmetries of power and culture. If women were to find a new place within a civil and political society of equal citizens they had to come to terms with both the opportunities and constraints opened up to them in specific situations. In the case of Britain abolitionism initially imposed many of the traditional constraints involved in all other political activities. Men held and continued to hold on to the commanding heights of national prominence within national legislatures and within the non-governmental associations that conducted the extra-parliamentary campaigns. Nevertheless, antislavery offered peculiar opportunities for the insertion of women into the processes of popular mobilization.. Everywhere the perceived attributions of women could be used to rationalize both women’s participation and a particular ideological strategy. Overseas slavery differed from all forms of labor in Europe in two major respects. Its formation resulted from the forced and massive destruction of the family, the sphere of social life most easily identified as women’s space. Secondly, slavery subjected women’s bodies to a degree of sexual and disciplinary control unmatched in Western Europe. Masters could routinely escape punishment in the treatment of overseas slaves for acts that would have cost them their liberty or their lives in the metropolis. Some historians have seen this ideological opening as a low equilibrium trap, rather than as an opportunity. It reinforced the conservative maledominated separate-spheres hierarchy. It separated middle-class antislavery activists from their sisters in the working classes both at home and overseas, retarding the development of more fundamental challenges to the patriarchal hierarchy of European society. If one confines the history of women in slave emancipations to Anglo-America it may be difficult to decide where the balance of costs and benefits to lay in relation to the emancipation of European women. (I set to one side the issue of the contribution of “separate spheres” to colonial women, although I think that it was probably most helpful to slave women immediately before and after their emancipation).39 Expanding the comparative perspective beyond Anglo-America casts the results of massive women’s involvement antislavery in a different light. The tangible activities of women in British antislavery constitutes crucial evidence in favor of Linda Colley’s thesis concerning the role of British women in forging a public and nation-building role for themselves after the American Revolution. It is not difficult to imagine a historian of nation-building in 130

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry France, Spain, or Portugal devoting a chapter to “Womanpower”, or to “A Woman’s Place is in the Nation.”40 But it is difficult to imagine any history of Continental antislavery devoting a similar chapter to women as one of the principal class actors. Even in Britain the road was uphill and long. As late as 1829, a British Peer, introducing a petition signed by “a great many ladies,” could have the petition instantly ridiculed by another noble Lord inquiring “whether the petition expressed the sentiments of young or old ladies.” Just four years later, Daniel O’Connell, with the massive antislavery women’s petition on the table of the House of Commons, could cleverly mobilize both the old habits of mockery and the new ideology of ‘separate spheres’ to shame opponents into respectful silence: He [O’Connell] would say – and he cared not who the person was of whom he said it – he would that that person had had the audacity to taunt the maids and matrons of England with the offence of demanding that their fellow-subjects in another clime should be emancipated. He would say nothing of the bad taste and the bad feeling which such a taunt betrayed – he would merely confine himself to the expression of an opinion, in which he was sure that every Member of that House would concur with him, namely, that if ever females had a right to interfere, it was upon that occasion. Assuredly, the crying grievance of slavery must have sunk deep into the hearts, and strongly excited the feelings of the British nation, before the females of this country could have laid aside the retiredness of their character to come forward and interfere in political matters . . . and, he hesitated not to say, that the man, whoever he might be, who had taunted the females of Great Britain with having petitioned Parliament – the man who could do that, was almost as great a ruffian as the wielder of the cart-whip.41 Not a single Member of Parliament was prepared to risk responding with either humor or disapproval. Even those, like William Cobbett, who resented the interference of “187,000 ladies” almost as much as he detested abolitionists and blacks, had to await a more convenient and less solemn moment to scold the ladies for their foolish abuse of political power.42 In France the same traditions and sneers could not easily be breached. Women hesitated to use same political means at hand to further either their own legal interests or those of their overseas brothers and sisters. French antislavery never became sufficiently embedded as part of the national culture and organization to make it either a pathway to the exercise of power or to allow women to gain organizational experience. In Britain antislavery was part of what it never was in France, the vanguard of a new mode of collective action. In the half century before British slave emancipation, British 131

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry popular contention switched from older forms, still exemplified by the Paris sugar riots of 1792, to a new repertoire of public meetings, demonstrations, and special interest associations, while using newspapers to project their demands and presence onto a national and international stage.43 Antislavery was a primary example of that transformation. Indeed, British antislavery made a successful “new mobilization” look all too easy.44 In France, the crucial changes in forms of popular contention became standard instruments of popular policy only in the 1840s and 1850s. Harbingers of popular French antislavery were nipped in the bud by revolutions, emancipations and repressions. More was involved in the intertwining of a British women’s movement and antislavery than a new mode of contention. The development of the modern social movement was embedded in a larger transformation – a new form of civil society. In the 1830s Alexis de Tocqueville observed, with astonishment, the enormous use that Americans made of political associations. But American political associations seemed to be only one variety amidst an immense proliferation of civil associations. People of “all ages, all conditions, all minds,” he wrote, were constantly uniting, not only for commercial and industrial undertakings, but for matters religious and moral, solemn, and frivolous – to create festivals and seminaries, to distribute books to the unread and missionaries to the antipodes. Along with the free circulation of ideas in newspapers, the right of acting in common struck Tocqueville as “almost as inalienable in its nature as individual freedom.”45 The development of voluntary associations was not confined to the United States, nor was it entirely new. Rapid economic development, combined with a reduction of governmental authority and the decline of governmental censorship in Britain produced the conditions for a rapid expansion of newspapers and voluntary associations in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The number of clubs in Britain tripled between the 1760s and the 1790s. In the Anglo-American world as a whole, their number stood at around 6,500 at the time of the British abolitionist explosion.46 By contrast, the expansion of Continental voluntary associations was hampered both by government and civil institutions in eighteenth-century Europe. French governmental control over the formation of associations remained far stronger than in England. New forms of association in religion and welfare areas were also hampered by the institutional dominance of the Catholic Church. Competition from still vital networks of confraternities and journeymen campagnonages added to the difficulties entailed in creating of new forms of association.47 The pattern changed during the three generations after the French Revolution, but not always such a way as to encourage the development of enduring associations. The revolutions of 1789, 1830, and 1848 exponentially expanded the number of clubs, especially in the political arena. The longer lasting periods of repression that followed them, however, dramatically curtailed that potential. The turbulence of the “associational 132

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry revolution” in France only reinforced the linkage of voluntary associations with instability and violence. Even where the French pattern of dramatic expansion and repression was absent, Continental antislaveries exhibited a pattern of inhibited female participation. In the Netherlands, as in France, women’s participation was restricted to charitable organizations for aid to slaves and ex-slaves. South of the Pyrenees, the newly formed Spanish Abolition Society published a series of letters in 1865 from British women’s antislavery societies to the “Ladies of Madrid.” Spanish women were encouraged to exercise influence over their male relations in favor of emancipation. Harriet Brewster de Vizcarrondo, the North American wife of a Puerto Rican abolitionist in Madrid, organized an ephemeral woman’s chapter of the Spanish Society.48 One must carefully distinguish between the right to participate and to alter the policies in voluntary associations and the ability to hold formal power within them. Already by 1800, an increasing variety of clubs in Britain, including debating and mutual benefit societies, had been opened to, or created by women. However, women’s organizations remained a small fraction of their all-male counterparts throughout the age of Anglo-American abolitionism. Thus the path to feminine participation was open but narrow. The main advance came with the nineteenth-century upsurge of public subscription associations, of which the Manchester abolition society of 1787 was a harbinger. These more structured societies could and did accommodate numbers of women as participants or in auxiliary branch units.49 Some associations, and women’s antislavery organizations foremost among them, offered women opportunities to create institutions, to master the arts of debating, formulate resolutions, hold office, negotiate with other branches, and to form contacts and alliances at the local, national and international level. In short, they were a major pathway in the formation of what might be called feminine social capital, the art of building effective networks, coalitions and leaders.50 The full quantitative and qualitative evaluation of antislavery as a mechanism for the production of social capital still awaits its historian or social scientist. We already have sufficient evidence, however, to savour one irony. Tocqueville carefully segregated his commentaries on women’s political role in democracies from his encomiums on association. Yet he ended his fervent hymn to voluntary organization by feminizing it: “the science of association is the mother science; the progress of all the others depends on the progress of that one.”51 The advances of antislavery women toward, if not into, possession of a national political presence involved clear constraints as well as opportunities. It has been widely noted that English women activists were less inclined to form more radical feminist associations from the 1830s to the early 1850s than were those in France and the United States.52 Radical English feminists had to “go international”, linking up with counterparts in France or America. Neither the rebuff to American abolitionists at the World Antislavery 133

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry Conference in London in 1840, nor the upheavals of 1848 on the European Continent immediately caused Britons to form a woman’s group with a specifically women’s rights agenda. Was it, as some have speculated, because British women were too conservative, or too bloated with pride in their own political and industrial systems, or “a unique sense of national superiority”? Or, lacking the stimulus of a revolution, were they simply unable to get over the personal animosities that women “transcended” in the United States, France and Germany?53 There may be a more plausible way to explain the failure of British women to imitate some of their American sisters immediately after the latter were refused official seats at the 1840 World Convention in London. The hesitancy of British antislavery women did not stem from nationalist pride in their political or economic system. It was rooted in their deep personal investment in the spectacular demonstration of their own efficacy within the most successful antislavery movement in the world. Some British abolitionists were more impressed by the counterproductivity of the “woman question” to antislavery in the United States after the 1840 convention. Commitment acted as a pragmatic check on their feminism.54 British women still found ample room to extend their range of associational skills within the ever-broadening range of social problems being addressed by voluntary associations in a polity officially committed to laissez-faire in both economy and society. As Sir James Stephen, a Colonial Office abolitionist observed in 1849, there was now “an association for every sorrow.”55 There was also a cultural and class bias among most British antislavery advocates that limited the appeal of some radical affiliations and “Frenchstyle” agitational forms. The confrontational language adopted by some feminist agitators in France and the equally confrontational street tactics of some black women in the Caribbean were alien to them. The rhetorics of the victimized colonial slave and of feminine domesticity better served the goals of both West Indian slaves and abolitionists, at least until 1840. Postemancipation reports of female-led confrontations in the churches and streets of Jamaica, and on the barricades of Paris, were at odds with both of these ideals.56 So, while many women rallied against the excesses of Governor Eyre after the suppression of the Morant Bay uprising in 1865, others rallied to his support. The Freedman’s Aid Movement split over the decision to send help to Jamaica as well as the USA. Women’s meetings condemning military behavior routinely condemned murders by the rioters.”57 In assessing the constraints on radical action fostered by antislavery, one must also note its comparative insignificance. For three generations after the rise of abolitionism in Britain feminism failed to achieve mass support in France. In the wake of four major revolutionary surges in France between the 1780s and the 1870s the women’s movement remained the concern of a small, and divided minority. Far more women remained organized under the banner of traditional religious institutions than of all varieties of secular 134

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry feminists combined. The absence of an antislavery movement and a tangible female presence within it availed women’s movements very little. Well into the fourth quarter of the nineteenth century French men and women who wished to rally around feminist banners found inspiration across the Channel, in the same region that had once formed the heartland of British antislavery. Between the end of the American Civil War and the consolidation of the French Third Republic at the end of the 1870s, British suffragists sent close to 1,000 petitions and over three million signatures up to Parliament.58 The great crusade against slavery probably helped to foster the emancipation of women in many ways we have yet to discover. It certainly did not hindered that process. Taking a longer and broader view of Atlantic slavery in the age of slave emancipation, one conclusion seems warranted. Where popular antislavery flourished women’s participation generally flourished. Where antislavery associations encountered a hostile or repressive environment receptivity to women’s movements was usually nasty, boorish, and short-tempered.

Notes For their helpful comments and suggestions I am deeply indebted to the participants at the Sisterhood and Slavery Conference, especially David Brion Davis, Maurine Greenwald, Gerda Lerner, Claire Midgley, Karen Offen and Kathryn Kish Sklar. 1. Karen Offen, “How (and Why) the Analogy of Marriage with Slavery Provided the Springboard for Women’s Rights Demands in France,” delivered at the Conference, Sisterhood and Slavery, pp. 1–6. 2. See David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 12–24; Drescher, From Slavery to Freedom: Comparative Studies in the Rise and Fall of Atlantic Slavery, (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 225; Sue Peabody, “There Are No Slaves in France”: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Regime (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 3. Offen, “Analogy of Marriage,” 1–6. Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834 (New York: Routledge, 1992), 25, concludes that, almost as a matter of consensus, feminist authors were saying nothing about African slavery “that would cause any ‘true-blooded Englishmen’ to raise and eyebrow.” Convergence of widespread and incisive condemnations of European and African subordination were still almost a century away at the end of the seventeenth century. 4. Clare Midgley, Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780–1870 (London: Routledge, 1992), esp. 35–40, 49–50; and Midgley, “Slave Sugar Boycotts, Female Activism and the Domestic Base of British Anti-Slavery Culture,” Slavery and Abolition 17:3 (December, 1996), 137–162. See Also Christine Bolt, The Women’s Movement in the United States and Britain from the 1790s to the 1920s (Amherst Mass: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 4 ff. 5. Seymour Drescher, “Two Variants of Anti-Slavery: Religious Organization and Social Mobilization in Britain and France, 1780–1870,” in Anti-Slavery, Religion and Reform, ed Christine Bolt and Seymour Drescher (Hamden, Conn: Archon Books, 1980), 43–63. 6. In addition to Midgley, see Thomas Clarkson, The History of the Rise, Progress

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7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16.

17.

18. 19.

and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament 2 vols. (London: Longman, etc. 1808), II, 350. See Women in Revolutionary Paris 1789–1795, ed. Darlene Gay Levy, et al (Urbana, Ill: University of Illinois Press, 1979), 103–122. Ibid 111–113; 115–118; and George Rudé, The Crowd in the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 95–98. Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, 78–79, 217 n. 54; and Drescher, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977) 116 and 247n. Salop County Record Office, “Katherine Plymly Diaries, 1791–1814,” vol 5, entry of 27 February, 1792. On the significance of Manchester, see Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, 67–77, 82–83; Drescher, “Whose Abolition? Popular Pressure and the ending of the British Slave Trade” Past and Present, 143 (May, 1994), 136–166, esp, 142–144; and Midgley, Women Against Slavery 18–19. Midgley, “Slave Sugar Boycotts, 142–150; and Midgley, Women Against Slavery, 43–50. Charlotte Sussman, Consuming Anxieties: Consumer Protest, Gender, and British Slavery, 1713–1833 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). See also David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture [1966] 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988) preface. Midgley, Women Against Slavery, 19–20. Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, 53–54; and Gilbert Shapiro and John Markoff, Revolutionary Demands: A Content Analysis of the Cahiers de Doleances of 1789 (Stanford, 1998), Appendix I. Ironically, French abolitionists of the 1790’s were pioneers in admitting women to their Society, and in arguing for the general utility of admitting women into philanthropic societies. See “Compte rendu de la cérémonie commémorative du décretd ‘abolition, organisée le 16 pluviôse an VII (4 février 1799),” in La Société des Amis des Noirs 1788–1799: Contribution à l’histoire de l’abolition de l’esclavage, Marcel Dorigny and Bernard Gainot eds. (Paris: Éditions UNESCO, 1998), 393–394. Almost a decade earlier the first Société des Amis des Noirs recognized the support given by Olympe de Gouges “to the cause of the Blacks” (Ibid., 265, 283). Clarkson, Rise, II, 123–166. See, inter alia, Daniel P. Resnick, “The Sociétié des Amis des Noirs and the Abolition of Slavery,” French Historical Studies 7 (1972), 558–69; Valerie Quninney, “Decisions on Slavery, the Slave Trade and Civil Rights for Negroes in the Early French Revolution,” Journal of Negro History 55 (1970), 117–30; Yves Bénot, La Revolution Française et la fin des colonies (Paris: La Decouverte, 1988); Gary Kates, The Cercle Social, the Girondins, and the French Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 214–219. On women, see inter alia, the essays of Dominique Godineau, Harriet Applewhite, Darlene Levy, and Gary Kates, in Women and Politics in the Age of the Democratic Revolution, op.cit. Bénot, La Revolution, ch 7; Carolyn Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution From Below (Knoxville TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1990); and D. B. Gaspar and D. P. Geggus eds. A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 1997). Candice E. Proctor, Women, Equality and the French Revolution (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990) ch 10. See Ruth F. Necheles, The Abbé Grégoire 1788–1831: The Odyssey of an Egalitarian (Westport, 1971); and Paul Michael Kielstra, The Politics of Slave

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20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34.

35. 36.

Trade Suppression in Britain and France, 1814–48: Diplomacy, Morality and Economics (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000). Lawrence C. Jennings, French Anti-Slavery: The Movement for the Abolition of Slavery in France, 1802–1848 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Kielstra, The Politics of the Slave Trade, ch 2; and Betty Fladeland, “Abolitionist Pressure on the Concert of Europe, 1814–1822,” Journal of Modern History 38 (1966), 355–373. Peter Dixon, “The Politics of Emancipation: The Movement for the Abolition of Slavery in the British West Indies, 1807–1833, Oxford University D. Phil thesis, 1971; and Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, chaps. 3–5. Clare Midgley, Women Against Slavery, ch 1–3; and Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834 (London, 1992). Drescher, “Whose Abolition?,” 136–166. Midgley, Women Against Slavery, 45, 51, 174. Ibid, 62–66. Seymour Drescher, From Slavery to Freedom: Comparative Studies in the Rise and Fall of Atlantic Slavery, 44–46; 57–77. Ibid, 62–64. Claire Goldberg Moses, French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (Albany: SUNY Press, 1984), 104–105. Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, 240n.; and Jennings, French Anti-Slavery, 199. Ibid, 239. A special plea for petitions was issued to women by the provincial French abolitionist, Guillaume de Felice. See Emancipation immédiate et complète des esclaves: Appel aux abolitionistes (Paris:Delay, 1846). Jennings, French Anti-Slavery, 239. For the Club des Amis des Noirs, see Drescher, From Slavery to Freedom, 180, 193n 60. Karen Offen, “Women and the Question of ‘Universal Suffrage’ in 1848: A Transatlantic Comparison of Suffragist Rhetoric,” NWSA Journal, 11:1 (Spring, 1999), 150–177. As far as I can determine the radical women of 1848 sought inspiration in their Revolutionary metropolitan forebears, not in colonial slaves or Caribbean slaves of either gender. See Laura S. Strumingher, “Looking Back: Women of 1848 and the Heritage of 1789”, in Women and Politics in the Age of Revolution, eds. Harriet B. Applewhite and Darlene G. Levy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1990), 259–285; and Bonnie S. Anderson, Joyous Greetings: The First International Women’s Movement, 1830–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). See also,??? For the Droits de la Femme, I have relied on the documents published by???. David Barry, in Women and Political Insurgency: France in the Mid-Nineteenth Century, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996) discusses to 20 revolutionary clubs, but not the Amis des Noirs. Women played a minority role in the Amis du Peuple, and among those arrested in the June Days. See Offen, European Feminisms 1700–1950: A Political History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 111–112. It would be interesting to know whether Parisian women’s newspapers supported Schoelcher when he ran for a seat from Paris to the Constituent Assembly in the Spring of 1848. He was not supported by the electoral coalition of workers’ corporations and radical clubs, and was sometimes charged with focusing on slave liberation rather than on universal emancipation. See Drescher, From Slavery to Freedom, 181, 193 n. 58. Serge Gavronsky, The French Liberal Opposition and the American Civil War (New York, 1968), 186. Le Lien, 16 December 1865; 16 January 1866; and 5 June 1867. As far as I can determine this was the first public antislavery manifestation in which women were

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37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52. 53. 54.

both initiators and speakers. Clarisse Gautier Coignet was the niece of Clarisse Vigoureux, the first “disciple” of the pioneer socialist, Charles Fourier. Vigoureux’s daughter married a leading Fourierist, Victor Considerant. Considerant first proposed extending the suffrage to single adult women in the National Constituent Assembly, in 1848. He was laughed off the floor. See Karen Offen, European Feminisms 1700–1950: A Political History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 111. My thanks to Karen Offen for the biographical detail on Clarisse Coignet and her family. Midgley, Women Against Slavery, 124–127. Ibid, 148–149. See also Howard Temperly, British Antislavery 1833–1870 (London: Longman, 1972), 224–228. Mimi Sheller, “Quasheba, mother, queen: black women’s public leadership and protest in postemancipation Jamaica, 1834–1865”, Slavery and Abolition, 19 (Dec. 1998) 90–117. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), ch 6, and 350–360. Ibid, 279–280. Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, 149. Charles Tilly, Popular Contention in Great Britain 1758–1834 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1994), ch 2. David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 168–230. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Debra Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 184, 489. Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies 1580–1800: The Origins of an Associational World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 128, Fig 4.1. Ibid, 18. Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, Empire and Antislavery: Spain, Cuba and Puerto Rico, 1833–1874 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999), 91–97, 117–118. Clark, British Clubs, 130–132; 198–199. On Manchester, See Midgley, Women Against Slavery, 18–19; Christine Bolt, Women’s Movements, Ch. 2; and F. K. Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 22–46. For the incrimentalism of petitioning social organization and political self-confidence in American women’s mobilization against slavery, see inter alia, Gerda Lerner, The Majority Finds its Past: Placing Women in History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 118–128; Michael Vorenberg, Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery and the 13th Amendment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 38–39; and Susan Marie Zaeske, “Petitioning, Antislavery and the Emergence of Woman’s Political Consciousness,” Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1977. Tocqueville, Democracy, 492. Midgley, Women Against Slavery, 157. Bonnie S. Anderson, “The Lid Comes off: International Radical Feminism and the Revolutions of 1848,” NWSA Journal vol 10(2) (1998), 1–12, esp. 8. Bolt, Women’s Movements, 68–69. On the contrasting social and political situations of British and American antislavery women, see Kathryn Kish Sklar, “‘Women Who Speak for an Entire Nation,’ American and British Women at the World Anti-Slavery Convention, London, 1840.”, in Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne, eds., The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 301–340.

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pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry 55. 56. 57. 58.

Clark, British Clubs, 471. Midgley, Women Against Slavery, 190–194. Midgley, Women Against Slavery, 192. See Sophia A van Wingerden, The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Britain, 1866– 1928 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999).

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6 CIVILIZING INSURGENCY: TWO VARIANTS OF SLAVE REVOLTS IN THE AGE OF REVOLUTION Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it and I shall move the world. – Archimedes How was slavery abolished? João Pedro Marques sets his sights on deflating a new master narrative that places insurgent slave revolts at the center of the story. Both the traditional and new narratives agree that the successful and climactic assaults on this perennial institution began at the end of the eighteenth century. However, in the new narrative, African slave resistance long preceded Euro-American abolitionism. Slaves themselves instigated incessant and often massive revolts for centuries before the emergence of political abolitionism. They were also the primary and principal catalysts in the two major stages in the emancipation process: ending the intercontinental slave trade and the dismantling of the institution itself. The temporal extension of the new approach is clear. The process began long before the pivotal “age of abolition,” in the 1770s. Various forms of slave resistance must be re-imagined as one long uninterrupted struggle against the institution. One should include in the process all flights from enslavement and all autonomous communities formed by ex-slaves beyond the zone of slavery.1 The final stage of the emancipation process was introduced by a series of massive collective uprisings, forcing the closure of the institution. All forms of collective resistance, before and after the age of revolution (c. 1775–1830), thus eroded the institution and portended its destruction. The great slave uprisings in Saint-Domingue in 1791 and Jamaica in 1831 were only the climactic and decisive moments in the process. Marques challenges this narrative both logically and empirically. You cannot explain a variable by a constant. Slavery was a millennial institution that produced millennial resistance of every type catalogued in its later New World embodiments. The level of revolts in both ancient Roman and Medieval Muslim slavery produced uprisings of scale and durability that matched or exceeded similar conflicts in the Americas. Against the catalogue of dayto-day resistance, flight, and marronage must be set the robustness of the 141

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry institution over centuries and its flexibility in using manumission and maroon communities to stabilize the institution. Three centuries after the founding of the Atlantic system, the cumulative effect of slave revolts on both sides of the Atlantic had neither eroded the imperial commitment to the institution nor halted its expansion. On the contrary, as Marques concludes, for three centuries Western colonial slaves struggled for individual or group freedom, just as Old World slaves had done before them. But they neither sought nor succeeded in eliminating the institution. Nor did they formulate “an anti-slavery conception of human relations.” Slave rebellion was not synonymous with anti-slavery, either in intention or impact.2

I. The Impact of the Haitian Revolution I will concentrate on two events Marques designates as examples of his “new equation,” the slave revolts that broke out in the critical four decades between 1791 and 1832: in Saint-Domingue (1791–1804); in Barbados (1816); in Demerara (1823); and in Jamaica (1831–32). Marques emphasizes that these four uprisings occurred within the context of a quantitative surge in major uprisings throughout the colonial world, of which these were only “key” episodes. In terms of its impact upon the institution of slavery, the Saint-Domingue/ Haitian uprising was notable for its shifting combination of traditional and novel elements. The rebels’ appealed to both African ceremonies and royalist symbolism as powerful sources of solidarity. The pattern of insurgent slave behavior and ideological options in the colony lurched as military fortunes shifted both within and beyond Saint-Domingue. Various groups of slaves adhered to or withdrew allegiances from the French, British, and Spanish monarchies before coalescing under Toussaint Louverture in favor of France and general emancipation. Then, under Dessalines, they coalesced against France and re-enslavement. In dramatic contrast with the insurgents in Dutch Berbice three decades earlier, the rebels were aware of the new possibilities opened up by a divided France and a divided and embattled Europe. Within this context, slaves had opportunities to maneuver first for their personal freedom, then for the freedom of all of the colony’s slaves, and, finally, for independence from European domination. In terms of impact, Haiti transmitted news of its radical revolution to slave populations throughout the Atlantic world. To slaves and non-slaves alike, it demonstrated the possibilities and dangers entailed in the dramatic and violent destruction of the relationship into which they were bound. Two major messages were sent out and variously interpreted by this international audience. The first was the possibility that ex-slave communities might establish an independent polity based upon European models of republics or monarchies and create new societies and economies based upon free or coerced labor. The second message was the potential of such a revolution to intensify 142

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry brutalization and exterminatory violence. For most articulate Frenchmen and many other Europeans the message of Saint-Domingue’s revolutionary years were framed by the twin images of the initial uprising in the summer of 1791, with its destruction of life and property, and the massacre of the remaining French population in 1804 in the wake of Haiti’s independence. A glance at the sites of both rebellion and repression beyond Haiti indicates the impact of this long revolution on the greater Caribbean.3 As Marques notes, the revolt did not dampen imperial ambitions during their struggles in the 1790s. Nor did it halt the appetites of Europeans for more slaves. Between 1791 and 1804, the slave trades of every imperial power not aligned with France (and thus exposed to British naval predation) thrived. The British, the Spanish, and the Portuguese trades’ all expanded. Even the Danish colonies, which officially terminated the importation of Africans in 1802, experienced the biggest trade in their entire existence during the period of the Haitian revolution. As for the new United States of America, more enslaved Africans were unloaded in its ports after 1791 than in any previous equivalent period in its colonial history. On the eve of the abolition of the US transatlantic trade, America’s imports actually reached their all time peak. More Africans landed there in 1806–1807 than during the entire period between the end of the Seven Years War and the Saint-Domingue Revolution.4 Nowhere did the revolutionary threat deter slavers or their governments from filling their slave ships with what abolitionists already called the “seeds of destruction.” This leads me to what is an overstatement in Marques’ evaluation of the impact of the Haitian revolution. In Britain, he maintains, revolution had a positive impact in the acceleration of the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. Of course, between 1789 and 1804, abolitionists did succeed in constricting some new potential frontiers of British slave expansion. One regulatory restriction, in 1799, probably did diminish Britain’s competitive edge in the trade, but Saint-Domingue played no part in the discussions of either slave frontier restrictions or shipboard regulations. Between the outbreak of the Saint-Domingue slave revolution and the final assault on the British slave trade in 1806–1807, British slavers remained the premier transporters of Africans to the New World. Did the “fear factor” at least deflect the pattern of the trade away from the neighborhood of the slave revolution? No. The pattern of slave imports into the Caribbean indicates that the Saint-Domingue revolution seems, instead, to have stimulated planters’ appetites for slaves in direct proportion to a colony’s proximity to Hispãnola, i.e., to Jamaica, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. Of the three, Jamaica was first off the mark in 1791 and remained the principal British colonial beneficiary of the Haitian revolution. Jamaica’s exports of sugar increased by 35,000 tons from the export period of 1786–1790 to 1801– 1805. That quantity was more than three and a half times greater than Cuba’s increase. The result was that in the first decade of the nineteenth century, Jamaica led the world in exports of both sugar and coffee. 143

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry Rather than fearing the “seeds of destruction,” Jamaica led the West Indian attack on abolition as being ruinous to its own future growth and competitiveness.5 We may therefore surmise that the “fear factor” in the British empire, as elsewhere, was inversely proportional to the distance of the Britons from the epicenter of the revolution. David Geggus has drawn attention to Jamaica’s enigmatic status as an island of stability in the revolutionary Caribbean of the 1790s. How much more enigmatic then was its relative freedom from slave uprisings throughout the entire “Age of Revolution.” One of the most turbulent British colonies before the last quarter of the eighteenth century, Jamaica experienced no major uprising between Tacky’s revolt in 1760 and the great “Baptist War” in 1831.6 What then, of the “fear factor” in the British metropole itself ? Marques makes claims for Haiti’s significant contribution to the ending of the British slave trade in 1807. This assessment does not rely upon any empirical analysis of British governmental policy, public discussion, or even abolitionist positions in the period just preceding British abolition. Begin with governmental policy: did the British government, in any of its activities before 1807, act on the premise that the danger of accumulating slaves outweighed the risks of expansion? In 1806, the most pro-abolitionist ministry to come into office during the twenty year struggle over the slave trade made a firm decision to retain that portion of Dutch Guiana (Demerara) that had the highest percentage of newly imported Africans in Guiana. This percentage was higher than those in any of Britain’s long-established colonies. So Britain was determined to acquire slave colonies brimming with freshly imported Africans on the very eve of abolition. Moreover, the government also decided that, if they restored the rest of Guiana (Suriname) to its former Dutch rulers, the British government was prepared to ask for nothing less than Cuba in compensation. Cuba had just become the largest single importer of slaves in the Caribbean. Beyond the Caribbean, in Africa in 1806, the British navy had just added the slaveimporting Dutch Cape Colony to its roster of conquests. In South America, a British expeditionary force captured Buenos Aires, the slave-importing capital of Rio de la Plata.7 The British empire had thus increased its potential as a slave empire more than ten-fold. Let us turn to parliament. In February 1805, during the last debate on abolition of the British slave trade before 1807, anti-abolitionist MPs noted, with some sarcasm, that the government was itself purchasing and arming African slaves for defense and expansion in the West Indies. This was no hyperbole. During 1806, British government purchases of African slaves for West Indian regiments reached their all-time peak.8 For a government with deep concern about the risk of slave revolts, especially in colonies worked by newly landed Africans, multiplying such risks in three separate areas of the globe would have been a policy bordering on insanity. The British Ministers, however, were far from acting irrationally. They, like the British planters, made the identical 144

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry assessment of the high value of the slave trade to foreign colonies. In fact, so did the abolitionists. In 1805 and 1806, it was the abolitionists who led the charge in demanding that British slave traders be prohibited from carrying Africans to foreign or conquered colonies. To bring slaves to foreigners, they insisted, was to advance foreign colonial development while retarding Britain’s development. Interdicting the slave trade would hobble the economy of the enemy. Note well that the rationale for passing foreign trade prohibition a few months before the Act of 1807 was that fresh slaves were “seeds of production,” not “seeds of destruction.” It was no accident that an abolitionist, James Stephen, was the author of Britain’s most important polemic in favor of interdiction and was the drafter of the 1806 Bill for the government.9 What then of the role of the Haitian revolution as a decisive factor in the enactment of total abolition in 1807? Begin by looking at the public sphere: abolition was discussed in some constituencies during the general election of 1806. Saint-Domingue was not part of the discussion. What about abolitionist propaganda? At the beginning of 1807, William Wilberforce published a Letter on the Abolition of the Slave Trade. It was by far the longest abolitionist tract ever to appear against the slave trade. For the first 320 pages of its 350 pages of text, Africans were unrelentingly portrayed as helpless enslaved victims of brutality, racism, degradation, and neglect. Finally, on page 320, Wilberforce announced that he had to “mention two or three additional considerations” – but he promised that he would “not dwell long on them.” Among them was the “danger of insurrections.” Why the understatement? For Wilberforce in 1807, Haiti still represented “the wild licentiousness of a neighboring kingdom,” enjoying none of the blessings of “true liberty” under the British Constitution.10 The danger arising from slave imports might ultimately be inevitable. At the moment, however, Britain enjoyed “a happy interval” in which she might “providentially” “avert the gathering storm.” How long was this “happy interval”? Lord Howick, the Cabinet member who introduced the crucial second reading of the Bill in the House of Commons in 1807, was more precise than Wilberforce. He preempted the protrader assertion that even a discussion of abolition would arouse the revolutionary passions among the British slaves. Nonsense, replied Lord Howick. For 20 years, he declared, the question had been continually debated, and declared contrary to humanity: “Look at the state of [our] islands for the last 20 years,” he countered, “and say, is it not notorious, that there never were so few insurrections amongst the negroes, as at the very time they knew that such an abolition of this infamous traffic was under discussion?”11 One other major anti-abolitionist argument had to be parried. The Bill’s opponents denounced the abolitionists as hypocrites. If slavery violated humanity and justice as much as the Atlantic slave trade, why did abolitionists actively oppose any motion for even free-birth emancipation in 1807? The abolitionist response was: look at Saint-Domingue. Immediate emancipation, warned Howick, would only produce “horrors similar to those at 145

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry St.  Domingo.” If colonial slaves were human and brethren they were still largely African and savage: “It must be remembered,” noted another abolitionist, that “Dessalines himself was an imported African.”12 Both pre- and post-revolutionary Haiti were models to be avoided, not emulated.

II. Civilizing Insurgency: Demerara After Haiti, Marques aptly shifts his attention to the large-scale British slave uprisings that erupted between the ending of the Napoleonic wars and British slave emancipation. Three successive revolts shook the British West Indies: Barbados in 1816; Demerara in 1823; and Jamaica in 1831. All were stimulated by increasingly intrusive metropolitan interventions into the relationship between masters and slaves. I focus on Demerara, whose uprising I consider to be the most revealing and transformative event in the shift toward slave emancipation. Although the insurgents in Barbados revealed important new facets of slave behavior, the revolt’s immediate impact on the metropolitan political scene still closely resembled the impact of the Saint-Domingue revolution. Both uprisings contributed to a hiatus in major abolitionist initiatives. The negative impact of Saint-Domingue lasted for about a decade after 1791. That of Barbados lasted for nearly seven years. In the wake of Barbados, British abolitionists skillfully developed arguments to mitigate and even defend the slaves’ resistance, but their posture remained largely defensive. It probably reflected the largely negative metropolitan public opinion.13 When Thomas Fowell Buxton took over parliamentary leadership of abolitionism in the early 1820s, his chief concern in taking the first step toward emancipation remained the fear that further discussion of emancipation in Britain “might lead to servile insurrection in the West Indies.” His very use of the term “servile insurrections” evoked the atrocities of slave revolts in classical antiquity and Saint-Domingue. It was the Demerara insurrection that shifted the balance of opinion in favor of sympathy toward the slaves and antipathy toward the planters. The Demerara uprising deserves careful scrutiny because the comparative behaviors of the slaves and masters contributed crucially to that shift. The outbreak itself was not based, as were so many prior events, on rumors of a nonexistent document or a decree in favor of liberation. The slaves’ conspiracy was a direct result of the failure of Demerara’s governor, under planter pressure, to publicize a very modest metropolitan list of amelioration measures. After the revolt’s suppression, abolitionists were able to demonstrate that the immediate publication of the same document in neighboring Berbice had resulted in no disturbances whatsoever. Concealment from above fueled conspiracy from below. The range of rebel demands reflected both their aspirations for full freedom and their wish to get whatever advantages might be hidden in the document. The post-rebellion 146

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry investigations revealed that the insurgents had devoted an enormous amount of time and energy into trying to learn the actual contents of the reforms contained in the government’s document. For weeks, they hesitated to turn to action. Both in planning and in action the rebels talked of presenting their grievances to the governor. The second novel aspect of the revolt was its organizational reliance upon a recently developed institution in Demerara. A missionary chapel became the site of the discussion of plans for collective action. Denied other autonomous space outside the plantation, the leaders used their minimal allotment of religious freedom and their status as deacons within the chapel to communicate more freely with each other.14 The missionary presence that had thrived after slave trade abolition was crucial to the new pattern of action. The uprising itself clearly revealed that its leaders did not intend to overthrow British authority. Plantations were seized. Masters and their families incarcerated. Humiliation was sometimes inflected. There was no repetition of the atrocities of the Berbice revolt in 1763 or of those in Saint-Domingue between 1791 and 1804. In Demerara, where 77,000 slaves and 10,000–12,000 insurgents vastly outnumbered the 5,000 whites and free blacks, only two or three whites died in hostile action. Above all, the leaders attempted to impose self-discipline among the insurgents and to negotiate with the British governor. Demerara’s rebel leaders attempted to rewrite the rules of slave contention. The exemplary moment was most evident at the “crisis” point of confrontation – 500 advancing British troops and mobilized auxiliaries came face to face with, and were surrounded by, 3,000 to 4,000 slaves. They were asked by the commanding officer about their grievances. The responses ranged from demands for time off to attend Sunday services to demands for clarification about the rumors that they had been freed. Jack Gladstone, one of the slave organizers, handed the British colonel a document signed by captured managers and masters, testifying to their good treatment. Colonel Leahy responded by reading the governor ’s formal declaration of martial law. He ordered the rebels to lay down their arms and return to work. After a long silent standoff, the troops opened fire. Their disciplined barrage broke the deadlock. Then began the process of suppression. On-site round ups and summary executions were followed up by formal but equally summary trials and, in later stages, by more formal trials of the leadership. The outstanding result of the revolt was its transformation into a quasimetropolitan popular contention. This process was certainly accelerated by the colonial government’s indictment of the missionary whose chapel had been the major site of the conspiracy. Reverend John Smith was indicted, convicted, and condemned to death on the basis of slave testimony obtained under duress and later recanted. The dramatic impact of the Demerara cycle of insurgency was quickly registered in the metropolis. When news of the uprising first reached Britain, Thomas Clarkson had to interrupt his 147

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry organizing tour because abolitionists were widely targeted as “traitors of our country.”15 By the time the account of the repression circulated through the press, it was the planters who were depicted as the vengeful and uncivilized agents in the confrontation. Smith’s death in prison and colonial attacks on other missionaries aroused an enormous backlash in Britain. Some historians are inclined to emphasize the fact that the one casualty of the Demerara uprising who was selected as its iconic martyr was a white missionary rather than any of the hundreds of executed black workers. In other words, the missionary “stole the martyr ’s crown.” This overlooks the fact that the death of this freeborn native Englishman was converted into decisive evidence that the brutal suppression of the rebellion had been an assault on native-born Christian Britons as well as overseas Christian West Indians. Missionary Smith was the abolitionists’ Archimedian fulcrum. It enabled them to raise popular contention in the New World to the level of the Old. His death allowed the rebels to be identified not just as fellow men and brothers, but also as fellow freedom-loving Christians. The Demerarans had reacted to their unnatural deprivation as would any freeborn Briton. In response to Smith’s death, hundreds of petitions were sent to parliament by dissenting congregations. No previous suppression had ever induced such a mass metropolitan mobilization. British non-conformist chapels became a mainstay of future anti-slavery petition campaigns. They also were the driving organizational force in the radicalization of abolitionist demands for emancipation. The parliamentary general election of 1826 became the first, since 1806, in which slavery was an electoral campaign issue. Thus, the most important step in the “Anglicization” of the slaves and the detoxification of slave insurgencies occurred within the cycle of the Demerara revolt. The leaders membership in chapels linked their enslavement to their Christianization. Their actions were reconfigured on the emerging English class-relations model as a “general strike” against intolerable working conditions. Colonel Leahy, the commanding officer in the climactic confrontation, inadvertently emphasized that he had been dealing with men who knew how to participate in an orderly negotiation. He acknowledged that he had made a list of the insurgents’ demands, but had destroyed it as useless. “For abolitionists, the dialogue between slaves and authorities justified their comparison of the conduct of the rebels in Demerara and that of workers at home.”16 The rebel leaders did not, I must emphasize, undertake their action in the belief that a measured challenge to imperial authority was tantamount to suicidal martyrdom.17 They gambled on reconfiguring the rules of contention and aimed at aligning their situations as closely as possible with those of Britons. They were fully aware that the language of contention they articulated was framed within the religious, moral, and legal constructs of powerful agents of change in the metropolis. Nine years later, on the eve of emancipation, the injustice of colonial slavery had been so deeply domesticated that abolition, in its own turn, became fused 148

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry with a campaign to limit child labor in factories. By 1832, it was almost impossible to find a meeting, petition or tract in favor of protecting British children, which did not demand “the immediate abolition of slavery both at home and abroad.”18 By becoming fellow Christians and fellow workers, slaves were already perceived as individuals who loved and yearned for freedom in its civilized (and British) sense. One must remain wary, however, of overevaluating the power of either revolts or threatened revolts to determine the actual terms of entry into full legal freedom. Many historians have echoed Eric Williams’s succinct manifesto on the impact of the great Jamaican uprising of 1831–32. It was, he wrote, an overpowering ultimatum to parliament and people: “Emancipation from above or emancipation from below. But EMANCIPATION.” When Parliament did pass the emancipation act in 1833, it also determined that full freedom would come only after a transition period of “apprenticeship” lasting up to eight years. Buxton vehemently objected to this “slavery-by-anothername.” He invoked Jamaica and grimly warned MPs of another dreaded and inevitable “servile Insurrection.”19 On 1 August 1834, however, the Emancipation Law duly came into operation with apprenticeship and without bloody insurrections. Abolitionists around the Atlantic hailed this peaceful transition as one of the most extraordinary events of their century.

III. Conclusion Marques’ final chapter opens with a pre-revolutionary dream of liberation. French philosophers saw only two sorts of actors who might fulfill that dream – a philosopher king from among the lords of the earth or a black Spartacus arising from the wretched of the earth. His chapter then reviews the heroes who did emerge – statesmen like Wilberforce, Lincoln, and Schoelcher, and insurgent slave leaders like Gladstone of Demarara and Sharpe of Jamaica. In most processes of emancipation, however, neither philosopher kings nor slave generals played the principal roles. Rulers vied with each other to expand and defend their systems. Slaves and non-slaves alike participated in such schemes. When slave systems ended through violent conflicts among the free and powerful, slaves often attached themselves to and fought alongside those who could best promise them the greatest opportunity or security. This held true for both the Western hemisphere, which attracts Marques’ attention, and the Eastern hemisphere. Most slave systems ended without the decisive intervention of single “heroes,” who, in any event, were mightily constrained by circumstance. Ironically, the empire in which slave insurgents acting on their own had the greatest impact was the one in which ordinary free men and women were also the most influential. The British economy was more prosperous than its more slave-dependent competitors. It civil society allowed more leeway 149

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry for continuous political action. Its state was for a brief but crucial period the nation with the longest reach on earth. Able to stand on the fulcrum of British “free soil,” abolitionists also moved the great lever of their empire, by fits and starts, toward the termination of the institution of slavery and the oceanic slave trades. The abolitionists, in turn, were soon joined by unfree abolitionists on the slave soil of their own empire. Not always and forever, but on occasion, rebels with narrow room for action generated enough support to accelerate the dismantling of a millennial institution. In global terms, the most significant turning point may not have been from servile insurrection to revolution in Saint-Domingue, but to self-disciplined insurgency in Demerara.

Notes I would like to thank Stanley Engerman, and David Geggus for reviewing and discussing this chapter with me. 1. Marques, Slave Revolts and the Abolition of Slavery, part 1, ch. 1. 2. David Patrick Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), ch. 1. During the very year that the largest slave system in the New World was abolished by constitutional amendment, a Sudanese slave revolt broke out in the Egyptian army. It was abolitionist neither in intention nor outcome. See Ahmad Alawad Sikainga, “Comrades in Arms or Captives in bondage: Sudanese Slaves in the Turco-Egyptian Army, 1821–1865,” in Slave Elites in the Middle East and Africa: A Comparative Study, eds. Miura Toru and John Edward Philips (London: Keegan Paul International, 2000), 197–214. 3. See David Barry Gaspar and David Patrick Geggus, eds., A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007); and Geggus, ed., The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2001). 4. David Eltis et al., eds., Slave Trade Database, http://www.slavevoyages.org. 5. Seymour Drescher, “Econocide, Capitalism and Slavery: A Commentary,” Boletin de estudios Latinoamericanos y del Caribe 36 (June 1984): 49–65, esp. 57, Table 5. Using slave prices as an indicator of planters’ willingness to invest in the future of slavery, one might note that Cuban planters were willing to pay more for both African males and females in 1806 than in 1790. The increase for prime age females, however, had risen more steeply than for males. See Laird W. Bergad et al, The Cuban Slave Market, 1790–1880 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 174, Table B.2. On the simultaneous surge of African slaves into neighboring Louisiana, see Paul F. LaChance, “The Politics of Fear: French Louisianans and the Slave Trade, 1786–1809,” Plantation Society 1 (1979): 164–170. Louisiana and Mississippi received nearly 20 percent of the Africans who reached North America between 1790 and 1810. See Allan Kulikoff “Uprooted Peoples: Black Migrants in the Age of American Revolution 1790–1820,” in Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution, eds. Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983), 143–171, Table 1, 149. 6. See Davis Geggus, “The Enigma of Jamaica in the 1790s: New Light on the Causes of Slave Rebellions,” William and Mary Quarterly 44: 2 (1987): 274–299. 7. Seymour Drescher, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977), 102–103. 8. Roger Norman Buckley, Slaves in Red Coats: The British West India Regiments, 1795–1815 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 55, Table 1. Even the rate

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9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

of resistance aboard slave ships appears to have dropped during the decade before 1807. The 19 recorded incidents during the decade 1797–1806 were little more than one-third of the 53 recorded in 1783–1792. This earlier decade was the last one of peace before abolition as well as the apogée of the entire transatlantic trade. My thanks to David Eltis for his help in searching the database. Roger Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition 1760–1810 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1975), 368. William Wilberforce, A Letter on the Abolition of the Slave Trade (London: T. Cadell and W. Davis, 1807), 258–259. Still more pointedly, James Stephen, the principal abolitionist advisor to the Prime Minister, explicitly avoided invoking the Haitian Revolution in his long public appeal for the passage of the abolition Bill. See Stephen, Dangers of the Country (London: J. Butterworth, 1807). Hansards Parliamentary Debates (Hereafter, P.D.) ser. 1, vol. 8 (1806–1807), col. 952. Ibid., cols. 955, 970, 975. Gelien Matthews, Caribbean Slave Revolts and the British Abolitionist Movement (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 36, 64. Emilia Viotti da Costa, Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood: The Demerara Slave Rebellion of 1823 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 145. For much of the account of the revolt, I rely upon Crowns of Glory, as well as on Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), ch. 16. For a comparative perspective on slave rebellions in British and other political orbits, see David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), ch. 10. For the revolt’s impact upon US opinion, see Edward Bartlett Rugemer, The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008). Matthews, Caribbean Slave Revolts, 49. Ibid., 76. In fact, Gladstone was reprieved at the request of the governor himself. The Governor praised Gladstone’s “good behavior, intelligence, and usefulness,” and “humanity to whites,” “even during the insurrection,” see Viotti da Costa, Crowns of Glory, 244, 367n97. Seymour Drescher, “Cart Whip and Billy Roller: Anti-Slavery and Reform Symbolism in Industrializing Britain,” Journal of Social History, 15:1 (1981): 1–24, 12. Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944/1994), 208; and, for Buxton’s threat, see P.D., ser. 3, vol. 19 (24 July 1833), col. 1190. In the wake of the Jamaica slave insurrection at the end of 1831 and the passage of the Reform Bill in 1832, the Jamaican Assembly claimed that West Indians were no longer represented in Parliament. They refused to cooperate in the further operation of ameliorative Orders-in-Council on colonial slavery. The British Cabinet now feared both further slave and planter unrest. In voting for emancipation in the next year, the imperial parliament agreed to a huge compensation package and an apprenticeship system in order to assure the peaceful acceptance of emancipation. (See Miles Taylor, “Empire and parliamentary reform: The 1832 Reform Act revisited,” in Rethinking the Age of Reform: Britain 1780–1850, eds. Arthur Burns and Joanna Innes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 295–311.

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pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry Bibliography Anstey, Roger. The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1975. Baird, Laird W. et al. The Cuban Slave Market, 1790–1880. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Buckley, Roger Norman. Slaves in Red Coats: The British West India Regiments, 1795– 1815. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. Craton, Michael. Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982. Davis, David Brion. Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Drescher, Seymour. “Cart Whip and Billy Roller: Anti-Slavery and Reform Symbolism in Industrializing Britain,” Journal of Social History. 15:1 (1981), 1–24. Drescher, Seymour. “Econocide, Capitalism and Slavery: A Commentary, “Boletin de studios Latinoamericanos y del Caribe. 36 (June 1984), 49–65. Drescher, Seymour. Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977; rept. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Eltis, David, et al. Transatlantic Slave Trade Database http//www.slavervoyages.org/ tast/index.faces. Gaspar, David Barry and David Patrick Geggus eds. A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2001. Geggus, David Patrick. Haitian Revolutionary Studies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. Geggus, David. “The Enigma of Jamaica in the 1790s: New Light on the Causes of Slave Rebellions,” William and Mary Quarterly, 44:2 (1987), 274–299. Hansards Parliamentary Debates, ser. 1, vol. 8, 1806–07; ser. 3, vol. 19, 1833. Kulikoff, Alan. “Uprooted Peoples: Black Migrants in the Age of the American Revolution,” in Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman eds. Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983, 143–171. La Chance, Paul F., “The Politics of Fear: French Louisianans and the Slave Trade, 1786–1809,” Plantation Society, 1 (1979), 164–170. Matthews, Gelien. Caribbean Slave Revolts and the British Abolitionist Movement. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. Rugemer, Edward Bartlett. The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008. Stephen, James. Dangers of the Country. London: J. Butterworth, 1807. Taylor, Miles. “Empire and Parliamentary Reform,” in Rethinking the Age of Reform. eds. Arthur Burns and Joanna Innes, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Toru, Muira and John Edward Philips eds. Slave Elites in the Middle East and Africa: A Comparative Study. London: Keegan Paul International, 2000. Viotti da Costa, Emilia. Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood: The Demerara Slave Rebellion of 1823. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

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pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry Wilberforce, William. A Letter on the Abolition of the Slave Trade. London: T. Cadell et al, 1807. Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1944–1994.

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7 LIBERTY, EQUALITY, HUMANITY Antislavery and Civil Society in Britain and France

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” With this Declaration of 1776 Lynn Hunt opens her Inventing Human Rights: A History. Her history is built around two more declarations. In 1789 the first two articles of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizens affirmed that men are born and remain free and equal in rights. These are “liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression.” In 1948 the first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights also begins, “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” This third document immediately proceeds to designate the first specific violation of these rights: “No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.”1 By comparison no references to slavery or the slave trade appeared in either of the two eighteenth-century declarations. Nor did the first two constitutions of the United States (1783, 1787) or of France (1791, 1793) directly refer to their slave systems. Hunt’s account of the “invention” of human rights clearly follows a trail of declarations, from American to French to United Nations. She also notes that human rights only become meaningful “when they gain political content.”2 This implies that declarations of human rights must somehow be articulated in enforced legal prescriptions – (constitutional or legislative). Hunt’s own story begins with the prior emergence of human rights from a general eighteenth century western European sentiment that crystallized in revolutionary epiphanies at the end of that century. It is a sequence from thought to action. Human rights thought and action were diverted from their global and universalist potential by the nineteenth-century projects of nationalism and imperialism. It required another wave of catastrophic upheavals in the twentieth century to fulfill the potential of their eighteenth-century predecessors. Samuel Moyn argues for an even greater disjuncture between the eighteenth and late twentieth centuries in the global history of human rights. He claims that the search for historical precursors of contemporary human rights is a perfect instance of what Marc Bloch termed the “idol of origins.” Looking 155

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry for the origins of a major phenomenon, like the sudden emergence of a global human rights movement, he writes, has tempted contemporaries to assume that it is the result of a long historical process, the progressive result of an accumulation from far upstream in time. Such an impulse leads one to seek out causes of the phenomenon centuries or even millennia before the event to be explained. The result is the identification of harbingers of causes. For Moyn, it is not a persistent stream but a shocking groundswell that has to be explained. In neither Hunt’s nor Moyn’s frames of reference does the British antislavery movement have a prominent role to play on the road to the contemporary upsurge of human rights.3 I select Lynn Hunt’s and Samuel Moyn’s texts because they exemplify major points of contention in accounting for the history of “human rights” and the emergence of its contemporary form. Both the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries are virtually absent from their accounts. Yet targeting ancient revolutionary moments as the engines of expansion or insisting upon the complete novelty of contemporary human rights create their own problems. They fail to address the question of why slavery was so conspicuously absent from those eighteenth century declarations and so prominently placed at the forefront of their twentieth century variant. They also obscure the role of other claims for “humanity” at local, national, and international levels of law and jurisprudence long before the late twentieth century. The abolitions of the slave trade and slavery hold a special place in the history of the globalization of rights in law. Focusing on the comparative histories of two major national and imperial initiators of antislavery action under the standard of universal humanity, this essay will analyze the implications of their different paths to the globalization of human rights.4 In Medieval times the boundaries of enslaveability were gradually, if not always rigorously, restricted by religious affiliation. Muslims and Christians were admonished to refrain from enslaving fellow believers, and especially from delivering them into the hands of infidels. The lands beyond the frontiers of monotheism in Africa and Eurasia became the largest zones of recruitment into the institution. Although the legitimacy of the institution of slavery remained grounded in its assumed ubiquity and antiquity, “free air” or “free soil” zones emerged in local and national jurisdictions of northwestern Europe. At least as far back as the sixteenth century, juridical commentaries, court records, and popular traditions affirmed that people in bondage were released from their legal obligations when they entered within certain jurisdications. Nevertheless, affirmations of this privilege invariably recognized its particularity. In relation to the larger world, the legitimacy of slavery was the rule. Its absence was exceptional.5 Beyond their northwestern European metropoles, every one of the states subscribing to the “free soil” principle within their home territories recognized and encouraged the transatlantic slave trade and slavery in their 156

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry overseas colonies. Within Europe itself, there were frequent attempts to evade the implications of the freedom principle – to create exceptions to the exception. This was especially the case concerning slaves brought to the metropole by their overseas owners. Whatever the particular outcome of these maneuvers, the ubiquity of slavery was consensually acknowledged by a legal theory steeped in the Civil Law tradition inherited from antiquity. Centuries of law treatises echoed the Roman juristic designation of slavery as being “contra naturam,” immediately followed by the observation that it was an “institution of the ius gentium (law common to all peoples)” and what “natural reason prescribed for all men.”6 There was a crucial novelty in the development of slavery in the early modern Atlantic world. From the end of the seventeenth century the institution’s most rapid growth was occurring under the auspices of the very societies whose rulers had declared their own realms to be “slave-free” zones. The two most important of these were the French and British empires. In this respect the two kingdoms were in an analogous position, although there were repeated attempts to create statutes of exception to the freedom principle in France. There is also general agreement that, in cultural terms, antislavery sentiment was growing in both nations by the last third of the eighteenth century.7 Antislavery societies emerged in the late 1780s. The first European abolitionist societies were founded in Britain (1787), and in France (1788). The development of their overseas slave systems also ran along parallel economic paths throughout the century between England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the French Revolution of 1789. Toward the end of that century their combined tropical colonies received seventy percent of the Africans landed in the Americas and for eighty percent of the sugar exported to Europe.8 Both nations appeared to be on a par with regard to expressions of cultural discomfort with, and economic interest in, the Atlantic slave system. Nevertheless, the two nations were to have very divergent encounters with slavery and antislavery in the following century. After the British and French societies crossed the threshold to the formation of national abolitionist societies, their civil political and legal systems offered a striking contrast. By the late eighteenth-century British abolitionists could use mechanisms of a public sphere still unavailable to their counterparts across the Channel. Anglo-Americans on both sides of the Atlantic claimed, and were envied for, the most highly developed civil societies in the world. In Britain, a network of provincial newspapers circulated and nationalized an evolving dialogue between private individuals, civil associations and national legislators. Published letters, public meetings, and ongoing parliamentary debates allowed citizens to intervene in public discussion in a manner that was still inconceivable on the Continent. When the Marquis de Lafayette helped to found the French Société des Amis des Noirs in February 1788, he cautioned Wilberforce that France lacked “the blessed advantages of a National 157

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry Assembly,” an institution that “seemed so remote as to preclude the citizens of France from uniting in expressions of sympathy.” France’s Royal Censor gave the Amis permission to publish only news about abolitionist activity on the English side of the Channel.9 Compared to their British counterparts, French abolitionists also lacked far more than a national legislature at their abolitionist point of departure. During the 1780s Great Britain was enjoying one of the outstanding moments in its economic history. British abolitionism made its great breakthrough at a moment of record-breaking prosperity and economic growth in agriculture, manufacturing, and commerce. It dominated the world’s oceanic trade in every direction. A barrier-lowering commercial treaty with France in 1787 formed the capstone to expanding markets in Europe. Month after month British newspapers reported the descent of their erstwhile military enemies and economic rivals on both sides of the Atlantic. Their pages recorded agricultural dearth, economic recession, financial bankruptcy, and political crises in the republics of the United States, the Netherlands and, above all, in the kingdom of France.10

Age of Revolution and War Perhaps the most striking difference between Britain and France at the end of the 1780s was the relation of their political institutions and civil societies to the birth of abolitionism. In Inventing Human Rights, Hunt asserts that mundane collective appeals for rights, like “petitions,”“bills,” and the discourse of ordinary politics seem somehow “inadequate” in comparison with the great Declarations of 1776 and 1789. The very word “Declaration” had less of a “musty, submissive air than the ordinary stages of the legislative process.” Declarations were bold, aggressive, and total, signifying the intent to “seize sovereignty.”11 Like the words on the American dollar bill, they voiced aspirations to create a novus ordo secularum. We have already noticed, however, that neither the two bold Declarations nor the four Constitutions of the United States and France between 1776 and 1793 seized the opportunity to openly attack slavery. This failure certainly did not occur because their authors neglected to think about the institution. We know that Jefferson’s famous draft article denouncing the British slave trade was deleted from the final document. We also know that in France during the famous night of August 4, 1789, when the general assault on privileges was launched, a proposal to extend the emancipation of metropolitan serfs to colonial slaves was one of the few proposals that aroused considerable disapproval. It disappeared from the summary list of reforms composed the next morning.12 “Human Rights” may seem more robust than many other terms used to designate the inherent claims human beings have upon each other. British abolitionists did not embed their demands in an attempt to “seize sovereignty.” 158

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry However, their claims were, in a fundamental sense, equally comprehensive and global. Their slogan, “Humanity, Justice and Sound Policy” was less strident but not less universalistic. Of the triad, “humanity” was more frequently associated with demands for slave trade abolition than were “justice” or “sound policy.” The British abolitionists’ emblematic medallion, bearing the inscription “Am I not a Man and a Brother?” was intended to arouse hostility against the violation of enslaved Africans human rights. The most important aspect of the comparison is that the British abolitionist movement, innovatively moving from mass popular mobilization and petitioning to parliamentary investigations, bills, and enactments, succeeded to a degree unmatched by the Amis des Noirs. The British campaign in 1788 accounted for more than half of the petitions reaching Parliament during that session. Their agitation absorbed a share of the public sphere that was never remotely replicated anywhere in Europe. A year later in France a great collection of national grievances was gathered in the cahiers de doléances. Its few dozen calls for action against slavery and the slave trade were completely overridden by the multitude of other demands. In Britain, both the supporters and opposers abolition recognized the singular triumph of abolitionism in public opinion. During the making of the first constitution in revolutionary France, it was the defenders of the slave system who carried the day in organization and agitation.13 In Britain the defeat of the first bill to abolish the slave trade in 1791 produced two major responses among the British public. The first was an intensification of petitioning. By the time a second bill reached Parliament early in 1792, the number of petitions had increased five-fold over 1788. They favored abolition by a proportion of a-hundred to one. The number of signers also increased sevenfold, from over sixty thousand in 1788 to upwards of four hundred thousand in the campaign of 1791–1792.14 British civil society mobilization also broadened and deepened during this second wave. For many, Parliament’s first negative vote in 1791 symbolized its failure to heed the will of the people. Now “the people” had to “manifest to Europe and the World that public spirit, that virtuous abhorrence of SLAVERY, to which a British SENATE is unable – or unwilling to aspire.” A mass sugar boycott, was launched. Its “antisaccarite” campaign was directed towards families and women. It appealed to women’s sensitivity to family destruction wrought by the slave trade. It offered women an indirectly political role as household managers, giving them a means of overcoming their gendered ineligibility to sign petitions. The appeal specifically intended its injunctions to rally children to the cause, enhancing their education through abstention. Decades later women entered campaigns as full-fledged petitioners for slave emancipation.15 The 1792 abolition Bill successfully passed in the House of Commons only to be stymied in the House of Lords. Thereafter the great Saint-Domingue Revolution and conflict against the radicalized French republic constrained 159

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry further popular mobilization for a decade. Indeed, precisely at the moment of maximum repression of British civil society in the 1790s, British military forces were massively deployed to combat French revolutionary emancipation in the Caribbean. Moreover, during the 1790s British slavery became the most rapidly expanding slave system in the world. Only after the French military disasters on both land (Saint-Domingue 1803) and sea (Trafalgar 1805) secured the British empire, did Britain’s abolitionists feel sufficiently confident to revive civil mobilization against the slave trade. In June 1806 both Houses of Parliament united in declaring the British slave trade “contrary to the principles of ‘justice, humanity and sound policy.’” (This was the same triad that Prime Minister William Pitt had employed at the very outset in 1788, when requesting parliament to investigate the slave trade.) In retrospect petitions and bills based upon claims to humanity might strike historians as “submissive.” But in 1807 slaveholders found the term to be potentially so inflammatory that their final plea was to have the words “humanity” and “justice” deleted from the preamble to the Slave Trade Abolition Act.16 By the time that British abolition was enacted after eighteen years of debate, the French empire had gone through a full cycle from slavery to emancipation to slavery. Until 1791 the Amis des Noirs lost the battle to place abolitionism high on the French legislative agenda, much less in the French constitution. The Amis’s attempts to gain traction for abolition could not have come at a less propitious moment. The tropical colonies’ share of French imperial trade was at an all time peak. Moreover, during the period between the convening of the Estates-General in 1789 and the implementation of the first French constitution in 1791, France’s overseas slaves were probably the quietest and most productive labor force in the empire. The five reported conspiracies or revolts in the French Caribbean before the Saint-Domingue revolution paled in comparison with the thousands of insurrectionary outbreaks in metropolitan France. The prosperity of the slave system allowed pro-slavery spokesmen to decouple the “national interest” from “humanity,” and to identify abolitionists as either visionary or anti-patriotic.17 The distance between the civil societies’ approach to slavery in Britain and France is best illustrated by their divergent responses to one initial impact of the Saint-Domingue revolution. In Britain, the rising price of sugar following the uprising dismayed British abstainers. It nullified much of the potential economic pressure of abstention on British West Indian sugar planters. In Paris, reaction to the price rise registered differently. During the winter of 1792, Parisian crowds were “enraged” at having to pay twice the usual price for sugar. They regarded it as an essential item in their consumption. In a taxation populaire they sacked a major warehouse, selling sugar to participants at the pre-revolutionary “fair price.” During the discussion that followed at the radical Jacobin Society, not a single speaker mentioned the link of the soaring price to the slave revolution; nor did anyone admonish the rioters for coveting slave-grown produce.18 160

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry The rapidly shifting outcomes of revolutionary conflict resulted in dramatic transformations in the status and treatment of the slaves, ex-slaves, and re-enslaved in various parts of the French overseas empire between 1789 and 1815. There is little evidence to suggest widespread French popular mobilization for abolition in the period leading up to French slave emancipation in 1794, even in the radical Jacobin Club. In 1793 a petition of Paris’s free colored men to the Convention was not even mentioned in the Club’s Journal de la Montagne. The Convention’s abolition decree on February 4, 1794, resulted from a sudden policy shift in response to events in Saint-Domingue. Civic metropolitan practice and legal protection in the colonies did not converge following emancipation (16 pluviôse an II). Even under the Constitution of the Year III (1795), which formally declared the colonies to be “integral parts of the nation and subject to the same laws and the same constitution” as metropolitan France, the new colonial citizens never enjoyed the full legal protections that prevailed in the metropole. Post-emancipation colonial rule generally “centered on the surveillance and control of laboring bodies by decrees that would have been illegal in France.”19 Only in Saint-Domingue did the fragility of French control in the face of Spanish and British hostilities lead to the colony’s virtual autonomy under Toussaint Louverture. Despite a flurry of metropolitan festivals celebrating emancipation immediately after of 16 pluviôse, the Directory’s shifts, evasions, and nullifications of full legal implementation in the years that followed emancipation were not influenced by any popular mobilizations. Even before the Napoleonic restoration of slavery in 1802, metropolitan legislators continued to differentiate colonial from domestic citizenship. There was a brief revival of the Amis des Noirs in 1797, but without a hint of civil society mobilization. The overseas colonies empire resembled “an appendage of metropolitan soil subject to permanent siege rule.”20 The interaction of the two Franco-Caribbean theaters of revolution mutually disrupted civil societies on both sides of the Atlantic. In the colonies rulers and leaders attempted to fill the juridical and jurisdictional voids left by the shifting tides of revolutionary upheaval and the fortunes of external invasions. In Toussaint Louverture’s constitution of 1801, three basic elements of civil society were formally prohibited: the free movement of individuals from plantations; the right to public assembly; and the right of association. Most inhabitants of plantations were under regimes of iron-clad discipline and military supervision. One long-term legacy of the revolutionary conflict was a critically fragmented civil society. France was similarly afflicted by revolutionary upheaval and external conflict if not by major foreign military occupation before 1814. Civil society was unable to coalesce around stable alternatives regarding slavery during the decade long struggle in the colonies. The fact that the campaign for human rights and the Amis des Noirs became identified with the Girondin initially drove faction in the French legislature initially induced many radical Jacobins 161

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry to join with white colonists in identifying the overseas slave rebellions with the enemies of the revolution. The subsequent association of abolition abroad with the radical terror in Paris and the Vendée peasantry in the provinces made overseas emancipation as congruent with narratives of murderous repression as of liberation. The ebb and flow of military mobilizations were chiefly responsible for the successes and failures of attempts to determine the divergent fate of slaves in the French empire. Napoleon engineered the greatest single anti-abolitionist victory in the Caribbean, re-enslaving tens of thousands of French citizens in 1802. The following year his troops suffered a disastrous defeat while attempting to re-impose slavery in Saint-Domingue. The suppression of all independent civil society and open political opposition allowed both of these events to occur without any popular metropolitan manifestation of approval or disapproval.21 Well before 1802 the first French Republic demonstrated its disinterest in universalizing slave emancipation. In 1795 the French army occupied and sponsored a revolutionary Batavian Republic in the Netherlands. It made no attempt to have its new satellite republic emancipate Dutch colonial slaves, even on the island of Saint-Martin, which the French and Dutch shared jointly. Nor did the French pressure the Dutch to expand the application of the Batavian Republic’s own Declaration of Rights beyond the shores of the Netherlands. The Batavian National Constituent Assembly declined to support a motion for overseas slave emancipation on the grounds that any such action “might very well lead to a violent insurrection as bad as anything in Saint Domingue,” and “was bound to bring ruin to many virtuous and patriotic burghers.” In revolutionary Batavia, the republic had different priorities than those proclaimed on 16 pluviôse in Paris. What remained a colonial limbo in the French empire under the Directory became a full-blown reversion to enslavement under Napoleon Bonaparte. Only in Haiti, where Napoleon’s army suffered a catastrophic defeat, did the abolition of slavery remain enshrined within the new nation’s fundamental law. Haiti joined metropolitan Britain and Canada in becoming “free soil” zones for foreign slaves who entered its jurisdiction. Haitians placed a lessthan-universalistic legal limitation on their antislavery refuge. Full citizenship and the right to own property were extended only to non-white foreigners. Moreover, migrants, like natives, were probably subject to compulsory labor on plantations or public works and to military service. In this regard the postliberation status of Haitian peasants bore some resemblance to the “apprenticeship system” in Sierra Leone, Britain’s new colony on the other side of the Atlantic.22

Post-War By the end of the Napoleonic wars Britain had established an identity as the principal global agent against the transatlantic slave trade. The British 162

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry government began to wage post-war naval, diplomatic, and ideological confrontations to constrict the trade. Three times before Napoleon’s defeat the British unsuccessfully attempted to use preliminary peace negotiations (1801, 1806, 1814) to open talks on a joint termination of the Anglo-French slave trades. Negotiations were immediately reopened with the restored Bourbon monarchy in 1814. Lord Castlereagh, the British Foreign Secretary, believed that he had overcome a major hurdle to international abolition when Louis XVIII agreed to continue the slave trade for only five more years. News of this extension, however, produced yet another wave of national petitions in British society. Once more the campaign produced the largest turnout of signatures in British history. Newspapers reported subscribers in the hundreds of thousands. Ultimately, 1,370 petitions reached parliament. In a nation with no more than four million eligible signers, between a fifth and a third of them signified their disapproval of the offending slave trade agreement with France. For Britain’s Foreign Minister, the final total (1,370 petitions against and none in favor of the article) signaled only one thing: “the nation was bent upon this object . . . Ministers must make it the basis of their policy.”23 Britain’s first postwar achievement was an international declaration against the slave trade at the Congress of Vienna. The article did not specifically declare the slave trade to be a violation of human rights or refer to past national declarations. Rather it stated that “the slave trade has been considered by just and enlightened men in all ages, as repugnant to the principles of humanity and universal morality.” This formulation allowed supporters of even the most traditional institutions to retrospectively invent a tradition of long-term consensual opposition to the slave trade and slavery. The article appealed in the mode of British abolitionist rhetoric to the principle of “humanity,” rather than to “human rights.”24 With an oblique glance at and beyond British civil society, the assembled Congress credited “the public voice, in all civilized countries” for “calling aloud” for suppression. The public mobilization of one civil society was thus seamlessly grafted onto all “civilized countries.” The Congress could remain silent about mainland Europe’s silence before and during the gestation of the article. The negotiators also hedged the declaration with the observation that long-ingrained prejudices required patience to allow due time for all nations to come into conformity with universal compliance. The condemnation of the slave trade was the only article in the treaty that offered any recognition whatsoever that a “world” beyond Europe had claims on those at Vienna. Still more significantly, the article allowed the time for the French, in particular, to become reconciled to a cause now imbricated with national humiliation and defeat, both by ex-slaves across the Atlantic and by victorious enemies in France. The British nation had passed through the “Age of Revolution” without enduring a major revolution, civil war, or foreign conquest. France had endured them all. It would take decades before another French abolitionist society could again be founded in France.25 163

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry French civil society also viewed the post-revolutionary era in another way that distinguished it from the nation’s offshore neighbor. The British had passed through the entire Age of Revolution without a single major slave uprising within their own colonies. The French experienced their Caribbean revolutions mostly through the eyes and tales of returning colonial refugees and soldiers. Stories of personal suffering gave their hearers a far sharper impression of atrocities endured than those inflicted by their ex-colonial fellow citizens. For decades the Haitian Revolution was virtually a taboo subject in French legislative discussions of the slave trade – too horrific to need or warrant discussion. When the French government finally succeeded in pressuring isolated Haiti to pay reparations in exchange for recognition of its independence in 1825, the only voices raised in France were those complaining of the insufficiency of the compensation settlement. No association in France expressed reservations about the morality of extracting reparations from impoverished ex-slaves who had been the victims of systematic brutality and violence for generations longer than their former masters and enemies.26 Even after the abolition of their second slavery, in 1848, the French government resisted allowing the warships of another nation to board suspected slavers sailing under the sovereignty of their national flag. A recalcitrant state diminished the effectiveness of international patrol arrangements. Fearing outraging French opinion, French governments helped to bury two British post-war multinational treaty initiatives. At the height of British abolitionist influence the French legislature rejected Britain’s final, and nearly successful, effort to negotiate a multinational treaty for naval patrols, armed with a mutual right to search.27 A major Anglo-French crisis in the Middle East intruded before the treaty could be ratified. Resentful French legislators, urged on by the French press, forced their government to withdraw the Right to Search treaty from consideration for ratification. Even abolitionists like Alexis de Tocqueville and Victor Schoelcher refused to support a treaty that sanctioned British naval inspections of vessels sailing under a French flag. The popular outburst over the slave trade was a significant setback for the French abolitionist cause. Foreign minister François Guizot lamented that he also had often fought popular perspectives but never a more general or stronger one. Fearing a possible outburst of violence, he banned a public meeting for an Anglo-French antislavery conference in Paris. None was ever held before French slave emancipation. 28 While a new generation of French abolitionists was balancing their conflicting commitments to abolition and nationalist pride, British abolitionists deepened their nation’s commitment to abolishing their imperial slave system and to globalizing their policy of ending transoceanic slave trades. At the metropolitan level this meant again expanding active public lobbying and replenishing the reservoir of petition signers. In the period between the great petition of 1814, British colonial slave emancipation (1833), and 164

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry post-emancipation “Apprenticeship” (1837–38), the sources of subscribers expanded in a number of directions. The religious cohort shifted more decisively to the ranks of non-conformist Protestants. Methodists, Baptists, and Congregationalists were all experiencing their most rapid rate of growth. By the 1830s the pool of signatories in Ireland included both Protestants and Catholics. The press noted the appearance of Jewish abolitionist in London and stressed the ecumenical breadth of abolitionism in Britain. Gender boundaries were also breached. As pioneers in modern mass petitioning, British women came into their own as organizers and signers in the 1830s. Their greatest single petition, loaded with more than 180,000 names, became the most widely publicized abolitionist document delivered to parliament in a half-century of mass mobilizations. By the end of the 1830s women had probably overtaken men as signers of abolitionist petitions to Parliament and addresses to the queen. As the campaign for slave emancipation reached its climax in 1833, working class adherents also became vocal supporters at petition rallies.29 Perhaps the most surprising additions to the ranks of British abolitionists before emancipation were those living in the West Indies. They could not form associations to agitate or petition for their own freedom on the very site where their status constituted the foundations of their masters’ authority; between Waterloo and emancipation in 1833 their entry into the public sphere came in the form of uprisings. Not coincidentally, all major British slave insurrections came in the wake of parliamentary debates or of governmental initiatives designed to limit the arbitrary powers of masters or to ameliorate the slaves’ conditions. The British slaves’ interventions contrasted with the pattern of earlier uprisings in the French islands. The major British colonial uprisings in Barbados (1816), Demerara (1823) and Jamaica (1831), involved tens of thousands of slaves, a total only exceeded by those involved in the Saint-Domingue Revolution. As David Brion Davis observes, the combined number of whites killed in the three British revolts was less than twenty. This was not even a third of the number killed in Nat Turner’s brief revolt in Virginia in 1831. Fewer whites were killed in all three uprisings than in the opening weeks of the revolt in Saint-Domingue. The toll certainly did not equal one-tenth of one percent of the total who died in the Saint-Domingue revolution.30 Beginning, with the Demerara insurgency in 1823 the rebels took care to preserve the lives of all masters whom they took into custody. When negotiating with the forces of order sent to quell the uprising, they presented documents from their captives testifying to their good treatment. The most striking novelty of the Demerara uprising was how it was used by abolitionists in Britain. They stridently compared the uprising to an English-style workers’ action. Self-disciplined laborers had, in their view, behaved no differently from fellow Christians and British workers at home. If the language of abolitionists was not that of universal human rights, it was clearly the 165

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry vocabulary of a common humanity and a shared civilization. The Governor of the colony reprieved the rebel’s leader for his “good behavior, intelligence, and usefulness,” and for his “humanity to whites” during the insurrection.31 Once again, “humanity” was the British proxy for human rights. The British abolitionists successfully reframed slave resistance as normal civilized behavior under the stress of captivity. What most deeply impressed and inspired abolitionists abroad was what happened on the day of emancipation in the British colonies on August 1, 1834. For William Lloyd Garrison, across the Atlantic, it was “the greatest miracle of the age.” For Frederick Douglass, Americans had “discovered in the progress of the antislavery movement that England’s passage to freedom is not through rivers of blood. . . . What is bloody revolution in France is peaceful reformation in England. The friends and enemies of . . . freedom, meet not at the barricades . . . but on the broad platform of Exeter Hall” [the abolitionists’ customary site of assembly]. For Alexis de Tocqueville, across the Channel, the day of emancipation – and the decade thereafter – did not produce “a single insurrection;” nor did it “cost the life of a single man” in colonies where blacks were twelve times as numerous as whites. From the perspective of French and American abolitionists that was indeed a civil transformation.32 Because French abolitionists continued to wrestle with the ghosts of revolutions past and future revolutions, they hesitated to mobilize the civil society of their nation. The French Society for the Abolition of Slavery, founded in the wake of British emancipation (1834), continued the Amis tradition of a small elite organization. Two French petition campaigns in the 1840s, not initiated by the Abolitionist Society, never accounted for more than one percent of supporters mobilized by the British. The first petition (1844) seemed to reinforce the distance between vocal urban workers and silent bourgeois and peasants. The workers of Paris and Lyon who organized the petition welcomed female signatories, but women remained a small contingent among the signers. French religious mobilization was equally modest. Except for one petition signed by six hundred Catholic clergy, the French Hierarchy evidenced a studied neutrality towards the institution of slavery – rendering it unto Caesar as a secular legal institution. Only on the eve of the Revolution of 1848 did a Parisian Catholic newspaper initiate a call for a more coordinated mass petition. The British movement had already set the bar so high, however, that those who wished to maintain the status quo could dismissively ask, where were the voices of millions of French peasants and workers aligned with those of “liberal théoriciens?”33 Perhaps the most significant indicator of the lack of popular pressure for slave emancipation came during the French Revolution of 1848. With conservatives momentarily immobilized, the Provisional Government permitted Victor Schoelcher to prepare a decree of emancipation. It was deliberately promulgated before the National Constituent Assembly convened. Schoelcher feared that this body, elected by universal male suffrage, might actually make 166

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry the passage of slave emancipation hinge upon offering prior compensation to their slaveowners, on the British model. This requirement might well have indefinitely postponed emancipation, pending metropolitan economic recovery and fiscal stability.34 During the same period, British abolitionists constituted the hub of a widening movement against the Atlantic slave trade and world slavery. They hosted two international conferences in 1840 and 1843. They formed the first durable NGO for monitoring international slavery. They subsidized and distributed literature worldwide. British abolitionists and residents abroad were urged to encourage the formation of small antislavery societies in foreign countries. They dispatched agents and missionaries to engage subjects and citizens to ensure that the “free air” principle prevailed everywhere under British sovereignty. In France, the legacy of counter-civil society military and revolutionary mobilization continued well beyond the ending of colonial slavery. In the first decade of the Second French Empire the second French antislavery society vanished. The American Civil War and the political liberalization of the empire opened the door to a modest abolitionist revival. In 1867 the antislavery societies of Britain, France, and Spain inaugurated an international convention in Paris. Its delegations included representatives from the western European metropoles and colonies in both Africa and the Caribbean as well as Haiti and a number of South American nations. The Liberal opposition predominated but the Haitian delegate was heard for the first time. Nevertheless, the specter of France’s turbulent past still haunted the proceedings. Neither the Amis des Noirs nor any of the revolutionaries who had decreed the first emancipation received personal recognition. The imperial government oversaw the proceedings to the extent of deciding which papers could be orally delivered. Only supplemental written amendments allowed figures like John Brown and Ogē to be honored in the written record. Only William Lloyd Garrison’s spontaneous speech, delivered in English allowed him to conclude with: “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” to the echo of rousing cheers. The subsequent intervention of another war and Parisian uprising postponed the appearance of a French premier at an antislavery meeting until the consolidation of the Third Republic in 1881.35 Comparing abolitionism in Britain and France through the lens of their civil societies can be usefully extended beyond those once-leading empires of slavery. Jeremy Adelman, for example has recently suggested that abolition in mainland Spanish America occurred not as a result of revolutionary challenges, but as a byproduct of the breakdown of their civil societies. As in Haiti, the violent fragmentation of some Hispanic colonial societies continued long after wartime anti-slavery measures had liberated many slaves and promised gradual emancipation to the others. Exploring the civil society mobilization in the Brazilian and American cases offers other comparative opportunities for further research.36 167

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry Toward the end of the nineteenth century, when British abolitionist power to mobilize massively had waned, the British Antislavery Society continued to lobby its government for international pressure on slavery and the slave trades. As late as the first quarter of the nineteenth century, British courts still unreservedly reconfirmed the traditional principle that the “law of nations” protected foreign slavers against peacetime seizures unless covered by mutual treaties of inspection.37 In addition to Britain’s ever-growing network of bilateral treaties with other sovereign states, a new inference of the “civilizing mission” allowed Britain to pursue suspected slavers not sailing under flags of “civilized” states. By the time that international lawyers began to organize themselves as a scholarly association in the 1870s, even Continental jurists could no longer accept the conclusion that where “the slave trade had not been outlawed by positive treaty it could only be deemed lawful” under the law of nations.38 For a new generation of self-consciously “international” lawyers, the legal status of slavery or the slave trade could no longer be allowed to depend upon variable cultural norms but upon human nature. Human nature was imagined to be evolving towards antislavery throughout contemporary Europe. An imperialist and “orientalist” perspective identified antislavery as a cutting edge of the civilizing process. As with human rights discourse, antislavery claims based upon “humanity” could be deployed to justify colonialism, imperialism, and many other forms of domination and coercion. At Brussells in 1890 the nations involved in carving up Africa into European imperial dominions erstwhile empires of slavery presented themselves as empires of antislavery. Of course, it still required dedicated abolitionists to see to it that those outside the fold of civilization adhered to the new norm. This globalization of norms is nowhere better illustrated than in Japan. The Japanese Meiji Restoration literally established its antislavery and civilizational bona fides in 1872 via a legal case. The case stemmed from the involuntary transportation of Chinese coolies in transit through Yokohama en route to Peru. It was not accidental that a coolie passenger sought refuge on a British warship. Nor that the crew handed the escapee over to British consular officials. Nor that the British Consul decided to intervene and to inspect the escapee’s ship. Nor that many other westerners in Yokohama, including the representatives of “Germany, Italy, Denmark, and France were far from enthusiastic about the idea of encouraging the Japanese to interfere in foreign commerce.” Nor that for the trial, the British Consul arranged for a fellow Briton to advise Japanese judge Ōe Taku, on the bench. Nor that both the ship’s captain and the Chinese laborers aboard his ship came to be represented by British barristers. Nor that the legal proceedings were conducted primarily in English, a language not understood even by the presiding Japanese judge. Significantly, the Meiji government had only just begun the process of creating a modern legal system, and Ōe Taku was the highest-ranking Japanese official in Yokahama. In rendering his final judgment in 1872, Ōe sounded 168

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry remarkably like England’s Lord Chief Justice Mansfield in 1772, stating that slavery was “a state which is so repugnant to all sense of natural justice that it has ever been held that it can exist or be recognized only by force of express law, and which there is no obligation on the part of a sovereign state either in the law or comity of nations to in any manner assist or countenance.”39 In a single sentence judge Ōe established Japan’s credentials as a civilized, antislavery, sovereign state. By 1900 the slow death of slavery through the march of civilization seemed to be as inexorable to historians as it was to international culture. There scarcely seemed to be a need for a new international declaration of human rights as a call to action. “Anomalies,” such as the residues of the slave trade in Africa and the Middle East or slave-like systems of forced labor in King Leopold’s Congo or Portuguese Africa, could be scrutinized by international exposure and pressure. The ghost of the old popular mobilizations of the British antislavery tradition could occasionally be mobilized into demands for action. In the decades before the First World War Great Britain witnessed the largest resurgence of anti-slavery extra-parliamentary protest in nearly fifty years. The 1906 British parliamentary general election was to be British non-conformity’s last hurrah in a major humanitarian mobilization against atrocities in the Congo. The fusion of “humanity” with “human rights” concerning slavery had occurred long since. As Roger Casement wrote to MP Charles Dilke in 1904 concerning the Congo: “It is this aspect of the Congo question–its abnormal injustice and extraordinary invasion, at this stage of civilized life, of fundamental human rights, which to my mind calls for the formation of a special body and the formulation of a very special appeal to the humanity of England.”40 In the twentieth century, however, the history of slavery took another turn, this time in Europe. In 1944 there were more slaves and “less-than-slaves” toiling within Europe itself than there had been in all of the Americas a century earlier. Once again this system emerged under the authority of a militarized society. In its wake came another international declaration of human rights, in 1948. In contrast to the two earlier Declarations, the third did not emerge at the anticipated dawn of a new and more perfect world order. It came in grim reaction to a vast counter-revolution against the fundamental communality of human beings. The reappearance of slavery, the slave trade, and mass annihilation in Europe – the erstwhile heartland of civilization – triggered the reaffirmation of an international consensus on core human rights. In the Universal Declaration, slavery properly took its place at the forefront of the wrongs.41

Genealogies of Human Rights For Hunt, the invention of human rights is to be found at the opening of the national revolutions in the United States and France. Moyn argues vigorously 169

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry against embedding the contemporary “human rights movement” in a long durée. A truly global movement, he posits, emerged only in the last quarter of the twentieth century. For both historians the century and a half that followed the Age of Revolution were dominated by worldwide nation-building projects that prevented human rights from emerging as a dominant global movement. What of the alternative banner of humanitarianism, of which antislavery was emblematic? For Moyn, as for Hunt, early campaigns against the slave trade and slavery at home and abroad “that look more like contemporary human rights” campaigns were “almost never framed as rights issues.” They were rhetorically anemic and ideologically timid. Antislavery “served better,” Moyn concludes, “to justify the deployment of compassionate aid without undermining the imperialist attitudes and projects with which it was normally entangled.”42 Whatever the differences between the British abolitionist and current human rights projects two centuries later, both share a number of significant characteristics. The abolitionists’ innovative definition of the slave trade as a “crime against humanity” clearly identified every nationally-sponsored transatlantic project as an assault on the human status: “Am I not a man and a brother?” was an affirmation rather than a question. Against both nationalist and imperialist projects antislavery asserted that certain relationships were of an overriding global concern and that the acquisition of human property by the citizens of any nation should be subject to extra-national jurisdiction. Even the establishment of international “Mixed Commissions” on both sides of the Atlantic was a very modest harbinger of that assertion.43 Interventions in favor of enslaved captives of foreign nationals were in most respects, imperialist. But it cannot be overlooked that this long-term policy cost its principal implementers and citizens a substantial expenditure of lives and treasure. The interventions in favor of the enslaved were explicitly sanctioned in the language of universal morality.44 Finally, a comparative perspective suggests the importance of civil society activism in enhancing both the democratization and universalization of rights. It also suggests how much this activism is conditioned by political cultures and constraints within and beyond national boundaries. The social and organizational means to achieve the ending of the slave trade was grounded in civil society mobilizations both domestic and transnational. Launched almost simultaneously in Great Britain, America and France its participants conceived of themselves as branches of a cosmopolitan enterprise.45 The strongest branch achieved a preponderance and durability in the public sphere that was not matched for half a century by any other contemporary human rights movement. Analysts of the modern social movement like the late Charles Tilly and Sidney Tarrow now see British abolitionism as a pioneer in collective action, forecasting the modern social movement that has proliferated so widely during the past two centuries. In this sense abolitionism was the harbinger of the global human rights movement.46 170

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry Notes I wish to thank Cheryl Welch, Stanley Engerman and Kevin Grant for their very helpful comments and suggestions. 1. (New York: Norton, 2007), Appendices. 2. Ibid., 21 ff. 3. Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), ch. 1, esp.  41–42. Moyn sees Hunt as a paradigmatic proponent of the “idol of origins,” projecting the causes of a phenomenon back into an invented tradition. In contrast, Moyn denies the importance of precedents for the current human rights movement, making it exclusively contingent on the collapse of alternative international moral perspectives in the 1970s. For Hunt, the long nineteenth century was a parenthesis in which nationalism and imperialism detoured the potentially universalist radicalism of the Age of Revolution’s “rights” discourse. Tellingly half of Inventing is devoted to the pre-abolitionist development of sentiment against cruelty and inhumane treatment. Thereafter, while the British abolitionist movement is allotted a page for keeping alive “the flame of human rights for more than century and a half, a decade of Franco-Caribbean emancipation receives nine times as much attention. Moyn views the same extended period as one in which rights talk was both latent and bound within the very nation-building projects of the Age of Revolution. Abolitionism, however, even anticipates the “shocking groundswell” so-central to Moyn’s account of the emergence of the contemporary human rights movement. See Seymour Drescher, “The Shocking Birth of British Abolitionism,” Slavery and Abolition, 33:4 (2012), 571–593. For Moyn human rights were perpetuated only within nationalism and imperialism. So intertwined were the rights of man and the rights of citizens in the search for national sovereignty that in the wake of World War II, Hannah Arendt treated them as a historical conjuncture: “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man.” (See Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1951), Part Two, chapter 9. 4. For an alternative interpretation, see Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery (London: Verso, 1988); and Blackburn, The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights (London: Verso, 2011), esp. 5, 178 ff., 477–488. In this volume Blackburn notes the potential connection between human rights and the ending of slavery, especially in relation to the Haitian Revolution and the late twentieth centuries. (See ch. 8 and 478–480.) 5. See Sue Peabody and Keila Grinberg, “Free Soil: The Generation and Circulation of an Atlantic Legal Principle,” Slavery and Abolition 32:3 (September 2011), 331–39: and Seymour Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), ix–x, 23–24, 28, 25, 66–67, 93–97, 100–105, 134, 238, 398. 6. Seymour Drescher and Paul Finkelman, “Slavery”, in The Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law, ed. Bardo Fassbender and Anne Peters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 890–916. 7. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966). Among the various long-term explanations for this emerging western sentiment see, inter alia, The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation, ed. Thomas Bender, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), reflecting long historiographical debates on grounding the cultural emergence of antislavery in economic development. On the western edge of the Atlantic, abolitionist societies were founded

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8.

9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

almost simultaneously in a number of the early United States. At the national level civil society mobilization entailed both abolitionist and anti-abolitionist movements. For some comparative perspectives, see, inter alia, David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Blackburn, American Crucible, ch. 8 and 12; Drescher, Abolition, ch. 9 and 11. On the slave trade, see David Eltis and David Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), and, Voyages: The TransAtlantic Slave Trade Database, http://www.slavevoyages.ord/tast/index.faces. On the supply of North Atlantic sugar see S. Drescher, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 77, Table 16, “Sources of North Atlantic Sugar Imports, 1787–1806. Bodleian Library, Oxford: Wilberforce Papers, Marquis de Lafayette to William Wilberforce, Paris, February 25, 1788. See Drescher, “Shocking Birth, “1–23; David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution 1770–1823 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975); Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); J. R. Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Antislavery: The Mobilization of British Public Opinion Against the Slave Trade. 1787–1807 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); Iain Whyte, Scotland and the Abolition of Black Slavery, 1756–1838 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006); Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); and Blackburn, American Crucible. For a major alternative interpretation, see, inter alia, Blackburn’s American Crucible, and his, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery 1776–1848 (London: Verso, 1988). Hunt, Inventing, 114–115. See John Markoff, The Abolition of Feudalism: Peasants, Lords, and Legislators in the French Revolution (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania University Press, 1996), 431 n. Compare Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, 53–54, 70–84; Gilbert Shapiro and John Markoff, Revolutionary Demands: A Content Analyses of the Cahiers de Doléances of 1789 (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1998), appendix I, “The Subject Codes,” 436–474; and David Patrick Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies, (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002), 160–161. Oldfield, Popular Politics, ch. 4; Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, ch. 3–5; and The British Slave Trade: Abolition, Parliament and People, ed. Stephen Farrell, et al (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007). On abstention see W[illiam] A[llen], The Duty of Abstaining from . . . . West India Produce . . . January 12, (1792) p. iii “advertisement.” On British Women, see Clare Midgley, Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780–1870 (London: Routledge, 1992), 18–19; Oldfield, Popular Politics, 135–41. For the British attempt to suppress the Franco-Caribbean slave liberation, see David Patrick Geggus, Slavery, War and Revolution: The British Occupation of Saint Domingue, 1793–1798 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). On British wartime policy see Michael Duffy, “The French Revolution and British Attitudes to the West Indian Colonies,” in A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean, eds David Barry Gaspar and David Patrick Geggus (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997), 78–101. On the inversion of British and French abolitionist mobilization during the decade after the outbreak of Anglo-French hostilities in Europe and the Caribbean, see Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, 98–99. On the resurgence of abolitionism in

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17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

1806–1807, see Drescher, “Whose Abolition? Popular Pressure and the Ending of the British Slave Trade,” Past and Present, 143 (May 1994), 136–166. On the fate of the abolitionist slogan in 1807, see Stephen Farrell, “‘Contrary to the Principles of Justice, Humanity and Sound Policy’: The Slave Trade Parliamentary Politics and the Abolition Act, 1807,” in The British Slave Trade: Abolition, Parliament and People, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007) 141–171. Compare Geggus’s table of Caribbean Slave Rebellions and Conspiracies in “Slavery, War, and Revolution in the Greater Caribbean, 1789–1815,” in A Turbulent Time, 46–49; and Markoff, Abolition of Feudalism, 271, Fig. 6.1. Markoff counts 4,689 insurrectionary events in France between late 1788 and early 1793 (only rural conflicts). See Women in Revolutionary Paris 1789–1795, Darline Gay Levy et al. eds (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1979), 103–122. For a description of the riots, see also George Rudé, The Crowd in the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 95–98. See Carolyn E. Fick, “The Saint-Domingue Slave Revolution and the Unfolding of Independence, 1791–1804,” in The World of the Haitian Revolution, David Patrick Geggus and Norman Fiering eds. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009), 177–196; quote on 179; and Miranda Frances Spieler, “The Legal Structure of Colonial Rule during the French Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 66 (April 2009): 365–408; quote on 373. On the continuities and transformations wrought by the Haitian Revolution, see Malick W. Ghachem, The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 303–14. Ibid., 398–408, and Jeremy D. Popkin, You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), ch. 10. On popular commemorations in France, see Jean-Claude Halpern, “The Revolutionary Festivals and the Abolition of Slavery in Year II,” in The Abolitions of Slavery from L. F. Sonthonax to Victor Schoelcher 1793, 1794, 1848 (Paris: UNESCO 2003), 155–166. On the brief impact of the revived Société des amis des noirs et des colonies in 1797–1799, see Pernille Røge, “Political Economy and the Reinvention of France’s Colonial System, 1756–1802,” (Ph D diss., Queens’ College, Cambridge University, 2009) 175–179. The last quotation is in Spieler, “The Legal Structure,” 408. See especially three essays in The World of the Haitian Revolution: Malick Ghachem, “The Colonial Vendée,” 156–176; Carolyn E. Fick, “The SaintDomingue Slave Revolution and the Unfolding of Independence, 1791–1804”, 177–196; and Jeremy Popkin, “The French Revolution’s Other Island,” 199–222. Ada Ferrer, “Haiti, Free Soil, and Antislavery in the Revolutionary Atlantic,” American Historical Review 117:1 (2012), 40–65. Paul Michael Kielstra, The Politics of the Slave Trade in Britain and France, 1814– 1848 (New York: Saint Martin’s Press, 2000), 30–31. British and Foreign State Papers, 1815–1816 (London: James Ridgeway, 1838), 292. Lawrence C. Jennings, French Anti-Slavery: The Movement for the Abolition of Slavery in France (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Darrell Meadows, “The Planters of Saint-Domingue 1754–1804: Migration and Exile in the French Revolutionary Atlantic,” (Ph.D. diss., Carnegie Mellon University 2004) 323–340. Kielstra, Politics of the Slave Trade, 150–162. For accounts of the anti-British outburst against the Right to Search and its impact upon French abolitionism, see Paul Michael Kielstra, The Politics of Slave

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29.

30. 31.

32.

33.

Trade Suppression in Britain and France, 1814–1848 (Houndmills: Macmillan, 2000), 160–162, 207–260; and Lawrence C. Jennings, French Reaction to British Slave Emancipation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988) ch. 6, 144–168. At a private gathering, held in lieu of the prohibited assembly, leading British antislavery spokesman emphasized: “It is not, however, gentlemen, as an Englishman I meet you on the present occasion – it is not as a Frenchman I address you. Proud as we may be of these appellations, there is one more sacred and tender-one that links us with the whole human race – that of man! It is as a man sympathizing with his oppressed fellowman – feeling the pressure of his chain, and earnestly desiring his deliverance from bondage, that I address you, and conjure you – by all that is immutable in justice – and by all that is sacred in religion, to urge forward the cause of abolition in this country, as a great debt you owe to mankind; and, above all, to him who is the great father of all, and who commands us to ‘break every yoke and let the oppressed go free’”. (British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Reporter LX, Vol III, no. 7 (April 6, 1842), 49. See, inter alia, Seymour Drescher, From Slavery to Freedom: Comparative Studies in the Rise and Fall of Atlantic Slavery (New York: New York University Press, 1999), ch. 1, 2 and 6; Midgley, Women Against Slavery; on Catholics in Ireland, Christine Kinealy, “The Liberator Daniel O’Connel and Antislavery,” History Today 57:12 (October 2007), 51–57; C. S. Monaco, Moses Levy of Florida: Jewish Utopian and Antebellum Reformer (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 2005); on the limits of the relationship between Irish Catholics and Abolitionists over Ireland, see David Turley, The Culture of English Antislavery, 1780–1860 (London: Routledge, 1991), 150–151. Even the radical working class manifesto on the “Objects of the Productive Classes”, demanded “Free and protected ingress and egress of all persons into and out of all countries” (article 3), and “The rights of humanity to be universally established” (article 15). Davis, Inhuman Bondage, ch. 11, esp. 208–221. Emilia Viotti da Costa, Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood: The Demerara Slave Rebellion of 1823 (New York: Oxford University Press: 1994; Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), ch. 16; S. Drescher, “Civilizing Insurgency: Two Variants of Slave Revolts in the Age of Revolution,” in Who Abolished Slavery? Slave Revolts and Abolitionism, eds. Seymour Drescher and Pieter C. Emmer (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010); 120–132. See William Lloyd Garrison, The Liberator, 20 August 1841; The Frederick Douglass Papers: Speeches, Debates and Interviews 5 vols. ed. John W. Blassingame (New Haven: Yale University Press; 1979–1992), I, 373; Alexis de Tocqueville “On the Emancipation of Slaves” (1843), in Tocqueville and Beaumont on Social Reform, ed. and trans. S. Drescher (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 137–173, esp. 138; 150–154. For a Haitian perspective of the British people’s “wisdom and energy” in exercising their political rights, see “Celebration of Negro Emancipation at Haiti” [from the Manifeste Port-Au-Prince, August 20, 1841] Anti-Slavery Reporter (November 17, 1841), 241–242. See Jennings, French Antislavery, 101–108; Drescher, From Slavery to Freedom, ch. 6, quotation on 178. On the eve of the Revolution of 1848, the French Abolition Society finally attempted to launch a large-scale abolitionist petition campaign by shaming their countrymen: “France blushes to still have slaves when England has no longer had them for more than eight years, when Tunis, Sweden, Wallachia Egypt have successively delivered themselves from this hideous plague; France views slavery as an iniquity and abolition as one of its highest duties, but it has not yet manifested its wishes with enough unity to move the legislature to act

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34. 35. 36.

37. 38.

39.

40.

definitively; even one that would be a belated homage to human dignity.” See Nelly Schmidt, Abolitionnistes de l’esclavage et reformateurs des colonies 1820– 1851 (Paris: Éditions Karthala, 2000) 468–470 (my translation). Schmidt observes that it is erroneous to consider the period immediately prior to the Revolution of 1848 as a rising tide preparatory for definitive emancipation legislation. (ibid., 298). Drescher, From Slavery to Freedom, 180–181. For accounts of the meetings of 1867 and 1881, see Anti-Slavery Reporter 15:9 (September 16, 1867), 193–200; New York Tribune; September 13, 1867, 2; and ibid. May 22, 1881, 2. Jeremy Adelman, “The Rites of Statehood: Violence and Sovereignty in Spanish America,” Hispanic American Historical Review, 90:3 (2010), 391–422; Edwin Cruz-Rodréguez, “A Abolición de la esclavitud y la formación de lo public-polético en Colombia 1821–1851,” Memoria y Sociedad, 12:25 (2008), 57–75; Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, Empire and Antislavery: Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, 1833– 1874 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999); and essays by Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, Albert Garcia Balaña, and Josep M. Fradera in Slavery and Antislavery in Spain’s Atlantic Empire, eds. Josep M. Fradera and Christopher Schmidt-Nowara [editors?] (New York: Berghahn, 2013). On Portuguese abolitionism, see João Pedro Marques, The Sounds of Silence: Nineteenth Century Portugal and the Abolition of the Slave Trade (New York: Berghahn, 2006). Drescher and Finkelman, “Slavery,” 890–905. Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 54–57. On the eve of the international Congress on Africa at Berlin in 1884, the British government decided to propose an anti-slave trade declaration, “making it a crime against the Law of Nations.” It was to be subject to the legal jurisdiction of all civilized nations, whatever the nationality of the accused. See Suzanne Miers, Britain and the ending of the slave trade (New York: Africana Publishing Company, 1975), 171. Daniel V. Botsman, “Freedom without Slavery? ‘Coolies,’ Prostitutes and Outcastes in Meiji Japan’s ‘Emancipation Moment,’” American Historical Review, 116:5 (December 2011),: 1323–1347 (quotes on p. 1331 and 1336. Conversely the European Habsburg empire, lacking a civil antislavery tradition, demonstrated the ease with which mercantile interests could constrain British diplomatic pressure to shut down the seaborne slave trade. See Alison Frank, “The Children of the Desert and the Laws of the Sea: Austria, Great Britain, the Ottoman Empire and the Mediterranean Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century,” American Historical Review, 117:2 (April 2012), 410–444. Casement to Dilke, February 1, 1904, quoted in Kevin Grant, A Civilized Savagery: Britain and the New Slaveries in Africa, 1884–1926 (New York: Routledge, 2005), 62. For details of the Congo campaign see ibid., 66–78. Even before the revolutions of 1848, the British anti-slavery society argued that two generations in Europe and America “had been taught to regard personal freedom as the inalienable right of every man, without distinction of race, clime, or colour, . . . . a principle so potent for good is destined to achieve universal triumph.” See also, inter alia, The Anti-Slavery Reporter 3:25 (January 1848), 1; and, ibid. 4:48 (December 1849), 184; 1:7 (July 1846), 108; 6:66 (June 1851), 94 (evoking both “inalienable rights,” and “rights of humanity;” 2:18 (June 1847), 89; 6:65 (May 1851), 76; 6:70 (October 1851), 165; 3:31 (July 1848), 118; 1:11 (November 1846), 184. The fusion of “humanity” and human rights was a secularized and culturally relativized version of antislavery. Just as they had rights to their bodies, land,

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41. 42. 43.

44.

45.

46.

and labor, Africans had rights to respect for their distinctive cultures. For the interweaving of human rights terminology into antislavery during the half-century after the Congo campaign, see Kevin Grant, “Human Rights and Sovereign Abolitions of Slavery, c. 1885–1956” in Beyond Sovereignty: Britain, Empire and Transnationalism, c. 1880–1950, eds. Kevin Grant, Philippa Levine, and Frank Trentmann (New York Macmillan Palgrave, 2007), 80–102. See Drescher, Abolition, ch. 14. Moyn, Last Utopia, 6 ff. esp. 32–33. See Jenny S. Martinez, The Slave Trade and the Origins of International Human Rights Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), p.  138). “Humanity” emerged as a keyword early in discussions of the problem of Russian serf emancipation at the end of the Napoleonic wars. Proponents quickly discovered that most noblemen “quickly fell back into exclamations about the French Reign of Terror.” In response, radical reformers pointed to the Saint-Domingue uprising as a warning of serfdoms’ dangers. The appeal to action was couched in terms of the need to end “slavery in Russia,” the right to possess other humans as contrary to “Humanity, Natural Law, the Holy Christian Religion, and the Will of the Almighty. . . .” See Susan P. MacCaffray, “Confronting Serfdom in the Age of Revolution: Projects for Serf Reform in the Time of Alexander I,” The Russian Review 64 (2005), 1–21; quotations on 18). Martinez, Slave Trade, 139. The intervention in favor of the enslaved was explicitly grounded in the language of universal morality. (ibid., 139). The social and organizational means to achieve the ending of the slave trade were embedded in civil society mobilizations, again simultaneously domestic and transnational. See Chaim D. Kauffman and Robert A. Pape, “Exploring Costly International Moral Action: Britain’s Sixty-Year Campaign Against the Atlantic Slave Trade,” International Organization 51:4 (1999), 631–638. For another perspective on the role of antislavery as a pioneering development in a long-term transnational advocacy of rights, see Peter Stamatov, The Origins of Global Humanitarianism: Religion, Empires, and Advocacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). See, inter alia, Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, ch. 5; and Drescher, Abolition; and Brown, Moral Capital, 391–424. For a perspective that sees the breakdown of civil society in “the onset of war, civil war, revolution or narrowly averted revolution” as the major explanatory link between to slave past, slave emancipations, and the expansion of human rights, see Blackburn, American Crucible, 485. Significantly, Blackburn observes that Moyn, in his review of Hunt’s Inventing Human Rights, remarks that “it is worth pondering in what ways the campaign to abolish slavery, which began in the years that Hunt covers, anticipated human rights movements. But to do so one would have to move beyond her way of defining human rights so as to see in them a set of institutional practices, prominently including international mobilization, information gathering, public shaming and so forth.” (Moyn, “on the Genealogy of Morals,” The Nation (April 16, 2007)(emphasis added). Here Moyn clearly draws attention to the modus operandi of British abolitionism. See Charles Tilly, Social Movements, 1768–2004 (Boulder/London: Paradigm Publishers, 2004), 32–34; and Tilly and Sidney Tarrow, Contentious Politics (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2007), ch. 1. For recent indications of the increasing interest in antislavery’s role in long-term processes of democratization and international law see, inter alia, the Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law (cited above); The Edinburgh Companion to the History of Democracy, eds. Benjamin Isakhan and Stephen Stockwell (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University

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pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry Press, 2012) ch. 27, 325–36; and The Legal Understanding of Slavery: From the Historical to the Contemporary, ed. Jean Allain (Oxford University Press, 2012), passim. On recent trajectories of abolitionism, see Joel Quirk, The Anti-Slavery Project: From the Slave Trade to Human Trafficking (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).

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8 EMPERORS OF THE WORLD British Abolitionism and Imperialism

In 1799, midway into the twenty-year debate on British slave trade abolition, the Earl of Westmoreland rose in the House of Lords to mock the Sierra Leone Company’s directors as quixotic visionaries, attempting to ban a vast international trade along a broad swath of the coast of Africa: “Can a miserable settlement on the coast of Africa alter the manners of Kingdoms larger than Europe?” Who, he asked, were “this great company, these emperors of the world, who measure their empire by degrees and lines of the globe . . .? Will you decree your colonies to decline?”1 Less than two decades later an abolitionist delegation arrived in Paris with the aim of persuading the restored French monarchy to renounce the slave trade. The French colonial minister was appalled: “Do you English mean to bind the world?” Nearly two centuries later historian Howard Temperley concluded that one could easily understand why Southern slaveholders and Indian sepoys should have responded violently to what they saw as an attempt to impose an alien and destructive way of life upon them.2 Reviewing British slave trade abolition from the perspective of two centuries, how may we assess its impact in relation to the phenomenon we began to call imperialism a little over a century ago? The context of a commemoration is not fixed once for all in human memory or historical discourse. It shifts over time, sometimes churning up long-forgotten or barely noticed debris from far upstream. For almost a century and a half after 1807, the historiographical context of British slave trade abolition seemed clear. Abolition was part of Britain’s unchallenged status at the center of the movement to eliminate slavery from the world. Symptomatic was the centenary of British colonial slave emancipation, in 1933. It was celebrated in Hull, Wilberforce’s birthplace, as a national and imperial triumph. The London Times accurately headlined the event as the Centenary of Wilberforce. G. M. Trevelyan and Reginald Coupland agreed that abolition had elevated all mankind to a higher plane. The national memory was refreshed by a roll call of the gallant band of Saints led by their English hero.3 The beneficiaries were also appropriately noted: West Indians assembling in devotion to await the sunrise of freedom, and the natives of Africa,still 179

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry unaware that future British rule would entail the end of slavery in the “heart of darkness.” The story was dramatic, the motivation clear, the ending happy. Abolitionism had made Britain safe for reform, the West Indies safe for freedom, and Africa safe for domination. Embedded in the celebration was an explicit justification of British imperialism. Coupland concluded, almost in passing, that the abolitionist crusade had guaranteed that the empire would do right by its African subjects. Fifty years later, during the last great commemoration of abolitionism before this year’s bicentenary, the context had changed utterly. In 1983, I attended an academic conference at the University of Hull entitled “Abolition and Its aftermath.” I noted that the Saints had virtually vanished from the program. There were no papers devoted specifically to British abolitionism, nor to its saints, not even a paper on William Wilberforce himself I was reminded of William Cobbett’s quip when he was forced to leave England in 1816. He consoled himself with the thought, “No Wilberforces!Think of that! No Wilberforces!”4 WHAT HAD happened in the half century between 1933 and 1983 was a dramatic demolition of the whole structure of European overseas empire that had dominated so much of the earth in 1933. In the wake of the Second World War the collapse of imperialism proceeded even more rapidly than its fluctuations and extensions during previous centuries. One aspect of the demolition was a historiographic revaluation of the great campaign against the slave trade and slavery by the world’s paramount empire. The emblematic work in this process was, of course,Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery (1944). Williams’s study was, among other things, an explicit devaluation of the significance of morality in the destruction of British slavery and an implicit devaluation of Britain’s use of abolitionism as a justification for imperial rule in the whole of its Afro-American orbit. In Williams’s perspective slavery provided the basis for British economic expansion up to the Industrial Revolution, and Britain’s antislavery in turn provided the basis for its imperialism: “The defense or attack,” he concluded, “is always on the high moral or political plane. The thing defended or attacked is always something that you can touch or see, to be measured in pounds sterling or pounds avoirdupois, in dollars and cents, yards, feet and inches. This is not a crime. It is a fact.”5 Within this frame of reference moral and political motivations and outcomes were so conflated with economic motivations that they could be treated as functions of economic forces. Thirty years ago it was unusual to argue that in 1807 slavery was not a wasted enterprise that could easily be terminated in exchange for accumulating moral capital.6 So where do we stand at the bicentennial of British slave trade abolition? Perhaps it is significant that a book entitled MoralCapital appeared on the eve of this commemoration. It is a deeply researched study of the foundations 180

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry of British abolitionism. The Wilberforce Centre for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation was launched at Hull. The point is not that British abolition was again to be treated as one of the “three or four perfectly virtuous pages” in the history of nations. Eric Williams saw to that. It does mean, however, that the moral and political dimensions of both abolitionism and its consequences are being reenvisioned as complex human activities with origins in specific political contexts and diverse effects. Some were clearly contrary to the logic of economics or political economy. To put it succinctly, the current mood reopened the historiographical landscape to the study of abolitionism and its political outcomes as autonomous processes in the dismantling of the transoceanic slave trade.7 I’d like to consider one such process, the relation of abolitionism to British imperialism. For the sake of analysis I distinguish imperialism from another phenomenon, colonialism. The latter term was initially used to describe European settlement in non-European areas of the earth. Colonialism applied to European settlements in large portions of North America, South America, Australia, New Zealand, and Eurasia that were dominated by populations of permanent European residents. Nineteenth-century British expansion after abolition had little to do with its policies toward the slave trade or slavery I will define imperialism by the features developed at the apogee of European domination over over-whelmingly non-European societies during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and by its distinguishing difference from other forms of expansion – trade, exchange, and migration. Classic imperialism is a form of political incursion, or a policy aiming at incursion, into the sovereignty of another state or community. Its agents usually believed that they represented a superior civilization in situations of unequal power, culture, morality, or religion.8 I will emphasize the relation of British abolitionism to imperialism from about the 1780s to the 1870s, when the most salient objective of British abolitionism beyond its own empire was the ending of the transoceanic slave trade. Let’s begin with two observations. During the decades before slave trade abolition, in 1807, British traders were the single most important carriers of Africans to the New World. Even more significantly, during those decades Britain aimed to use its position as the world’s premier naval power to expand both its slave system and its dominance over rival European producers of tropical staples. The first site of imperialism to be examined is therefore the British Caribbean. When both popular and parliamentary abolitionism emerged in the 1780s, the British West Indies was still Britain’s premier imperial possession. Its relative place in the empire had only been enhanced by the loss of the continental colonies. For the previous century and a half, conquests of foreign slave colonies and slave trade factories had been causes for national celebration. The retention of the threatened British possessions during the American War of Independence was hailed in the metropolis as one of the few consoling 181

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry outcomes of the conflict. In imperial calculations the British sugar colonies had become, in Michael Duffy’s words, not just a jewel in the imperial crown “but now virtually the crown itself ”9 Despite the emergence of popular abolitionism in 1882 the British government viewed the outbreak of war with France in 1793 as yet another opportunity to expand its slave empire in the Caribbean in order to add to Britain’s commercial and naval supremacy. Only the outcome of the great slave revolution in the Caribbean and the fortunes of war in Europe prevented the permanent acquisition of a vast new slave empire from the French. Nevertheless, fifteen years of warfare at enormous human cost allowed the British to open two new potential frontiers for slavery (Spanish Trinidad, Dutch Demerara and Berbice) before they shut down their transatlantic slave labor supply in 1807 – These two underdeveloped colonies, first captured in the late 1790s, contained far more arable land than Britain had acquired in two centuries of previous conflicts in the Caribbean. Trinidad alone, definitively acquired in 1802, could have kept British slavers occupied for another century. By 1814 the British also retained possession over the island of Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean, and the Cape Colony, in South Africa. The first was seized from the French (1810) and the second from the Dutch (1806). Thus, by the end of the Napoleonic Wars the British had more than doubled the size of their imperial slave populations at the end of the War of American Independence. They had doubled the capital invested in slave production. They dominated the Western world’s sugar market more thoroughly than at any point in the history of the transatlantic slave system. And the British Empire had increased its potential for further expansion tenfold.10 Even before the passage of abolition, in 1807, however, the British government, under abolitionist pressure, had begun to constrict the development of these new slave frontiers. After the fall of Napoleon however, the fate of Britain’s slave empire without fresh labor supplies became increasingly clear. From 1815 the British share of slave-produced staples in the world market declined steadily. Those of slave-importing Cuba and Brazil correspondingly expanded. This was most graphically demonstrated in the staple-export statistics of Trinidad and Cuba, which was retained by Spain during the French Wars. During the first half of the nineteenth century Trinidad’s sugar exports reached only twenty thousand tons per year. Cuba’s exports, fed by the African slave trade, soared to over three hundred fifty thousand tons per year. The contrast between Cuba and Trinidad was emblematic of the trajectories of the two Caribbean slave empires. On the eve of British abolition its Caribbean colonies produced well over half the sugar reaching the North Atlantic market. The Spanish Caribbean accounted for only 12 percent. In 1850 the British West Indian share had dropped to 13 percent. Its Spanish counterpart had risen to 27 percent. By the end of the era of Cuba’s slave trade, in 1870, that island alone delivered 42 percent of the world’s tropical sugar to the market. No wonder the Times lamented that Trinidad would have 182

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry developed far more rapidly under the corrupt and authoritarian domination of Spain than it had under British colonial rule.11 Decade after decade the British government hobbled the imperial growth of its slave empire, in full awareness of the consequences of abolitionist policies. From the outset parliamentarians knew the consequences of allowing the resumption of the slave trade by other colonial powers. As early as 1814, James Stephen, Britain’s most knowledgeable abolitionist and a member of Parliament, warned the prime minister, Lord Liverpool, that allowing other Europeans to reopen the slave trade would help them to raise sugar at lower cost. In 1814 a profound contradiction was opening up between Britain’s imperial economic interest and its unilateral prohibition of the slave trade. That contradiction continued for more than half a century after abolition of the British slave trade. The same situation prevailed in the slave trade itself On the eve of abolition in 1807 about 40 percent of captive Africans crossing the Atlantic were being landed in British ports. By the end of the Napoleonic Wars the British government’s theoretical alternatives were clear: they could employ a variety of diplomatic, economic, and military pressures trying to choke off the trade in Africans while maintaining abolition in the British colonies, or they could conditionally restore the African trade to the British system until an effective international agreement outlawed the traffic.12 The first option was employed for the next two generations, despite considerable expense, endless diplomatic complications, and enormous opportunities for evasion by foreign merchants and their rulers. The British slowly developed an elaborate treaty network and a large naval patrol to curtail the transatlantic slave trade. Despite this effort more than three million Africans were delivered to the Americas in defiance of that policy for six decades after 1807.13 The second option needed to rely only on effective multinational reciprocity. It protected both British imperial and colonial interests. It would have minimized diplomatic complications, maximized the competitive position of British slavery, and prevented or slowed any decline in Britain’s world position in tropical production. It would have eliminated the policing costs of the British navy and would certainly have benefited the British consumer. The human costs would have been borne chiefly by Africans, who had neither capital nor votes in metropolitan policy. Yet the second option was never even considered. Forced to fight the battle of world sugar production on untenable terms, Britain did not so much as hint at employing its most effective precautionary weapon – the reopening of the British slave trade. If revival remained an unthinkable alternative at the return of peace in Europe, it was because the aversion to British slaving relied on something independent of economic arguments. The source of silence, inexplicable within contemporary economic parameters, lay in the thunderous British popular petition against the Anglo-French treaty that allowed the temporary 183

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry revival of the French slave trade. The most numerous petitions in British history covered the tables of both houses of Parliament in June and July 1814. So, when all the economic and demographic indicators pointed in one direction, the empire took the other.14 In this case the relation of abolitionism, and particularly the abolition of the slave trade, to imperial interests seems fairly straightforward. Britons abruptly ceased to be the major economic players in the slaving system. Thereafter Britons could play only clandestine and indirect roles in its continuation, often as investors, consumers, and slaveholders outside the empire. In that capacity they helped expand the wealth and power of foreign states and empires more than their own. Abolitionists thus clearly helped reduce the value and relative imperial significance of the British slave complex after 1807. They played a similar, if less intentional, role on the coast of Africa. In terms of imperialism, abolitionists undertook their most important West African venture before 1807 – It was managed by the government-chartered Sierra Leone Company. The principal directors of the company were leading philanthropists, including Wilberforce himself Some of them had sponsored relief for the black poor in London and a failed settlement in Sierra Leone in 1787. The second colony was constituted along lines that were closer to contemporary mercantilist models. The rationale for me enterprise was that an efficient and economically competitive colony would have greater chances for success than the earlier failed attempt at freeholders’ democracy. The directors of the Sierra Leone Company envisioned their colony as an experiment in head-to-head competition between cultivation by free labor in Africa and slavery in the West Indies. The new company’s mercantile profits and success would also hopefully undermine slavery in an ever-widening arc beyond the core zone with a protected “legitimate” trade.15 British parliamentary approval for the new company was obtained in partial compensation for Parliament’s defeat of a slave trade bill in April 1791. Although the directors did not look forward to spectacular profits, their employers were explicitly informed that their main and immediate priority was commercial viability. The Sierra Leone Company was so quickly and heavily subscribed mat abolitionists boasted of having to take precautions to see that the West Indians did not attempt to obtain a substantial share of the capital. Company directors and the first governor felt that the St. Domingue slave uprising opened up an ideal – perhaps divinely ordained-opportunity. In European markets, sugar was selling at prices that had not been offered for almost a century.16 Their colony, however, could not rely on capital and providence alone. It also depended on the voluntary recruitment of free workers. Many African Americans who had gained freedom at the end of the American War of Independence were struggling in very difficult conditions in Nova Scotia. Thomas Clarkson’s brother John traveled to Canada to recruit settlers for the 184

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry new African colony. The response was overwhelming. Thinking that there was ample acreage available to ensure an independent existence, nearly thirteen hundred free blacks volunteered to move to Sierra Leone. Unfortunately, they were deceived in the amount of land they had been assured.They were equally disappointed by the political rights they were denied in the governance of the colony.17 Whatever their role in the new colony, the Nova Scotians’ demands for full political participation in a self-governing colony did not add to the attractiveness of the experiment for the investors.The Sierra Leone experiment managed to endure through enormous initial difficulties, including internal strife, overgovernance, heavy mortality,and a devastating French raid in 1794. The chief complaint of the governors and directors turned out to be the difficulty of obtaining steady farm labor from either white or black overseas settlers or from native Africans. Successive waves of migrants failed to meet the directors’ expectations and hopes. A decade after its launching, the company’s entire capital had diminished by more than 90 percent from its heady subscription days. In 1807, on the verge of bankruptcy, the Sierra Leone Company petitioned the government for the colony’s transfer to the crown. Its directors acknowledged their inability to compete with the slave traders. Among their arguments for British retention of the colony, its economic value and potential were not even mentioned. The directors’ only hope was that the imminent closing of the slave trade might remove “the want of a regular supply of labourers,” at that point “far below the demand.” A year before the company’s petition, the government had already contemplated breaking up the colony to reinforce its black West India regiments. Sierra Leone’s performance as a colony was regarded as so poor that negotiations between the company and the government had to be conducted in secret until after the passage of the Abolition Act, in 1807. Wilberforce feared that any news of the impending transfer would be used as antiabolitionist propaganda.18 Within months of the passage of the Abolition Act, the British government took over full responsibility for the colony and its expenses. Members of Parliament who opposed the transfer noted that the project had already cost the government more than £900,000 in subsidies, in addition to the vanished private capital. No MP argued for Crown Colony status on the grounds that the settlement could somehow match the Caribbean as a producer of sugar. Supporters of colonization had already argued that most of the expended funds were justifiable as a rescue operation. The British were morally obliged to sustain both the voluntary black refugees from Nova Scotia and the contingent of Jamaican Maroons who had been forcibly deported to Africa. Maintenance of the colony was also defended on humanitarian terms, as a potential asylum for slaves rescued by British warships from the African slave trade. When the British government undertook control of the already heavily subsidized colony, its status as a humanitarian haven for freed slaves was 185

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry confirmed. Despite the high costs of maintenance, it was arguably cheaper for the state to pay for its continuance as a refuge than to create a new asylum somewhere else on the African coast. The very existence of the colony proved that an orderly society could be maintained in Africa without reliance on either slavery or the slave trade. The subsidy, however, meant that Sierra Leone also stood as a failed “experiment” in quasi-forced migration.19 Sierra Leone’s controversial status as a failed economic venture did not end with its change of legal status. During the following decades some of the colony’s employees were accused of participating in the slave trade, of sanctioning coerced labor, and of constraining the free movement of labor and trade. Opponents even insisted that Sierra Leone remained as much a clandestine nest of the slave trade as under the company’s rule. A high volume of slaving took place just beyond the jurisdiction of the colony. In other respects there was also a good deal of continuity in attitudes toward the African colony. The African Institution, founded in 1808, combined the roles of advocates for abolition and a Sierra Leone lobby. For antiabolitionists and those hostile to budgetary waste, the African colony was a grave of Europeans and a drain on the imperial treasury. Most ministers retreated to minimalism, wearily noting that “whatever might be thought of the propriety of an establishment like Sierra Leone,” it was, at least, an indispensable port of debarkation for captured victims of the slave trade and at best a potential “nucleus of African civilization.”20 Defenders of Sierra Leone were eager to keep it out of all discussions of slavery or abolition, but the most sustained parliamentary attack on the colony was undertaken soon after the first popular mobilization for gradual emancipation, in 1823. Following years of parliamentary sniping and threatening motions to reconsider the expediency of British withdrawal from Sierra Leone, a prominent Radical, Joseph Hume, launched a major attack in 1830. For Hume, Sierra Leone was an empirically rich experiment. More than four decades’ worth of economic and demographic data had accumulated. In both the colony’s “foundings” (1788, 1792) a large proportion of the colonists, black and white, had died. Considering the cumulative expenditure of “nearly three millions of money” and “evils so dreadful that he would not shock the House by reading them,” Joseph Hume threw the mortality figures into the balance against the whole settlement. With its annual death rate of 160 per thousand, Sierra Leone ranked below that of every contemporary Caribbean slave colony. Thomas Fowell Buxton, the parliamentary leader of the abolitionists, responded. He agreed “that the experiment of Sierra Leone had failed.” He objected only to Hume’s recommendation of withdrawal. Uprooting seventeen thousand liberated Africans, who were also British subjects, would be enormously expensive and utterly inhumane. The British had assumed responsibility for and were bound, in good faith, to keep it.21 It was not only critics of Sierra Leone who were wary about intrusions of Europeans as managers of the “civilization” of Africans. Abolitionists had 186

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry already learned one lesson well. As early as the passage of the slave trade abolition act and Sierra Leone’s absorption into the empire, Wilberforce’s own evangelical branch of the Established Church directly opposed any further territorial ambitions in Africa. The Christian Observer, an Anglican periodical, was aroused against suggestions that Britain use the worldwide conflict against Napoleon as an opportunity to seize African coastal territory in order to prevent a postwar Franco-Dutch revival of the slave trade. The Christian Observer noted that any further occupations could be misconstrued. The British could be accused of “inducing African princes to give up liberty.” ”[Nor] would a satisfactory reply be easily found, should it hereafter be said that the princes of Africa had been robbed of their independence, and the people of their liberty, while too ignorant to understand the value of the privileges they surrendered.” What was most to be feared, however, was that dominion held out “a lure to injustice too strong, we fear, for the political virtue of any nation; and when we see the vast strides which our ambition has so lately made in the east [India], under the plausible pretexts of consulting . . . the happiness of the native principalities and the safety of our own establishments, we dread lest the existence of similar temptations in another continent should lead to the perpetration of similar enormities.” In such an event Britain would rightly be held to account for having passed off “a solemn mockery on mankind, by professing to abandon injustice in one form to while determined to pursue it in another.”22 As for Sierra Leone itself, the periodical reluctantly assented to governmental control only as a lesser evil to a private colony charter, because “the country is now so wakeful to all her interest, the number of our political citizens so large and the general opinion so powerful, that neither public nor private rapacity are likely to escape correction.” Even so, it concluded, strict limits should be prescribed against expansion. The theme of strict limitations became the leitmotif of British policy in West Africa during the British leadership against the slave trade for more than sixty years. Even at the peak of abolitionist political power and global ambitions, in 1840, Secretary for War and the Colonies Lord John Russell authorized renewal of a campaign to expand Anglo-African anti-slave trade treaties with the strict proviso that they would call for no annexation of territory. Ministers far less sympathetic to the abolitionists were inclined to suggest the abandonment of West Africa altogether.23 Even James Stephen, the Colonial Office’s most influential abolitionist undersecretary, was opposed to any further British penetration of Africa: “[If] we could acquire the dominion of the whole of that continent, it would be but a worthless possession.”24 Nothing could more decisively demonstrate the distance between the utopian ambitions of the first decade of the abolitionists at the end of the eighteenth century and the deep skepticism of abolitionists, politicians, and the Colonial Office during the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century. 187

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry That pessimism was deepened by the most ambitious British intrusion of all into Africa during the age of the transatlantic slave trade. It was undertaken at the peak of British abolitionism’s political strength, at the end of the 1830s. The movement had just demonstrated its political popularity in two mass petition campaigns. A weakening Whig government desperately needed abolitionist support to maintain its dwindling parliamentary majority. Buxton seized the opportunity to request the government’s sponsorship of an expedition into the interior of Africa. Thirty years of British naval and diplomatic activity, he argued, had failed to halt or even substantially diminish the volume of the trade. The solution was to plant the seeds of agriculture and legitimate commerce within the heart of the continent. Although Buxton quickly obtained Russell’s support, most abolitionists were totally opposed to the project. It entailed dispatching naval vessels up the Niger River. Force might have to be used, if only in self-defense. The important Quaker and pacific element in the movement would not support even that potential use of force. The national Anti-slavery Society refused to approve of the Niger expedition. Its leaders felt that the entire attempt to strike at the African supply side of the trade was misplaced. The whole project was also ignored by the first World Anti-slavery Conference, which met in London in June 1840.25 Nonabolitionists were equally unimpressed by the proposal. Britain’s intellectual elite had no qualms about predicting the experiment’s imminent failure on scientific grounds. For the Radical Westminster Review, the African experiment had already been tried at Sierra Leone for two generations. The same venture, under the same patronage, would lead to the same failure. Of Sierra Leone, it concluded, “We do not believe that any colony of Great Britain presents such a lamentable result. “The Spectator suggested that, as far as the government was concerned, “the wiser plan” would be to “take the money and throw it into the sea, for thereby no lives will be lost.”26 Both political economy and epidemiology forecast the failure of the venture, and so it turned out. Fevers killed or disabled the bulk of those who sailed up the Niger. Some of the survivors, who briefly established an experimental farm along the river, were accused of using whips to extract work from their “idle and promiscuous” remnant of laborers. Buxton could do no better than to bow before the facts and before God. To the second World Anti-slavery Convention, in 1843, he confessed that “it is essential that I show the complete failure of that remedy.” Fifty years’ experience at Sierra Leone were sufficient. They had proven beyond measure the deadliness of West Africa. Providence itself had “erected a wall of malaria around it which we cannot break through.” For the world beyond the abolitionists, the Niger expedition was a grim reenactment of the age-old tale of the white man’s grave, now embroidered with a cautionary narrative about the folly of the antislavery imagination.27 Thus ended the last major project of British expansion in West and Central Africa for the duration of the Atlantic slave trade.It is noteworthy in this 188

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry context that both the British Anti-Slavery Society and the British Aborigines Protection Society not only opposed further annexation but echoed the Christian Observer. Toward the end of the slave trade both organizations urged that the West African colonies be abandoned on the grounds that “British rule had brought chiefly injustice and mis-government.” The three successive colonial undersecretaries between the 1830s and 1860s also welcomed a loosening of ties with Britain.28 Imperialism, in the sense of extending domination in Africa, was thus the last thing on the minds of British policymakers or the public press throughout the period of the suppression of the transatlantic slave trade. On the contrary, as the trade registering its last major shipments in 1863 the (hardly abolitionist) Times asked and answered its own rhetorical question in relation to a conflict in Gambia: Who ever heard of a War in Gambia? What do we know of the King of Bedaboo, and why should we rejoice at having taught him a “severe lesson!” What harm has he done us and why should we be anxious to pay an additional income tax for the pleasure of killing. . . his sable subjects? As it stands it looks as much like a piratical in road as any exploit we ever read about. . . . Who ordered it? And who will pay for it? . . . Can it be possible after all the lessons we have received of the inflammatory character of little wars we can find ourselves in the thick of a “war upon Gambia” without no tice, and so far as we know, without reason?29 Well after the end of the Atlantic trade the Times was still asking, even of Sierra Leone, “Does it really need an Englishman [even as governor]? Is it really so indispensable?” And on the very eve of Britain’s first serious expansion into the interior of the Gold Coast, in 1873, the Times continued its rhetorical sneering: “Why do we retain or even extend what we call a Protectorate over this pestiferous coast?”30 The definitive ending of transoceanic slave migrations, in the mid-1860s, coincided with a major discussion of British imperialism Africa. A costly war with the Ashanti on the Gold Coast revived calls on both sides of the aisle in Parliament for an end to British civil establishments. In 1865 a select committee on West Africa rehearsed the familiar theme that Sierra Leone had failed. It added that the slave trade was now winding down and that the most flourishing legitimate African trade was occurring in areas outside British jurisdiction. The committee’s final report recommended that no more territory was to be annexed except in the interests of efficiency or reducing expenditures. The committee advised that the ultimate object of the government should be withdrawal from all of West Africa, with the possible exception of the main settlement of Sierra Leone. The naval patrol itself was terminated in 1870.31 189

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry The most decisive military intrusions entailing slave trade abolition occurred in naval actions outside sub-Saharan Africa. The first took place during the formative period of Britain’s post-Napoleonic abolitionist policy. The second occurred near the end. Britain’s single most important naval operation against the slave trade was undertaken in the absence of metropolitan abolitionist agitation and had nothing to do with transatlantic slaving. When the British foreign minister began his diplomatic campaign at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 to internationalize the condemnation of the slave trade, the political and material costs of accumulating “moral capital” were quickly apparent. The British were accused of hypocrisy by cynical or hostile European diplomats. Why were the British concerned with the plight of black Africans to the exclusion of enslaved Europeans in North Africa? The ultimate response was the British fleet’s bombardment of Algiers in 1816. The battle of Algiers was the largest armed humanitarian intervention in British military history. It was also the largest cannonade against an onshore target by a naval force during the age of sailing ships. British seamen suffered a higher rate of casualties than they endured at the battle of Trafalgar, in 1805.32 The incursion resulted neither in British territorial expansion nor the liberation of any Britons. Every one of the more than three thousand liberated slaves were continental Europeans. This imperialist venture was not registered in many, if any, commemorations of abolition. The abolitionists themselves showed no particular interest either in promoting or thereafter celebrating the original expedition. The British were certainly not accused of having favored Africans. There were none among the liberated Algerian slaves. Britain’s most decisive imperial military action against the African slave trade actually occurred in 1850 on the coast of Brazil. Brazil was then, as it had been for most of the three and a half centuries of the transatlantic slave trade, the largest recipient of Africans bound for the Americas. It had also reaped the greatest benefit from the Anglo-American abolitions of 1807. The naval action against slaving on the coast of Brazil ironically occurred just as British public support for naval activity was reaching a low ebb. Fortunately for abolitionists, the British naval action coincided with a Brazilian determination to end the importation of slaves. The transoceanic slave trade was momentarily reduced by go percent, but Britain gained no further influence over Brazilian trade or policy than it had achieved before the action.33 British intrusions on foreign sovereignty in favor of abolition were more diplomatic and fiscal than military. For two generations after 1807 the British attempted to build a naval inspection netwrork that would close off the possibility of slaving vessels sailing with impunity under foreign flags. The network was never completed. The French never conceded a full right of search. America, as the major slaveholding republic in the New World, remained determined to avoid British imperial intrusion. For six decades the United States refused to enter into any agreement that would have 190

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry compromised its sovereignty. Only in the dark days of its own military crisis, in 1862, did the Union agree to a mutual “right of search” of suspected slavers. Within five years the transatlantic Atlantic slave trade had been brought to an end.34 In short, the six-decade British campaign for the suppression of the slave trade entailed “imperialist” methods by mixtures of coercion and intimidation, stretching and breaching international law.It also inspired British governments to occasional blockades and armed interventions in Ouidah, Dahomey, and Lagos. These actions were always examined in Parliament, where the underlying defense of the actions was that a moral imperative to put down the slave trade overrode legal constraints of international law. Coastal blockades of Lisbon or West African ports certainly constituted violations of the sovereignty of Portuguese and West African polities. In this respect they were actions of little consequence to British economic, political, or strategic domination.35 The self-imposed limitations of British governments in relation to the AfroAtlantic world should not be taken to imply any limitations on British imperial expansion in general. In the two generations between Waterloo and the ending of the transatlantic slave trade, the British Empire accounted for ninetenths of the non-Europeans under European domination. In 1870 Britain could and did claim an empire unequaled in the history of the world. But the empire’s expansion to western regions of North America, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific entailed neither an expansion of slavery nor an invocation of antislavery principals as an ideological justification for such expansion. In attempting to abolish the slave trade while extending the growth of tropical and semitropical trade, British policy did breed deep counterproductive as well as counterimperialist tendencies.The result was a penumbra of alternative coerced labor migrations. The disposition of recaptives landed in Sierra Leone for forty years after 1807 was only the beginning of an ever-widening stream of unfree labor migration. Britain’s self-limitation on territorial expansion meant that a vast slaving zone remained open in the interior, beyond British sovereignty. Europeans at best only whittled away at the networks of African enslavement and distribution. Not until the end of the nineteenth century did serious enforcement take place. In Sierra Leone recaptive children were “apprenticed” to settlers,allowing for unregulated coerced labor and sexual exploitation. Only after decades of denunciation was the system ended in 1847.36 The British diplomatic mode of slave trade abolition unintentionally created another stream of unfree labor into the Americas. Recaptives were placed by Anglo-European judicial commissions into the hands of residents of Cuba and Brazil as emancipados. For many this turned out to be a form of “apprenticeship for life.” No effective mechanisms were put in place to supervise and enforce liberation of former recaptives from masters at the end of their terms of service.37 Not until the 1860s, at the close of the transatlantic slave trade, did the British again move 191

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry forcefully (with another blockade and seizure of Brazilian vessels) to recoup the liberty of emancipados. The largest legacy of bonded labor migration, however, occurred within the confines of the empire. Faced by pressures of competition with slaveimporting Caribbean islands and Brazil, the British government allowed its \/Vest Indian colonies to turn to India for the recruitment of indentured servants. For a very brief period British abolitionists were able to brand this system a “new slave trade.” By the late 1840s, however, the government definitively redesignated this contracted workforce as a system of voluntary labor. The result was that far more indentured laborers were recruited for long-distance migration within both hemispheres in the century after British abolition than had been transported to the Americas in the century before it. International abolition of the slave trade thus left a long stream of unfree labor in its wake.38 Abolitionism cast an even longer shadow across Africa. In the 1880s and 1890s, during the Scramble for Africa, antislavery became a major rationalization for the legitimizing and creation of European spheres of dominion. The abolition of slavery and the slave trade may ironically have removed one of the most glaring impediments to imperial expansion. Abolitionists and radicals could no longer point to tolerance of slavery as characteristic of European imperial injustice over non-Europeans. But the possibilities and practicality of a large-scale imperial project were probably even more reflective of the economic and military gap that opened between Europeans and non-Europeans during the course of the nineteenth century.39 Abolitionism could and did rationalize, but clearly did not cause, that imperial expansion. This effect can be most readily seen in the two major European imperialist conferences on Africa held in Europe (Berlin in 1884, Brussels in 1889). At Berlin, European powers were concerned primarily with the rules for carving up territory. Slave trade abolition was no more than a symbolic afterthought. Britain sought “to carry off all the honours of the meeting by being the first to propose (on so fitting an occasion) an international declaration in relation to the traffic in slaves.”40 The aim, among almost all conferees, was to minimalize any obligations entailed in a general declaration against the trade. In the end the Berlin conference restricted its resolution to support for Britain’s priority – the interdiction of the seaborne trade. Only a vague phrase committed the European signatories to suppress slavery itself. Five years later, at the Brussels conference, the slave trade was more clearly the center of diplomatic attention. Here too, however, control over the slavery itself remained within the sovereign domain of individual imperial powers. After Brussels, European attempts to quickly convert their new dominions into profitable colonies led them to create state-sponsored coerced labor systems in place of the institution of slavery. The Berlin and Brussels treaties transformed antislavery from an incentive for ending the enterprise of coerced African migration into a rationalization for political domination. 192

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry A movement that had ended an era of individual bondage functioned as a rationalization for the indefinite dependency of peoples.41 After two hundred years it is appropriate to reconsider the abolitionists’ process in a more bicentennial and global perspective. For a thousand years before 1800 a deadly slave trade had thrived across the Sahara and the Indian Ocean. Between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries another transatlantic coerced migration ruthlessly fed one of the most coercive systems in human history. Until the last third of the eighteenth century a policy of eliminating these intercontinental trades and the institutions they sustained had never been seriously undertaken by any sovereign ruler or parliamentary body. By the end of the Napoleonic Wars, Britain’s national legislature had shut down a principal transoceanic trade in human captives. Outside Parliament one great national mobilization after another had launched the world’s leading commercial and naval power into a sustained campaign to end that entire trade. For yet another century every major British abolitionist initiative would be advertised to foreign powers and to the world as a major objective of the government and the nation. By 1815, British abolitionism had also elicited the first international treaty declaration against the slave trade. A century after its political emergence abolitionism was routinely invoked by European powers as a major justification for imperial expansion and political domination. Abolitionism did not halt imperialism, but it shaped even that procession of pride and power more profoundly than we realize. By the end of the nineteenth century antislavery had become the gold standard of “civilization.” Without abolitionism late-nineteenth-century imperial expansion would have incorporated both slavery and the slave trade into the toolbox of European and Muslim imperialisms. Not just millions, but tens of millions of Africans might have continued to be captured and deported. Millions more would have died en route from the African interior, in transcontinental journeys and in “seasonings.”42 Whether or when the ending of this pervasive institution would have been provoked by other political and economic developments remains unclear. We know that in the early twentieth century new ideologies and new institutions came to power within Europe itself They assembled deadly combinations of racial or ethnic victimization, coerced migrations, deadly degradation, and slave labor. During the second third of that century such massive institutions extended half way around the globe. This suggests that slavery’s nineteenthcentury chances of survival beyond Europe and its twentieth-century successors within Europe might have been mutually sustaining in the absence of abolitionism’s prior success. All around us remains overwhelming evidence that abolition eliminated only one major network of human brutality and death. Yet it is hard to imagine a world that would not have been far worse off without its elimination. 193

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry Notes This chapter benefited from discussions at the Centre of African Studies, University of Cambridge; the Association for the Study of World African Diaspora, in Barbados; and a conference at Fordham University School of Law. I also express my appreciation for an early reading by Stanley L. Engerman. 1. Westmoreland’s speech may be found in John Debrett, The Parliamentary Regista, ser. 3, vol. 8 (London, 1799), 586, emphasis added. On the whole de bate, see Roger Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760–1810 (London: Macmillan, 1975), 331. 2. For the quotations, see Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (London: Verso, 1987), 320; Howard Temperley,”Anti-slavery as a Form of Cultural Imperialism,” in Anti-slavery, Religion and Reform, ed. Christine Bolt and Sermour Drescher (Folkestone: Dawson, 1980), 335–50 (quotation, 349). 3. For an extended analysis of the construction of British public memory concerning the abolition of the slave trade and slavery, see J.  R. Old field, Chords of Freedom: Commemoration, Ritual and British Transatlantic Slavery (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), esp. chap. 4. 4. Seymour Drescher, “The Historical Context of British Abolition,” in Abolition and Its Aftermath: The Historical Context, 1790–1916, ed. David Richardson (London: Frank Cass, 1985), 4. Other events in the 1983 commemorations of slave emancipation at Hull did include considerations of both abolitionism and Wilberforce. When a descendant of Wilberforce was invited to speak at the academic conference, his primary role was, significantly, to introduce the conference’s honored speaker.The honoree himself was the Trinidadian intellectual C. L. R. James, author of The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1938), a classic account of the St. Domingue slave revolution. 5. Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944), 2n. See also David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975);Thomas Bender, ed., The Antislavey Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Seymour Drescher, “The Antislavery Debate,” History and Theory 32, no. 3 (October 1993): 3n–29, review essay of The Anti-slavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation, ed. Thomas Bender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). For a recent discussion of the role of moral considerations in British abolition see David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), chap. 12. 6. See Seymour Drescher, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977), 165. For a recent summary of the literature, consult Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital. Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 14–16. 7. Brown, Moral Capital, esp. introd., epilogue. See also Robert William Fogel, The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Fogel, The Slavery Debates, 1952–1990: A Retrospective (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003), where the Nobel laureate in economics argues for the power of morality in changing the course of history. 8. See P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, Innovation and Expansion, vol. I of British Imperialism (London: Longman, 1993), 42–43. 9. Michael Duffy, “The French Revolution and British Attitudes to the West Indian

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10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

Colonies,” in A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean, ed. David Barry Gaspar and David Patrick Geggus (Bloomington: I ndiana University Press, 1977), 79. On British fortunes in the Caribbean, see David Patrick Geggus, Slavery, War, and Revolution: The British Occupation of Saint Domingue, 1793–1798 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); Michael Duffy, Soldiers, Sugar, and Seapower: The British Expedititions to the West Indies and the War against Revolutionary France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). On British slavery’s economic status in both the empire and the world market from 1800 to 1815, see, for example, Drescher, Econocide, chaps.5, 9; David Eltis; Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), chap. 1; David Eltis, Frank D. Lewis, and David Richardson, “Slave Prices, the African Slave Trade, and Productivity in the Caribbean, 1674–1807,” Economic History Review 58, no. 4 (2005): 673–700; Ralph Davis, The Industrial Revolution and British Overseas Trade (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1979), tables 38–64; Joseph E. Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England: A Study in Intemational Trade and Economic Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), table 4.2. For a contemporary estimate of the British slave empire in 1814, see P. Colquhoun, ATreatise on the Wealth, Power and Resources of the British Empire (London: J. Mawman, 1815), chaps. 1, 3, 10, 11, 12. See Drescher, Econocide, chap.  6; Eltis, Economic Growth, chaps. 1, 13; David Eltis, “The Traffic in Slaves between the British West India Colonies,” Economic History Review 25, no. I (1972): 55–64. Drescher, Econocide, 156–60; Eltis, Economic Growth, chap. I. See David Eltis, Stephe n D. Behrendt, David Richardson, and Herbert S. Klein, eds., The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (Atlanta: Emory University, 1999–), http://www.slavevo’ages.org/tast/index.faces. Sevmour Drescher,”Public Opinion and Parliament in the Abolition of the British Slave Trade,” in The British Slave Trade: Abolition, Parliament and People, ed. Stephen Farrell, Melanie Unwin, and James Walvin (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 42–65. Sermour Drescher, The Mighty Experimen: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), chap. 6. Drescher, Econocide, 114–19. Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and the Global Quest for Liberty (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006); Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves, and the American Revolution (New York: HarperCollins, 2006). For a concise exploration of the mision and difficulties of the Sierra Leone Company, see Suzanne Schwarz, “Commerce, Civilization and Christianity:T he Development of the Sierra Leone Company,” in Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery, ed. David Richardson, Schwarz, and Anthony Tibbles (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), 25276. See British Library Add Mss 58978, fol. n 9, Grenville Papers, Correspondence with Wilberforce, Wilberforce to Grenville, September 20, 1806; fol. 157• Correspondence with Auckland, Grenville to Lord Auckland, William Eden 1st Baron Auckland, August 10, 1806. Drescher, Mighty Experiment, 93–96. Ibid., 97. Ibid., 99–100. Christian Observer, April 1807, 256. Christopher Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1962), 16, 217.

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pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry 24. Philip D. Curtin, The Image of Africa: British Ideas and Action, 1780–1820, 2 vols. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964), chaps. 5, 7. 25. Howard Temperley, White Dreams, Black Africa: The Antislavery Expedition to the River Niger; 1841–1842 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), chaps. 6, 7. 26. Drescher, Mighty Experiment, 166–f’7. 27. Ibid., 168. 28. Fyfe, Sierra Leone, 335. 29. Times (London), 12 April 186 1, 8, col. f. 30. I bid., 8 August 187J. 31. Fyfe, Sierra Leone, 336–39. 32. W. I. Clowes, The Royal Navy, a History From the Earliest Times to the Present (London: Sampson, Low 1901), 228. 33. See Leslie Bethell, The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade: Britain, Brazil and the Slave Trade Question, 1807–1869 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 228–50; Jeffrey D. Needell, The Party of Order: The Conservatives, the State, and Slavery in the Brazilian Monarchy, 1831–1871 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 138–55. 34. See Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s Relations to Slavery, completed by Ward M. McAfee (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), chaps. 5, 6. 35. See Robin Law, “Abolition and Imperialism: International Law and the British Suppression of the Atlantic Slave Trade,” paper presented at “Domestic and International Consequences of the First Governmental Efforts to Abolish the Atlantic Slave Trade,” conference, Accra and Elmina, Ghana, 8–12 August 2007. My thanks to the author for allowing me to consult his manuscript. On the larger issues of law raised by British suppression, see Eltis, Economic Growth, 119–22. 36. Allen M. Howard, “Nineteenth-Century Coastal Slave Trading and the British Abolition Campaign in Sierra Leone,” Slavery and Abolition 27, no. 1 (2006): 23–49. 37. See David R. Murray, Odious Commerce: Britain, Spain, and the Abolition of the Cuban Slave Trade (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), chap. 13; Bethell, Brazilian Slave Trade, 380–83. I omit detailing the long list of practices by which Britain attempted to bring pressure to bear on civil society in foreign countries to accelerate the abolition of the slave trade or slavery. On the example of Brazil, see Richard Graham, Great Britain and the Onset ofModernization in Brazil, 1820–1914 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 169–70; Eltis, Economic Growth, 10119, chap. 12; Robert L. Paquette, Sugar Is Made with Blood: The Conspiracy ofLa Escalera and the Conflict between Empires over Slavery in Cuba (Middle town, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988). 38. Drescher, Mighty Experiment, chaps. 10–11. 39. Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 1118. 40. Suzanne Miers, Britain and the Ending of the Slave Trade (New York: Longman, 1975), 171. 41. Seymour Drescher, Dilemmas of Democracy: Tocqueville and Modernization (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1968), 191–95. 42. In this respect, whatever the cost of life, wealth, and trauma to slave traders and slaveholders arising from British slave trade interdiction must be offse t by the more precious benefits accruing to potential victims. “Seasoning” was the initial period after the Middle Passage, during which slaves were acclimated to the disease environment and the disciplinary regimen of the New World plantations. See also Eltis, “Abolition of the U.S. and British Slave Trade” (see note 35, above).

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pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry My thanks to the author for pe rmission to consult his manuscript. For sustained British attempts, after the Scramble, to defend coerced Africans the boundaries of British .jurisdiction, see Kevin Grant, A Civilised Savagery: Britain and the New Slaveries in Africa, 1884–1926 (New York: Routledge, zoos), chaps. 2, 5.

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9 HISTORY’S ENGINES: BRITISH MOBILIZATION IN THE AGE OF REVOLUTION

‘HISTORIANS of slavery have identified the half century after 1775 as a major, if not the major, turning point in the history of the institution. Often identified as the age of revolution, the period marked a fundamental shift in attitudes and behavior in favor of constraining, phasing out, or destroying this millennia-long form of human relationships.1 Before 1775 the Atlantic world’s rulers, merchants, producers, and consumers in Europe, Africa, and the Americas agreed that the slave trade was necessary for sustaining and expanding the wealth-generating system that was slavery. Despite distaste for and occasional moral outrage against the institution, antislavery sentiment was overborne by the magnitude, dynamism, and durability of the system. Fifty years later the institutional and ideological landscape had been transformed. The slave trade or slavery itself had come under challenge in the British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese empires. In large parts of the New World, the newly independent states of North and South America and the British Caribbean, governments had prohibited the importation of new slaves. The ways that different areas reached these stages varied greatly. One can weave a narrative of antislavery through the various political upheavals and military conflicts that crisscrossed the Atlantic world from the mid-1770s to the mid-1820s: first in North America (1775–83), then moving to France (1789–99) and the Caribbean (1791–1804), and finally roiling through Spanish America (1810–25). The fifty years of revolutionary wars began in the North American segment of the British Empire. A generation after the termination of that initial conflict, both parts of a now-divided empire managed to peacefully legislate the ending of Anglo-American transatlantic slave trades. Elsewhere abolition emerged amid shattered political systems and prolonged military conflict. In the French and Spanish empires, abolition of the slave trade occurred in the context of violent upheaval, military occupation, civil wars, constitutional revolutions, and coups d’etat in Europe and the Americas. The Portuguese monarchy survived the external threat of Napoleonic domination in 1807 only by flight to its colony of Brazil, but neither part of its divided empire witnessed the degree of violence or upheaval that occurred in North America and across the French and Spanish empires. 199

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry Even Great Britain can be made to fit into this revolutionary frame of reference. Some historians have interpreted the abolitions of the British slave trade and slavery as counterrevolutionary responses to the discontents aroused by the “industrial revolution.” Abolition has been identified as the outcome of an ideological crisis among a political and cultural elite whose “awareness of domestic suffering” was “blunted by the fear of revolution.” Still others have correlated each major step against the slave trade and slavery from 1787 to 1838 with specific crises of political legitimacy or with surges in class or protorevolutionary threat. Perhaps British abolitionism emerged at a moment of national humiliation arising from the loss of the American colonies or served to retrieve Britain’s threatened image as the torchbearer of liberty from the new American challenger.2 Despite attempts to link the rise, persistence, and successes of British abolition to international defeats and near-revolutionary moments during more than a half century after 1775, British abolitionism, slave trade abolition, and slave emancipations were all fair-weather revolutions. They correlated inversely with revolutionary upheavals and revolutionary wars in the French and Spanish empires. Nor did Britain follow the path of the Luso-Brazilian Empire, which took advantage of its escape from the massive violence of the Franco-Spanish empires to become the largest transatlantic slaving network in the world. British abolitionism followed its own stable trajectory. In its origins and in its outcome, that trajectory may have been the most significant development in the history of antislavery during the decades from the 1770s to the 1820s. This dramatic change was embedded within a longer Anglo-American transformation. Britons and North American colonists shared one of the most highly developed civil societies in the Atlantic world. In Britain a thickening network of newspapers increasingly nationalized an evolving dialogue between citizens and legislators. Parliamentary debates and government initiatives were now the daily grist of readers. Letters, advertisements for public gatherings, political pamphlets, and news items about activities of political debaters in London were fare for ongoing public conversations. Newspapers linked provincial readers not only with the center in London but also with interested actors from all parts of the island. Accompanying parliamentary debates, newspapers, associations, libraries, debating societies, and public meetings offered parallel venues for ongoing discussions and petitions to the national legislature. Within this broader milieu, abolitionism came to occupy a distinctively innovative position. Between its emergence as a national social movement in 1787 and the internationalization of slave trade abolition in 1814, abolitionism became a pioneering organization in the mobilization of hitherto untapped groups as political actors. The movement’s varying fortunes in Parliament during those three decades were equally emblematic of the difficulties of converting popular pressure into law and policy.3 200

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry The great surprises of British abolitionism were its breadth, depth, and duration. Popular agitation came in successive waves during the fifty years from 1788 to 1838. A mass petition from Manchester catalyzed the first mobilization in 1787 and became the model for most of the one hundred petitions in the first provincial campaign. Manchester’s ten thousand petitioners represented two-thirds of the city’s eligible adult males. The huge contingents of signers from the textile trade in Manchester and the metals trade in Birmingham, both heavily engaged in producing commodities for export to Africa, were singled out for special mention in abolitionist propaganda. These towns were the very ones from which antiabolitionists had expected overwhelming rejection of any proposed legislation that would interfere with the slave trade. The December 1787 Manchester petition was innovative in other respects. Newspapers were especially significant in the first national mobilization. Manchester’s abolitionists advertised their petition in every major newspaper in England and called for similar petitions from local readers. As a result petitions for abolition constituted more than half of all petitions sent to Parliament during the 1788 session. London echoed Manchester’s initiative. When early in January 1788 the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade in London (known as the London committee) circulated a general call for petitions, it was published in the form of a copy of the Manchester petition. At a conservative estimate, at least sixty thousand individuals signed the 1788 abolition petitions.4 The public sphere rapidly expanded in many directions. From the outset organized religious dissenters rallied to the movement. Evangelical Anglicans, Baptists, Congregationalists, Methodists, and Unitarians quickly added their support to the crucial Quaker cadres. Though members of Parliament still generally thought women’s signatures delegitimized public petitions, female voices and pens were not taboo. Almost instantly, debating clubs, poems, pamphlets, and newspapers noted their opinions. Public space also opened for Africans’ voices. It is not coincidental timing that Olaudah Equiano’s 1789 autobiography became the Atlantic’s first popular narrative of an African’s lifetime journey from slave to freeman to British abolitionist writer and lecturer.5 In a second petition campaign, in 1791–92, more than four hundred thousand names flowed into London just in time for the introduction of William Wilberforce’s parliamentary motion for abolition. These petitions and signatures were probably the most to have ever reached Parliament simultaneously on a single subject. In some parts of the country, between one-quarter and one-third of the adult male population petitioned for abolition. Remarkably, nearly half of Manchester’s eligibles signed. Geographically, the London committee received positive responses from one end of the country to the other, from back-waters and large towns and from principal and general inhabitants. Clerical conclaves, university faculty assemblies, and chambers of commerce modestly took their places as corporate petitioners alongside 201

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry trades organizations and workers’ friendly societies. The London committee emphasized that it favored popular petitions. Response to the great 1791–92 campaign indicates that the abolitionists requested and received almost unlimited support within the contemporary boundaries of legitimate signers. The movement’s organizers were in fact less worried about too little popular enthusiasm for abolition than too much; after 1792, the combination of rising internal radical threats and revolutionary war in Europe and the Caribbean shut down the movement for a decade.6 The modus operandi established in 1788–92 continued for the half century that followed. As British abolitionists moved toward advocating slave emancipation in the colonies in the early 1820s, the same process resumed. More than five thousand petitions reached Parliament in 1831 and again in 1833. From the mid-1820s women inserted themselves en masse into the category of legitimate petitioners. In 1830 dissenters welcomed women as a decisive presence. By 1833, on the day scheduled for the introduction of the Slavery Abolition Bill to the House of Commons, the largest single antislavery petition in British history arrived by carriage at the doors of Parliament. “A huge featherbed of a petition,” it bore 187,000 signatures in “one vast and universal expression of feeling from all the females of the United Kingdom.” Of the 1.3 million who signed that year’s petitions, 400,000 were women. In the last mass petition, in 1837–38, the 700,000 women who addressed the new Queen Victoria amounted to two-thirds of the 1.1 million signatures sent to the House of Commons. By that time religious dissenters’ share of signers had also risen to an all-time high.7 The abolitionist movement stimulated another innovation m mass mobilization that endured intermittently in British abolitionist circles for more than three generations. The antisaccharite consumer boycott was a response to Parliament’s rejection in 1791 of the first bill to abolish the trade. If Parliament could not be counted on to act on the people’s will, and if women could not gain formal access to the political public sphere, they could still act: outside the orbit of the London committee, Britons launched a nationwide campaign to abstain from the consumption of slave-grown sugar. Intended as an instrument of direct economic coercion against the whole slave interest, the movement dramatically broadened the public sphere. Special appeals were directed toward women as managers of the household budget. They stressed women’s sensitivity to family destruction and offered a means of compensating for their exclusion from the petition campaign. Children too were urged, and volunteered, to become part of this national consumer mobilization. On his speaking tours, Equiano distributed pamphlets against consuming slave sugar. Thus alongside the carefully crafted and targeted appeal of the London committee appeared a parallel movement involving hundreds of thousands of other participants.8 British abolitionists appealed to the minds as well as to the emotions of legislators and the public. The indefatigable Thomas Clarkson painstakingly 202

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry labored to accumulate statistical evidence and eyewitness accounts of the endless horrors of the slave trade. Doctors and common seamen testified in parliamentary committees to the brutality and mortality suffered by slaves and crew. Every Briton became aware of the inside of a slave ship through mass-produced prints. From 1791 to 1807, abolitionists in and out of Parliament predominantly emphasized moral reasons over other justifications for total abolition of the trade. Their opponents consistently and symmetrically emphasized economic and security concerns over moral qualms. In no other country was the inhumanity of the transatlantic voyage so widely publicized. Even sixteen years after popular mobilization against the slave trade reached its first crescendo, Clarkson’s sober History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the Slave-Trade paused for a moment of awe to commemorate the mood of 1791–92. “Of the enthusiasm of the nation at this time none can form an opinion but they who witnessed it . . . The current ran with such strength and rapidity, that it was impossible to stem it . . . [No petitions] were ever more numerous, as far as we have any record of such transactions . . . The account stood thus. For regulation there was one; against all abolition there were four; and for the total abolition of the trade five hundred and nineteen.” In the wake of total victory over Napoleonic France in 1814, abolitionists again called on the nation, this time to demand the renegotiation of an article in the peace treaty that allowed French merchants to reopen a slave trade that British warships had shut down for twenty years. Had Clarkson updated his History that year, he might well have summed up the great poll of 1814 as: petitions favoring revision, 1,370; against, 0. Even slaving Liverpool and the West Indies came aboard. Clarkson only noted to Wilberforce, “All England is moving.”9 If British abolitionism was distinctive in its mobilization, organization, and persistence, the context of its success was equally distinguished. Outside the northern United States and some parts of Latin America where 10 percent or less of the population was enslaved, massive civil conflict or external military threats were necessary preludes to slave trade abolition and slave emancipation. Nowhere in the Iberian imperial orbit did a popularly organized movement dedicated to opposing slavery form during the age of revolution. As in the French Caribbean, wars and revolutions were history’s principal engines in undermining the stability of the institution in Spanish America. British abolitionism, on the contrary, did not emerge at a moment of national humiliation arising from the loss of the North American colonies. Nor was it a direct response to heightened internal class conflict, a surge of political polarization, or an economic devaluation of the British slave system in the metropolis. To the extent that national self-scrutiny about Britain’s slave trade became the subject of sustained imperial discourse after 1783, it did so in the context of revived national self-confidence. 10 By many available empirical measures, popular abolitionism emerged at one of the most benign junctures in British history during the period between 203

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry the crisis of American colonial resistance and the ending of the transatlantic slave trade nearly a century later. A survey of British newspapers, legislative debates, and official data on trade and national income in the late 1780s indicates a nation reveling in its prosperity, security, and power. The postwar fires of partisanship and reform had subsided within Parliament and in the country at large. Economic prospects beyond the seas seemed especially bright. British manufactures were winning everywhere: a new French treaty was expanding the Continental market for them. Beyond Europe, British trade dominated entrepots from Canton to America. The West Indies was sending back fine sugar crops. Less than five years after the 1783 Treaty of Paris, the press found Britain’s transformed international position equally exhilarating. France, plagued by aristocratic revolt and popular rioting, was verging on bankruptcy and military impotence. The Netherlands was descending into revolution. The Dutch East and West India companies were foundering. Britons were equally well informed of developments in the new American Republic. In 1786 and 1787, newspapers offered an unending flow of bad news from New England to Georgia: rebellion in Massachusetts, inflation in Rhode Island, fomentation in New York, stagnation in Philadelphia, problems in the Carolinas and Georgia. The American Confederation itself seemed to be at risk of disintegrating. When William Wyndham Grenville, 1st Baron Grenville, presented a new bill on rules to govern trade between the United States and the British West Indies in 1787, he emphasized that the provisions had to be temporary because it was difficult to decide whether Americans were “under one government, whether they consisted of many discordant governments, or whether they were under no government at all.”11 Nor was Britain threatened by moral comparison with its erstwhile American colonists, even regarding the slave trade. Though American seamen were again sailing to West Africa to load slaves for the West Indies, some of their fellow seafaring countrymen were being unloaded as slaves in North Africa. The London press smugly listed the high prices demanded for Americans in Algiers alongside accounts of the dey’s brutal punishment of any corsair who dared to capture Britons in violation of Anglo-Algerian treaties. Whatever may have contributed to transforming abolitionism from a popular sentiment to a political movement in 1787–88, it was neither a reaction to postwar jeremiads nor a widespread notion that the British needed to snatch the role of liberty’s champion back from the United States. Popular abolitionism proceeded from a different premise: how could the world’s most secure, free, religious, just, prosperous, and moral nation allow itself to remain the premier perpetrator of the world’s most deadly, brutal, unjust, and immoral offenses to humanity? How could its people, once fully informed of its inhumanity, hope to continue to be blessed with their enviable condition?12 When the second great wave of petitions flowed into Parliament in 1792 after a decade of “peace, prosperity, and power” under Prime Minister William 204

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry Pitt, however, the storm clouds were gathering. The French Revolution had inspired the formation of radical British reform groups, most of which appropriated slave trade abolition as a natural kin to their own reform demands and a potential opening for ideological alliance. Abolitionist leaders worried that association with such groups could endanger their own mobilization. Wilberforce cautioned Clarkson, who was quite sympathetic to the French Revolution, not to mention it on his petition tour. William Dickson, the London committee’s agent for Scotland, received the same strict admonition. The mass sugar boycott movement was founded precisely on the premise that Parliament, as then constituted, was unresponsive to the clear message of public opinion. Some of the boycott propaganda was almost insinuatingly threatening to the legislature.13 The great slave revolt in Saint Domingue entered the debate over abolition at the same moment. Its chances of success were still too uncertain to affect the outcome of the parliamentary voting, but Clarkson felt obliged to publish a disavowal of membership in the French Jacobin Club. A few months later, it became clearer that the French could not easily suppress the slave revolution. Detailed horrors of revolutions on both sides of the Atlantic compounded fears of domestic radicalism. Dickson encountered evidence that abolition’s opponents were making efforts to use the 1791 Saint Domingue uprising against petitioning and that they had already succeeded in terrifying at least one sympathizer in Perth. When Britain went to war against France in 1793, further abolitionist mobilization became out of the question. By then “odium had fallen on these collective applications” to Parliament for any reform. The prospects for success and failure for abolition in Britain thereafter moved inversely to the level of revolutionary violence in the French orbit.14 French and British abolitionism proceeded on opposite tracks from quite early in the French Revolution. In 1789 Clarkson crossed the English Channel hoping to further a joint abolitionist initiative. His visit quickly showed him the deep weakness of the movement in France. The French Societe des Amis des Noirs had no mass movement. The members lacked provincial cadres like the Quakers and other dissenters. They were hopelessly overwhelmed by a colonial and French mercantile counter-mobilization. The new regime, however revolutionary at home, deemed the colonies too valuable to tamper with. In 1790, the year before the Saint Domingue uprising, the French colonies imported a record fifty thousand Africans, half the slaves delivered that year to the Americas.15 A country just beginning to deal with the bankruptcy of the Old Regime and massive antitax ferment at home needed all the fiscal and commercial help that the most prosperous segment of the empire could offer. The revolutionary state continued to subsidize the slave trade. In the French Empire, the Saint Domingue slave revolution was truly the locomotive of antislavery. The Caribbean slave revolution, combined with a British threat to complete a sweeping conquest of the French sugar colonies in 1794, precipitated France’s revolutionary leap to general emancipation. In 205

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry reaction to the simultaneous threats on both sides of the Atlantic, British policy became firmly committed to defending its colonial system and to restoring the institution, where militarily feasible, in the French colonies. At the height of the French Caribbean threat to the British eastern Caribbean in the mid-1790s, British metropolitan abolitionism reached its lowest ebb.16 The 1792 House of Commons vote for gradual abolition, however, was never repudiated. The danger of foreign-born revolutionary liberation in the British Caribbean rapidly diminished in the late 1790s. And the threat of home-grown slave revolutions never materialized. Jamaica experienced no major slave revolt between 1770 and the great uprising of 1831; elsewhere, only colonies invaded by the French experienced threats to the institution. By 1805 victory at the Battle of Trafalgar had secured the British Empire from French threats at home and to its Caribbean islands. By 1806 the British had also reduced the mortality costs of Caribbean security against slave revolts by forming African slave regiments and a de facto detente with newly independent Haiti. The British Empire was therefore more secure in 1806–7 than it had been in a dozen years. By the time Foreign Secretary Charles Grey, 2d Earl Grey, known as Viscount Howick, opened the great abolition debate in the House of Commons in 1807, he dismissed the West Indian refrain that even discussions of abolition were recipes for revolt: “Look at the state of these islands for the last 20 years, and say, is it not notorious, that there never were so few insurrections, amongst the negroes, as at the very time they knew that such an abolition of this infamous traffic was under discussion?” Not a single member of Parliament for the slave interest rose to dispute his assertion.17 Massive British slave resistance influenced the issue of slave emancipation, but only toward the very end of the age of revolution. The 1816 uprising in Barbados, the island’s first in more than a century, placed abolitionists momentarily on the defensive. Wilberforce withdrew his slave registration project. As late as 1823, Sir Thomas Fowell, 1st Baronet Buxton, Wilberforce’s parliamentary heir, vacillated over introducing a resolution in favor of gradual abolition because he feared inciting a slave rebellion. When a massive uprising occurred in Demerara (a county in present-day Guyana) later that year, however, the rebels’ behavior aided the abolitionists. The Demerara slaves demonstrated no intention to kill their masters. They destroyed virtually no property. Equally important, they aligned their demands with those of British workers, demanding rights to wages, to days off, and to freedom. The agents of repression offered abolitionists the added bonus of a missionary martyr, John Smith, who died in colonial custody. The expanding network of missionaries in the colonies now allowed slaves to forge a public voice analogous to the dialogue that had been opened between the British public and the government about the slave trade four decades earlier. The Demerara uprising thus presented a far different challenge to British authorities than had the Saint Domingue and Haitian revolutions in the 1790s.18 206

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry Taken as a whole, British abolitionist advances after 1787 did not occur at moments of military threat or of widespread economic and political crisis. In retrospect the only mass abolitionist petitions ignored by the British government during the half century from 1788 to 1838 were the ones submitted in 1831. In the wake of a little-noted mass campaign of 1830–31, more than five thousand petitions poured into Parliament demanding the immediate abolition of slavery. Another political crisis intervened. The administration argued, and the parliamentary abolitionists agreed, that the question of emancipation would have to await resolution of the deadlock over parliamentary reform. And so it turned out. The peaceful passage of the Representation of the People Act in 1832 opened the gates to emancipation. By then the massive Jamaica uprising (the “Baptist War”), with its small toll of white deaths (14) and its heavy toll of reprisals (540), could no longer stall the engine of emancipation.19 By the end of the age of revolution, British abolitionism had therefore transformed itself and the nation. In the course of a single generation after 1788, it evolved from the program of an innovative public contender into a settled and irreversible fixture of national policy. As the first successful British reform movement of the nineteenth century, abolitionism created a new variety of special-interest claims making and developed a well-established set of routines. Abolitionism transparently linked local and mass popular politics to national affairs while expanding the range and power of new participants in the public sphere. In other words British abolitionism was a precocious pioneer of the modern social movement. The state had clearly learned to listen if not always to obey. Abolitionism also expanded its own agenda. The great petition of 1814 precipitously launched Britain into a global mission against the slave trade. When Clarkson observed that “All England is moving,” he may not have grasped the full import of his words. The British ambassador in Madrid quickly received a confidential communication from Foreign Minister Robert Stewart, 2d Marquess of Londonderry, known as Lord Castlereagh: “You must really press the Spanish Government to give us some more facilities on the Slave Trade . . . the nation is bent upon this object, I believe there is hardly a village that has not met and petitioned upon it, both Houses of Parliament are pledged to press it; and the Ministers must make it the basis of their policy.” Preparing to leave. England for his difficult new assignment as ambassador to Paris, Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, was equally impressed: “People in general appear to think that it would suit the policy of this nation to go to war to put an end to that abominable traffic. “20 Wellington’s adjective showed that he too had internalized the abolitionist message if not its commitment. Most abolitionists did not advocate war as a method of change. The movement’s pacific origins in the Religious Society of Friends a generation earlier limited its demands on the use of British power for two generations after the Battle of Waterloo. Nevertheless the seaborne 207

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry dimensions of the African slave trade invited an aggressive British response to this transcontinental traffic. That response began before the peace treaty signed at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, where British initiative ensured one article that looked beyond Europe: the one condemning the slave trade. In subsequent years British foreign ministers tried in vain to negotiate collective international treaties to implement this moral condemnation. They created a series of bilateral treaties that used two major breaches of national sovereignty as tools for attacking the slave trade. First, a mutual “right of search” allowed sailors of one nation to board the ships of another to look for African captives. This provision in effect gave British ships the right to do the searching because the Royal Navy constituted the principal fleet patrolling the sea-lanes from Africa to the Americas. Second, bilateral “mixed commissions” were created on both sides of the Atlantic to adjudicate the validity of seizures and the disposition of the captives. For the first time in Western history, an international judicial system superseded the rights of European nationals or subjects to be tried solely by magistrates of their own state for acts committed on the high seas. These bodies were quiet pioneers of courts of international law that would come to fruition in the twentieth century.21 By the 1820s British abolitionists were able to leverage the economic, diplomatic, and naval power of their nation to globalize the attack on the slave trade. In West Africa the first free-soil settlement was formally incorporated into the British Empire in 1807. Though its status was long compromised by military recruitment and fourteen-year apprenticeships, Sierra Leone remained the primary refuge on the western African coast for those and their progeny who would otherwise have been consigned to chattel status. Farther south British conquest also closed Cape Colony (present-day Cape Province) to the slave trade in 1807. In Southeast Asia the British abolished the trade to conquered Dutch Java. Slave imports to Mauritius(captured in 1810) were effectively shut down in the 1820s.22 What did Britain’s commitment to international abolition mean for the global future of the slave trade and slavery? The pattern British abolition established by 1815 cast a long shadow over the half century that followed. By the end of the Atlantic slave trade in the 1860s, Britain’s antislavery cost its metropolitan citizens r.8 percent of their national income during six decades. These financial costs of antislavery do not take into account the ill will toward the British state because of its pressure on the colonizing states of Western Europe between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the start of the American Civil War. In weighing the material and diplomatic costs of British abolition, it is equally important to bear in mind the benefits. As David Eltis points out, absent the vigorous British pursuit of an end to the trade, the pace of the nineteenth-century North Atlantic economic surge-later dubbed the industrial revolution – ”could only have greatly expanded the slave trade to several times what it actually was . . . Forced African migration into the Americas would have continued in excess of free European immigration.”23 208

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry Untold millions of immigrants to the New World in the long nineteenth century would have been African slaves, not free Europeans. If British abolition proceeded with the least threat of domestic revolution and foreign invasion after 1783, how did other empires and their slaves fare? A half century after the American War of Independence, much of the institutional and ideological landscape of 1775 had been transformed. Within large parts of the New World, governments had prohibited the importation of new slaves. Slavery had been entirely abolished in parts of Central America, Chile, Haiti, Santo Domingo, and the new United States. Other states had either instituted gradual abolition via “free womb” laws or pledged to prepare for the proximate liberation of all slaves in their territories.24 The upheavals and regime changes in all the Atlantic slave empires produced divergent national outcomes by the end of the age of revolution. After suffering sharp reductions during the latter part of the American War of Independence, the American and British trades in Africans reached all-time annual highs prior to the imposition of abolitionist constraints (ca. 1799– 1807). In the generation between the onset of the French Revolution and the defeat of Napoleon, Great Britain and the United States acquired far vaster plantation frontiers than they had occupied during the previous century and a half. In the British case, however, the new frontier was denied intracolonial and transatlantic sources of new slave labor. By 1825 it was virtually impossible for British West Indian slave owners to move major cohorts of field slaves even between British colonies.25 Because natural increase had long since been the major source of demographic growth for American slavery, the abolition of the African slave trade to the United States in 1807 did not halt the rapid development of the U.S. slave population, which, by the mid-1820s, was the largest in the western hemisphere. The geographic expansion of American slavery after the prohibition of Atlantic imports was even more spectacular than its demographic expansion. New territories annexed by the United States and new states formed within the union absorbed hundreds of thousands of new slaves. Until the American Civil War, U.S. citizens remained heavily engaged in the African slave trades to Brazil and Cuba.26 French slave traders continued their activities until the late 1820s, taking advantage of their government’s reluctant enforcement of prohibition. Despite the loss of Saint Domingue, the French flag shielded a level of trading into the 1820s unequaled since the 1793 outbreak of France’s twenty-year conflict with England. In what remained of the Spanish Empire, Cuba and Puerto Rico offered further evidence of the Atlantic slave system’s resiliency. Puerto Rican slave imports rose steadily from the 1810s, reaching their alltime peak in the 1820s and 1830s. The more important Spanish slave colony of Cuba imported 175 percent more slaves from 18n to 1830 than it had during the two prior revolutionary decades. As a result far more slaves lived 209

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry within the boundaries of the Spanish Empire in 1825 than had resided there at the start of the Latin American wars of independence. As in the United States, Spanish slavery had been abolished only where slaves composed IO percent or less of the population.27 The Luso-Brazilian Atlantic, whose territories, despite frequent slave uprisings, endured the least violent threat to its prerevolutionary social and political order, became the chief beneficiary of the Anglo-American slave trade abolitions in 1807. During the decade before 1775, about twenty thousand Africans were delivered to Brazil each year. The annual average rose steadily, from twenty-five thousand in the 1780s to more than fifty thousand in the 1820s. At the end of the age of revolution, Brazil had no abolitionist movement. From the beginning of the American Revolution to the successful completion of the Haitian Revolution in 1804, the quasi-universal discourse on slavery in the Ibero-American empires was a “resolute defense of the capture and commercialization of Africans.”28 By the mid-1820s the life-line to further African imports to Spanish South America had almost been severed. In newly independent Brazil, one of the emperor’s major advisers was prepared to call for an end to the Atlantic slave trade. At best, however, his position represented only a small minority in Brazil’s Constituent Assembly. It never threatened the slaveholders’ consensus in favor of maximum extension of the trade and the institution. The Luso-Brazilian economies remained the Atlantic’s most slave-dependent zone. Through British intervention the peace treaty of the 1815 Congress of Vienna contained one article devoted to the world beyond Europe. The Great Powers mutually contracted to work for the definitive abolition of the slave trade, designated as a commerce condemned by the laws of religion and nature. For two generations thereafter, the rulers of Brazil and Cuba had more to fear from British interventionthan from any domestic pressures for abolition. The south Atlantic areas least traumatized by internal military or revolutionary violence faced the least challenge to the institution. To put the matter starkly, 25 percent more slaves were being delivered to Ibero-American masters in the 1820s than had been freed by the Franco-Caribbean revolutions of the 1790s or had been carried from Africa by the Anglo-Americans during the decade before they abolished the slave trade. The United States moved along a different trajectory. The political movement against the Atlantic slave trade began on the American side of the Atlantic prior to the outbreak of the American Revolution. The first initiatives for restriction came from British colonies in North America and stemmed from a variety of moral, security, and racial motives. A 1774 nonimportation decree of the First Continental Congress included a ban on the importation of British-born African slaves. Throughout the age of revolution, however, the fate of the union had higher priority than sectionally inflected anti-slave trade sentiments. At the 1787 Philadelphia Convention, a comprehensive silence prevailed on anything more than the possible closure 210

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry of the slave trade after 1807. American politicians continued to pay that price of silence for the next thirty years. Antislavery remained fragmented within state and sectional lines. Legislators in almost all states prohibited their own citizens from participating further in the slave trade well before federal abolition. Only South Carolina reopened its trade, in 1803. Thereafter, at the first opportunity offered by the Constitution, the national legislature prohibited further slave importations into the United States in 1807. With that act the Constitution fulfilled its major antislavery promise. For most blacks south of the Mason-Dixon Line, there was no revolution at the end of the age of revolution. Slavery was more secure in the South when Thomas Jefferson died on July 4, 1826, than it had been on the day when his Declaration of lndependence was proclaimed fifty years earlier.29 For Britain the trade was a closed question. One might venture further, however, and recognize what had been given up. In 1800 Britain was poised to widen the gap between its rate of industrialization and that of continental Europe. In the next half century, Britain added to its empire not only Trinidad, Demerara, Berbice (now a county in Guyana), Mauritius, and Cape Colony but also Natal (present-day KwaZulu-Natal) in South Africa, Queensland in Australia, and Burma (now Myanmar) and Malaya (present-day Peninsular Malaysia) in Southeast Asia, all potential frontiers for plantation agriculture. Collectively, these acquisitions would have opened avenues for the slave trade far beyond slave merchants’ wildest dreams and abolitionists’ deepest fears in 1807. Had the New and Old World slave trades endured until the great conflicts of the twentieth century, it is difficult to imagine the magnitude of convergent human catastrophes in a globalized world ever more deeply infused with deadly racial ideologies. British abolitionism may thus have caused the nation to undertake what may be modern history’s most expensive and beneficial explicit overseas policy based primarily on moral premises. Britain’s role has always been controversial because it raises the issue of moral action as a force in human history. Abolitionism emerged at a crucial juncture in British imperial power, which was usually deployed to advance policies that were neither dominated by nor concerned with a moral mission. Because economic interest and colonization were so important in the rise and maintenance of New World slavery, it has been tempting to view Britain’s long campaign against the trade primarily as an extension of the class, racial, or imperial motives that had initially nurtured slavery and the slave trades. Precisely because of Britain’s economic, political, and naval preeminence, antiabolitionists and nonabolitionists-whether conservative or radical-often detected Machiavellian schemes beneath professions of moral motives. Generations of French officials never ceased to discover hidden layers of realpolitik, arrogance, and hypocrisy beneath British anti-slavery initiatives. “Do you English mean to bind all the world?” asked France’s first colonial minister under the restored Bourbons.30 His suspicion 211

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry reverberated through Europe and the Americas into the twenty-first century. British abolitionism never managed to free itself from charges of being more, or less, than its proponents professed. Considerations of long-term effects raise a final question about the legacy of British abolitionism in relation to the role of mass violence in ending the trade and the institution. Here it may be easier to draw up a balance sheet between the British abolition of the slave trade and other paths to abolition. Before and after the French wars ended, the Royal Navy stretched and breached international law in occasional or threatened blockades of European, Latin American, and African ports. These forays were almost always limited. They were challenged in British courts and parliaments.31 British abolitionism sustained a reputation for relative non-violence through slave uprisings and slave emancipation. A generation after the ending of the British slave trade, it was difficult to deny the contrasts between the brutal, deadly, unfinished, and partially reversed battles against slavery in the French and Spanish revolutions and the irreversible abolition of the slave trade to the British colonies in 1808. The model of nonviolent transition endured into emancipation. More than a half century after the emergence of British abolitionism, French abolitionist Alexis de Tocqueville asked his countrymen to consider what had taken place across the channel. “Had the principal colonial and maritime nation on the face of the globe declared sixty years ago that slavery was going to disappear from its vast domains, what cries of surprise and admiration would have issued from all sides . . . How many fears and hopes would have filled every heart!” What most impressed Tocqueville was the bloodless climax, the peaceful imposition of slave emancipation. On a single day in 1834, he wrote, eight hundred thousand slaves were called from “death to life.” Neither before nor after the announcement of coming freedom had it produced “a single insurrection.” The turbulence in the following decade was contention of the new kind-strikes and withdrawal from labor – not the old kind, the dreaded cycle of servile insurrections and brutal repressions recorded in ancient and modern histories. Tocqueville observed that “not a tenth of the disorder in ten years which ordinarily results from the most minor political question that agitates opinion in the civilized nations of Europe” had occurred in the British colonies after emancipation.32 Tocqueville underrated the degree of serious contention in the colonies before emancipation, just as he underplayed the role of the final Jamaican slave uprising. But he hit the mark squarely on the metropolitan process. “The emancipation of the slaves was a parliamentary reform, the act of the nation and not of its rulers. The English Government struggled as long as it could against the adoption of the measure. It resisted the abolition of the slave trade for fifteen years, and the abolition of slavery for twenty-five years. When it could not prevent its passage it tried to at least delay it, and when it gave up all hope of postponement, it sought to dilute the consequences, but always in vain; the popular torrent prevailed and swept it along.”33 212

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry Leading abolitionists on the other side of the Atlantic seconded this evaluation enthusiastically. For William Lloyd Garrison, British slave trade abolition was an “epochal victory of ‘right over wrong’” and the peaceful legislating of emancipation, “the greatest moral miracle of the age.” Even in the wake of the revolutionary days of 1848, when a second French republic abolished France’s “second slavery,” Frederick Douglass harked back to the British example. On August 1, 1848, the tenth anniversary of final British slave emancipation, he reminded his American audience that England’s “passage to freedom is not through rivers of blood . . . What is bloody revolution in France, is peaceful reformation in England. The friends and enemies of freedom, meet not at the barricades thrown up in the streets of London; but on the broad platform of Exeter Hall . . . Their ramparts are right and reason . . . Their Hotel de Ville, is the House of Commons.”34 Whatever the pattern of abolition in any of the sites of the trans-atlantic slave trades, a full historical assessment of British abolition demands an appraisal of the cumulative devastation that it curtailed, the wealth-generating enterprise that it foreclosed, the multigenerational action that it required, and the magnitude of foreclosures that it generated. Looking back across two centuries, the distinctive features of British abolition still stand out in high relief.

Notes Seymour Drescher is Distinguished University Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh. For their helpful comments, the author is grateful to David Eltis (especially for sharing an earlier version of his contribution to this Special Issue), Stanley Engerman, Van Beck Hall, Robin Law (for sharing a manuscript version of the paper he delivered at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture’s 2007 conference in Ghana), Philip Morgan, and the many participants at the bicentennial commemoration of the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade in Accra and Elmina, Ghana. 1. See for example David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1975); Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (London, 1988); Blackburn, “Haiti, Slavery, and the Age of the Democratic Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 63, no. 4 (October 2006): 643–74; Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York, 2006), chaps. 7–8. The tradition runs back at least three generations, to C. L. R. James, The Black jacobins: Toussaint Louverture and the San Domingo Revolution (London, 1938); Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1944), chap. 6. The tide of this article blends two concepts, Karl Marx’s designation of revolutions as history’s locomotives and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s designation of Thomas Clarkson as the “moral steam engine.” See Coleridge to Daniel Stuart, Feb. 13, 1809, in Ellen Gibson Wilson, Thomas Clarkson: A Biography (Basingstoke, Eng., 1989), I. For the original context of the quotation, see Earl Leslie Griggs, ed., The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (New York, 2002), 3: 746. 2. Davis, Problem of Slavery, 233 (“industrial revolution”), 366 (“awareness”). Robin Blackburn’s correlation of revolutionary threat with antislavery success

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3.

4.

5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

10.

is particularly pointed: “Anti-slavery breakthroughs were made rather under the pressure of revolutionary or proto-revolutionary events, and the actuality or threat of slave resistance.” See Blackburn, Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 526. In conformity with this scenario, “Britain’s oligarchy had a world to win if they could pull through [abolition in 1807] – and a kingdom to lose if they did not . . . The political conjuncture to be negotiated by the oligarchy was one of growing danger and isolation” (ibid., 312–13). See also David Brion Davis’s elegant identification of the abolition of the British slave trade as a displacement of metropolitan ills in Davis, Problem of Slavery, chaps. 8–9. See Joanna Innes, “Legislation and Public Participation, 1760–1830,” in The British and Their Laws in the Eighteenth Century, ed. David Lemmings (Woodbridge, Eng., 2005), chap. 5. For an analysis of Britain’s path to new forms of mass politics and relationships to the state, see Charles Tilly, Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758–1834 (Cambridge, Mass., 1995); Seymour Drescher, “Public Opinion and Parliament in the Abolition of the British Slave Trade,” in The British Slave Trade: Abolition, Parliament, and People, ed. Stephen Farrell, Melanie Unwin, and James Walvin (Edinburgh, 2007), 42–65. For the public debate over the significance of the Manchester petition and its economic interests, see Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective (New York, 1987), 68–72, 210–13. To a Liverpool letter writer who complained that the Manchester petitioners attacked their own cotton interest, a Manchester correspondent replied, “Why be alarmed for manufacturers and mechanics when they have no fears?” (ibid., 212 n. 25). See also Thomas Clarkson’s special use of the Manchester and Birmingham petitions in Clarkson, An Essay on the Impolicy of the African Slave Trade (London, 1788), n8–19. For Manchester’s role, see Drescher, “Public Opinion and Parliament,” 49. R. Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery: The Mobilisation of Public Opinion against the Slave Trade, 1787–1807 (Manchester, Eng., 1995), esp. chaps. 2, 4; Drescher, “Public Opinion and Parliament,” 51–53. On Olaudah Equiano, see Vincent Carretta, Equiano the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (Athens, Ga., 2005). Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, chap.  4; Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery, chaps. 2, 4–5. Clare Midgley, Women against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780–1870 (New York, 1995), 65 (quotations). See also Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, Conn., 1992), 279–80. Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, 78–79, 215–17. Thomas Clarkson, The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the Slave-Trade by the British Parliament (London, 1808), 2: 352–55 (“Of the enthusiasm”); Paul Michael Kielstra, The Politics of Slave Trade Suppression in Britain and France, 1814–1848: Diplomacy.” Morality and Economics (New York, 2000), 30–31 (“All England is moving,” 31). On the asymmetrical distribution of economic and moral motives, see Seymour Drescher, “People and Parliament: The Rhetoric of the British Slave Trade,” journal of Interdisciplinary History 20, no. 4 (Spring 1990): 561–80. See also Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York, 2007), 325–26. A long and distinguished historiographical tradition views Britain’s trauma of defeat and despair in the American War of Independence as the catalytic event in the emergence of British abolitionism. See among other works R. Coupland, The American Revolution and the British Empire: The Sir George Watson Lectures for 1928 (1930; repr., New York, 1965), 1–45, 82–83, 196–99; Christopher Leslie

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11.

12.

13. 14.

15.

16.

Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2006), esp.  182–206, 451–62. On this particular issue, David Brion Davis offers a different view. See Davis, “American Slavery and the American Revolution,” in Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution, ed. Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman (Charlottesville, Va., 1983), 262–80. “Trade with America,” London Morning Chronicle, Mar. 15, 1787, [3] (quotation). For a survey of British newspaper opinion on America, see Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, 141–42, 247–49. Quantitative indicators reinforce the qualitative observations in newspapers. During the 1780s net migration rates from England fell to their lowest level in the more than three centuries from 1541 to 1871. See E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541–1871: A Reconstruction (Cambridge, 1989), 531–35 (table A3.3). National income was rising at a record rate in the decade after 1782. See Patrick K. O’Brien and Philip A. Hunt, “The Rise of a Fiscal State in England, 1485–1815,” Historical Research 66, no. 160 (Oune 1993): 129–76, esp. 175–76 (table 5). Further indicators of economic growth and prosperity in the mid- to late 1780s may be found in the increased output and export of coal, metals, paper, and ships built. Customs reported record imports of raw wool, raw silk, cotton, tea, sugar, and wine. Newspapers reported bumper farm crops and consumption of wheat. In the area of public finances, national expenditures dropped dramatically in the mid-1780s, whereas net public income reached record heights. For statistics on all these items, see B. R. Mitchell, British Historical Statistics (Cambridge, 1988). Drescher, “Public Opinion and Parliament,” 46–47. As Christopher Leslie Brown observes, British “essayists were still condemning American slavery and celebrating British free soil” in 1785. See Brown, Moral Capital, 201. And constitutional reformer Christopher Wyvill conceded in 1787 that “the prospect of happier times had produced a disposition to acquiesce” in the political status quo (ibid., 202). Drescher, “Public Opinion and Parliament,” 47 (quotation), 55–56. Robert Isaac Wilberforce and Samuel Wilberforce, The Life of William Wilberforce (London, 1838), 2: 19 (quotation). On the initial significance in England of Saint Domingue’s uprising, see David Geggus, “British Opinion and the Emergence of Haiti, 1791–1805,” in Slavery and British Society, 1776–1846, ed. James Walvin (London, 1982), 123–49. See Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, http://www.slavevoyages. org/tast/index.faces. On the French revolutionary government’s colonial policy, see Miranda Spieler, “The Legal Structure of Colonial Rule during the French Revolution,” WMQ 66, no. 2 (April 2009): 365–408. For the Franco-Haitian influence on British abolition in the 1790s, see David Patrick Geggus, Slavery, War, and Revolution: The British Occupation of Saint Domingue, 1793–1798 (New York, 1982); Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington, Ind., 2002). On the effect of the Saint Domingue revolution in the Caribbean, see David Barry Gaspar and Geggus, eds., A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean (Bloomington, Ind., 1997); Geggus, ed., The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (Columbia, S.C., 2001). The Saint Domingue rebellion apparently had little effect on the Danish slave trade commission’s deliberations leading up to gradual abolition of the slave trade early in 1792. Indeed the commission welcomed a rumored British governmental hesitation. Its members took it as an opportunity to preempt British priority and gain glory for the Danish king. See Erik Gobel, “The Danish Edict of 16th March 1792 to Abolish the Slave Trade,” in Orbis in Orbem: Liber Amicorum john Everaert, ed. Jan Parmentier and Sander Spanoghe (Ghent, Belgium, 2001), 251–63.

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pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry 17. T. C. Hansard, ed., The Parliamentary Debates from the Year 1803 to the Present Time (London, 1812), 8: 952 (quotation). For the revolutionary decade, see David Geggus, “The Enigma of Jamaica in the 1790s: New Light on the Causes of Slave Rebellions,” WMQ 44, no. 2 (April 1987): 274–99. For the chronology of British colonial slave revolts, see Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca, N.Y., 1982), 335–39. Craton concludes that “nowhere in the British West Indies did slaves rise up unaided on French Revolutionary principles, and in the campaigns in which they participated they were doing no more than following a traditional pragmatic course . . . Far more British West Indian slaves rallied to the aid of the imperial regime” (ibid., 165). 18. See Emilia Viotti da Costa, Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood: The Demerara Slave Rebellion of 1823 (New York, 1994); Gelien Matthews, Caribbean Slave Revolts and the British Abolitionist Movement (Baton Rouge, La., 2006). 19. See for example Craton, Testing the Chains, chap. 22; Davis, Inhuman Bondage, 217–21. 20. Kielstra, Politics of Slave Trade Suppression, 31 (“All England is moving”); Seymour Drescher, “Whose Abolition? Popular Pressure and the Ending of the British Slave Trade,” Past and Present, no. 143 (May 1994): 136–66 (“You must really press,” 164). 21. David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York, 1987), 85, 93. Following the Napoleonic Wars, the British government began to negotiate a long series of bilateral treaties providing for a mutual right to conduct searches aboard suspected slavers flying the flag of the signatories, with joint courts adjudicating the resulting cases (ibid, 84–94). As Eltis observes, “Great Britain was a signatory to all the myriad treaties affecting the slave trade from 1810 to 1900.” See Eltis, “Was Abolition of the U.S. and British Slave Trade Significant in the Broader Atlantic Context?” in “Abolishing the Slave Trades: Ironies and Reverberations, ed. Scott E. Casper, Christopher Grasso, and Joseph C. Miller, special issue, WMQ 66, no. 4 (October 2009): 717–36 (quotation, 731). The strongest states with slaves refused to sign up, which left enough holes in the network to sail hundreds of thousands of Africans to the Americas. See Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s Relations to Slavery, comp. and ed. Ward M. McAfee (New York, 2001), 160. For France, see Kielstra, Politics of Slave Trade Suppression. 22. See Richard B. Allen, “Licentious and Unbridled Proceedings: The Illegal Slave Trade to Mauritius and the Seychelles during the Early Nineteenth Century,” journal of African History 42, no. 1 (wor): 91–116, esp. 100 (table 2). On Sierra Leone, see Cassandra Pybus, “’A Less Favourable Specimen’: The Abolitionist Response. to Self-Emancipated Slaves in Sierra Leone, 1793–1808,” in Farrell, Unwin, and Walvin, British Slave Trade, 97–112. 23. Eltis, Economic Growth, 139 (quotation). For an estimate of the cost of abolition to Britain, see Chaim D. Kaufmann and Robert A. Pape, “Explaining Costly International Moral Action: Britain’s Sixty-Year Campaign against the Atlantic Slave Trade,” International Organization 53, no. 4 (Autumn 1999): 631–68, esp. 637; Seymour Drescher, The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation (New York, 2002), 232–33. 24. For an overview, see Blackburn, Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 331–79 (“free womb,” 348); George Reid Andrews, Afro-Latin America, 1800–2000 (New York, 2004), chap. 2. 25. For the transatlantic figures, see Voyages, http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/ index. faces. On the British intracolonial trade, see Eltis, “The Traffic in Slaves between

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26. 27. 28.

29.

30. 31.

32. 33. 34.

the British West Indian Colonies, 1807–1833,” Economic History Review 25, no. 1 (February 1972): 55–64; Hilary McD. Beckles, “’An Unfeeling Traffick’: The Intercolonial Movement of Slaves in the British Caribbean, 1807–1833,” in The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave Trades in the Americas, ed. Walter Johnson (New Haven, Conn., 2004), 256–74; Seymour Drescher, “The Fragmentation of Atlantic Slavery and the British Intercolonial Slave Trade,” ibid., 234–55. Michael Tadman, “The Interregional Slave Trade in the History and MythMaking of the U.S. South,” in Johnson, Chattel Principle, 117–42, esp. 120 (table 6.1). See Voyages, http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces. Jere my Adelman, Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic (Princeton, N.J., 2006), 98–99 (quotation, 98). See also Blackburn, Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, chaps. 9–10. For slaves landed in the lbero-American New World, see Voyages, http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces; Eltis, WMQ 66: 717–36. See Fehrenbacher, Slaveholding Republic, chap. 2. On the abolition process in the major Atlantic American seaboard regions, see Richard S. Dunn, “Black Society in the Chesapeake, 116–18w,” in Berlin and Hoffman, Slavery and Freedom, 49–82; Gary B. Nash and Jean R. Soderlund, Freedom By Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its Aftermath (New York, 1991); Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780–1860 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1998); David N. Gellman, Emancipating New York: The Politics of Slavery and Freedom, 1777–1827 (Baton Rouge, La., 2006). Reginald Coupland, Wilberforce (London, 1945), 327 (quotation), 396–97. For British naval enforcement on the Atlantic, see Eltis, Economic Growth, chap. 6. For military pressure on Portugal, see Joao Pedro Marques, The Sounds of Silence: Nineteenth-Century Portugal and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, trans. Richard Wall (New York, 2006). On Brazil, see Leslie Bethell, The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade: Britain, Brazil, and the Slave Trade Question, 1807– 1869 (Cambridge, 1970). For the African coast, see Robin Law, “Abolition and Imperialism: International Law and the British Suppression of the Atlantic Slave Trade” (paper delivered at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture’s conference “’The bloody Writing is for ever torn’: Domestic and International Consequences of the First Governmental Efforts to Abolish the Atlantic Slave Trade,” Aug. 8–12, 2007, Accra and Elmina, Ghana). Alexis de Tocqueville, “On the Emancipation of Slaves,” 1843, in Seymour Drescher, trans. and ed., Tocqueville and Beaumont on Social Reform (New York, 1968), 137–73 (quotations, 138, 154). Ibid., 151–54 (quotation, 150–51). A more recent translation appears in Alexis de Tocqueville, Writings on Empire and Slavery, ed. and trans. Jennifer Pitts (Baltimore, 200!), 199–226. Henry Mayer, Aff on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York, 1998), 151–52 (“epochal victory,” 151); “First of August,” [Boston) Liberator, Aug. 20, 1841, 134, in J. R. Oldfield, “Chords of Freedom”: Commemoration, Ritual and British Transatlantic Slavery (Manchester, Eng., 2007), 148 (“greatest moral miracle”); Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, 56 (“second slavery”); John W. Blassingame et a!., eds., The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews (New Haven, Conn., 1979), 2: 142 (“passage to freedom”). Douglass delivered his speech in Rochester, N.Y. For a general comparison of British and Continental patterns of reform, see Jonathan Sperber, “Reforms, Movements for Reform, and Possibilities of Reform: Comparing Britain and Continental Europe,” in Rethinking the Age of Reform: Britain, 1780–1850, ed. Arthur Burns and Joanna Innes (Cambridge,

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pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry 2003), 312–30. For detailed analyses of the relationship between abolitionism and democratization on the Continent, see Olivier Petre Grenouilleau, ed., Abolir l’esclavage: Un riformisme a f’tipreuve (France, Portugal, Suisse, xviiie–xixe siecles) (Rennes, France, 2008).

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10 CIVIL SOCIETY AND PATHS TO ABOLITION

Abstract This article explores aspects of the abolitionist movements in comparative imperial and national perspective. Contrasting the transoceanic roads to emancipation in the pioneering British and French empires, it then examines subsequent cases in Russia, the United States of America and Brazil. It attempts to assess the relative impact of civil and/or military mobilizations – or their absence – in relation to the public sphere and legislative actors. It speculates on the impact of different forms and outcomes on the legacies of abolitions.

Keywords abolitionism – civil society – emancipation – Russian serfdom – Brazil – Great Britain – France – United States On 9 May 1788, British Prime Minister William Pitt rose in the House of Commons and moved to consider legislation against the slave trade. The first time such a motion had ever been presented to a national legislature, he insisted that it was a necessary response to an engaged public. More than half of all petitions submitted to the House that year were demands for action against the slave trade. Pitt was powerfully seconded by Charles James Fox, leader of the parliamentary opposition. He too drew attention to the table of the House, loaded with petitions. Edmund Burke, the legislature’s outstanding orator, warned his colleagues that they must heed the nation. The consensus was clear. British abolition was to be a dialogue between parliament and people.1 Exactly a century later, on 8 May 1888, João Alfredo, head of the Brazilian government, introduced a bill in the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies calling for the extinction of slavery. His motion was received with acclamations and celebrations throughout the nation. The legislature agreed to bypass the customary preliminaries. The very next day, exactly one century after Pitt’s 219

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry motion in parliament, the Brazilian Chamber overwhelmingly voted for its approval.2 Twelve years after that, in 1900, Brazilian writer and abolitionist Joachim Nabuco summarized the alternative paths to emancipation taken by other nations. Abolition in Brazil, he emphasized, did not come, as it did in the United States, as the result of a bloody civil war. It was not, as with Great Britain, the gift of a rich and generous nation to its colonists, redeeming slaves by purchase. It was not, as in the case of France in 1848, brought about by a revolution. Nor was it, as in Russia, the work of an autocrat. In each country, he concluded, “the extinction of slavery had its distinct features, and was accomplished in a different manner.” At the end of what contemporaries called the “age of emancipation,” Nabuco could offer his nation as an example to the world of the ultimate abolitionist process, “a spontaneous movement, a current of opinion and of sentiment stronger than vested interests. It was an inward surrender on the part of those who might have defied it, and a peaceful victory, a growing national emotion, which effaced in a week even the memory of an institution which had always held the state and its laws in bondage.”3 Nabuco was interested in presenting the Brazilian way to emancipation as a moment of convergence with the progressive world’s progress towards everexpanding civilization. The last New World nation to eliminate the institution was distinguished by the harmonious alignment of its ruler, its parliament, and its people, all peacefully sweeping aside the dissonant protests of a few reluctant reactionaries. Its achievement was untainted by monetary compensation, by revolutionary trauma, by military carnage, or by dependence on the whim of a single autocrat. In its emergence emancipation had barely touched the sides of Brazil’s birth canal. In light of a century and many historiographical turns in the study of slavery and abolition, it is worthwhile taking another turn towards Brazilian abolition in comparative perspective. In this article I will follow Nabuco in his choice of preeminent cases. Russia, the United States, Brazil, Britain, and France controlled the world’s largest slave populations on the eve of the terminations of their respective slave systems. For purposes of comparison I will concentrate on that aspect of the abolitionist process that Nabuco identified as most significant – the relation of their civil societies to their polities, and to the levels of violence that accompanied their abolitions.

Pioneers: The Anglo-French Moment Antislavery sentiments first politicized in the 1780s. The first national abolitionist societies were founded in Britain (1787) and France (1788). (Their counter-parts in the United States remained at the state level under their new federal constitution.) When the British and French crossed the threshold to the formation of abolitionist societies, their civil, political and legal systems 220

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry offered a striking contrast. British abolitionists could make use of a variety of mechanisms in the public sphere that were still unavailable to their counterparts across the Channel. In Britain a network of provincial newspapers served both to localize and nationalize discussions of slavery between private individuals, civil associations and a national parliament, all supported by prime minister William Pitt. On the other side of the Channel, as the Marquis de Lafayette emphasized to William Wilberforce in 1788, the French Société des Amis des Noirs lacked a National Assembly, thus precluding “the citizens of France from uniting in expressions of sympathy” with their British counterparts. France lacked even a free press. Its Royal Censor gave the Amis des Noirs permission to publish news only about abolitionist activity on the English side of the Channel.4 The next few years were to demonstrate that it would take more than a national legislature and even a dramatic expansion of French civil society to nationalize abolitionism. Perhaps the most striking difference between Britain and France was the fact that British abolitionists found themselves backed by one of the most massive non-revolutionary social movements in their national history. Thereafter, for nearly five decades, British abolitionism absorbed a share of the public sphere that was never even remotely replicated anywhere else in Europe. In its half-century of popular mobilizations between the 1780s and 1830s, the sites and rituals of abolitionism offered the world a broader connection between the nation’s civil and political spheres. From the outset petitioners gathered at general meetings in town halls or other public places. Their gatherings followed the pattern of parliamentary procedure: motions, seconding speeches, and solemnly worded resolutions – patterns familiar to those who regularly petitioned their national legislature. Thereafter, religious denominational petitions usually represented less than 8 % of abolitionist petitions submitted to parliament. Only in the 1830s did non-conformists begin to sign up under their own denominational banners. By then they accounted for more than half of the antislavery petitions submitted to parliament.5 Despite their overwhelming dominance of the public sphere, British abolitionists faced formidable opposing interests in parliament. In 1791 the defeat of the first bill to abolish the slave trade elicited a redoubled popular response. The number of petitions in 1791–1792 increased five-fold, and they favored abolition by a hundred to one. The number of signers increased more than six-fold to upwards of 400,000. Civil society mobilization also broadened. Since only adult males were regarded as legitimate signatories, a parallel mobilization drew families into activism in the form of a slave-sugar boycott. Anti-saccharite campaigners offered women a means of overcoming their still-gendered inability to sign petitions as well as opportunities to bring the question home to their children at the dinner table. The following generation of British women were distinctive in Europe in breaking down the barriers to abolitionist associations and petition signing.6 221

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry The campaign of 1792 achieved a partial victory in parliament. A majority in the House of Commons voted for abolition of the slave trade by 1796, but the House of Lords postponed further progress by electing to hold its own independent hearings. Thereafter, the outbreak of war with the revolutionary French republic and the great slave revolution in Saint-Domingue induced the government to constrain further popular mobilization. British military forces were massively deployed to combat French revolutionary emancipation in the Caribbean. The British empire briefly became the most rapidly expanding slave system in the world. Regarding the progress of abolitionism, Britain and France moved in precisely opposite directions over the next generation. A large collection of national grievances was assembled in France on the eve of its great revolution in 1789. Calls for action against slavery were, however, swamped by a multitude of demands for reform within France. In the new National Constituent Assembly it was the defenders of colonial slavery who carried the day. The framers of France’s first constitution explicitly declined to apply their revolutionary principles to their slave colonies, the most prosperous areas of their empire. At the height of the British petition and boycott campaigns across the Channel, the Saint-Domingue revolution was treated in France as a disaster that had to be suppressed. Only the convergence of outside developments induced the rulers of France to welcome the insurgents of the French Caribbean as allies rather than as enemies of the revolution.7 In 1794 the French Jacobins aligned themselves with their Caribbean insurgents and decreed the end of slavery in the French empire. That declaration occurred at the moment when French civil society was subject to the reign of terror: “Enemies of the Revolution,” whether Vendéan or aristocratic, Austrian or English, were branded as evil barbarians, “condemned by the high court of history for a failure to accept the blessings of revolutionary civilization.”8 Both in the French metropole and overseas the course of events was determined by violent military confrontations. The subsequent shifts in French colonial policy before the Napoleonic restoration of slavery in 1802 were not influenced by popular abolitionist mobilizations.9 The interaction of the Franco-Caribbean theaters of revolution disrupted or aborted autonomous civil society activity on both sides of the Atlantic. When Toussaint Louverture gained control of Saint-Domingue by 1800, three basic elements of civil society were prohibited by his constitution in 1801: the free movement of individuals from plantations, the right to public assembly, and the right of association. Most inhabitants of plantations remained under regimes of iron-clad discipline and military supervision. The long-term legacy of the revolutionary conflict leading to independence was a critically fragmented civil society.10 After 1800 the association of radical terror in France and slave revolution overseas spawned narratives of inhumanity as well as liberation. Napoleon’s brutal and catastrophic failure in Saint-Domingue allowed Haiti to become 222

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry the first national polity in the Americas to constitutionally prohibit slavery. Elsewhere, in 1802, Napoleon supervised the re-enslavement of tens of thousands of French colonial citizens while metropolitan civil society was also silenced. The British then reversed their reversal. Napoleon’s defeat in Haiti, reinforced by British mastery of the world’s oceans after Trafalgar allowed Britain to emerge as abolitionism’s pioneering empire. Aided by revived civil society activity, abolition of its Atlantic slave trade was enacted by parliament in 1807.

Postwar Internationalization By the end of the Napoleonic wars Britain had established a position as the principal global agent against the transatlantic slave trade. Even before Napoleon’s defeat, the British unsuccessfully attempted to include abolition in peace negotiations with France (in 1801, 1806, and 1814). Negotiations were again immediately reopened with the restored Bourbon monarchy in 1814. Lord Castlereagh, the British Foreign Secretary, believed that he had overcome a major hurdle to international abolitionism when Louis xviii agreed to reopen the slave trade for only five years. News of this extension, however, produced yet another wave of petitions – again the largest turnout of signatures in British history, as 1,370 petitions reached parliament. In a nation with no more than four million eligible signers, between a fifth and a third signalled their disapproval of the offending slave trade agreement with France. For Britain’s Foreign Minister, the 1814 campaign made it definitive, that “the nation was bent upon this object . . . Ministers must make it the basis of their policy.”11 Britain’s first postwar achievement was to negotiate an international declaration against the slave trade at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. With an oblique glance at and beyond British civil society, the assembled Congress credited “the public voice, in all civilized countries” for “calling aloud” for suppression. The public mobilization of one civil society was thus seamlessly grafted onto all European “civilized countries.” The condemnation of the slave trade was the only article in the peace treaty that offered any evidence that the world beyond Europe had claims on those assembled at Vienna. Nevertheless, it had a profound impact on the perspective of all continental powers still deeply engaged in the slave trade. The Portuguese were then carrying eight out of every ten African captives across the Atlantic to Brazil. One of Portugal’s delegates at the Congress warned that Brazil would have to begin to substitute free European for forced African labor. It would take three more generations to fulfill that prophecy.12 More immediately, the article also allowed time for the French to become reconciled to a cause many still identified with national humiliation and defeat, both by ex-slaves in the Caribbean and by British enemies in Europe. Britain had passed through the “Age of Revolution” without experiencing revolution, civil war, or foreign occupation. 223

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry France had endured them all. It would take decades before another French abolition society could again be founded in France.13 French civil society entered the post-Napoleonic era in another way that distinguished it from its offshore counterpart. The French heard the story of their Caribbean revolutions mostly through the tales of returning colonial refugees and soldiers. For decades after 1804 the Haitian Revolution remained a taboo subject in French legislative discussions – too horrific to need or warrant discussion. When in 1825 the French government finally succeeded in pressuring Haiti to pay compensation in exchange for recognition of its independence, no association in France expressed reservations about the morality of extracting reparations from those who had been the victims of systematic brutality and violence.14 While a new generation of French abolitionists had to balance conflicting commitments to abolition and nationalist pride, British abolitionists turned their attention to ending Britain’s imperial slave system and to ending other nations’ transoceanic slave trades. Domestically this meant continuous public lobbying and periodical renewals of petitioning. In the generation between the petition of 1814, and post-emancipation “apprenticeship” (1833–1838), the social base of adherents expanded in many directions. Abolitionist religious supporters were increasingly drawn from the ranks of non-conformist Protestants. Methodists, Baptists and Congregationalists were all experiencing growth. Geographically, by the 1830s popular support expanded to include Ireland, both Protestant and Catholic. Even more significantly, the gender boundary was massively breached by the 1830s. As pioneers in modern mass petitioning, British women came into their own as independent organizers and signers. In 1833, their greatest single petition, loaded with more than 180,000 names, became the most widely publicized abolitionist document delivered to parliament in a half-century of abolitionist mobilizations. By the end of the 1830s women had probably overtaken men as combined signers of petitions to Parliament and addresses to the monarch. As the campaign for slave emancipation approached its climax in 1833, workingclass adherents also became vocal supporters at petition and election rallies.15 Perhaps the most surprising addition to the ranks of British abolitionists were slaves in the West Indies. Before emancipation they could not form associations or petition for their own freedom on the very sites where their status as property constituted the foundation of their masters’ authority. Between Waterloo and emancipation in 1833, their entry into the public sphere came in the form of uprisings. Again, the coordination between parliamentary attention and political action was clear. Not coincidentally, every major British slave insurrection after 1815 came in the wake of parliamentary debates or governmental initiatives designed to limit the arbitrary powers of masters or to ameliorate the slaves’ conditions. British slave insurgencies contrasted with the French pattern. British colonial uprisings, in Barbados (1816), Demerara (1823) and Jamaica (1831), 224

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry involved tens of thousands of slaves, totals exceeded only by those in the Saint-Domingue revolution. As David Brion Davis observes, the combined number of whites killed in the three British revolts was less than twenty. This was less than a third of the number killed in Nat Turner’s brief revolt in Virginia in 1831. Fewer whites were killed in all three uprisings combined than in the opening weeks of the revolt in Saint-Domingue. The toll of slave deaths was a small fraction of those who died in the French Caribbean revolution.16 Beginning with the Demerara revolt in 1823, slave leaders tried to preserve the lives of all those whom they took into custody. The most striking novelty of the Demerara uprising was how it was used by abolitionists in Britain. Metropolitan British abolitionists successfully reframed slave resistance before emancipation as civilized behavior under the stress of captivity. They innovatively compared the uprising to English-style workers’ strike actions. Self-disciplined laborers had, in their view, behaved no differently from fellow Christians and British workers at home.17 What most deeply impressed foreign abolitionists was the behavior of the slaves on the day of emancipation, 1 August 1834. For William Lloyd Garrison, across the Atlantic, it was “the greatest miracle of the age.” For Frederick Douglass, Americans had “discovered, in the progress of the antislavery movement, that England’s passage to freedom is not through rivers of blood. . . . What is bloody revolution in France is peaceful reformation in England. The friends and enemies of . . . freedom, meet not at the barricades . . . but on the broad platform of Exeter Hall” [the abolitionists’ customary site of assembly]. For Alexis de Tocqueville, across the Channel, neither the day of emancipation nor the decade thereafter – had produced “a single insurrection” or “cost the life of a single man.” All this had occurred in colonies where blacks were twelve times as numerous as whites. From the perspective of French and American abolitionists that was indeed a civilized transformation.18 Until 1848 French abolitionists also had to wrestle with the specter of revolutions at home, past and potential. They therefore hesitated to attempt to mobilize the civil society of their nation. Founded in the wake of British emancipation (1834), the French Abolition Society continued the Amis des Noirs’ tradition of elite organization. Two small French petition campaigns in the 1840s, neither initiated by the Society, never amounted to more than one per-cent of signers mobilized by the British. The first (1844), organized by urban workers, seemed to underline the social distance between them and the rest of the nation. Women, too, always remained a small contingent among the signers. French religious mobilization was equally modest. Except for one petition signed by 600 Catholic clergy, the French hierarchy took a position of studied neutrality towards the fate of slavery, rendering it unto Caesar as a secular institution. Those who wished to maintain the status quo in the French empire dismissively pointed to the millions of French peasants and workers who had not responded to the pleas of a few “liberal théoriciens.”19 225

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry Perhaps the most significant indicator of the lack of prior popular pressure for slave liberation came in the wake of the Revolution of 1848. With conservatives momentarily immobilized, the Provisional Government charged Victor Schoelcher with preparing a decree of emancipation. He chose to promulgate it before the National Constituent Assembly was scheduled to convene. Schoelcher actually feared that such a body, elected by universal male suffrage, might choose to delay the passage of any emancipation act pending passage of a compensation package to their slaveowners.20

Second Wave of Emancipations: Russia and the United States In terms of its relationship to civil society, Russian emancipation occurred in a far different context from those in the British and French orbits. Unlike its predecessors, the servile estate in Russia overwhelmingly outnumbered the number of non-serfs. The imperial nobility was dependent upon their labor. The Tsar himself had direct dominion over more bondsmen than those of all masters in the Americas combined. He also ruled with a discretion unmatched in any other European or American polity. A political system unchecked by any national representative legislature combined with a closely censored press and severely limited rights to association or assembly rendered the Tsar “the autocrat of all the Russians.” Serious challenges to the state and society could only take the form of conspiracies from within or exiled voices from without. At the lowest level of society resistance manifested itself through communal petitions and regional uprisings. After Russia’s disastrous defeat in the Crimean War by Great Britain and France, Russian serfdom was identified as one of the principal sources of the empire’s relative economic, military and social vulnerability. The new Tsar, Alexander ii, was convinced that Russia’s international security and internal harmony crucially depended on eliminating serfdom. He wanted to include all levels of society in the renegotiation of their social relationships. Yet none of the agents of the state felt that the “floodgates” to participation could simply be thrown open, even to the privileged nobility, much less the unfathomable expectations of the peasant masses. They feared that the outcome of emancipation might generate forces far beyond the ability of the imperial bureaucracy to control.21 As Roxanne Easley observes, the state finally undertook a calculated gamble to gradually open a public conversation and to allow limited inputs only at certain stages. The Tsar began by convening a “Secret Committee on Peasant Affairs” in January 1857, composed of reform-minded intellectuals and nobles. At later bureaucratic stages the initial Committee was followed by a “Main Committee” and finally by an “Editing Commission.” It was necessary to at least create a virtual publicity (glasnost): to bring landowners aboard, provincial noble committees were formed. Some discussion of the 226

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry pending legislation was permitted in newspapers, disguised as histories of the peasant commune.22 Once the Main Committee hammered out a blueprint of legislation, further debate in the press was virtually stifled until the statute was ready for promulgation. An important reason for the resumption of strict censorship was the growth of peasant unrest. Peasants were permitted a symbolic presence only in ceremonies of thanks to the Tsar in St. Petersburg and Moscow. The Tsar also received weekly reports on the rural mood from the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Although initially planned to pre-empt any “unreasonable” expectations, news of the pending reform intensified political awareness. Peasants petitioned to insist that their right to ownership of land had to be recognized as part of any emancipation. They also demonstrated their selfdiscipline by joining in a collective temperance pledge. Entire villages took the pledge. In Russia, the English tactic of abstinence from sugar became Russian abstinence from vodka. By the end of 1858, the movement claimed a million members. The state’s alcohol revenue dropped. It was difficult for the state to brand sobriety as a Russian crime. To forestall similar mobilizations by the nobility, it was decided to invite provincial deputies to preview selected parts of the draft decree. They were not permitted to offer counter-proposals. They could meet the drafting committee only as individuals and were forbidden to meet separately as a body. Some deputies did attempt to petition for an independent judiciary and freedom of the press. The emperor was outraged by this “oligarchic” noble intervention and forbade any further discussion of the peasant question. While modifications were made, the emancipation statute was issued as a lofty proclamation by “Alexander ii, Emperor and Autocrat of all the Russias” on 19 February 1861.23 The legislation was designed to transfer some of the landowners’ domains collectively to the liberated peasants. This was to avoid creating an enormous “proletariat,” who were seen as agents of radical revolution in Western Europe. This allotment was balanced by measures to reduce the economic self-sufficiency of the peasantry, ensuring that their labor would continue to be accessible to the landowners. Most significantly, the ex-serfs were required to compensate for their allocation through extended redemption payments. Like the Haitians, and many emancipated slaves working apprentices elsewhere, the liberated serfs were required to contribute to the indemnity for their liberation. The peasants also continued to be classified as a separate estate with obligations to the state. The real institutional addition to Russian civil society was a new form of localized government, the zemstvo. Once the uncertainty of the transition had passed without widespread peasant uprisings, the state avoided further gambles by ensuring that the zemstvo would not be a democratic institution. Property qualifications for membership resulted in a major over-representation of the nobility, particularly in the provincial assemblies, where they 227

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry secured three quarters of the seats. Above all, zemstvos could not affect the larger policy of the state, either in fiscal matters, the court system, or the central government’s state police. Absent a representative political system curtailing contact between zemstvos, removing its judicial functions, and appointing its peasant delegates, the state became confident that local selfgovernment could be as easily confined as it had been to create.24 Only another major war-induced crisis in 1905 and the formation of a national legislature could reopen the possibility of an expansion of civil and political liberty. Whatever its other differences from later Brazilian abolition, Russia offered a way to emancipation premised upon the initiative of the ruler. If, as Peter Kolchin concludes, Russians never openly conducted a public debate on emancipation, they provided a formula for the initial topdown stage of the emancipation process in Brazil. Like Russia, the United States also represented the second wave of emancipation in the 1860s. However, in terms of their respective political and civil societies they stood as polar extremes in the perspective of contemporaries. The United States was a federal republic rather than an absolute monarchy. America was studded with layers of representative legislatures rather than a centralized bureaucracy; its inhabitants enjoyed the broadest electorate of any nation. Rather than being ruled by a lone autocrat, the United States allowed the freest press and the most unrestricted civil society in the world. Alexis de Tocqueville was not alone in offering the two countries as the polar opposites of the potential future: America functioning through the interaction of individuals, Russia based upon collective obedience and servitude; the one expanding westward with the plough, the other advancing eastward with the sword.25 Yet it was America, not Russia that terminated its servile system by the sword. It was perhaps the very strength of its civil society that rendered slavery’s ending so deadly. The usa had been created through the formal consent of its active citizens in their component states. One of its founding compromises was the acceptance of the right of each state to decide on the future of its slave system. American statesmen initially observed a vow of mutual self-constraint, keeping the institution’s prognosis out of national legislative discussion. For nearly two generations after the American Declaration of Independence there remained a rough balance between slave and non-slave states. In 1807 the abolition of the slave trade to the United States was the outcome of a broad consensus to prevent further African migration. Just as successful British military action in the Crimea precipitated Russia’s decision to move towards emancipation, successful British mobilization against its colonial slavery in the 1830s accelerated the formation of a parallel movement in the northern United States. In America the ubiquitous practice of collective association encouraged abolitionist leaders to quickly replicate practices that had taken decades to develop in Great Britain. Few studies of American abolitionism begin without reference to the “Second 228

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry Great Awakening” of American Protestant reformism that provided recruits for radical abolitionism, with its twin belief in individual ability and moral responsibility for remaking society. The American Antislavery Society (AAS), founded within months of the passage of British emancipation, expanded its membership and propaganda at a rate exceeding anything that the British movement had produced in its early phase. The decentralized organization of British abolitionism was also quickly replicated and surpassed in the United States. The feminization of American abolitionism was equally rapid. By the mid-1830s, hundreds of thousands of Americans were signing petitions requesting Congress to end slavery in Washington dc, which, unlike the states, was under the direct jurisdiction of the national legislature.26 America’s abolitionists were able to go beyond Britain’s in another important respect. Both slaves and most free blacks in the British orbit were separated from the metropole by thousands of miles. British abolitionists could interact with most Caribbean blacks only at a distance. America’s northern states contained free blacks who could be directly incorporated into the antislavery movement, as well as many more, as runaways from the South could also act as living representatives of those still enslaved. They went on speaking tours in both America and Great Britain. British-style abolitionist civil mobilization had different effects on the other side of the Atlantic. By the late 1830s abolitionists, at the peak of their power, relied on the fact that their parliamentary support was necessary to sustain a British administration. Meanwhile, in America, abolitionist speakers were mobbed in riots. Propaganda sent to the South was burned. Thereafter, us Postmasters-General allowed each state to block mail deemed threatening to public order. Abolitionist petitions sent to Washington were subjected to a “gag” rule. For eight long years abolitionist petitions could not even be acknowledged by Congress as having been submitted to the national legislature.27 Most crucially, unlike its British counterpart American abolitionism was confronted by both hostility in the North and a great anti-abolitionist mobilization in the South. In America, unlike Britain, antislavery was not consensually ratified at the ballot box. Voting was the ultimate register of public opinion. For almost two decades after the mid-1830s abolitionism could make almost no headway against a two-party system that offered no hope for broad sectional action against the Southern slave system. Southern political counter-mobilization was quite robust. In every off-year election between 1840 and 1860, the South exceeded the North in the percentage of its eligible electorate who cast votes. Given the state of southern civil society, it was impossible for slaves to replicate the Caribbean insurgencies of Demerara or Jamaica. During the generation between British emancipation and the Civil War, there were no major slave insurrections in the South. The toll of the brief Nat Turner rebellion in Virginia resulted in the deaths of more than three times the toll of all whites 229

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry killed in the combined slave uprisings of tens of thousands in the British colonies between Waterloo and emancipation. Most non-slaveholding American citizens, North and South, deemed emancipation impossible or impractical unless coupled with the colonization of freed slaves beyond the borders of the United States. The only significant path to freedom in the antebellum us South was the “Underground Railroad,” which amounted to a trickle compared to the rate of natural increase in the slave population.28 Moreover, the reaction to abolitionism in the South was more pro-slavery and extreme than elsewhere. By contrast, Russian pro-serfdom sentiment gradually weakened in the generation before emancipation.29 Unlike Russia in the late 1850s, most American observers still estimated the probable endurance of slavery in generations to come. Abraham Lincoln himself estimated its duration for another century as late as his campaign for the Senate in 1858. In no other society was the institution as central to the elite’s self-definition as in the writings of us southern apologists. The constitution of the Confederate States of America in 1861 acknowledged its foundation on the principle of slavery. American abolitionist mobilization, launched on a British-inspired model, had to cope with the fact that southern counter-mobilization, reinforced by nationwide racism and the risk to the Union, created a tremendous barrier to political abolitionism even in the North. In the 1840s the “Liberty Party” never attracted more than three percent of the electorate and failed to elect a single individual to the national legislature.30 To preserve itself as a movement, abolitionists, like other minorities, had to perpetuate themselves through traditional civic rituals like the Fourth of July, military parades, public meetings and church gatherings. Their one major innovative ceremony was in celebrating anniversaries of the first of August: the date of British slave emancipation.31 It was not the expansion of abolitionism but the expansion of the United States that opened the political door to antislavery. The more rapidly expanding North, especially in population, haunted the South. The North’s potential to generate a coalition of northern free soil states threatened a long-term erosion of southern support of slavery. This is not the place to discuss the impact of the reopening of the issue of slavery in the western territory newly conquered from Mexico. The issue of restricting the spread of slavery engaged not only traditional abolitionists but a far larger northern antislavery constituency. Rallies of laborers now joined “free soiler” contentions that areas previously set aside for free labor were being reopened to slavery. Mass meetings were followed by new waves of mass petitions. The crisis reinforced a general fear of southern expansionism: it nurtured northern fears of a subversion of free labor and of a slave power conspiracy.32 Although abolitionist petitioners had been unable to convert the North into an overwhelmingly antislavery region, the election of Lincoln, dedicated to stopping any further extension of slavery, was sufficient for the beginning 230

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry of southern secession. The violence and duration of the subsequent American civil war did not, however, replicate the impact of the Haitian, French, or Spanish American revolutions. Civil society did not break down in the United States. The conflict did open doors to slave flights to freedom in unprecedented numbers as the Union armies moved into the South. Yet even at the end of the war far more people remained enslaved in the South than had been liberated by northern armies.33 The constitutional underpinnings of the American political system remained intact and were reaffirmed. Since the us Constitution did not give Congress the authority to interfere with slavery within the states, the only certain way of definitively abolishing the institution was by formal amendment to the constitution, forbidding it throughout the United States. That process was duly completed in 1865. There were no revolutionary seizures of power on either side of the conflict. Above all, no wars of mass civil extermination or expulsion occurred. Even with the widespread “violence of everyday life” that followed the fall of the Confederacy, it seemed reasonable for ex-slaves to assume “that blacks could expect justice from the government under which they lived.”34 Above all, United States slave emancipation was immediate and total, without compensation for slaveowners, as in Britain, or obligations for redemption payments from freedmen, as in Russia.

Brazil What of Brazil? The last of Nabuco’s five polities to end institutional slavery carried the knowledge of all of its predecessors into the process of emancipation. Like Russia, Brazil’s servile institution was pervasive throughout the empire and its ruling notables were slavery’s principal beneficiaries. Unlike Britain, France and the United States, there was no area of Brazil where the free soil principle prevailed for generations before abolition. Like Britain and France it was a constitutional representative monarchy. Brazil’s political system, with its small and highly stratified electoral franchise, gave the emperor great lee-way to determine the outcome of elections and the composition of ministries. However, Brazilian civil society apparently had more press freedom than was the case with the pre-1848 French constitutional monarchy, and certainly more than Russia. So, “given the fraudulent character of Brazilian elections, . . . the emperor and the monarchy’s statesmen tried to gauge public opinion through a combination of provincial presidential reports and the press.” The degree to which newspapers were supported by subventions, however, often undercut their credibility. This was of particular importance in assessing its role in ending the Brazilian slave trade. The British secret service funds that subsidized pro-abolitionist newspapers rendered them far less authoritative as an index of public opinion.35 As they had with France, Russia and the United States, the British played an important initial role as a catalyst in Brazilian abolition. The total number 231

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry of African captives landed in Brazil reached its all-time peak in the triennium immediately before abolition of the slave trade in 1850. This surge was due in no small part to two British policies. First, Britain moved to end tariff restrictions on the importation of slave-grown sugar in 1846. In Britain, the consequent increase in Brazilian slave importation (1847–1849) occasioned the most serious parliamentary challenge to the Royal Navy’s deployment against the African slave trade (1850), which was the second policy. The combined pressure of these developments intensified the British government’s determination to undertake decisive naval action against slavers in Brazilian waters. Recent historiography has debated the relative roles of British intervention, fear of slave revolt, or a cholera epidemic.36 No one, however, has argued that a large abolitionist popular mobilization precipitated abolition. Even measured against French abolitionist activity before French emancipation, the decision to end the Brazilian trade does not appear to have been a response to non-slave mass pressure. A conservative pro-slave Cabinet, backed by the emperor, secured passage and enforcement of the legislation, and well into the American Civil War the British Minister in Rio de Janeiro could identify no major current of public opinion against slavery. Regarding slavery itself, even before the American Civil War, with the succession of French, Dutch, Portuguese, South American and Russian emancipations, Brazil’s notables could perceive the increasing isolation of the institution and of Brazil’s standing in the opinion of the “civilized” world. Well into the 1860s the emperor regarded potential external pressures as a prime motive for undertaking further action against slavery. As the tide of the American Civil War turned in favor of the North, emperor Dom Pedro was concerned that it should not produce a repetition of British humiliations. Early in 1864 he noted to the incoming head of a new cabinet that “events in America require us to think of about the future of slavery in Brazil. So that what occurred in respect of the slave trade does not happen again to us.” The memory of the brief British naval blockade of 1850 was also a reminder of Brazil’s continuing vulnerability on account of slavery.37 In the country at large there was as yet little evidence of widespread agitation in favor of moves towards emancipation. To foreign abolitionist societies the emperor, with his periodic indications of the need to address the problem, seemed to offer the first best hope for progress towards emancipation. In 1867 the revived French abolitionist movement presented a plea for emancipation to Dom Pedro. The British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society issued similar personal appeals for an imperial initiative in 1864, 1869 and 1871. Indicative of their early assessment of the weakness of popular agency in Brazil, their appeal to Dom Pedro was to repeat what the Russian emperor had successfully done.38 In 1867, for the first time, the emperor alluded to the question of emancipation before the legislature, but forward movement was postponed pending the end of the war against Paraguay. Brazil’s victory in 1870 presented the world 232

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry with the only instance in which one slaveholding nation induced another to abolish slavery while sustaining its own institution. The passage of the (free womb) Rio Branco law (1871) appears to have been primarily an intra-elite contestation. Even with the weight of his constitutional prerogatives it took four years for the emperor’s first initiative to ripen into a parliamentary project, and months more to assemble a cabinet in 1871 willing to bring a bill before the legislature. There was certainly more Brazilian antislavery activity by 1870 than there had been in Russia a decade earlier. Yet extra-parliamentary mobilization may have been as vigorous from those who opposed the legislation. Unlike Britain, opponents of the bill entered an unprecedented volume of protests into the records of Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies. Planters and merchants launched two waves of hostile petitions. The account of the Rio Branco debates also seems to indicate that, for those in the Chamber, “public opinion” still signified the views of the landed and mercantile classes. Indeed, members on both sides of the debate spoke as though “public opinion” was reluctant to accept even gradual emancipation, and even though conservatives, unlike us southerners, acknowledged the moral inferiority and ultimate demise of the institution.39 I stress these elite petitions because popular abolitionist petitioning does not appear to have been a salient factor in the passage of the Rio Branco law. Equally striking is the relatively small number of petitions to the national legislature even when popular mobilization did transform the salience of an aroused antislavery public opinion during the following decade. This offers further evidence of a gap between political and civil society in Brazil for most of the period before emancipation. In Britain abolitionist organizers could always offer petitions as evidence of overwhelming metropolitan support for moves towards abolition. In contrast, universal white male suffrage in the United States long demonstrated the absence of support for radical abolitionism in all parts of the nation down to 1860. Brazilian abolitionism developed in the absence of both America’s mass suffrage and its institutionalized racist hostility to non-white participation in the public sphere. (It would be interesting to know about the extent to which the Franco-Caribbean model of violent racialized revolution was used as a threat either for or against liberation.) From the comparative perspective of a non-expert, the most remarkable aspect of Brazilian popular mobilization was its distinctive modus operandi in the final decade before emancipation. The abolitionists’ first task was to expand the base of their movement. Both Celso Thomas Castilho and Angela Alonso have analyzed the means by which abolitionists expanded the social base of Brazilian abolitionism and infused its participants with a sense of “citizenship and political agency.”40 Unlike Anglo-Americans, Brazilian abolitionists could not easily turn existing religious or political institutions to their own ends. In most countries with overwhelmingly Catholic populations abolitionists could not rely upon the Church hierarchy to actively support abolitionism. Ideologically, 233

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry moreover, radical nineteenth-century abolitionists identified Catholicism with the hierarchical structures of the old regime. Politically, Brazilian emancipation occurred within the context of an electoral system that actually decreased the number of inhabitants eligible to vote. At the height of the struggle for emancipation and the western world’s trend towards expanded suffrage, Brazil’s electoral reform in 1881 further restricted its electorate. It may well be that the percentage of eligible voters in the 1880s was less than that of the French constitutional monarchy before 1848. Anglo-American abolitionism evolved within a world of public meeting halls and churches. Brazilian abolitionism occurred in different locales: theaters, concert halls, and carnivals. As Castilho observes, reacting to the exclusionary electoral reform of 1881, abolitionism demonstrated alternative means of participating in the political process. In this sense the defeat of Nabuco’s first motion for emancipation in the Chamber of Deputies radicalized the implications of civil mobilizations. They occurred at the sub-national and provincial levels as a reaction and a counterpoint to the legislature’s attempt to evade the question at the national level. British abolition had never had to grapple with this issue. American abolition had also been faced with a legislative wall at the national level. But Brazilian abolitionists, unlike the Americans, also had to create a sense of empowerment among unenfranchised Brazilians. They also had to create an active commitment to abolitionism that had become nationalized in Britain nearly a century earlier.41 Brazilian abolitionists developed their most effective recruitment tool in artistic performances in theaters and streets. They mixed cultural performances with abolitionist associational appeals in recitals, concerts and plays. As Castilho notes, narratives of slave life had a different pedagogical function for Brazilians than those presented to British or American audiences. Performances had to generate empathic identification in non-slaves who casually witnessed slave life in their own communities. One means of doing so was to climax abolitionist performances with donations for freeing a slave by the legal means prescribed in the Rio Branco law. Another means of identification was through the appropriation of carnivals. They injected abolitionist symbolism into African and religiously inspired festivities and ceremonies. Carnival groups cooperated with abolitionist associations to make such events another occasion for slaves to buy freedom. At the same time local governments were urged to promote municipal and provincial manumission funds. Instead of practicing consumption restraint or limiting purchases to “free labor” commodities, Brazilians could purchase the liberation of slaves.42 Far more than their American counterparts, Brazilian men of color could play leading roles in civic gatherings. André Rebouças, Vincente de Souza and José do Patrocino organized the Central Emancipation Committee (ace) in Rio de Janeiro. Between its founding in 1880 and emancipation they sponsored nearly 150 events in or near the capital. They integrated concerts, plays, poetry and festivals. They blended traditions of theater, carnival, displays of 234

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry decorations, flowers and newly introduced electrical lighting to appeal to all of the senses. Two generations earlier many Anglo-Americans might have been shocked by such baroque settings for serious abolitionist mobilizations. The presence of mulattos onstage was crucial to energize audiences usually left on the margins of political activity. “There is nothing more holy and noble than we of African race, who are working day and night to save our brothers from the barbarous irons of slavery,” one leading mulatto told his audience. It would be “infamous” if they were not at the forefront in “a cause which is wholly ours, by our blood, our heads, and our hearts (Repeated Applause).”43 The memory of the indigenous population was evoked in opera. The European tradition was invoked with radical symphonic marches like The Marselhese of the Slaves, in selections from Verdi and in portraits of radicals like of Victor Hugo. British abolitionism had sought to encompass the family nearly a century earlier, beginning with abstention from sugar. In Brazilian abolitionist festivities women and children were recruited as decorators and performers. As both Alonso and Castilho emphasize, the cumulative effect of such performances was not just to create a new sensibility toward slaves but to expand the public sphere by identifying the participating audiences as “citizens of all classes.” As in Anglo-America, abolitionists were socially inclusive. They had the additional capacity to ceremonially extend citizenship, to individual slaves by rituals of purchase. Peculiarities of slavery in Brazil also made it possible for civil associations to dispute the slave status of large numbers of individuals. By treaty with Britain, Brazil had prohibited the purchase of African slaves as of 1831. All captives intercepted by the British navy or landed clandestinely and all of their descendants were therefore being held illegally as slaves. Abolitionistsponsored lawsuits could free individuals and keep the question of liberation before the public. Such performances, in courtrooms as well as on the streets, were within the parameters of the Rio Branco law and the legal repertoire of Brazilian public activities. But slavery still remained a national institution. A dramatic change occurred in 1881. An abolitionist group in the province of Ceará began to advocate for a ban on the exportation of slaves from the province. They persuaded the boatmen of a merchant ship to refuse to load slaves bound for sale. The strike, supported by thousands of demonstrators, grew into mass movement. Within two months the province’s slave trade was almost at an end. The central government countered by appointing new antiabolitionist officials. In response abolitionists developed a new repertoire in Ceará – spontaneous creations of free soil areas by blocks, towns, provincial capitals and finally whole provinces. By the Spring of 1884 Ceará was not quite a free province, but had earned the sobriquet of the “Canada of Brazil.” It was receiving runaways from Peaui to São Paulo, as the terminus of an underground railroad. It spawned similar liberation movements from Amazonas to Rio Grande do Sul. Even where 235

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry the abolition process remained incomplete, the pace of erosion portended an accelerated ending. As late as 1881 planters expected slavery to last at least until 1910. By 1883 they had reduced their expectations to 1889 or 1890.44 In tandem with abolitionist subversions slaves themselves appeared to be testing the range of new options offered to them by a shifting public opinion. In some individual cases insurgents even presented themselves to local authorities after committing acts of violence. This would indicate a level of interactive trust. During the final stage of abolition collective slave escapes from plantations became the order of the day. They were actively or passively sanctioned by the press and agents of the legal and political system, including the princess regent Isabel. There was no repetition of the widespread killings of masters that had characterized the outbreak of the Saint-Domingue revolution. Nor did Brazilian slaves engage in mass burnings of British plantations as slaves had in the Barbados and Jamaica uprisings. In anticipation of proximate liberation, even slaves in the hardcore areas of planter resistance appear to have concluded that bloodshed and guerilla warfare were neither necessary nor desirable. The state finally reacted with vigor in 1885, after a major conservative victory in national elections.45 In response, regional abolitionist movements intensified and radicalized their tactics. By 1886, abolitionists extended their underground railroad activities into the Paulena heartland of planter resistance. Facilitating rural flight they probably favored collective desertion over violence to sustain the support of urban public opinion. Police violence and brutality could then be contrasted with flight in the press, in public demonstrations and parliament. As with their concerts abolitionists were now orchestrating contention. The abolitionists’ repertoire was of destabilizing both the labor system and governmental authority. The army’s refusal to act as slave hunters was an ominous sign that, as far as slavery was concerned, the institutional props were eluding state management. The looming prospect of collapsing legitimacy for the government was further compounded by the military’s public petition to the princess regent, denouncing their deployment against slaves. This petition marked a decisive victory for the civil society initiative. A rapidly withering estate had to be quickly dispatched, buried in order to save the (elite-dominated) state.

Legacies: Civil Society after Abolition In light of their respective paths to emancipation, how may we assess the legacies of these different paths to abolition? In one respect the great French and Haitian revolutions should again command our attention. I would hazard the guess that Nabuco excluded this emancipation from his list of pre-decessors because of its association with deadly militarized revolutions. (The same might hold true for his avoidance of Spanish American precedents.) Slavery 236

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry was abolished, at least in aspiration, throughout the French empire in 1794. After Napoleon restored the institution in 1802, Haiti, with its independence, became the first nation to have permanently abolished slavery throughout the territory under its jurisdiction (1804). The priceless message delivered to the enslaved, and to the world at large, was that slavery was no longer immutable or inevitable in the plantation societies of the New World. That liberation came at enormous cost to Haitians both before and after independence. Struggling for recognition, Haiti’s militarized political system depressed the development of its civil society. Two centuries later it remained a nation whose individual citizens endured the second highest risk of bondage in the world.46 France’s first revolutionary emancipation also ended with a military despotism that both suppressed its civil institutions and restored overseas slavery. Its empire would witness the interplay of further abolitions and restorations of the slave trade only in tandem with further metropolitan revolutions and restorations. For generations French advocates of abolition would avoid focusing upon the first revolutionary emancipations. Nabuco was therefore hardly alone in associating French slave emancipation with Lamartine and 1848, and not revolutionary Haiti and Paris in the 1790s.47 For Nabuco, French emancipation was more comfortably associated with the less murderous abolition of France’s second slavery. Selecting among the commemorating date(s) of French abolition endures as a challenging embarrassment of riches. For most nineteenth-century abolitionist societies on both sides of the Atlantic, the British example remained abolitionists’ preferred point of departure. In the United States, France, Spain and Brazil, Britain’s example offered the smoothest and most durable schema for terminating and historicizing their own emancipations systems. The narrative of the British process was widely accepted at home. A political system in which slavery had been firmly ensconced was challenged by the people. A parliamentary elite had to be compelled, reluctantly but ineluctably, through stages of abolition. Even in Haiti, early commemorations of British emancipation toasted the British people for taking the initiative and the parliament for having had the wisdom to accede to the national will. Uprisings of British slaves could be credited with accelerating emancipation but its supreme moment was the bloodless last act. By the 1880s the British Antislavery Society was recognized everywhere as the oldest established permanent human rights group in the world. Their nation’s long position as the world’s most powerful economic, naval, and diplomatic empire enabled the Society to remain the world’s most international antislavery organization. Even when it became a tool of imperial expansion the continuous association of abolitionism with British imperial power offered its citizens with a vision that their country remained the world’s most trustworthy guardian of civilization, politically and morally.48 The Russian legacy is less clear. There, emancipation gingerly opened the door to civil society. The real civil society legacy of emancipation was the 237

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry creation of the zemstvos, local agencies organized at provincial and district levels to oversee local needs. Election was open to individuals of any estate, but representation was proportional to land ownership. The state made it clear that zemstvos would not be a democratic representative institution. At the provincial level the noble minority held three quarters of the seats, and the state retained the right to nullify local decisions. The possibility of crowning the zemstvos with a national representative institution was firmly rejected by the state until the revolution of 1905. Thereafter, until 1917, the state attempted to roll back its concessions in the interest of the autocracy. In the twentieth century Russia would develop and dismantle yet another servile labor system, the Gulag, created in the absence of any popular civil or political mobilization. In the United States, northern victory in the Civil War opened a brief period in which ex-slaves were offered equal access to both civil and political rights. Given the continuity of racism and the federal structure of the United States, the gains in equality beyond legal freedom were sharply constrained once the white majority regained control of most state governments in the South. The momentum towards equality was renewed only a century after the Civil War, again through a massive multiracial civil rights mobilization. As earlier in the case of Britain, the violence of the southern opposition helped to solidify majority support for the rights movement. The most significant long-term impact of American slave emancipation may have been international. The Civil War entailed the deaths of 750,000 men, the largest toll of any in the age of emancipation. Absent that victory it is easy to imagine slavery’s persistence in the Americas well into the twentieth century. Estimating the probable impact of such ongoing slave societies allows for too many contingent outcomes and may not be counterfactually compelling. At the very least, we may hypothesize that the continued existence of slave societies in the Americas, and perhaps in Afro-Asia, might only have enhanced the growth of racism during the first half of the twentieth century. Any powerful racialized state in the eastern hemisphere would probably have gained at least the benevolent neutrality of counterparts elsewhere. There certainly would have been far less of a “free” New World to redress the wrongs of the Old. Brazil most closely resembled Britain in achieving a civil society emancipation without a major revolution or war. Although Brazil had the advantage of being a latecomer, it completed the process of abolition in opposition to inclinations of a majority of its elected representatives. Nabuco used its celebratory and non-violent climax as the signifier of a consensual national sentiment that was supposedly implicitly there from the very first moment of abolitionist agitation: “The slave-owner of one day was, the next, the liberator of his slaves en masse. The heart of the country was won to the cause from the very beginning. . . .”49 Yet even the immediate aftermath of the Golden Law’s passage makes this implausible. The princess regent signed the legislation, 238

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry preceded and followed by a joyous multitude of all classes. However, both monarch and monarchy were both swept aside sixteen months later. Even before the overthrow the imperial Chamber of Deputies had declined to make the anniversary of emancipation a day of national celebration.50 Nor were there among the ranks of society other reformers quickly mobilized to adopt the repertoires of the movement or to transfer the language of antislavery to other demands for reform. It was certainly not effectively tied to successful demands for the extension of political rights as concomitant to America’s postwar reconstruction. The sparse simplicity of Brazil’s Golden Law bespeaks little concern for the future of the transformed slaves. The speed with which ex-slave labor was marginalized by European migration seems to have been matched by the political marginalization of their abolitionist allies.51 Domestic marginalization had its counterpart at the international level. On the eve of the emancipation of the last slaves in the western hemisphere, Pope Leo XIII famously issued a ringing endorsement of antislavery in the form of an epistle to the Brazilian Church. Little more than a year later invitations were dispatched from Brussels to attend the most important international conference ever held on the abolition of the slave trade. Brazil was not on the list. Instead, it was classified by its European organizers as one of the “minor powers,” whose presence might just make the proceedings unwieldy. Such nations, it was decided, could be asked to adhere to the final resolutions in order to add moral support – if necessary.52 Which brings us back to Nabuco’s ultimate vision of Brazilian slavery as having held the nation in thrall until the climactic moment of emancipation wiped out even the memory of the institution. Did his dazzling retrospective of the Brazilian process obscure the true magnitude of one of the most significant popular mobilizations in the history of abolition?

Notes * I wish to express my gratitude to Vitor Izecksohn and Stanley Engerman for their helpful suggestions. 1. Cobbett’s Parliamentary History of England: From the Norman Conquest to the Year 1803 vol. 27 (9 May 1788), 495–505. 2. Robert Conrad, The Destruction of Slavery in Brazil, 1850–1888 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 270–275. 3. Joaquim Nabuco, “The Anti-Slavery Struggle in Brazil,” Anti-Slavery Reporter (Aug.–Oct. 1900): 126–129. 4. Seymour Drescher, “Liberty, Equality Humanity: Anti-slavery and Civil Society in Britain and France,” forthcoming in The Rise and Demise of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Atlantic World, Kristen Mann and Philip Misevich, eds. (Rochester: Rochester University Press, 2016). 5. Seymour Drescher, From Slavery to Freedom: Comparative Studies in the Rise and Fall of Atlantic Slavery (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), chs. 2 and 3. 6. On women’s antislavery mobilization in Britain see, inter alia, Clare Midgley,

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7.

8. 9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780–1870 (London: Routledge, 1992), On sugar abstention see Charlotte Sussman, Consuming Anxieties Consumer Protest, Gender and British Slavery, 1713–1833 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), and J.R. Oldfield, Popular Politics and British AntiSlavery: The Mobilization of Public Opinion Against the Slave Trade, 1787– 1807 (London: Routledge, 1998). On religious mobilization and petitioning see also Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution 1770–1823 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975); Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Iain Whyte, Scotland and the Abolition of Black Slavery, 1756–1838 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006); and Robin Blackburn, The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights (London: Verso, 2011), 162–169. See Jeremy D. Popkin, You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) ch. 10; and Malick Ghachem, “The Colonial Vendée,” in The World of the Haitian Revolution, David Patrick Geggus and Norman Fiering, eds. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 156–176. David A. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007), 160. André Cabanis and Michel L. Martin, “L’ independence d’ Haiti devant l’ opinion publique française sous le consulat et l’ empire: ignorance et malentendus,” in Mourir pour les Antilles: Independence nègre ou l’ esclavage, 1802–1804, Michel L. Martin et Alain Yacou, eds. (Paris: Centre d’ etudes et de recherches caraibeennes, 1991). See Carolyn E. Fick, “The Saint-Domingue Slave Revolution and the Unfolding of Independence, 1791–1804,” in The World of the Haitian Revolution, David Patrick Geggus and Norman Fiering, eds. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 177–196, quote on 179; and Miranda Frances Spieler, “The Legal Structure of Colonial Rule during the French Revolution,” William and Marry Quarterly 66, no. 2 (Apr. 2009): 365–408, quote on 373. On the continuities and transformations wrought by the Haitian Revolution, see Malick W. Ghachem, The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 303–314. Paul Michael Kielstra, The Politics of the Slave Trade in Britain and France, 1814– 1848 (New York: Saint Martin’s Press, 2000), 30–31. Paquette Gabriel, Imperial Portugal in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions: The LusoBrazilian World, c. 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 77. Lawrence C. Jennings, French Anti-Slavery: The Movement for the Abolition of Slavery in France (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Darrell Meadows, “The Planters of Saint-Domingue 1754–1804: Migration and Exile in the French Revolutionary Atlantic,” PhD dissertation, Carnegie Mellon University, 2004, 323–340. See, inter alia, Midgley, Women Against Slavery; on Catholics in Ireland, see Christine Kinealy, “The Liberator Daniel O’Connel and Antislavery,” History Today 57:12 (Oct. 2007): 51–57; C.S. Monaco, Moses Levy of Florida: Jewish Utopian and Antebellum Reformer (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 2005); on the limits of the relationship between Irish Catholics and abolitionists in Ireland, see David Turley, The Culture of English Antislavery, 1780–1860 (London: Routledge, 1991), 150–151.

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pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry 16. David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006) ch. 11, esp. 208–221. 17. Emilia Viotti da Costa, Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood: The Demerara Slave Rebellion of 1823 (New York: Oxford University Press: 1994); Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), ch. 16; Seymour Drescher, “Civilizing Insurgency: Two Variants of Slave Revolts in the Age of Revolution,” in Who Abolished Slavery? Slave Revolts and Abolitionism, Seymour Drescher and Pieter C. Emmer, eds. (New York: Berghahn, 2010), 120–132. 18. See William Lloyd Garrison, The Liberator, 20 Aug. 1841; John W. Blassingame, ed., The Frederick Douglass Papers: Speeches, Debates and Interviews 5 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979–1992), i:373; Alexis de Tocqueville, “On the Emancipation of Slaves” (1843), in Tocqueville and Beaumont on Social Reform, Seymour Drescher, ed. and trans. (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 137–173, esp. 138, 150–154. For a Haitian perspective of the British people’s “wisdom and energy” in exercising their political rights, see The British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Reporter (17 Nov. 1841), 241–242; “Celebration of Negro Emancipation at Haiti” [from the Manifeste Port-Au-Prince, August 20, 1841]. 19. See Jennings, French Antislavery, 101–108; Drescher, From Slavery to Freedom, ch. 6, quote on 178. 20. Drescher, From Slavery, 180–181. 21. See Roxanne Easley, The Emancipation of the Serfs in Russia: Peace Arbitrators and the Development of Civil Society (London: Routledge, 2009), ch. 1; David Moon, The Abolition of Serfdom in Russia, 1762–1907 (London: Routledge, 2001), 1–70; and John Markoff, The Abolition of Feudalism: Peasants, Lords, and Legislators in the French Revolution (University Park, Penn.: Penn State University Press, 1996), chs. 5–8. 22. Markoff, Abolition of Feudalism, ch. 2; Moon, Abolition of Serfdom in Russia;  Jerome Blum, The End of the Old Order in Rural Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), part 3; Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 181. 23. Kolchin, Unfree Labor, ch. 3. On the perennial quest of the Russian autocracy to activate and neutralize public self-government after the Great Reforms, see also Thomas S. Pearson, Russian Officialdom in Crisis: Autocracy and Local SelfGovernment, 1861–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 24. Peter Kolchin, “In Defense of Servitude: American Proslavery and Russian Proserfdom Arguments, 1780–1860,” American Historical Review 85, no. 4 (Oct. 1980): 804–827, esp. 823 ff. 25. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Eduardo Nolla, ed., James Schleifer, trans., 2 vols (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2012), i:656. 26. Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Governments Relations to Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), ch. 2. Davis, Inhuman Bondage, ch. 13; and William W. Freehling, The Reintegration of American History: Slavery and the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 198–214. 27. Davis, Age of Emancipation, chs. 8–10; and Richard Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall: Black Americans in the Atlantic Abolitionist Movement 1830– 1860 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni versity Press, 1989). 28. Davis, Inhuman Bondage, 216–221; and Viotti da Costa, Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood. 29. Kolchin, Unfree Labor.

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pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry 30. Robert William Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York: Norton, 1989), 287–302. 31. Edward Rugemer, The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008), ch. 7. Haiti was the only other foreign country in which British emancipation was commemorated. 32. Michael Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1850s (New York: Norton, 1978), 148– 153. 33. Gary Gallagher, The Union War (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), 198 n. 34. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution 1863–1877 (New York: HarperCollins, 1989), 123. 35. See Jeffrey D. Needell, The Party of Order: The Conservatives, the State, and Slavery in the Brazilian Monarchy, 1831–1871 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), esp. 138–155, and 380 n. 91; David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 114–116. 36. See Leslie Bethell, The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade: Britain, Brazil and the Slave Trade Question: 1807–1864 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 237–279; and Dale T. Graden, Disease, Resistance, and Lies: The Demise of the Transatlantic Slave Trade to Brazil and Cuba (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014), esp. chs. 5 and 6. 37. Roderick J. Barman, Citizen Emperor: Pedro ii and the Making of Brazil, 1825– 1891 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 195. It must be recalled that the British government continued to hold the issue of liberating emancipados like a sword of Damocles over Brazil’s head until 1869. On the Christie affair, see Bethell, Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade, 386–387. 38. Anti-Slavery Reporter (Apr. 1864): 89–95; Ibid. (Apr. 1871): 131–132. 39. See, inter alia, Needell, Party of Order, 263–303; Dale Torston Graden, Slavery to Freedom in Brazil: Bahia, 1835–1900 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006), 227. 40. See Angela Alonso, “The Theatricalization of Politics: The Brazilian Movement for the Abolition of Slavery,” unpublished paper presented at the Gilder-Lehrman Center conference “American Counterpoint: New Approaches to Slavery and Abolition in Brazil,” Oct. 2010; and Celso Thomas Castilho, “Performing Abolitionism, Enacting Citizenship: The Social Construction of Political Rights in 1880s Recife, Brazil,” Hispanic American Historical Review 93, no. 3 (Aug. 2013): 377–410. 41. Castihlo, “Performing Abolitionism,” 386 ff. 42. Celso, ibid., 406–407. 43. Quoted in Alonso, “Theatricalization.” 44. See Robert Conrad, The Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 1850–1888 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 183–209; and Pedro C. de Mello, “Expectation of Abolition and Sanguinity of Coffee Plantations in Brazil, 1871– 1881,” in Without Consent or Contract: Technical Papers 2 vols., Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, eds. (New York: Norton, 1992), 629–646, Table 32.3 on page 644. Maria Helena Machado examines movements involving slaves themselves in the coffee regions of Brazil during the last decade of Brazilian slavery. She traces a long-term development in Sao Paulo culminating in a highly organized form of slave agency. See “Slavery and Social Movements in NineteenthCentury Brazil,” Review: A Journal of the Fernand Braudel Center 34, no. 1–2 (Jan. 2011): 163–191. 45. Jeffry Needell, “Brazilian Abolitionism: its Historiography and the uses of

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46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52.

Political History,” Journal of Latin American Studies 42, no. 2 (May 2010): 231– 261. See Kevin Bales’ project: “Walk Free Global Slavery Index” (2013). See Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995). Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Colony and Metropole in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). Nabuco, “Anti-Slavery Struggle,” 126. Hendrick Kraay, Days of National Festivity in Rio de Janeiro, 1823–1889 (Stanford: Stanford On marginalization, see inter alia, Rebecca Scott, “Defining the Boundaries of Freedom in the World of Cane: Cuba, Brazil and Louisiana after Slavery,” American Historical Review 99, no. 1 (Feb. 1994): 70–103; Reid Andrews, “Black and White Workers in Sao Paulo, Brazil 1888–1928,” Hispanic American Historical Review 68, no. 3 (Aug. 1988): 491–524; Thomas H. Holloway, Immigrants on the Land: Coffee and Society in São Paulo, 1886–1934 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980); and Maria Helena Pereira Toledo Machado, “From Slave Rebels to Strikebreakers: The Quilombo of Jabaquara and the Problem of Citizenship in Late Nineteenth-Century Brazil,” Hispanic American Historical Review 86, no. 2 (Mar. 2006): 247–274. In following Nabuco’s scenario I have not included Spanish imperial abolition into my essay. Those who are interested may see my brief reflections in, “From Empires of Slavery to Empires of Antislavery,” in Slavery and Antislavery in Spain’s Atlantic Empire, Josep M. Fradera and Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, eds. (New York: Berghahn, 2013), 291–316. See Suzanne Miers, Britain and the Ending of the Slave Trade (New York: Prentice Hall, 1975), 231.

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11 ABOLITION AND CIVIL SOCIETY: WEST AND EAST

In March 1844, an English traveler in Morocco presented himself to the governor of Mogador. He announced that he was the agent of a society for promoting the abolition of “Slavery and the Slave Trade in Every Part of the World.” His mission was to petition the Sultan of Morocco to join this global project to abolish a traffic “contrary to the rights of Men and the Laws of God.” The governor replied that the traveler’s mission was “against our religion; I cannot think of it or interfere with it in any way whatever.” It was, he said, authorized by the Prophet himself and the Sultan would cut out his tongue were he even to accept the petition. The Sultan’s own people, he concluded, would rise in revolt against him and have his head cut off. At the other end of the Mediterranean the Ottoman Sultan was rejecting a similar proposal from the British ambassador.1 The governor’s response was hardly unreasonable. For millennia, slavery had been a ubiquitous and perennial institution. It had been sanctioned as part of the natural, cosmic and divine order, establishing a hierarchy of domination and dependency. Legal or religious codes had established justifications for enslavement and regulated the terms of relationships between masters and slaves. Extended monotheistic communities like Islam and Christianity altered the boundaries of slavery but accepted the captivity of each other’s religious members as part of their mutual claims to sanctioned enslavement. In the four centuries before Richardson’s mission to Morocco, Western Europeans had created a string of new settlements across the Atlantic that extended slavery for the entire length of the Western hemisphere. Some of its colonies had higher percentages of slaves than did any societies in the Old World.

Divergence of the West Some of these European states, however, had diverged from the general pattern of sanctioning slavery in their European metropoles. By the end of the fifteenth century, before they launched new slave colonies in the Americas, some had become nations without chattel slaves. Their judicial traditions had reached the point of declaring that anyone arriving on their soils was freed 245

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry of the status of being a slave. Although the arrival of masters with slaves from their overseas colonies offered challenges to the assertion of this territorial freedom principle, their civil societies and judicial systems never formally accepted the idea that their own colonial slaves’ status remained intact when they were taken by their masters to Europe.2 England, with the most autonomous civil society in Europe, took the lead in developing an organized non-governmental challenge to both the Atlantic slave trade and its own colonial slave system, at the peak of their importance to the metropolitan economy. By the late eighteenth century Britain had the most extensive newspaper system in the world, with the greatest degree of freedom in terms of press censorship, public assembly, and the widest freedom of association. For all of the restrictions on its suffrage, it possessed the strongest representative body in Europe, allowing the greatest public access to parliamentary decision-making. France was to anticipate British abolition by enacting slave emancipation in 1794, but the decree was made only in response to an overseas slave revolution in Saint-Domingue, which was rescinded by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1802. Thereafter, both France’s metropolitan civil society and its abolition process lagged behind that of Britain. Another important characteristic of British civil society was its relative religious diversity. Popular religious movements became important agents of abolition in the half century following abolition’s breakthrough in the late 1780s. Religious denominations that were independent of the influence of the established Church of England became a principal organizational network for the abolitionist movement. Such nonconformist groups, as well as more secular associations, were willing to discount the authority of religious biblical texts that employed traditional methods and that invoked biblical passages recognizing and sanctioning slavery.3 These developments enabled British abolitionism to become the most durable and permanent antislavery movement in the world. Scholars of popular movements have identified it as a pioneer of the modern social movement. Its techniques of information gathering, mass petitioning, and nationwide networks were models for peaceful popular movements to come. Its petitions gathered the largest number of signatories during five decades of mobilization. Abolitionism also opened the gates for female organization, campaigning, and international boycotting on a scale never before seen. British overseas slaves could not, of course, hold public meetings demanding their liberation. They organized major revolts in tandem with British abolitionist initiatives toward emancipation. There were two such uprisings (1823 and 1831), joined by slaves in their thousands. In one respect these slave revolts were more like their British metropolitan counterparts than their Haitian predecessor. The rebels were careful not to take human life and the abolitionists in Britain were able to use the brutal repressions to further their demands for emancipation. By the time that British popular mobilization reached its peak in the 1830s, women equaled men in affixing their signatures to petitions to 246

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry Parliament and addresses to their monarch. They formed durable auxiliary organizations in provincial cities and canvassed in critical parliamentary elections in which support for abolitionist elections was critical to the passage of abolitionist legislation. Richardson on his North African mission and British diplomatic representations to Muslim rulers invariably spoke of the antislavery project as the will of the British Parliament and the British people. In terms of effectiveness, of course, it helped to be citizens or governmental representatives of the wealthiest, most highly industrialized, commercialized, naval power in the world. With small European governments Britain made slave trade abolition a condition for the restoration of their colonies at the end of the Napoleonic wars. To wartime Spanish and Portuguese allies, Britain offered Spain and Portugal relief from repayment of large war debts to Britain in exchange for anti-slave trade treaties. In the wake of its victory over Napoleon at Waterloo, Britain pressured the returning Bourbon king of France to accept Napoleon’s desperate decree ending the French slave trade.4 In this perspective we must be wary about identifying pressure on Muslim rulers to end their slave trades or slavery as “Western” or “European” initiatives. For at least the first three quarters of the nineteenth century, the internationalization of abolitionism was primarily a British project. When the British government first pressured France to join in the renunciation of its slave trade in 1814, the French Colonial Minister sarcastically replied, “Do you English mean to bind the World?” There were few other mobilizations in the West as popular or as sustained as that of Britain. For the most part the British Abolitionist Society unsuccessfully sought to stimulate the formation of mass abolitionist movements elsewhere in Europe. Only small numbers of individuals formed abolitionist societies on the Continent – in Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands. Spain belatedly formed a large abolition society after the outcome of the American Civil War. French antislavery after the Revolution was also meager. On the one occasion that the French Abolition Society ventured to invite the British society to a joint public session in Paris, the French government prohibited the meeting on the grounds that it might cause an anti-British disturbance. Although France ultimately emancipated its colonial slaves during the Revolution of 1848, tension between the French and British governments over the means of enforcement lingered late into the nineteenth century. France refused to sign a “right to search” treaty for the suppression of the seaborne slave trade, fearing to acknowledge its possible infringement on national sovereignty. Moreover, civil society mobilization in France continued to be disrupted by regime changes, in 1851 and 1870, and by deep hostility between religious and secular segments of the French polity. As far as the rest of Europe was concerned, abolition of the slave trade was primarily a British project until the last two decades of the nineteenth century.5 Britain did have one early counterpart to its civil society abolitionist mobilization in the West. Encouraged by the success of Britain’s campaigns in the 247

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry 1830s, American abolitionists adopted British social movement techniques in order to pressure the American federal government into beginning to dismantle slavery in the United States. Even in the northern states, however, the public campaign was initially disrupted by riotous crowds, fearful of disrupting the Union and very hostile to the idea of allowing African Americans to become equal citizens. In the national legislature, the overwhelming majority of representatives was at first quite hostile to discussing any issue that would threaten the compromise that had allowed the original thirteen colonies to form the federal union. In response to popular antislavery petitions, the United States House of Representatives resolved that all such petitions were to be set aside without any further recognition or action. So the same moment that the governor of Mogador was refusing to receive the British abolitionist petition to his ruler, the United States Congress reaffirmed its annual resolution against the reception of antislavery petitions. In short, American abolitionist mobilization was met by strong counter-mobilizations, both North and South. It would take decades of agitation before the nation would elect a president who pledged only to stop the expansion of slavery in the American republic. That was enough to start the bloodiest civil war in the history of slave abolition. One must also take due note of the relative difficulty experienced by advocates of antislavery in the Western pursuit of abolitionist agendas. Britain itself was to experience a major deceleration of its abolitionist project within the empire itself just as American legislation and Muslim rulers were rejecting the extension of antislavery initiatives into their own societies. It is especially significant because it prefigured the way in which Britain dealt with slavery in the Middle East and the larger orbit of Muslim slavery during the entire century after the initial forays in the early 1840s. In the Atlantic world, both before and after 1840, Britain largely confined its international abolitionist agenda to the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. Only within its own imperial sphere did Britain venture to directly abolish slave systems. Even there it conducted its “mighty experiment” only with the largest compensation package offered to any slaveholder in the New World, as well as a proviso for a limited transitional period of compulsory labor and protection for its colonial sugar producers.6 In all colonies where the British Atlantic model of emancipation was followed, the overseas slave economies and slave populations were always very small in proportion to those in their metropoles. In the United States and Cuba counter-mobilizations by slaveholders and their allies presented a more formidable challenge to abolition. In those cases as well as in Haiti emancipation was resolved after prolonged military conflicts.

The Indian Path to Emancipation Western attitudes towards slavery in the Middle East were first forged during Britain’s imperial expansion in India. While abolitionism was emerging in the 248

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry West, Britain’s expanding dominions in India were sustained by a contingent of administrative and military personnel amounting to no more than one European to a thousand indigenous subjects. In order to preserve its domination, the East India Company made extensive accommodation to the prevailing systems of religious and customary laws which they found in place. The “Cornwallis Code” of 1795 assured the indigenous population that, in all lawsuits involving “succession, inheritance, marriage, caste, and all religious usages and institutions,” Muslim and Hindu laws were to be the general rule in civil matters (including slavery) by which judges were to form their decisions. Between its initial victory in abolishing the slave trade in 1807 and the abolition of colonial slavery in 1833, the British Abolitionist Society made no direct appeal whatsoever to their rank and file to extend their project to Britain’s dominion in India. They clearly calculated that it would be far easier to act against slavery in the Atlantic world rather than their Eastern Empire. Transatlantic colonial slave-owners were far fewer and far more dependent upon British protection than those in India. Even the small British garrisons in the Caribbean sufficed to deter them from resistance to metropolitan legislative initiatives because these very contingents ensured the slaveholders’ wealth and safety.7 The opposite held true for India. The British government left abolitionist action even against the slave trade to the discretion of the East India Company. Most agents of The Company were deeply hesitant about taking action against slavery during the half century between the emergence of abolitionism in 1788 and the completion of the emancipation process in the West. Even after the completion of emancipation in the western colonies, a widely help opinion was that Indian slaves were free men in comparison to already liberated ex-slaves in Jamaica and that emancipation would be “very unpopular” with both slaves and masters in India.8 Some British magistrates were, however, deeply disturbed by the condition of the indigenous slave population in India. They produced a steady stream of depictions of abuse and suggested radical intervention to ameliorate the situation. Others were strongly convinced that slavery did not warrant the same approach to reform in the subcontinent as was applied to Atlantic slavery. They emphasized the difference between the rigors of large-scale plantation slavery in the sugar colonies and the more domestic forms that prevailed among a large proportion of slaves in the East. They argued that periodic famines in India induced the poorest members of the population to bind themselves to masters or to sell some of their children into bondage in order to prevent the entire family from starving. “We believe then,” concluded an East India Company magistrate, “that there is a motive operating exclusively upon the lower classes in India, inducing them to enter into the condition of slavery, and to continue in it from choice . . . [In] this respect the slavery of India is much more analogous to pauperism than the slavery of the ancients or of the Western World.” Impoverishment in India was analogous 249

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry to pauperism in England, except that there was no equivalent to an English Poor Law and no English right to relief for the Indian population.9 Opponents of emancipation in India identified a final radical difference between slavery in the Western and Eastern hemispheres. Citing Alexis de Tocqueville’s recent work on Democracy in America, they emphasized the fact that slavery in the West rested upon the equivalence of slavery with the African race. Slavery was a mark of dishonor perpetuated on the entire black population from generation to generation. Whatever marks of dishonor existed in India, they argued, slaves were of the same race as their masters and could clearly emerge from that status. Finally, advocates of sustaining the “Cornwallis” doctrine of non-interference noted that although there were cases of individual flight from the condition of slavery, there were no massive slave uprisings as was the case in the Americas. Since slavery was a status that caused no major disruption in the social order, its sudden abolition might have the effect of undermining a social order so amenable to continued British domination.10 British antislavery finally did turn eastward at the height of its prestige and power. Just as the British Slave Emancipation Bill was passing through Parliament in 1833, the East India Company Charter came up for its regular twenty-year renewal. Two MPs, related to prominent British abolitionists, quietly moved the inclusion of a clause that “in four years all rights over any person . . . being in a state of slavery, shall cease.” Greeted by a storm of parliamentary opposition, the clause was withdrawn, but the Government of India was directed instead to consider the means of mitigating and ultimately extinguishing slavery.11 At the pinnacle of British antislavery’s prestige as a popular movement in 1840, a World Antislavery Convention dedicated abolitionism to global emancipation. India was designated as the next target of British abolitionist intervention. Using the East India Company archives, the abolitionists were able to itemize aspects of brutal enslavement that were not widely practiced even in the West: kidnapping, child sales, and a market in India for mutilated African eunuchs. That was now sufficient for the British Anti-Slavery Reporter to designate slavery in India as “the worst slavery known either in ancient or modern times.”12 Its magnitude was also recalculated to be as more than ten times the number of slaves who had been liberated in the British slave colonies in 1833. The pressure of metropolitan abolitionism was sufficient to induce the enactment of a law on slavery in 1843, exactly ten years after its Atlantic counterpart. However, it took a very different form than its predecessor. Act V contained only four short articles. The central message was that henceforth magistrates would not enforce any masters’ claims arising out of an individual’s “alleged” enslavement. Any reference to abolition or emancipation was avoided. Act V was therefore an affirmation of delegalization. Anyone who claimed to be a slave would have to access judicial liberation, individual by 250

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry individual. The Government of India also focused on prohibiting any master’s action that would be criminal if practiced upon a free person and the activities of traffickers and sales by one individual to another.13 The process of abolition in India has been designated in retrospect as the “slow death of slavery.” It became the model for ending slavery throughout much of the Eastern hemisphere.14 This exceedingly gradual mode of emancipation was the outcome of a major event in the history of British antislavery. The metropole completely failed to respond to the Abolitionist Society’s call for another wave of popular mobilization. One of the worst depressions in nineteenth century Britain shifted popular attention to attending to ills closer to home.

The Middle East At the World Antislavery conference in London slavery and the slave trade in the Ottoman Empire, stretching from the Maghreb to the Indian Ocean, became another target of the abolitionist “swing to the East.” Strongly lobbied by the Antislavery Society, Foreign Minister Palmerston instructed the British Ambassador in Istanbul to inform the Ottoman government, now threatened by French policy in Egypt, that British support depended upon British public opinion. Public support, in turn, depended on some action against the slave trade. The ambassador reported that, as in India, slavery in the Ottoman realm was regarded as “an institution closely interwoven with the frame of society . . . and intimately connected with the law and with the habits and the religion of all classes, from the Sultan himself down to the lowest peasant . . . They might believe us to be their superiors in the Sciences, in Arts, and in Arms, but they are far from thinking our Wisdom or our morality greater than their own.”15

The First Abolition: Tunisia In the Middle East’s encounters with Western abolitionism it should be emphasized that the earliest formulation of the invitation to embrace antislavery from the British Antislavery Society was modestly formulated without any implication of the moral superiority of the West. Richardson’s appeal to the governor of Mogador was an invitation to join a common project to end a practice “contrary to the rights of men and the Laws of God.” The laws referred to those of the single God worshipped by Muslims as well as by Christians. While the governor of Mogador rejected the possibility a positive reaction was possible. The British Consul in Tunis, in April 1841, used the same moral formula to remind Bey Ahmed of Tunis that if he were to check the slave trade in his jurisdiction it would “be truly gratifying not only to the British Government but to the British nation generally.”16 Ahmed replied that he would do everything in his power “to put a stop not only to the exportation 251

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry of slaves, but slavery altogether.” Given the fact that prominent and powerful Tunisians were holders of thousands of slaves, Ahmed’s response did not appear to have overtly reflected a profound moral transformation. Most significant was the fact that the Bey was increasingly threatened by both expanding French presence from neighboring Algeria and by Ottoman indications that they aimed to restrict his power in Tunisia. Ahmed seized the opportunity to launch an appeal for support from Britain, whose government also wished to maintain the status quo. The British Consul welcomed this additional reason to support the Bey as long as he pursued “the wise and reasonable course” he was following. The Bey quickly abolished the slave market and its offices in 1841 despite the disapproval of the Sultan and of the French Consul. There were also expressions of resentment from major proprietors of slaves in Tunis on grounds that it would disrupt the social order. On the other hand the act received support from the Malta branch of the British Anti-Slavery Society and several merchant groups in the Mediterranean as well as the French Abolition Society. The Bey then began to plan moves toward a gradual abolition of slavery, such as a “free womb” decree. These were vigorously resisted by the local elite. In Istanbul, the Sultan stipulated that Ahmed was not to engage in further reforms without prior approval. As in the West, some slaves fled their masters and sought asylum among members of the British embassy. This was the forerunner of a privileged British consular asylum that would be fortified by treaties in the Middle East for a century to come. In 1845, the Bey decreed Tunisia itself to be a site of refuge. In a version of the “Indian model” of “delegalization,” Tunisian authorities would no longer recognize the legality of foreign master’s rights over their runaway slaves. Finally, in 1846, a decree of abolition was issued proclaiming compulsory emancipation. Its relation to Tunisian civil society, however, was minimal. The measure was dependent upon a conjecture of external threats to the Bey’s position from both France and the Ottoman Sultan. The British government, inclined to preserve a political status quo favorable to Ahmed Bey, was equally anxious to have a decisive move towards general emancipation. The first in the Muslim Middle East. As the first area in the Middle East to officially abolish slavery, it demonstrated the seriousness and effectiveness of the British government policy. British metropolitan abolitionists also looked to Tunisia as a precedent for the wider Muslim world. The centerpiece of their own contribution to the process was the appearance in Tunisia of an anonymous Legal Treatise (risala). Published a few months before the decree, it may have originated in British Malta.17 Following Muslim legal methodology, the Treatise presented the current practices of enslavement as contradicting principles of Shari’a, thereby undermining claims to ownership. In particular, it argued that many of the black captives were probably already Muslims. Familiar with the prerequisite formula of conversion (shahada) they were illegally held and sold as 252

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry slaves. As in English medieval jurisprudence, in all dubious cases, decisions were to be “in favor of liberty.”18 Internally, the abolition act was more contentious. It was an entirely topdown process. The Bey emphasized the role of his personal initiative in coming to a decision. There was virtually no broad widespread discussion, even among the ulama, prior to enactment. The wording of the act offered little by way of reference to traditional Islamic exegesis. Two ulama signed favorable documents but there was no prior effort to invite clerical or elite approval. The effects of that omission soon became apparent. In regions distant from the capital, there was widespread resistance and evasion, especially where agriculture depended upon slave labor. Most significantly the decree did not, as both the British government and abolitionists had hoped, become the catalyst for a wave of imitators in the Muslim world. Nor within Tunisia itself was there any outpouring of post-emancipation discussion, no formation of counterparts to the smaller European abolitionist societies to denounce violations of the law and no penal legislation, much less enforcement of the law. Civil society remained quiescent on the issue. Detailed accounts of the emancipation process do not mention the establishment of associational formations on the modest scale of the Netherlands or Malta discussing the abolition or its impact upon Tunisian society. Even forty years later during the intensification of European suppression of the slave trade in Africa, there appears to have been little indigenous public mobilization or widespread discussion in Tunisia. Even after the establishment of French domination in the 1880s, slaves remained in Tunisia. Slave cases were still adjudicated exclusively in Tunisian, not French, courts.19 In 1890, more than four decades had elapsed before another abolition decree in Tunis made slave dealers subject to prison terms of up to three years. The Tunisian decree of 1846 briefly became fodder for abolitionism in Europe. The French abolitionists, preparing for a major petition drive calling for the emancipation of French colonial slaves in 1847, attempted to shame their government with the observation that Muslim Tunisia had now surpassed all Catholic-majority nations in general and France in particular in achieving colonial emancipation. This attempt to shame the French government into taking action to abolish slavery in the colonies was a sign of the weakness of the abolitionist movement on the very eve of French emancipation. During its previous parliamentary session, France’s two legislative chambers had received small petitions requesting the abolition of slavery at least in Algeria. The government requested a reaction to possible emancipation from Marshal Bugeaud, the conqueror and governor-general of the colony. He dismissed the petitions as the effusion of a small clique of dreamers. Implicitly referring to the British example, where, he asked, were the millions of signatures from the peasants and other citizens of France? The issue was decided a few months later, not by a wave of civil society petitions and legislative delegation but by a new revolutionary government’s executive decree.20 253

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry More significantly, the Middle Eastern states only moved slowly towards ending the slave trade, a process that endured well into the twentieth century. Elites, whose social and familial structure was deeply intertwined with kulharem bondage, depended upon slave labor. There was widespread evasion of the law where flight or reduction of control over slave labor threatened output. In the process of enslavement there remained sufficient ground in Shari’a law for Muslim acknowledgment that unauthorized seizures of individuals who were probably Muslims opened a terrain of restriction in the enslavement process. There remained substantial room for convergence on probation since the slave trade had been the first and most enforceable target of British abolitionism. Since the slave trade also remained the primary source of slavery’s endurance it was identified as the key to gradual abolition. However, even the move towards slave trade abolition aroused violent resistance on the Arabian Peninsula. Direct conquest as in the case of Egypt offered European authorities and Muslim rulers opportunities to constrain the flow of slaves into the Middle East.21 As had been the case from the beginning of British rule in India, threats to the social order or economic activity always played a major role in the calculus of decisions to constrain the authority of masters or to expand the options of slaves. Most significantly, the Tunisian venture in emancipation had no imitators in the Middle East for more than a generation.22 In one respect the southern rim of the Muslim-dominated societies in proximity to the African slaving ports was the source of obstacles to the European transatlantic slave trade, if not to Muslim slavery or to intra-Muslim slave traders. A number of Muslim rulers and clerics vigorously challenged the dispatch of enslaved co-religionists and occasionally all slaves to Christian merchants. Periodic jihads also offered transforming the status of the enslaved. Unfortunately for prospects of a general abolition of the trade the broadly accepted religious sanction of slavery and enslavement allowed counter-abolitionist arguments to be challenged and reversed. Moreover, as in the case of the Franco-Caribbean, recourse to military methods also allowed for expansions of profitable enslavement and reversals of the process. Thus during the century following the onset of the “Age of Revolutions” in the Atlantic Ocean world, this same area became the zone of the globe’s largest proportions of enslaved populations and a principal contributor to the Eastern slave trades. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Africa had accounted for 11 percent of the world’s enslaved. By 1850 that proportion had increased to 25 percent and by 1900 to 47 percent.23

The Second Western Wave Only toward the end of the nineteenth century did antislavery again become a major issue accompanied by a new wave of European expansion and imperial domination in Afro-Asia. At that moment, developments in both hemispheres 254

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry intensified the pressure for responding to increased European expansion. During the century of abolitionism after 1788, popular European antislavery had been recruited predominantly but not exclusive from the ranks of Protestants, liberals and radical secularists. Brazil, the last slaveholding state in the Americas, abolished slavery in the wake of a massive civil mobilization in 1888. With the last Catholic nation enacting emancipation in the New World the papacy finally openly identified antislavery as a movement fully aligned with Christianity. In 1888, Pope Leo XIII sent a dramatic epistle to Brazil’s bishops. The pope referred to “new roads” and new commercial enterprises undertaken in Africa, where apostolic men could secure the safety and liberty of the continents slaves. With the pope’s sanction, Cardinal Lavigerie in Africa hoped to launch a “great crusade of faith and humanity” to both convert and liberate the continent’s slaves.24 In Europe, a transnational civil society mobilization linked European expansion in the Old World with the Western “civilizing mission.” Although far more riven by overtones of nationalist and denominational rivalry stemming from its Catholic missionary sanction, Lavigerie’s presentation of the movement as another chapter in a millennial conflict between Christianity and Islam quickly led to a polemical response from the Ottoman ambassador at Brussels. Noting that his own ruler had condemned the slave trade a generation earlier, he denounced the Cardinal’s implication that Islam offered Muslims the right to enslave black idolaters. Antislavery could now symbolically be identified by conservative opponents as a dual crusading enterprise against recalcitrant Muslim rulers and Arab slave traders in Africa and the Middle East.25 The European mobilization culminated in an international diplomatic Conference in Brussels in 1890. All European states pledged to make the ending of the slave trade under the sovereignty or protectorate of “civilized nations.” From Asia, the Ottoman Empire, Persia, and Zanzibar were invited to attend. Renewed legislation or orders against slaving or slavery by Tunisia, Persia, Egypt and the Ottoman Empire were issued as indicators of response to the intentions of those societies. Beyond these diplomatic moves, however, there was a rising wave of publicity in Europe identifying Islam itself as the obstacle to progress against slavery and the slave trade. In the decades to follow this would add ammunition to conservative ulama who wished to insist that the entire abolitionist project was an attempt to subvert Islam.26

Civil Society and Abolition in the East From their own perspective, the British abolitionists got less than they had hoped for. In India and in the Ottoman Empire, the movement faltered abruptly as an engine of mass mobilization in the 1840s and the Indian Government was allowed to settle for Act V. This meant that the magistrates would no longer enforce compulsory obedience on servants claimed by 255

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry masters under slave law, and would not actively probe into the master–servant relations based upon other forms of asymmetrical relations of power. Only in cases where kidnapping, criminal cruelty and forced sale were uncovered would the courts act to constrain the masters from holding slaves.27 Similarly, in the Ottoman Middle East, the British altered their ambition from the abolition of slavery to the suppression of the slave importing trade as a means of gradually reducing the number of slaves. The strategies of gradual liberation became known as the Indian model of emancipation. In zones outside British sovereignty, its consulates could also act as sites of liberation for disaffected slaves even where slavery was still a legal status. This extraterritorial power played a role as zones of refuge in the Middle East well into the second quarter of the twentieth century.28 The road to emancipation remained a top-down affair in the Middle East. Change occurred through international diplomacy, whether at the binational level as with Britain or also in the corridors of the League of Nations and the United Nations in the twentieth century. These issues found little resistance in popular mobilizations. Rulers were palpably reluctant to break openly with Shari’a law principles persisting in the Arabian Peninsula. Civil society mobilizations, either on the scale of Britain and the United States in the early nineteenth century or on more modest scales elsewhere, were never echoed on the southern or eastern shores of the Mediterranean world or in India. To explain the relative dearth of abolitionist discourse and collective opposition in the Middle East, Madeline C. Zilfi emphasizes the persistence of deep economic and ideological elite and ulama investment in slavery. In the Middle East, slavery retained a more pervasive role in sustaining the entire social system. Violent resistance to change was most emphatic in some slaving ports of North Africa and Arabia. The Ottoman Empire did not contain any equivalent of the Northern States of America to shift the balance against an entrenched slave society. Zilfi further argues that upper echelons of the imperial elite at the center and periphery of the Ottoman Empire were most deeply invested in slavery and also had a more pervasive religious and legal justification for sustaining the system. “Ottoman dynastic legitimacy rested on its Islamic character,” and slavery’s most committed defenders brought the moral authority of Islam to its defense. At the lower echelons of society, “the great strength of the conservative ulema and political figures derived from their ability to mobilize support within the wider population.” Moreover, rulers in Istanbul had to attend to provincial anti-abolitionist sentiment without weakening their own political and religious legitimacy.29 Earlier invitations to Muslim rulers by the British Abolitionist Society were framed as an appeal to a common religious foundation. These were soon replaced by the concept that abolition was a Euro-Christian principle confronting a less civilized Muslim world devoted to maintaining the institution. In that polarized atmosphere, conservative ulama refused to recognize Western attempts to equate slavery as morally equivalent to the racial slavery of the 256

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry pre-abolitionist West. The British East India Company’s early acceptance of Eastern slavery as distinctive vanished. Europeans increasingly came to a consensus that Western antislavery was the gold standard of human civilization. In those areas of the Muslim world that retained the greatest political independence, the British government failed to convince an Islamic Conference in Arabia to go beyond a collective resolution that all slavery should be abolished except that permitted by Shari’a law. It also reaffirmed the principle that “slavery was to be limited to captives taken in war.” Significantly the resolution was proposed by the president of the Ulama Society of India. It also reaffirmed the principle that “slavery was to be limited to captives taken in war.” The resolution passed by a large majority.30 Like the majority of the ulama, Muslim civil society remained reluctant to embrace a categorical Western antislavery position. While the latter moved toward internationalizing slavery as a crime, the question of slavery became deeply interwoven in the Middle East with a primary commitment to defend Islam. Demands by reformers for new readings of specific traditional texts or new methodologies of interpretations that supported abolition also encountered challenges about the degree to which scholars could reinterpret sacred texts on slavery in the light of historical change. This could be reinforced by a refusal to accept abolition in universal terms as inescapably a project of Western imperialism. Reformers insisted that Muslims had to engage European Christians as an inescapable reality, including the notion of human development – including antislavery – along European lines. They sought to stretch the meaning of slavery “to argue that abolition was not only promoted by Islam but also ordained by it.”31 In the Middle East the abolition of slavery followed the predominant formula of a slow death of slavery and incremental enforcement with full legal prohibition lingering until Saudi Arabia’s legislation in 1962. By the second half of the twentieth century, international definitions of slavery had expanded to include a wider range of practices. Agitation against these practices had devolved upon non-governmental lobbying organizations. Mass civil society antislavery mobilizations had become exceedingly rare. In the Middle East they had never appeared.

Conclusion By the end of the nineteenth century there were reformist voices in the Middle East wishing to adopt the position that Western insistence that all prior perspectives on religious texts had to be re-examined as historical creations subject to reconsideration in the light of developments in society. In Muslim societies, the debate continued over whether or not Qur’anic texts on slavery needed to be open to reinterpretation in the light of social and political developments both in and beyond Muslim countries. The fact remains, however, that insofar as slavery was concerned, even while it nearly vanished in the century after 257

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry Act V Middle Eastern civil society did not break with the pattern of response to abolitionism first demonstrated in the case of India. There were already early twentieth-century reformers eager to develop new approaches to religious texts related to slavery. Its advocates were eager to stretch literal statements to argue that those texts could sanction interpretations that abolition was not only allowed but promoted and ordained by Islam. However, there were no large-scale mobilizations that agitated for antislavery legislation.32 Until late in the twentieth century, all steps toward abolition were generated from negotiations between Arab national governments and foreign Western states or international institutions such as the League of Nations and the United Nations. The absence of civil society participations in the abolition of slavery in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries may have made it more difficult to integrate antislavery into the nationalizing cultures that emerged against European domination. Antislavery and the ending of slavery could have been widely perceived and identified as just another element of the cultural imperialism that accompanied European domination. It would not have been portrayed as integral to the projects of nation-building and national histories during the struggle for independence and self-determination.

Notes 1. Seymour Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (Cambridge, 2009), 3; and Ehud Toledano, The Ottoman Slave Trade and its Suppression: 1840– 1890 (Princeton, 1982). 2. See David Eltis, Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge, 2000), ch. 1; Sue Peabody, There Are No Slaves in France: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Old Regime (New York, 1996); J.H. Baker, “Personal Liberty under the Common Law,” in The Origins of Modern Freedom in the West (Stanford, 1995); Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective (London/New York, 1986); and Drescher, “European Antislavery,” in The Cambridge World History of Slavery, ed. Seymour Drescher, David Eltis, Stanley Engerman, and David Richardson (forthcoming) (Cambridge University Press). For an emphasis on the continuity of slavery in England into the late seventeenth century, see Michael Guasco, Slaves and Englishmen: Human Bondage in the Early Modern Atlantic (Philadelphia, 2014). 3. David Brian Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca, NY, 1975), 541–550. 4. See Gelien Matthews, Caribbean Slave Revolts and the British Abolitionist Movement (Baton Rouge, 2006); Emilia Viotti da Costa, Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood: The Demerara Slave Rebellion of 1823 (New York, 1994); and Seymour Drescher, “Civilizing Insurgencey: Two Variants of Slave Revolts in the Age of Revolution,” in Who Abolished Slavery? Slave Revolts and Abolitionism, ed. S. Drescher and Pieter C. Emmer (New York, 2010), 120–132. 5. Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery 1776–1848 (London, 1988), 120; Paul Michael Kielstra, The Politics of Slave Trade Suppression in Britain and France, 1814–1848: Diplomacy, Morality and Economics (London, 2000); and Lawrence C. Jennings, French Reaction to British Slave Emancipation (Baton Rouge, 1988).

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pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry 6. William A. Green, British Slave Emancipation: The Sugar Colonies and the Great Experiment 1830–1865 (Oxford, 1976); Seymour Drescher, The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation (New York, 2002); and Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1938 (Baltimore, 1992). 7. David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (New York, 1984), 179–180. 8. See Report from the English Law Commission on Slavery, 3 vols. (London, 1841), 193–195; and Nancy Gardner Cassels, Social Legislation of the East India Company: Public Justice versus Public Instruction (Los Angeles, 2010), 173–209. 9. Report, 191–195. 10. Report, 191–195. See also, Howard Temperley, British Antislavery, 1833–1870 (London, 1973), 96. 11. For this paragraph, see Andrea Major, Slavery Abolition and Empire in India, 1772–1843 (Liverpool, 2012), 3–7. 12. Anti-Slavery Reporter, March 24, April 21, June 2, and June 6, 1841. 13. Major, Slavery, 336: Cassels, Social Legislation, 203–207. 14. Suzanne Miers, “Slavery to Freedom in Sub-Saharan Africa: Expectations and Reality,” in idem, 237–264; and Howard Temperley, “The Delegalization of Slavery in British India,” in After Slavery: Emancipation and its Discontents (London, 2000), 169–187. 15. Quoted in Ehud R. Toledano, “Ottoman Concepts of Slavery in the Period of Reform,” in Breaking the Chains: Slavery, Bondage, and Emancipation in Modern Africa and Asia, ed. Martin A. Klein (Madison, WI, 1993), 37–63, (quote on p. 47). 16. Ismael Montana, The Abolition of Slavery in Ottoman Tunisia (Gainesville, Fl, 2013), 80. 17. For the entire process of abolitionism, see ibid., chs. 5 and 6. 18. Ibid., 114. For the Medieval English analogue to this instruction, see H. Baker, “Personal Liberty under the Common Law,” in The Origins of Modern Freedom in the West, ed. R.W. Davis (Stanford, 1995), 190. 19. Suzanne Miers, Britain and the Ending of the Slave Trade (New York, 1975), 68–73, 246. 20. On France, see Nelly Schmidt, Abolitionnistes de l’esclavage et réformateurs des colonies 1820–1851 (Paris, 2000), 468–70; and Seymour Drescher, “British Way, French Way: Opinion Building and Revolution in the Second French Slave Emancipation,” in Drescher, From Slavery to Freedom: Comparative Studies in the Rise and Fall of Atlantic Slavery (New York, 1999), 158–195. 21. Ehud Toledano, The Ottoman Slave Trade and its Suppression 1840–1890 (Princeton, 1982). 22. In January 1892, two agents of the British Anti-Slavery Society inspecting the conditions of the slave population in Tunisia after a decade of French occupation reported progress in the very difficult problem by a society of freed women who “made it their business to push inquiry behind that hitherto impenetrable veil,” enabling “any slave, male or female,” to make use of liberation papers and become free. Report from a correspondent of the London Times, January 26, 1892. 23. For important instances of Muslim resistance to the transatlantic slave trade see, inter alia, Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slaving: A History of Slavery in Africa (Cambridge, 1983, 2000, 2012); Jihad in West Africa during the Age of Revolution (Athens, Ohio 2016), Martin A. Klein, Slavery and Colonial Rule in French West Africa (Cambridge, 1998); Paul Lovejoy and Jan S. Hogendoorn, Slow Death for Slavery: The Course of Abolition in Northern Nigeria, 1897–1936 (Cambridge, 1999); and Rudolf T. Ware III, “Slavery and Abolition in Islamic

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24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

Africa, 1776–1905,” in The Cambridge World History of Slavery, Vol. 4: AD 1804 – AD 2016, ed. D. Eltis, S.L. Engerlman, S. Drescher and D. Richardson (Cambridge, 2017), 344–372. For demographic data see, B.W. Higman, “Demographic Trends,” in ibid., p. 23, note. François Renault, Lavigerie, l’esclavage African et l’Europe, 1868–1892 (Paris, 1971), 363–383. Amal N. Ghazal, “Debating Slavery and Abolition in the Arab Middle East,” in Slavery, Islam, and Diaspora, ed. Behnaz A. Mirzai, Ismael Musah Montana and Paul E. Lovejoy (Trenton, NJ, 2009), 139–154. Miers, Britain and the Ending of the Slave Trade, 346. For an Indian analogue, see Avril A. Powell, “Indian Muslim Modernists and the Issue of Slavery in Islam,” in Slavery and South Asian History, ed. Indrani Chatterjee and Richard M. Eaton (Bloomington, 2006), 262–286. The difficulty of organizing antislavery civil society associations went far beyond the Middle East or Muslim societies. See, for example, Sandra E. Greene, “Minority Voices: Abolitionism in West Africa,” Slavery and Abolition (online) (February 2015), 642–651. Herzy Zdanowski, Slavery and Manumission in the Red Sea and the Persia Gulf in the First Half of the 20th Century (Ithaca, NY, 2013), 178–179, 212–213. Madeline C. Zilfi, Women and Slavery in the Late Ottoman Empire: The Design of Difference (New York, 2010), 223–226. Zdanowski, Slavery and Manumission, 213. Ghazal, “Debating Slavery,” 152. See, above all, Ehud R. Toledano, “Abolition and Anti-slavery in the Ottoman Empire: A Case to Answer?” in Global History of Antislavery in the Nineteenth Century, ed. William Mulligan and Maurice Brie (London, 2013), 117–136.

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12 BRITAIN, INDIA AND BONDAGE, PART ONE Birth of the “Slow Death of Slavery”

In the fall of 1843, the South Durham British India Society sent a congratulatory address to the Court of Directors of the East India Company in response to the enactment of Act V by the government of India “for declaring and amending the Law regarding the condition of slavery” (on April 7, 1843). In their address they added a passage on the absence of a similar response from the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (hereafter Anti-Slavery Society). When we call to mind the great body of men who are declared, by themselves, to be jealously labouring to abolish slavery all over the world – and moreover, that they have recognized in the great AntiSlavery Convention of three years ago, free labour as the great and legitimate means of expelling slavery out of the world, and India as the grand field for its exercise – we cannot avoid expressing our deep regret to learn that this body has . . . taken no step . . . to congratulate you on . . . that vast mass of from ten to twelve millions of slaves to whom you have now given freedom . . . When we recollect that, in fifty years of most arduous exertion, this vast body, with its resources . . . and with the zealous support of the whole British power, have never succeeded in procuring the gratuitous liberation of a single thousand of slaves, but have been induced by despair to purchase at a cost of £20,000,000 of England’s money, the liberty of eight hundred thousand slaves, we are lost in wonder at their great apathy on the great occasion. We . . . find ourselves at a total loss to account for this silence on the ordinary principles of action in zealous and honest men.1 The Anti-Slavery Society reprinted the entire passage and responded. With one point of the critique, however, they completely agreed – the “silence” with which the “manumission of ten millions” had been received, not only by the London Anti-Slavery Society, but by the society’s many provincial branches; and by the national press as well. Indeed, noted the Anti-Slavery Reporter, “of all the [local] British India Society’s in existence, South Durham was the 261

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry only one by which silence has been broken.” The silence was not difficult to explain, they suggested. There had been “no general public excitement . . . no struggles or discussions, in Parliament . . . no effort on the part of the government to draw attention to it, nor even any publication of the fact.”2 Here, the Anti-Slavery Society ended its discussion. One implicit unanswered question raised in South Durham remained. A decade after the solemn ceremonies hailing slave emancipation, and five years after the boisterous celebration of the end of “Negro Apprenticeship” on both sides of the Atlantic, why was the proclamation of Act V received with hardly a whisper of commentary? As many historians of British antislavery have noted, during the half-century between the emergence of political abolitionist organization in 1787 and the successful antislavery campaign for slave emancipation in Britain’s slave colonies and Mauritius in 1837–1838 the East Indies were never incorporated as targets of organized abolitionism. In this case history has repeated itself in historiography. Historians of both the British Atlantic and Indian Ocean slave systems have frequently accounted for differences in their processes of abolition with reference to different mechanisms of enslavement, different deployments of slaves, demographic profiles, economic systems, or cultural variations in religious or racial foundations for those systems. Those who look more closely at the abolitionist processes themselves emphasize differences in both the timing and the chosen modes of addressing the problem of slavery in each system. It is also quite clear that, compared with legislation against Western slavery, legislation against slavery in India (Act V of 1843), the “delegalization” of slavery failed to produce a rapid demise of the system. Nor has its history yet achieved a fraction of the scholarly attention allotted to its Atlantic counterpart. The relative inattention devoted to the process of dismantling Indian servitude invites further examination.3 In the transatlantic world, new settlements created by Europeans had to accommodate their legal and social traditions to the presence of large numbers of unfree non-Europeans and systems of plantation slavery that had no parallel in northwestern Europe. The combination provoked persistent, if intermittent, dissonance and increasing commentary on both sides of the Atlantic toward the end of the eighteenth century.4 Although early English ventures into the Indian Ocean world began at almost the same time as their Atlantic counterparts, the opportunities and challenges in the East were quite different. English commercial enclaves long remained small collections of commercial agents on the fringes of one of the world’s most densely populated regions and powerful empires. The government-chartered British East India Company (hereafter EIC) began its career of rapid territorial expansion during the Seven Years War. The government of India was responsible to its London Board of Directors and ultimately the Imperial Parliament, which renewed the EIC Charter every twenty years. 262

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry When the abolitionist movement emerged in Britain toward the end of the 1780s the British population in India consisted of relatively small contingents of military and administrative personnel, amounting to no more than one in a thousand indigenous inhabitants.5 In order to assure its domination, the EIC made extensive accommodations to the predominant systems of religious and customary laws which they found in place, although criminal law was made subject to alteration by the government. The “Cornwallis Code” of 1795 assured the indigenous population that in all lawsuits “regarding succession, inheritance, marriage, caste and all religious usages and institutions, the Mahomedan laws with regard to Mahomedans, and the Hindoo laws with regard to Hindoos, are to be considered the general rule by which judges are to form their opinion.”6 For decades thereafter, there was a clear disjuncture between British metropolitan legislation affecting slavery in their Atlantic and Indian Ocean dominions. British abolitionists made a similar differentiation. When the imperial government finally intervened to end the slave trade in the Atlantic, the abolitionists made no move to demand its application to India. The same held true for legislation mandating colonial slave registration and other measures for the “amelioration” of colonial slaves in the 1820s. British abolitionists assumed that it was far easier to impose change on colonies in the West than the East. In the West Indies, slaveholders were more dependent upon metropolitan protection. British garrisons there sufficed to “deter them from resistance to any metropolitan initiative” because it was the garrison that ensured the slaveholders’ wealth and safety.7 As the Cornwallis Code demonstrated, the situation was reversed in the subcontinent. Early legislation against the Eastern slave trade was left largely to the EIC’s discretion.8 For British abolitionists India remained peripheral to their main concern with Africa and Africans until the 1830s, first with regard to the African slave trade and later to colonial slavery. Even after Britain added two Indian Ocean islands, Mauritius and Ceylon, to their empire at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, these colonies occupied a very minor place on the abolitionist agenda. In the 1820s, humanitarian-inspired commissions of inquiry were dispatched by the government to investigate conditions of civil society, including slavery, in a number of tropical colonies. Abolitionist interest was directed more towards South Africa than the Indian Ocean islands.9 Individually, some British magistrates were deeply disturbed by the condition of slaves in India. They produced a steady stream of suggestions for ameliorative and even radical reform. Their proposals, however, remained confined to depositions within the archives of the Indian government. When the first major public summary of decades of commentary was printed by order of Parliament in 1828, it was an indigestible collection of documents running to a thousand pages of text.10 Opportunities arose for linking both segments of the empire in an attack on the slave trade as early as 1791. British abolitionists launched a consumer 263

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry boycott of slave-grown West Indian sugar. Some grocers began to advertise the availability of “free sugar” from Asia to attract activist consumers and maintain pressure on members of Parliament. However, the outbreak of the Saint-Domingue slave revolution in the Caribbean caused a sharp rise in the price of sugar. European demand undermined the economic impact of the boycott. A second opportunity to insert India into the abolitionist agenda arose three decades later. West Indian sugar was protected from competition in the British domestic market. Some members of East India interest tried to have duties on East Indian sugar lowered to allow their sugars to enter the metropolitan market on equal terms. A Quaker importer of East Indian sugar requested abolitionist support of legislation equalizing East and West Indian sugar on grounds that the competition of “free Indian sugar” would undermine West Indian slaveholders’ reluctance to accept slave amelioration. Abolitionists, however, were reluctant to adopt the approach because India remained a slave society. Anti-abolitionists mounted continuous attacks on any abolitionist temptation to support a country that tolerated castes and slaves and whose ruling British authorities legally sanctioned the continuation of slavery. Abolitionists feared that tying themselves to India might expose them to the charge of failing to oppose slavery in East India with the same determination that they were showing in the West Indies.11 The Anti-Slavery Society also held back from full support of a campaign intertwining economic and humanitarian arguments. The argument that Indian free labor was cheaper than transatlantic slave labor was quickly dismissed by the spokesman for the British government. If that were the case, he observed, Indian labor offered very poor evidence of that. Indian exports, which had once supplied a substantial share of Britain’s ravenous demand for cotton was now non-existent. He observed that “[Every] ounce of it was [now] produced by the labour of slaves in the United States and the Brazils.”12 Faced with a charge of hypocrisy by West Indian planters, abolitionists fell back on a number of rationales for its selective action. They insisted that slavery in India was not, as in the Caribbean, Britain’s historical and moral responsibility. Moreover, the plight of servile Indians was not comparable to that of Africans in the Middle Passage and on plantations. Finally, when a more detailed catalogue of indigenous suffering became available in the parliamentary compendium of 1828, the abolitionists responded that the very publication of such shocking details meant that the EIC governors were completely different from West Indian slaveholders in their zeal to end the system. “In the East,” concluded the Anti-Slavery Reporter: all the authorities are on our side, and are quite as eager to extinguish every trace of slavery as we are. They seem to anticipate every suggestion, and to have a uniform, wakeful and intense desire to prevent 264

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry or to suppress the evil. In the West Indies, on the other hand, the authorities are systematically opposed to every effort of the kind, and no means of influence, combination, misrepresentation and delusion are left untried for preserving, in their most unmitigated harshness, all the most revolting and disgusting features of the system.13 Having reassured their readers, British abolitionists continued to tuck Indian slavery safely away. For another decade they concentrated all of their energies and words on the Atlantic world, in endless public meetings and debates. Their efforts culminated with the most massive petition campaigns in the history of abolitionism (1830–31 and 1833). They even converted the largest colonial slave revolts in British history into fuel for emancipation. After emancipation, another wave of agitation, in 1837–38, brought the transitional post-emancipation “Apprenticeship” system to a premature end.14 In a series of nation-wide public debates that preceded emancipation, it was the West Indian opposition who forlornly offered graphic details on Indian slavery as evidence of an abolitionist double-standard. The abolitionists’ star orator, George Thompson, simply brushed the charge aside: “Will two blacks make a white? Will the other side never leave off palliating one crime with another crime?”15 The rigorous separation between East and West continued in the wording of the Slave Emancipation Bill of 1833. During three months of parliamentary debates and in the final Act, the East India Company’s domains were explicitly excluded from a measure intended for “the Abolition of Negro Slavery.” One coincidence, however, offered abolitionists the opportunity for a major initiative in the East. In 1833 the Charter of the East India Company did come up for its scheduled twenty-year renewal. Two MPs related to prominent abolitionists quietly moved the inclusion of a clause that, by April 12, 1837, “all rights over any person, by reason of that person being in a state of slavery, shall cease.”16 The clause immediately came under fire from the EIC’s Directors and in both Houses of Parliament. On the basis of his experience in India, the Duke of Wellington warned the Lords to deal lightly with such a “matter if you wish to retain your sovereignty in India.” Other opponents chimed in with predictions of “insurrection in every part of India.”17 A revised clause avoided any expiration date. It simply directed India’s Governor-General, in Council, to consider the “means of mitigating the state of Slavery as soon as shall be practicable and safe.” Even leading abolitionists in the Commons agreed to place the matter in the hands of the Governor-General. Beyond the walls of Parliament, there was no comment from the public or the Anti-Slavery Society. An Indian Law Commission, formed to prepare a criminal code for India, ultimately offered individual slaves the opportunity to appeal to the courts for protection from physical violence by masters. However, non-interference with religious rights to property in persons remained the law of the land. 265

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry Faced with the task of assuring metropolitan acceptance of the huge compensation allotted to slaveholders, and assuring the slaves’ peaceful acceptance of “Apprenticeship,” overseas, the Anti-Slavery Society accepted the reworded clause in the renewed EIC Charter as a pledge of forthcoming action. For the next five years, abolitionists still focused exclusively on the Atlantic world. Their one new initiative was to encourage the development of a mass abolitionist counterpart in the United States of America. Their premier lecturer, George Thompson, was funded to make a speaking tour of the United States. In America, he soon discovered that abolitionism could incite as much counter-mobilization as mobilization. British abolitionists did, however, establish themselves as a place where the voices of American abolitionists could be heard. Both black and white speakers found an eager audience and could represent themselves as the cutting edge of international opposition to the slave trade and slavery.18 However, the greatest efforts undertaken by British abolitionists after 1833 were directed towards the successful outcome of the “great experiment” in the newly emancipated colonies. Abolitionists worked not only to ensure that the terms of the law were fairly executed, but that the period of bound labor was terminated ahead of schedule by yet another wave of popular mobilization.19 In the wake of that surge, British antislavery’s power appeared to be greater than ever. Abolitionists immediately began to expand their agenda. The Aborigines’ Protection Society extended its focus to the welfare of indigenous people across the globe. A Society for the Extinction of the Slave Trade and for the Civilization of Africa envisioned a major expedition to extend free labor into the interior of Africa. The British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society set its sights on the global extinction of the slave trade and slavery.20 British ministers were extraordinarily receptive and responsive to abolitionist delegations. Over the next five years, the British government negotiated more bilateral treaties to restrict the slave trade than at any similar period in the history of abolition.21

Engagement In 1838 India became a prime target of antislavery agitation for the first time. A British India Society was founded, aiming at a broad range of political and economic reforms. Appropriately, it hired George Thompson as its major public speaker and agitator. Abolitionists now turned their attention to the continual absence of any government movement towards fulfillment of the 1833 mandate to address the problem of slavery.22 Antislavery periodicals reminded readers that, despite the victory celebrations claiming that the last vestiges of slavery had disappeared from the British Empire, slavery in the East remained untouched. A decade after the Anti-Slavery Reporter’s encomium on the unflagging zeal of the EIC’s agents striving to mightily end the institution, no word of progress had been uttered. The Company’s London 266

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry directors began to remind the government in India that parliamentary impatience was wearing thin while administrators were allowing subordinate agents to delay execution of the directors’ orders.23 A new tone was evident in the pages of the Anti-Slavery Reporter: “from these tardy proceedings it may be justly feared, that many years will elapse before East India slavery will be abolished.” The article ended its report with the first intimation that it might require another dose of pressure-from-without to bring the East into line with the new order: “Slavery is the same bitter draught in the East as in the West . . . The outcry raised in India against the Suttee [Sati] was long powerless, until it returned reverberated from the British shore . . . May India’s cries to British humanity soon be heard and her miseries effectively relieved.”24 At the first World Anti-Slavery Convention, held in London in 1840, British abolitionists finally placed Indian slavery front and center as a cause for immediate action. William Adam, a former missionary in India offered the Convention a detailed survey on the extent and variety of slavery. In view of antislavery’s global ambitions, the perpetuation of slavery would clearly offer opponents of abolition ample opportunity to denounce Britain’s hypocritical sanctioning of the institution in her own Asian dominions. Adam dismissed the widely circulated claim that slavery in the subcontinent was a milder form of servitude, moderated by its domestic character. He emphasized some aspects of slaving practiced in the East – sales of children, variants of kidnapping, and a market in African eunuchs. The EIC too was now divested of its aura of persistent determination to end the institution. Its reluctance to report on legislative progress was evidenced by the Company’s determination to continue treating slavery as inextricably embedded in native religious faith and customary practices.25 Antislavery’s altered perspective was striking. As late as a month before the Convention, the pro-abolitionist press framed its appeal for public attention within an acknowledgment of oriental difference: “Though the miseries of East India slavery appear not to equal those which existed in the West, they are of such a character as to cry loudly to Britain for redress.” By the end of the Conference, the nation’s world reputation precluded further deference. William Lloyd Garrison confessed his sorrow at learning of “no less than a million slaves in British India.” He warned his audience that British rebuke would fall powerless on American ears unless the stain was removed. The Company’s directors were also listening. Immediately after the World Convention, a dispatch from London demanded a progress report from India and warned: “Parliament and the public are becoming impatient at the delay.”26 1840–42 also marked a high point of British diplomatic activity against the transatlantic slave trade. In addition to nineteen binational treaties with other nations, Britain organized negotiations for an unprecedented international right-of-search treaty, to be signed by Europe’s five major powers (Russia, 267

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry Prussia, Austria, France, and England).27 One month after the Convention, the Foreign Office appointed George Turnbull to be the British Consul in Havana. Turnbull was a member of the British Anti-Slavery Society, and a key participant at the 1840 Convention. Reaching Cuba, he actively engaged with other British abolitionists. The Spanish authorities soon suspected him of conspiring both with free blacks and slaves to plot a slave uprising. In Brazil, the Foreign Office’s Secret Service Fund was used to pay stipends to the Brazilian Foreign Minister to undermine the slave trade. British abolitionists went on overseas missions to encourage continental Europeans to increase their activities on behalf of emancipation. Both abolitionists and diplomats began campaigns to elicit support from Muslim authorities on the Southern and Eastern margins of the Mediterranean.28 Outside Parliament, the Anti-Slavery Reporter pulled out all of the stops in its assessment of the conditions of slavery and the Company’s endless evasion. Wider coverage was focused on the process of enslavement, including starvation and child prostitution. Eastern slavery was now reassessed as being worse than its Western counterpart. The Caribbean variant was as nothing compared with slavery in Malabar and adjoining provinces. The West Indies offered laborers better food, clothing and housing. The EIC’s officials were depicted as stubborn defenders of the status quo. The new British India Society appeared to offer additional reinforcement to the antislavery project. Its initial reform agenda included the abolition of slavery – with an old economic twist. India’s special destiny was to produce cheap cotton that would force US Southern planters to acknowledge the superiority of free labor. George Thompson, lecturer, moved seamlessly from antislavery to co-founder of the Aborigines Protection Society, to become the featured lecturer for the British India Society.29 At the World Convention, India served as the prime mover of the coming victory of free labor over slavery. Supporters confidently declared that American slavery could not compete for a single year with India. Given India’s prior record, however, several participants at the Convention successfully argued for a more cautious resolution.30 Another boost to abolitionist aspirations was the influence of antislavery in relation to the survival of the British government. A weakening Whig government regarded antislavery support as a crucial element in its survival. That assumption was tested in the spring of 1841. Faced with a steep decline in post-emancipation West Indian sugar production, the government sought to reduce the protection of its high-priced sugar colonies. The British AntiSlavery Society vigorously opposed the move. It feared both for the welfare of the newly freed and for the economic and social success of the great experiment.31 The defeated Whig government called for a general election. The role of antislavery had never seemed more significant in determining the balance of political power. The Times of London, which could be quite virulent towards 268

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry abolitionists, regarded this turn of events as evidence of antislavery’s hold on the nation. The British Anti-Slavery Society might be “a promiscuous enrolement of Churchmen, Dissenters, Jews, Quakers, Papists, Conservatives, Whigs, Radicals of all sects in religion, and of all parties in politics.” Yet, it continued, We must not forget too, that the society in question is the central embodiment of an almost unanimous feeling throughout the country. When the apprenticeship system was proposed to be abolished it collected its delegates in Exeter-Hall from all parts of the empire. Those delegates . . . still no-slavery, are now dispersed, but not disorganized, in every district of Britain. Is it to be supposed that they will remain callous and torpid at the pressing juncture? For The Times, the conclusion was obvious. “The triumphant defeat” of the outgoing Whigs was now unequivocally secured, “and the abolitionists who denounced its betrayal of freedom were the prophets of its doom.”32 In the wake of its decisive victory in protecting West Indian sugar the British Anti-Slavery Society determined to launch another major campaign to accelerate slave emancipation in the East. All prior rhetorical concessions to the distinctive mildness of master–servant relations vanished. Slavery in India was “the worst slavery known either in ancient or modern times.” In some areas it was “a thousand times more degrading than that which met with so large a portion of public reprobation in our West Indian and other colonies.” Its magnitude, reckoned at nearly a million during the World Convention, now rose to estimates of up to ten million. Counter-claims, that slavery was little more than a nominal designation of an already expiring anachronism, were denounced as deceptive. Half-hearted hints of coming reform had served only to raise prices for kidnapped slaves. The EIC was indicted for having resisted every suggestion to begin abolition. Far from having exhausted every legislative strategy to reach emancipation, its agents were practicing systematic evasion of the clear mandate in the renewed Charter of 1833. “In short . . . slavery exists in British India untouched.”33 News of the Governor-General’s private word to the Directors in London made matters still worse: “I should very much prefer,” wrote Lord Auckland, “not to legislate at all for the purpose of regulating the conduct of masters towards their slaves.” He feared that any such regulations would imply a “recognition of a State of Slavery.” By 1841, the Chairman of the Board of Control in London complained that Auckland’s private opinion was “very embarrassing; for if you follow up that opinion you will do nothing, and the people here will not bear that.”34 Despite warnings from London of Parliament’s “extreme impatience” for a promised plan on slavery, the Report on Slavery from India was contradictory in its documentation and deeply divided in its recommendations. By the 269

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry summer of 1841, it was patently obvious that no clear plan had been offered. In the wake of its victory in Parliament on West Indian protection, the British Anti-Slavery Society concluded that the only way forward required another major metropolitan mobilization to break the logjam. Its first move was to intervene in the general election. London issued a call to every antislavery society in the land to circulate much needed information. Harking back to 1832, it called for getting candidates for election to pledge support for immediate and entire abolition.35 What had taken years to organize for Atlantic colonial emancipation obviously could not be replicated in the few weeks allotted for a hastily called campaign. The Anti-Slavery Reporter was able to publicize only a handful of pledges. The months that followed allowed full-scale preparations for the upcoming parliamentary session. The London Committee envisioned another great wave of public meetings and petitions on the scale of prior mobilizations. Every article on India ended with a reminder of antislavery’s powerful past. “Your voice once said Africa be free . . . The voice of the country must be uttered aloud.” The Anti-Slavery Society was unrelenting. It reiterated the EIC’s original commitment to protect the indigenous religious sanction of slavery “contrary to every principle of just reasoning and the sacred obligations of duty.” That provision had allowed the enslavement of “multitudes of free and innocent persons contrary . . . both to Mohammedan and Hindoo law.” The Charter’s directive to change course had remained a dead letter for almost a decade. The abolitionist response had to be uncompromising, demanding the “immediate, unqualified, unconditional overthrow” of slavery. The scale of activity also had to be equally unprecedented. Even the colonies must join in order to bring to bear “the entire moral forces of the British empire.”36 Undesirable aspects of the earlier emancipation could be avoided. The society put to rest fears of another expensive metropolitan compensation. The price of slaves in India was far lower than it had been in the emancipated slave colonies of 1833. Of the £18–20 million annually wrung from the people of India by the EIC, £1–2 million would supposedly suffice to cover all costs.37 Meanwhile, the government of India accelerated the formulation of a law. In anticipation of the parliamentary session, a preliminary draft Act was drawn up in India by the end of December 1841. After a fierce debate by the Board of Control in London, it was returned to India in July 1842. A draft Act was published in India’s Government Gazette on January 24, 1843 and enacted on April 7, 1843. For legislation that had been awaited for a decade, its most striking feature was its brevity. Act V contained four short articles. No further sales were to be allowed for arrears of revenue. No court or magistrate would henceforth enforce rights arising out of an “alleged” enslavement. No one could be deprived of property on grounds of such an allegation. Any act which was a penal offense if perpetrated against a free person was equally applicable if perpetrated against an alleged slave.38 All reference to actual slavery, abolition or emancipation was avoided. Act V simply affirmed that 270

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry no magistrate would enforce claims to rights arising out of slavery – what came to be called “delegalization.”

Silence of Civil Society Meanwhile, whatever had transpired in India, the great metropolitan mobilization that had been the engine of political change utterly failed to materialize. There had been no activation of local antislavery societies, no mass public meetings, no crowded debates detailing the horrors against India’s slaves echoed in the press, no inundation of popular petitions to Parliament, no widespread gatherings in churches, no massive addresses to the Queen by the women of the realm. The silence echoed in Parliament. In major debates references to the slave trade and slavery were confined to the Atlantic world. No public post-mortem on the still-born mobilization was offered. No reference was made to developments within the antislavery movement itself. The British Anti-Slavery Society unobtrusively adjusted its assessment of Act V. It accepted the enactment as an implicit abolition of slavery insofar as the slaves might choose to seize the opportunity to liberate themselves. It did not linger on its failure to repeat the mobilizations that had brought down the British Atlantic slave system. The victory of 1838 had resulted in a diffusion of targets and organizations. None were faring well five years later. The African Civilization Society’s expedition to the Niger had been a monumental disaster, sewing death amongst its crew in Africa and reaping a harvest of contempt and hostility.39 The British India Society was even more inert as an organization for slave emancipation. From the very outset its priority was a call for the expansion of “free labour” cotton that would undercut slavery in America. Moreover, as early as 1841, the society suspended its reform campaign for the duration of the struggle for free trade to Britain.40 The British Anti-Slavery Society put the best face on what it could tease from the wording of Act V. Its journal spoke of the Act as emancipation in the future tense. Abolition “when it shall be fully and finally accomplished, will be one of the greatest events of modern history. Millions . . . will be emancipated . . . born free . . . millions more will be prevented from becoming slaves.” It noted that the Act’s actual language virtually “denied the legal existence of slavery in India.” As with Mansfield’s Somerset decision seven decades earlier, Act V permitted any slave claimed by a master as a slave could simply “walk at once into freedom.” “Delegalization” was to be a seamless liberation one servant at a time. Henceforth, anyone’s enslavement was “perfectly voluntary.”41 The muted voice of antislavery was certainly not due to a sudden transformation of abolitionist ideology. What so quickly altered it was its standing in the metropolitan public sphere. There was certainly no general diminution of British civil society mobilizations, but two developments dramatically lowered antislavery’s potential for social mobilization. British antislavery 271

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry had always thrived in moments of economic prosperity at home or success abroad. Following the termination of apprenticeship, the economic trajectories of the ex-slave colonies and the metropole moved in opposite directions. In the period immediately following the World Anti-Slavery Convention the British economy, already on a downward trajectory, slipped into a major depression, the onset of the “hungry forties.”42 At the same moment, the Anti-Slavery Reporter offered its readers a glowing picture of the success of the great experiment in Jamaica: Where else, in the whole wide world, is there a peasantry that with as little toil has such a command over the good things of this life? These people live well, they dress handsomely, they send their children to school . . . build chapels at their own expense and support entirely many of the missionaries.43 Such news from the Atlantic world bore heavily on overseas humanitarian projects in the Indian Ocean. In the midst of deepening depression, rising unemployment and high prices for foodstuffs, two new social movements surged to the forefront, the Anti-Corn Law League and the Chartist Movement. The League’s attack on the entire system of British trade protectionism directly clashed with the Anti-Slavery Society’s determination to prevent the importation of cheap slave-grown sugar in competition with that of the ex-slave colonies. Significantly, some of the most prominent leaders of the League were also members of the Anti-Slavery Society, and participants in its annual meetings. As League leaders, however, they broke with the Anti-Slavery Society’s decision to protect West Indian produce as early as the general election of 1841. Thereafter, they openly challenged the society’s official position and claimed a majority support of abolitionism’s own constituency. By 1842, the League far exceeded the British Anti-Slavery Society in both fundraising and claims to public support. Aiming their appeal precisely at the traditional antislavery rank and file, they also adopted its moral rhetoric, demanding the “total and immediate” repeal of the protective Corn Laws.44 The Chartists also coalesced and vied for public space with the Anti-Slavery Society. Antislavery had long been denounced by some radical working-class leaders, but before 1838 abolitionists had been able to extend their appeal across class lines. During the mobilization for emancipation in 1830–33, industrial workers had rallied to the cause and even successfully linked some of their own issues, like protecting child labor, to the crusade against slavery. In the formation of Chartism there was some overlap between prominent figures in both movements.45 The economic crisis sharpened the division between the two movements. For Chartists, the slaves had achieved freedom and equal status with the ending of apprenticeship. Now the “wage slaves” of Britain were entitled to priority on the reform agenda. Their militancy increased after 272

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry the call for a World Anti-Slavery Convention in 1840. Meetings convened to elect delegates to the Convention and to lobby MPs for various overseas policies. Both Chartists and Leaguers, sometimes aligned, began to disrupt their meetings.46 More crucial than the disruption of antislavery meetings by Chartists and Leaguers was their ability to demonstrate their relative power in mass mobilization. In their combined efforts, they pushed British antislavery and its campaign for Indian emancipation to the periphery of the public sphere. In 1841, the House of Commons received more petitions on the question of free trade than in any session between 1838 and 1843.47 Even more dramatic was the Chartists’ ability to accumulate signatures for extending the suffrage to the working classes. This mode of demonstrating collective power was even more crucial for their movement than for the League. Most of their constituents had no access to the ballot. Their petitions campaigns equaled, and then surpassed, the abolitionist mobilizations of the 1830s: 1.2 million Chartist signatures in 1839; 1.4 million in 1841; and 3.3 million in 1842.48 The presentation of their 1842 petition to Parliament both adopted and outdid their antislavery predecessors. In 1833, on the day scheduled for the introduction of the Slave Emancipation Bill, the largest single women’s antislavery petition had been delivered to the House of Commons. Described in the press as a “huge featherbed of a petition.” Hauled into the Chamber by four MPs “amidst shouts and laughter,” it bore 187,000 names – “one vast and universal expression of feeling from all the females of the United Kingdom.”49 Nine years later, the Chartist petition of 1842, carrying 3,317,702 signatures on a scroll six miles long and weighing more than 6 hundredweight, required thirty Chartists to carry it to Parliament. It was paraded through London by a procession of 20,000. A reported crowd of 50,000 witnessed its arrival. Only after breaking several windows and part of the door frame could the document be carried into the chamber. There it overflowed the table on which petitions were usually deposited.50 Neither the Chartists nor the League obtained legislative victories in 1841 and 1842, but their performance in petitioning deprived abolitionism of its traditional standing in the public sphere. It is no wonder that the question of progress towards emancipation in India was raised by one lone MP toward the end of the 1842 session. The ministerial reply was a single sentence. The MP was told that initiative for such legislation had to be taken by the Indian government. The Times took obvious pleasure in revising its assessment of the British Anti-Slavery Society. Only a year after its grudging designation of antislavery as the representative of a vast reserve national force, the editors contemptuously declared: “For the present class of agitation mongers in this line – the suppressionists and the expeditionists – the meetingers of ExeterHall and the committee – men of ladies anti-slavery societies – the civilizers of Africa and the educators of the Indies – we profess, for the most part but very little sympathy.” A few weeks later they continued their cascade of contempt: 273

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry “Who has empowered the anti-slavery associations to be the public adjustors of our foreign relations . . . by some artificial coalition of religionists generated in Exeter-Hall.” The downward evaluation became ever-more dismissive: One lead editorial began, “The Committee of that peculiar section of ostentatious and meddling philanthropists who have become notorious under the title of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society . . .”51 Well before the draft of Act V was published in India in January 1843, it was clear that the society’s capacity to mobilize the British public against Indian slavery in “Atlantic” abolitionist terms had vanished. The retreat on abolition in India was but one of a series of descending overseas expectations on Africa; on the transportation of indentured labor; on maintaining protective barriers for West Indian sugar; and on defining “free labor” sugar. With its political heft depleted, the Anti-Slavery Society had to make the best of an Indian “solution” that was neither total, nor immediate. At the annual meeting of the society in 1843 its Resolution on Act V expressed gratitude (to God) that the Indian Government’s had “dissevered” its connection with the system of slavery. At the same time, the Resolution made clear its unease, declaring that it would, “respectfully but earnestly press on the existing authorities” in Great Britain and India, the “supplementary” measures necessary to “prevent slavery and the internal slave trade from arising under new pretenses . . . [in order to give] the millions who have been virtually or absolutely enfranchised . . . personal, social, and civil rights . . . which their new circumstances imperatively demand.”52 The Resolution thus simultaneously hid and revealed abolitionist hopes and fears. One MP shifted the meeting’s attention to the “passivity” of the subcontinent. Perhaps, he mused, it was a blessing for India to have had such an easy transition, since “the great feature of the Indian character was passive obedience.” That observation, the record noted, was greeted with “cheers.” So, what had begun as another call for British society’s powerful antislavery agency was mitigated by India’s proverbial apathy.53 The British India Society, too, had long since turned its major focus of attention away from slavery in India. Bowing to perceived metropolitan priorities British civil society had already suspended all mass agitation. As George Thompson had declared in 1842: Does England want cheap sugar and a plentiful supply of it? Would her population consume free-grown rice and free-grown coffee? When this great measure [the Corn Laws] is obtained the wisely directed energies which have procured it, will be directed to the service of India. This is the heart of the Empire. Let us bring health to the heart. Spread it then . . . Not that we love India less, But that we love England more.54 For India, Britain’s abolitionist moment had passed and a new servitude was already rising. 274

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry Notes 1. British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Reporter (hereafter ASR) (London), iv, 23, October 18, 1843, 188. 2. Ibid. 3. For various assignments of reasons for the different degrees of attention and action displayed by both British civil society organizations and government institutions, see, inter alia, Howard Temperley, British Antislavery 1833–1870 (London, 1972), 108–110; and his “The Delegalization of Slavery in British India,” in After Slavery: Emancipation and its Discontents, Temperley ed. (London, 2000), 169–187. For Richard Huzzey what is anomalous in the case of Indian slavery is the fact that the Anti-Slavery Society, “was remarkably content with the limited law it secured from the East India Company.” Huzzey, Freedom Burning: Antislavery in Victorian Britain (Ithaca, NY, 2012), 179. See also, Huzzey, “The moral Geography of British Antislavery Responsibilities,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (December 2012), 22, 111–139. By 1839, writes James Heartfield “slavery had (for the most part) been abolished in the British empire.” The British and Foreign AntiSlavery Society: A History (Oxford, 2016), 1. A number of historians of India stress British misunderstanding of the nature of Indian slavery, often impelled by the constraints or goals of agents of the East India Company domination. For the most extensive survey of the range of perspectives see Andrea Major, Slavery, Abolitionism and Empire in India, 1772–1843 (Liverpool, 2012), 6. 4. For approaches to the development of British abolition in the Early Atlantic, see David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, NY, 1966); and Roger Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition (Atlantic Highlands, 1975), Part Two; for assessments of the emergence of abolitionism, see David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution 1770–1823, (New York, 1999), with a new Preface, chs. 8–9, Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective (London, 1986); J.R. Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Antislavery: The Mobilization of Public Opinion against the Slave Trade, 1787–1807. For studies stressing a longer pedigree for abolitionism, see Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: The Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006); John Donahue, Fire under the Ashes: An Atlantic History of The English Revolution (Chicago, 2013), ch. 7; and Joseph Moore, “Covenanters of the Atlantic World,” Slavery and Abolition 34:4 (2013), 534–561. 5. Estimates of India’s population were about 130,000,000 in the 1830s and 1840s. There was no census or registry of the number of slaves in India at the time of legislation to curtail the institution in 1843. The Third Annual Report of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (London, 1842), 101, estimated the slave population at just under 5 million, but other estimates ran the gamut from 1 to 10 million. 6. Nancy Gardner Cassells, Social Legislation of the East India Company: Public Justice versus Public Instruction (London, 2010), 175. 7. David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress, (New York, 1984), 179–180, quoting the abolitionist James Stephen, November 7, 1825. The problems of rulership created by the relative magnitude of Britain’s Asian dominions compared with those in the Atlantic world were almost always a point of departure for those urging caution in undertaking many reforms beside slavery. 8. Major, Slavery, 168–175. Major’s work offers an insightful account of the conditions of enslaved as well as of slave traders and slave holders, both European and Indian. See Parts II and III.

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pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry 9. On abolitionist activity in the 1820s, see Zoë Laidlaw, “Investigating Empire: Humanitarians, Reform and the Commissions of Eastern Inquiry,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 40:5 (2012), 749–768. Before the 1830s Mauritius received minimal attention from abolitionists in their publicity. Anthony J. Barker, Slavery in Mauritius, 1810–1833: The Conflict between Expansion and Humanitarian Reform, (New York, 1996), 152–153. 10. Cassells, Social Legislation, 177–192, and Major, Slavery, 138–174. 11. “London Abolition Society’s Instructions to William Dickson, agent for mobilizing Scottish petitions, Friends House Library Papers” (London), Temp Mss, 10/14. On the limits of campaigning against East Indian slavery, see Major, Slavery, 296–303, and 314–315. 12. On tensions between the East India Company (hereafter EIC), private traders and abolitionists, see Major, Slavery, 303ff. For contemporary press perspectives, see; John Bull (London) March 8, 1824, 261, June 7, 1830, 181; Asiatic Journal (London), January 1, 1829, 19; December 1, 1828, 664; and Oriental Observer (Calcutta), September 16, 1832, 411. The debate did raise the question of conditions under which free labor might be cheaper than slave labor. S. Drescher, The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation (New York, 2002), 114–118. 13. ASR, October 1, 1828, 328; and Major, Slavery, 314. 14. Temperley, British Antislavery, ch. 2, Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Colony and Metropole in the English Imagination, 1830–1867, (Chicago, 2002), ch. 5; Gelien Matthews, Caribbean Slave Revolts and the British Abolitionist Movement (Baton Rouge, LA, 2006), chs. 4–5; Iain Whyte, Scotland and the Abolition of Black Slavery (Edinburgh, 2006), ch. 6, and Huzzey, Freedom Burning, ch. 1. 15. Lectures of George Thompson (Boston, 1840), 140. 16. Cassells, Social Legislation, 196 and Major, Slavery, 3. 17. Temperley, “The Delegalization of Slavery in British India,” in After Slavery, H. Temperley ed., 169–172. 18. Richard Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall: Black Americans in the Atlantic Abolitionist Movement, 1830–1860 (Ithaca, NY, 1989); Betty Fladeland, Men and Brothers: Anglo-American Antislavery Cooperation (Urbana, IL, 1972). 19. Alex Tyrell, Joseph Sturge and the Moral Radical Party in Early Victorian Britain (Bromley, 1987); and Clare Midgley, Women against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780–1870 (London, 1992). 20. See essays by David Seddon, Charles Swaisland and Suzanne Miers in After Slavery, Temperley ed., 208–280. 21. David Ziskind, Emancipation Acts: Quintessential Labor Laws, (Los Angeles, 1993). 22. See Major, Slavery, Abolitionism, 321–327. 23. On press perspectives see: Bristol Mercury, July 21, 1838, The British Emancipator: Under the Sanction of the British Central Negro Emancipating Committee, October 31, 1838, November 14, 1838, 180, January 23, 1839, 204, and November 27, 1839, 317. 24. “East India Slavery”, ASR, January 29, 1840, 10–11. 25. William Adam, Slavery in India: Paper Presented to the General Anti-Slavery Convention (London, 1840), idem. The Law and Custom of Slavery in India in a Series of Letters to T.F. Buxton (London, 1840); and Major, Slavery, 321–330. 26. Leeds Mercury, May 2, 1840 and Caledonian Mercury (Edinburgh) July 11, 1840. On the response of the EIC’s London Board of Directors, see Cassells, Social Legislation, 200–201. 27. Ziskind, Emancipation Acts: Quintessential Labor Laws (Los Angeles, 1993),

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28.

29.

30. 31. 32.

33. 34.

35. 36. 37.

38. 39.

and Paul Michael Kielstra, The Politics of Slave Trade Suppression in Britain and France, 1814–1848 (London, 2009), 197–206. The transatlantic slave trade briefly decreased by more than half between 1840 and 1842. For Cuba, see Robert L. Paquette, Sugar is Made with Blood: The Conspiracy of Escalera (Middletown, CN, 1988). For Portugal, see João Pedro Marques, The Sounds of Silence: Nineteenth Century Portugal and the Abolition of the Slave Trade (New York, 2006). For Brazil, see David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York, 1987), 115. For Abolitionists on mission in Western Europe, see Maartje Janse, “Holland as a Little England”: British Antislavery Missionaries and Continental Abolitionist Movements in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” Past and Present, 229:1 (2015), 123–160. Ronald Gifford, “George Thompson and Transatlantic Slavery, 1831–1865,” Indiana Univ. PhD Dissertation, 1999. For a detailed analysis of the complex relations between the British Anti-Slavery Society, the Aborigines Protection Society and the British India Society, see especially, Zoë Laidlaw “‘Justice to India – Prosperity to England – Freedom to the Slave!’ Humanitarian and Moral Reform Campaigns in India, Aborigines and American Slavery,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 22:2 (April 2012), 229–324. Proceedings of the General Anti-Slavery Convention, called by the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, London (London, 1841). Huzzey, Freedom Burning, ch. 5, and Seymour Drescher, Mighty Experiment, ch. 10. The Times, May 12, 1841. The Times could not be suspected of embracing individual abolitionists or their leaders. The very next week it dismissed claims by some abolitionists who “dwell on the unparalleled falsehood that slavery is still tolerated in our own East India possessions!” It sprinkled, “loathsome,” “unmitigated” and “fraud” and falsehood throughout the editorial. Ibid., May 17, 1841. ASR, March 24, 57, 60, April 21, 75, June 2, 113, and June 16, 129–134, 1841. For the provincial press see Newcastle Courant, July 23, 1841, Belfast News-Letter, July 27, 1841 and the Freeman’s Journal, August 11, 1841. On Governor-General Auckland’s Opinion and the London Board of Directors’ response, see Cassells, Social Legislation, 200–201. The Anti-slavery Society was never able to override the position held by some in the Indian Governor General’s Council that most slavery in the subcontinent was a more benign than that endured by its Atlantic counterpart. They cited Tocqueville’s 1835 description of racial slavery in Democracy in America. Tocqueville later came to the same conclusion: “In India slavery is mild, it was very harsh in the colonies.” See Alexis de Tocqueville, Oeuvres Complètes, Tome III, vol. I, Ecrits et discours politiques (Paris, 1962), 502. One annoyed Indian Law Commissioner was certain that if “so much fuss” had not been made about Atlantic slavery in Europe, slavery in India would never have become worthy of special notice in Parliament. See Cassells, Social Legislation, 202. ASR, June 16, 1841, 134–136. Ibid., October 6, 1841, 206, 210. Ibid., October 20, 1841. The contemplation of a general registration for all of India offered the spectre of a deluge of “enslavements” embedded within over one hundred million of the EIC’s subjects, whose compensation was estimated at between 10 and 125 rupees per person. Cassells, Social Legislation, 203–204, and Dharma Kumar, Land and Caste in South India (Cambridge, 1965). Howard Temperley, White Dreams, Black Africa: The Anti-Slavery Expedition to the Niger 1841–1842 (New Haven, CT, 1991), 161–168, and Drescher, Mighty

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40.

41.

42.

43.

44. 45.

Experiment, 164–167. In the wake of the dismal outcome of the campaign for Indian emancipation, The Times gloated, “With the present class of agitationmongers in this line – the meetingers of Exeter-Hall and the committee-men of ladies anti-slavery societies – the civilisers and educators of the Indies we profess, for the most part very little sympathy,” The Times, June 29, 1842. The British Emancipator, November 27, 1839, 315. See also, S.R. Mehrota, “The British India Society and its Bengal Branch, 1839–46,” India and Economic and Social History Review 4:2 (1967), 131–154, and Laidlaw, “Justice to India.” In a series of lectures in Calcutta that coincided with publication of the Draft of Act V, Thompson never once referred to either slavery in India or the forthcoming Act. ASR, March 22. 1843, 45. Other media that published the arrival of the final legislation were far more laconic than the Anti-Slavery Reporter. The Northern Star, June 17, 1843, offered, without any headline, just four lines printing the whole text of Act V likewise and concluded, “there is no slavery in India which is not voluntary.” See R.C.O. Matthews, A Study in Trade Cycle History: Economic Fluctuations in Great Britain 1833–1842 (my thanks to Stanley Engerman for alerting me to this study). On migration statistics from England, see E.A. Wrigley and R.S. Schofield, The Population History of England 1541–1871: A Reconstruction (Cambridge, 1982), 531–535, Table A3.3; and B.R. Mitchell, British Historical Statistics (Cambridge, 1980), 76–77. Temperley, British Antislavery, 148. The comparison was reiterated in Parliament and editorialized by The Times – “that among [Jamaicans] there was no instance . . . of parents putting their infants to death to save them from the horrors of protracted starvation . . . no poor laws to imprison under pretense of maintaining the poor. The operatives of this country have the right to demand at least equal advantages in respect of social condition, with the negro in the West Indies” (The Times, May 19, 1841). Another MP, Mr. V. Smith, insisted, on the authority of Jamaica’s governor, that the condition of the Jamaican working classes “was far superior” to the working classes in any part of Europe. The Jamaican labourers lived “in a condition above the middle classes of other countries” (ibid., May 13, 1841) See also ibid., May 21, 1841, Westmoreland Gazette, May 29, 1841, and Bury and Norwich Post, June 16, 1841. Again and again, both sides assumed that this was a zero-sum situation for West Indian and British labourers. Simon Morgan, “The Anti-Corn Law Leagues and British Anti-Slavery in Transatlantic Perspective, 1838–1846,” The Historical Journal 52:1 (March, 2009), 87–107. See inter alia, Patricia Hollis, “Anti-Slavery and British Working Class Radicalism,” in Anti-Slavery, Religion and Reform, ed. Christine Bolt and Seymour Drescher (Folkstone, Kent, 1980), 294–315; S. Drescher “Cart Whip and Billy Roller: Antislavery and Reform Symbolism in Industrializing Britain,” Journal of Social History 15 (1981), 3–24; Drescher Capitalism and Antislavery, ch. 5; and Betty Fladeland, “Our Cause Being One and the Same: Abolitionists and Chartism,” in Slavery and British Society, ed. James Walvin (London, 1982), 69–99. From the start, Thomas Clarkson and the British abolitionists feared working-class hostility to abolition were it to run against their well-being. During the first mass boycott movement against slave grown sugar reached in 1791, Clarkson was asked why the London abolition committee did not call for the extension of the slave sugar boycott to cotton. Abolitionists, he replied, could not envision taking away “the bread of fellow subjects, the innocent poor of our country” (Salop County Record Office, Diaries of Katherine Plymly 1791–1814, vol. 5, February 27,

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46.

47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52.

53. 54.

1791.) More personally than anyone, Clarkson knew that the first mass petition to Parliament calling for abolition had originated in Manchester. Lecturing in Nottingham, George Thompson was greeted by workers shouting that if they were black “they might have secured sympathy now sent over the water.” See Ronald Gifford, “George Thompson and Transatlantic Slavery, 1831– 1865,” Indiana University, PhD Dis., 1999, 202 and 216. At another meeting in Manchester, the Northern Star headlined the result as, “Triumph of Chartism over the Anti-Slavery Humanity Mongers.” It reported that the crowd paid the greatest attention to Thompson, except “when he was describing the black slaves of India. The Chartists reminded him of the white slaves of England then under his nose.” A Chartist counter-resolution, loudly called for, was adopted by “a united voice . . . one of the greatest triumphs ever gained at a public meeting in Manchester.” Northern Star, December 12, 1840. On the Chartists’ domestic priorities, see also Gregory Vargo, “‘Outworks of the Citadel of Corruption’: The Chartist Press Reports the Empire,” Victorian Studies, 54:2 (2012), 227–253, 249 n 3. American abolitionists saw the Chartists and the League as models for social agitation. See W. Caleb McDaniel, The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform (Baton Rouge, LA, 2013 143–158 and 161– 180). Henry Miller, “Popular Petitioning and the Corn Laws, 1833–1846,” English Historical Review, 128: 527 (August 2012), 82–919. Paul A. Pickering “And Your Petitioners,” etc. Chartist Petitioning in Popular Politics 1838–1848, English Historical Review (April, 2001), 369–388. Clare Midgely, Women against Slavery; 62–66. Pickering, “And Your Petitioners &C: Chartist Petitioning in Popular Politics 1838–1848,” 368–369. British petitioning on slavery would not again reach mass proportions until the American Civil War. At that point it reflected a much more divided public. See Richard Blackett, Divided Hearts: Britain and the American Civil War (Baton Rouge, LA, 2001), ch.4. The Times, June 29, 1842, July 18, 1842 and October 21, 1842. The Times, June 22, 1843, “Annual Meeting of the British and Foreign Anti–Slavery Society.” The British press echoed the Anti-Slavery Society’s position, announcing that henceforth, “there is no slavery in India save that which is perfectly voluntary.” See, inter alia, Freeman’s Journal, June 8, 1843; Essex Standard, Lincoln, Rutland and Stanford Mercury, Leeds Times, Norfolk Chronicle, Western Times (Exeter), all June 10, 1843; Preston Chronicle, Northern Star, and Leicestershire Mercury, June 17, 1843; Bury Post and Norwick Post, June 21, 1843. Ibid. British Indian Advocate, January 1, 1842, 43. See S.R. Merotra, The Emergence of the Indian National Congress (Delhi, London, 1971), 22.

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13 BRITAIN, INDIA AND BONDAGE PART TWO Indentured Emigration

Early in 1843 George Thompson journeyed to the Indian subcontinent on behalf of the British India Society. There he offered a series of lectures to the “Native Community of Calcutta.” His message was dramatic: “The Natives of India are a conquered people; they are subjects of a military despotism . . . wholly excluded from the privileges of representation . . . they have no voice . . .” Indians had to be able to reach the ultimate decision-making political authority over them – the Parliament of Great Britain. His own purpose, Thompson declared, was to “rouse the intelligent natives” of India to become the narrators of “their own grievances as far as they were . . . removable by legislation.” To do so they, like the British people, first had to develop a public sphere and formulate their own remedies for their own condition. Thompson warned them to look for no relief “independent of their own exertions.” They must build voluntary associations, discover the sources of their country’s ills and reach the ear of Parliament through peaceful agitation.1 Thompson added that there should be no social barriers to membership in these associations. Civility was equally necessary in the exchange of opinions since all such societies might err, either in methods or goals. Lacking their own representative political institutions their targets had to be the British people and the British Parliament.2 Just as he began his series of Calcutta lectures, the long delayed draft of Act V was published in the official Government Gazette on January 24, 1843. Here was a remarkable opportunity for Thompson to indicate the potential of popular civil agitation. Yet, during his entire series of lectures, Thompson did not once refer either to the Draft or the existence of slavery in India. He did not, however, avoid referring to slavery. Just two days after the publication of the Draft he spoke to Calcutta’s Anglo-Indian Agricultural Society. India, he confidently told his listeners, was destined to supply the whole world with articles now “chiefly the produce of slave labour.” The slave produce he was referring to, of course, currently came from the United States, profiting slaveholders “calling themselves Republicans and Christians.” A Republican and Christian American in the audience vigorously objected. Thompson hastily apologized.3 As a spokesman for the British India Society addressing 281

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry an Indian agricultural society Thompson was, of course, bound to identify Indian commodities, especially cotton and sugar, as already the product of free labor. In this sense, the very publication of the draft of Act V was a reminder that slavery was still inconveniently legal in British India. Wearing two hats at once could be uncomfortable. It would soon be more comforting. By the time he reported the results of his Indian journey to American abolitionists six months after Act V was enacted, Thompson confidently informed garrison’s readers that Act V now assured (in the careful wording of the British Anti-Slavery Society) the “virtual abolition” of slavery in India.4 For Anglo-American Abolitionists, Act V had made the British Empire free to free the world from slavery. In India reaction to the Draft was quite meager. In Calcutta the AngloIndian Friend of India, although quite favorable to some action against slavery, continued to insist that India’s indigenous forms of servitude bore no resemblance whatsoever to their Atlantic counterpart. So general was what it called the “appearance” of “entire freedom” that were anyone to “travel or do business here in India,” and be asked “whether slavery existed, he would feel obliged to deny the fact.” Nevertheless, the hardly visible “stain” of slavery was to be removed along with the import duties on East Indian sugar that still favored the West Indian free labor producers.5 When the draft of Act V was finally announced in January 1843 the Friend of India was jubilant. It hailed 1843 as “the first year since the tenth century before Christ, in which it could be said that “Slaves cannot breathe in India.” It observed that Indian slavery had never received the same degree of public attention or national indignation in England as its West Indian counterpart. In retrospect, however, the newspaper viewed that absence as an advantage. It had allowed the government of India to produce a measured prohibition of slavery. That the Act did not literally abolish slavery now demonstrated the “ease with which slavery had been abolished.” As the Friend of India predicted, it would be cherished as a model for future reforms.6 Indigenous opposition to the Draft in India was meager. If it offered slaveholders what Indrani Chatterjee terms “a glimpse of the apocalypse,”7 there was little evidence of widespread resistance. No more than 1,500 Hindu and Muslim slaveholders petitioned or protested against the measure. At that magnitude, the petitioners could be ignored. The inactivity of other masters seemed to be justified. No prior census or registration of slaves in India had ever been attempted. Neither the actual magnitude of the status nor individual slaves themselves could be identified unless they or their masters formally appealed for legal redress. Even the purchase or sale of slaves would not become a penal offense before 1860. “Delegalization” helped to make slavery in India both elusive and residual. Although the British press would continue to identify informal slave markets and even refer to provinces inhabited by thousands of slaves, such intermittent affirmations inspired neither parliamentary nor public demands for renewed antislavery campaigns.8 In 282

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry 1867, a Paris International Anti-Slavery Conference issued formal appeals for legislative action against slavery to rulers who had still not formally abolished slavery within their jurisdictions. No such appeal was addressed to the government of India. When Britons celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of British slave emancipation in 1884, the Anti-Slavery Reporter enthusiastically endorsed the “Indian” path to emancipation as the model for ending slavery in British-occupied Egypt. India’s seamless passage from slavery to freedom was without compensation, social disruption, or interruption in the economy. The “great experiment” in the Caribbean was not even mentioned.9

From Slavery to Indenture In 1843 there had been one form of Indian bondage that Thompson was quite willing to bring to the attention of the native community of Calcutta. Listing a number of India’s serious ills, he wondered why “Indians are so easily cajoled into taking a voyage to Mauritius, to cultivate sugar cane, and to consign themselves to men, who the other day, were among the most remorseless of all the slave-holders on the face of the earth.”10 He was referring to the tens of thousands of indentured laborers who had already gone to work on that island’s sugar plantations following the abolition of slavery in that island.11 Facing a looming shortage, Mauritian planters turned towards India for an alternative source of labor. The new workforce could not be held as chattel slaves, but they could voluntarily contract themselves to labor under significant penal constraints. From the outset the indentured Indian servants were identified as “coolies,” a designation that was ultimately extended to other indentured servants laboring within European dominated areas. After a short period of unregulated recruitment the system was subjected to Indian governmental oversight of conditions of transportation. Efforts were made to ensure that a certain proportion of the indentured were women. Requirements for voluntary consent were also met in principle by official supervision in order to ensure some degree of informed consent. Rates of wages were generally higher than could be obtained at home. Laborers were limited in their movement and subject to incarceration and heavy fines for unauthorized absence or refusal to work. There were periodic changes in regulations or oversight, usually precipitated by discoveries of extraordinary abuse or collective outbreaks of discontent. When the system was established in the 1830s many laborers in England and elsewhere in Europe were themselves still subject to conditions of criminal confinement for breaches of contract.12 In England itself the system continued through the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Indian indentured servants were tied to multi-year contracts in order to offset the expense of long-distance transportation costs. After their contracted terms, laborers had a choice of free passage back to India or of remaining in place with opportunities to acquire land and move freely into alternative occupations. 283

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry Initially high shipboard mortality was sufficient to be evocative of the slave trade. To abolitionists, at the height of their metropolitan influence in the late 1830s, the new system seemed closer to a revival of the slave trade than a means for allowing informed and freely consenting recruits to achieve a better life. Challenges to the system began precisely at the termination of the Caribbean apprentice system. The first parliamentary intervention came 1838, calling for an investigation of this “new slave trade” in disguise. The Anglo-Indian Friend of India demanded “absolute abolition” as the only safe response to this threat of a new slave trade. The government responded by banning indentured migration to both Mauritius and the West Indian exslave colonies. Backed by the combined power of abolitionist pressure in Britain and elite public opinion abroad, abolitionists were able to announce the defeat of attempts to have the suspension lifted at their first World AntiSlavery Conference in June 1840. This victory was short-lived. The proponents of migration were able to expand the opportunities for increased indentured migration throughout the British tropical colonies. There are indications that it was not just an ongoing counter-mobilization of the planters and the diminution of metropolitan abolitionist power that eased the way for its restoration. There were also indications of approval from below. The Friend of India reported evidence of positive experiences by many returning migrants. Some reinscribed themselves for indenture and chose to remain in the colonies after the expiration of their indentures.13 By the winter of 1841–42, history was repeating itself on the metropolitan front. A call by the British Anti-Slavery Society for popular agitation against the restoration of the flow of indentured servants to Mauritius went unanswered. Newspaper articles declared, inter alia, that the public “was weary of the whole exhausted topic.” Indian Protectors could be installed. The “Hill Coolies” were “as free to move as a Paisley weaver” and “new value” could be obtained from unlocking “the superfluous population of a country of 150 million men.”14 The failed bid to rouse public agitation against the restoration of indentured migration to Mauritius was followed by a failure to prevent the system’s expansion to the West Indies. The Anti-Slavery Society’s inability to sustain its claim to represent British “popular opinion” eroded its leverage in India. It was soon apparent that neither the governments of India and Britain, nor the metropolitan Parliament and press accepted indentured servitude as evils or equivalents to the slave trade and slavery. India remained the principal source of indentured labor in the British colonies. The number of Indians departing from the subcontinent for transcontinental employment in the final decade of the nineteenth century exceeded those who had ventured abroad half a century earlier.15 The designation of “coolies,” attached to the earliest indentured Indians migrants, was ultimately applied to all indentured laborers originating in the Eastern hemisphere. Although those who intervened against abuses in the system insisted on 284

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry similarities between slavery and indentured labor, antislavery advocates also needed to count the indentured as “free” in order to demonstrate the successful revival of British Caribbean sugar production during the generation following West Indian slave emancipation. Defenders of the system acknowledged that indenture required surrendering elements of “freedom.” They rationalized such constraints as prerequisites to the internalization of a “modern” work ethic and to civilization. They were equivalents of the “apprenticeship” system that British emancipation had imposed upon ex-slaves as a condition of their liberation. For nearly half a century after the enactment of Act V there were no popular mobilizations against slavery or indentured servitude in Britain or India. Outbreaks of collective labor resistance and notorious cases of abuses in the colonies stimulated periodic parliamentary investigations and further remedial legislation without undermining the legitimacy of the system. In assessing the persistence of slavery in the Western hemisphere into the late nineteenth century and in Africa and Asia into the early twentieth, the British Anti-Slavery Society continued to emphasize slavery as having been legally abolished within the British imperium. However flawed, indenture was the lesser evil.

The Revival of Public Agitation against Servitude Public agitation against overseas indentured migration emerged only in the early twentieth century. Unexpectedly, it originated neither in Britain nor India. Nor did it directly arise from any of the periodic protests by indentured laborers in their initial areas of settlement.16 The initial catalyst was provided by the interaction of Europeans and non-indentured Indians in South Africa. Most of the nineteenth century transcontinental European migrants generally settled in temperate areas of the world already predominantly peopled by Europeans. Correspondingly, Indians, mostly indentured, overwhelmingly migrated to tropical colonies. Once they had served their terms of indenture they were usually free to re-inscribe for another term, return to India, or to remain overseas as free British subjects with few legal constraints on their choice of occupation or residency. By the late 1880s expanding settlement by Asians in temperate zones was meeting with increased resistance. Hostility was especially acute in Natal, South Africa; European settlers wanted the colony to be reserved, like Australia or Canada, for white colonists. Non-indentured mercantile and educated Indian migrants were also settling in Natal. By 1893 Indians in Natal were estimated to number 46,000 compared with 45,000 Europeans. The 470,000 Africans in the colony did not enter into the immediate political calculations of either group. Most disconcerting to Europeans was the significant portion of the Indian community who were non-indentured migrants. As tradesmen, merchants and professionals they successfully competed with Europeans at all levels.17 To address the situation, the Natal whites imposed a 285

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry series of voting restrictions and special tax burdens on both coolies who chose to remain and on all incoming Indians. Seeking to maintain an indentured labor force while discouraging permanent settlement, Natal’s legislation also required future incoming laborers either to sign re-indentures at the termination of their contracts or to pay a considerable annual tax for themselves and all members of their families in order to remain. At least until the end of the South African War most indentured migrants still chose to remain in Natal. In 1902 only 11 percent returned to India at the expiration of their contracts.18 Seeing an existential threat to their own future, the leaders of the Natal Indian community hired a young lawyer, Mohandas K. Gandhi, to plead their case. Gandhi’s legal strategy was to accept the existing restrictions on indentured British subjects already in place. He argued only that free Indians could not be deprived of their right, as British imperial subjects, to the full benefits of European civilization. Their children were entitled to become full legal equals, socially, economically and politically. He also petitioned the imperial government to support his clients against the Natal government. British colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain acknowledged that the Empire traditionally allowed no distinctions based upon race or color. However, where self-governing colonies sought to control the permanent settlement of “Asiatics,” the imperial government would accede to colonial opinion. The government of India, while objecting to Natal’s policy on behalf of its Indian subjects, chose not to use the weapon of suspending emigration. They too asked only that legally domiciled Indians be accorded the rights of full nonindentured citizens. Gandhi himself, a London-trained member of the imperial legal system, initially advertised his campaign in Natal, primarily as a struggle for the civil equality of his non-indentured Indian clients. Even his rationale for satyagraha (mass civil disobedience) was grounded in the belief that he could exert sufficient non-violent pressure to force British imperial authorities to adhere to their own promise of full imperial citizenship.19 In 1885 the establishment of an Indian National Congress finally offered India’s elite a nationwide institution with the potential to bring political pressure to bear on the government of India. For the first decade of its existence the Congress remained relatively deferential to a government that had granted it an advisory national forum. Such institutional recognition seemed to be a promise that Indians were being prepared for full self-government. Just as so many English, Irish and foreign Europeans had also risen from penal and indentured servitude to full citizenship in self-governing British colonies, so might freemen of Indian descent. The narrative of the earlier ascent of coerced labor in North America and Australia was transported to the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean world and Oceania. Even those who were soon to become home-rule nationalists took pride in their British political and legal heritage.20 Until the close of the nineteenth century most members of the Indian National Congress, like most British public figures, accepted the legitimacy of indentured servitude as a voluntary surrender of time delimited constraints 286

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry in exchange for ultimate civil equality for themselves and their descendants. Natal’s conversion of indenture into a snare rather than an escape hatch further debased the value of British imperial citizenship. Each successive failure of Gandhi’s campaigns in Natal provoked increased frustration within the Congress. Class resentment reinforced national humiliation. Free, wealthy and educated Indians were being branded as “coolies,” unworthy of their full rights as imperial subjects. Natal’s laws explicitly withheld the vote from any group (i.e. all Indians) whose ancestors lacked the suffrage in their land of origin. Before the Boer War the discussion of Natal’s disabling legislation was largely confined to annual debates and resolutions of the Congress. In Natal the divergence of perspectives between Indian indentured laborers and the Indian commercial community was still sufficiently wide that the Natal government could long ignore Indian potential as a united political bloc. Although Natal’s legislation was described by one member of Congress as a manifesto declaring all Indians to be descendants of slaves, it was only on the eve of the Boer War that the particular debilities of the indentured were mentioned in Congress for the first time.21 The Afrikaners’ pre-war treatment of their own Indian population in the Transvaal was one of the British government’s declared reasons for going to war. Another was an assurance to British workers that victory would enlarge their overseas opportunities. The acquisition of two new territories in South Africa, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal, altered Britain’s priorities. In order to gain the acquiescence of the defeated Afrikaners, the British were willing to allow them to retain and even extend their prior legislative restrictions against their small Indian population. Economically the Transvaal was also urgently in need of a large influx of labor in order to exploit its vast reserves of gold. British mining companies, like their plantation predecessors, wanted to employ indentured laborers at a far lower wage bill than would be required to lure their counterpart of unionized British workers. To avoid replicating Natal’s large resident Asian population, indentured laborers were to be permitted to remain in the Transvaal only under close confinement and only as long as they were under contract. The termination of their contracts would automatically subject them to compulsory repatriation. The mining companies and the Transvaal government thus initially envisioned a workforce of disposable indentured Indians. To South African Indians nothing more clearly revealed their future than post-war British policy in the newly annexed territories. The government of India, already embroiled in fruitless efforts to alter the Natal system, refused to sanction migration under the Transvaal’s conditions. Transvaal’s mine owners then successfully petition for the transportation of tens of thousands of indentured Chinese to Africa under contracts similarly requiring close confinement during, and compulsory return after the termination of their contracts. 287

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry The scheme aroused a storm of opposition in the metropole. British public interest was already coalescing against other “new slaveries” in Africa: atrocities in the King Leopold’s Congo Free State and Portuguese coerced labor mobilizations in Africa. The prospect of a large-scale importation of indentured Chinese into Britain’s new South African acquisition initiated the most popular “antislavery” mobilization in Britain since the American Civil War. Large public meetings in the metropole denounced the project as the creation of another new system of “Chinese slavery,” in defiance of Britain’s national tradition. Major trade unions formed an alliance with antislavery religious organizations. In Transvaal the white artisanal labor force viewed the lowwage contracts as potentially undermining their own wage scale. The issue of slavery probably figured more prominently in the national election of 1906 than in any political campaign since the parliamentary elections of 1832.22 The debates over the indentured Chinese continued long after 60,000 Chinese reached the gold mines of Transvaal. For years Members of Parliament raged over the extent to which Britain had actually allowed the importation of 60,000 slaves into a British dominion under the guise of indentured servants. There was probably more extended discussion about the boundaries between indentured servitude and slavery than ever before or after in British legislative history. Certain points, however, became abundantly clear as soon as the new Parliament convened after the election. The new Liberal-Labour government quickly muted its electoral rhetoric. It quickly affirmed that the Chinese laborers, already at work in the mines were, at least “technically,” not slaves. To have claimed otherwise was politically impossible. Imported slaves would have to be liberated at once and relieved of their illicit contractual obligations on arrival in any British dominion. The Chinese could then have chosen, inter alia, to collectively strike for higher wages or to abandon the mines. Their permanent presence would have shattered both the previous government’s promise to open the new territories to rapid economic development and metropolitan labor. The new government also had to abide by the peace treaty assurance to Transvaal’s white population that the acquired territory would remain a white man’s colony, and the mining companies that the immediate labor shortage was resolved. Not only were the coolies kept on site, but all contracted still scheduled to sail from China were to be allowed to complete their voyages, serve their full contracted terms and then repatriated. The heated debates over the Chinese coolies had implications for all Indians in South Africa. A newly forming self-governing Union was now demanding the right to control immigration to the exclusion of all non-Europeans. Within Parliament, MPs continually premised their arguments on the Chinese with references to Anglo-Saxon or European settlers’ priorities. South Africa, they categorically declared, was to become and to remain a “white man’s country.” Rhetorical questions precluded alternatives. Did members, they asked, really favor “yellow,” “Asiatic,” “Chinese,” or “colored” labor under 288

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry any conditions? Hadn’t anti-Asian immigration policies already been adopted without objection in the self-governing colonies of Canada and Australia? Few MPs referred even in passing to the presence of “Kaffirs” (the indigenous Africans), who far exceeded the combined numbers of Europeans and Asians. Those who allotted “civilizational” superiority of Indians and Chinese over Africans never qualified the assumption that the future of self-governing colonies of the empire would have to be determined by its European inhabitants.23 In all of the debates only minority voices occasionally challenged this embedded racialized premise on empirical or historical grounds. Sir Charles Dilke protested against white males alone being taken as the sole foundation of South Africa’s future. He continually rejected this “momentous departure” from Britain’s constitutional tradition. A British Parliament was about to “enshrine an absolute colour bar in the sharpest form” ever formulated in the English language. Dilke insisted that an empire already overwhelmingly black simply had to be made acceptable to the vast majority of its people. In the rarest of references to the Indians, he reminded his colleagues that their condition was actually worsening. The prestige of Britain, he predicted, “must suffer in India if it could not enforce protection for its own subjects even within the empire.” Indians would surely take note as they moved inexorably forward toward their own self-government: “The affections of the people of India, he concluded . . . could not be based on the principle of giving all power to the white men,” and in South Africa, “the black nations always must predominate.”24 Such appeals were met by dismissive references to racial and political realities. After years of discussion it was clear that free settlement and civil equality were no longer rights accorded to all British imperial subjects.

Indian National Mobilization If references to Natal were virtually absent these debates in Parliament Congress in India was acutely aware of the discussions in London and the government of India’s refusal to allow Indians to migrate to the Transvaal under conditions of compulsory repatriation. Gandhi’s failure to achieve his goals in South Africa and the British government’s acquiescence in the racial laws of the newly self-governing territories of the Transvaal and Orange River colonies had created a crisis in India. The National Congress split into moderate and extreme factions. Even the moderate faction was aware that it had to find some leverage against the rising tide of imperial hierarchy. They focused on pressuring the government of India to use its one traditional power to control recruitment for overseas indentures. As early as 1905 the Congress had passed a resolution requesting the Indian government to require that future grants of migration require prior recognition of civil equality to all free and post-indentured Indian imperial citizens. By 1909 the imperial Parliament had made it clear that the imperial government would accept the new South African Union’s unequivocal 289

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry decision to incorporate permanent racial civil and political disabilities against non-whites into its constitution. In response, Gopal Krishna Gokale, the leader of Congress’s moderate faction, moved a resolution demanding that the government of India suspend all further indentured migration to Natal. Invoking Wilberforce and the British campaigns against slavery he identified suspension of migration as opening the battle in a struggle for “the honor of India.”25 In South Africa, Gandhi’s rhetoric escalated as Indians protested in all of the colonies. The British press amply noted Gandhi’s similar appeals to the heritage of British antislavery. Transvaal laws requiring degrading segregation and compulsory fingerprinting of Indians “could only be applied to slaves.”26 Indians in South Africa denounced attempts to force them into the ranks of the “new slaveries” elsewhere in Africa. Indentured Indians – the “coolies” – finally became a central symbol of India’s plight. Public discourse, even in Parliament, had long since accepted the term as applying to indentured Asiatics and Africans. It was now explicitly assailed in India as the principal instrument of degradation. Henry Polack, editor of Gandhi’s newspaper Indian Opinion, became the Clarkson of Indian servitude. Traveling extensively across the subcontinent he offered a series of lectures exposing the abuses of the indenture system, including vividly documented cases of sexual exploitation, torture and rates of official suicide that had never before been publicized to the larger Indian public.27 Tactically, the issue of indentured migration was far less encumbered by domestic religious and communal Indian social divisions that plagued other policy issues. As soon as the Congress made its motion, the All-India Muslim League joined its Hindu counterpart in demanding an end to indentured migration to South Africa. The level of unanimity within both the Indian Council and the press impelled the government of India to agree to the suspension of emigration to Natal as soon as all of the bureaucratic agencies hurdles within India and the metropolis could be surmounted. By the end of 1911, two years after the original resolution, recruiting for Natal was halted.28 In South Africa Gandhi, still stalemated in negotiations with the Transvaal government, added a new arrow to the quiver of passive resistance. Placing women in the front line, Natal protesters illegally crossed the border with Transvaal to appeal to Indian coal miners to join the protesters. The foreseen imprisonment of the women, wrote Gandhi, “worked like a charm upon the miners.” They struck and joined the marchers. The miners faced far worse treatment than the women. They were rounded up in pens and whipped back to work. Both the British and Indian press denounced the violent suppression. An unprecedented series of Times editorials on the events in South Africa registered the impact of the event. The traditional image of the apathetic Indian vanished. “Passivity” re-emerged as passive resistance. From initially suggesting Indian restraint in order to “soften” the hearts of South Africans, The Times became progressively more alarmed at the rising danger 290

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry South Africa posed both to British rule in India and the imperial system as a whole.29 Far more significant was the reaction in India. The Congress proudly noted that Indians were becoming collective actors as well as collective targets. Gandhi was singled out for the fact that overseas “Mohamedan and Hindu, Zoroastrian and Christian” had united in a common struggle”.30 In Transvaal, where violent white populism pressured the government to remain unyielding in opposition to Indian migrations, popular white resistance was met by popular Indian non-violent disobedience. The former sought to ensure that the Transvaal government remained firmly committed to unyielding discriminatory legislation. Gandhi hoped to sustain support in both Britain and India by provocatively illegal, but non-violent, agitation. For this purpose mass demonstrations, inviting violent reaction by police authorities, created enormous publicity. The reportage became tri-continental.31 In India, the Viceroy, flooded by telegrams of protest, became concerned about the possibility of uncontrollable domestic popular indignation.32 Gokhale and others in the legislative Council demanded the call of a special session to consider the general issue of the status of Indians in the Empire. As with the suppression of the strike-like uprising of slaves in Demerara almost a century earlier in 1823, the comparative self-restraint of the insurgents offered opportunities for common waves of sympathy in Britain and in India. For the very first time a Viceroy in India openly condoned the tactic of nonviolent resistance. The new prime minster of the Union of South Africa made some concessions to Gandhi but refused to consider allowing free movement or land ownership for Indians in the predominantly Afrikaner provinces of Transvaal and the Orange Free State. The affinities of indenture’s proximity to slavery, already primed by years of metropolitan British public debate, now resonated in India with intercontinental emphasis – indenture was “a form of virtual slavery,” now even more degrading to Indians because “even China does not approve of it.”33 Gandhi returned to India in 1914, determined to expand the potential impact of non-violent civil disobedience. The turn of events in South Africa had given him an instrument and the moral and political capital that he needed to use in India itself. He came ashore in a country already mobilized far beyond an elite that had largely monopolized the issue for nearly twenty years. As Karen Ray demonstrates, the anti-indenture movement became an all-Indian national movement in 1913, perhaps for the first time under the British Raj. Religion, which had always been of major significance in the British fight against Atlantic slavery now came into its own in the fight against indentured migration. In India its role was transformed. For more than a century the governments of India and Britain had axiomatically regarded religion in India as the most formidable obstacle to change. Moreover, apart from the briefly and far more limited Anglo-Indian opposition to indentured migration at the end of the 1830s, Indian servitude had flourished both in the 291

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry subcontinent and overseas. Generations had passed without eliciting major collective opposition within either Britain or India. When religious mobilization was finally brought to bear against indentured migration it did not arise from the activist Christian missionaries in India who had long identified themselves as heirs of their evangelical abolitionist predecessors. This mobilization drew its inspiration from the very indigenous religions regarded by progressive Britons and Indians the principal barriers to the abolition of all forms of Indian servitude. The orthodox Hindi-speaking Marwari Community was the principal agency that drew the rural population into the orbit of opposition to indentured servitude in 1913. The Marwari’s Vaishya caste were prominent traders and bankers in Northern India. They began to insert themselves into the indenture question in a way that resembled the pioneer abolitionists in the Anglo-American world who began by rescuing runaways from masters trying to bring runaways back to enslavement in the West Indies. The Marwari Society began to patrol reception “coolie depots” in order to engage individuals who had, or might have had, second thoughts about leaving India pending their departure. As earlier British abolitionists would have advised, the Society began to research official records and gathered evidence from interviews with returned emigrants about their experiences. They also formed abolitionist networks, the Indentured Cooly Protection Society and Anti-Indentured Emigration League had branches in major cities. To prospective recruits, they emphasized crucial Hindu caste proscriptions against crossing oceans, or prohibitions against inter-caste dining and intermarriage as arguments against emigration. As the laws regarding withdrawal from contracts in India required, they would offer to pay the travel expenses for up-country relatives to come to ports and to petition for the release of contracted indigent volunteers who had second thoughts. The Society offered to guide individuals before magistrates in order to have them formally swear to having changed their minds. They even broke caste sanctions against traveling in the same coaches as impoverished recruits in order to dissuade them from continuing their journey. In the same abolitionist mode they sent lecturers out on circuit to recruiting centers. They stressed a laborer’s subjection to five years of liability to imprisonment for failure to fulfill all the demands of the contract. The abolitionist tactics apparently had some effect. Recruiters began to complain that agents of the Society were undermining legal recruiters’ efforts by distributing propaganda pamphlets. The Indian government felt itself under enough public pressure that it feared to unleash any large-scale police interventions. The Society also sent lecturers to traditional villages of recruitment. The lectures offered descriptions of sexual exploitation that may have been more intimately portrayed than their British counterparts a century earlier – examples of violent sexual abuse by fellow emigrants or brutal overseers, against which even husbands could not protect their wives. Fiction could 292

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry reinforce facts. Plays, most famously Kuli Pratha, were performed in villages to dramatize the severity of servitude. More than a touch of nationalism was added to the mix. Europeans treated coolies as helpless victims because they had been a conquered people: . . . my sons are tied with the chains of slavery. Having no weapons, they have no defense. However, violence was discouraged as an appropriate civic response to the abuse. The play concluded with the moral, that “agitation was the only alternative.”34 By the end of 1915 Indian nationalists were convinced that victory was at hand. Never had Indians appeared to be so united. The government of India was eager to comply with the ongoing Indian demand for the ending of indentured emigration from India. In response to the agitation yet another imperial commission was called to survey the problem of indentured servitude. Another investigative report was issued in 1915, with mixed messages. The onset of war in Europe shifted the British government’s attention away from India. At best it began to consider a gradual phasing out of indentured migration following any announcement about ending the system. Nevertheless, after the crisis of 1913 the magnitude of the Marawi mobilization steadily increased. Even Governor-General Hardinge privately noted that almost from his arrival he felt that indentured emigration “can hardly be regarded as other than slavery in disguise, and a discredit to the people of India . . .” After eight decades the abolitionists’ initial assessment of the system was finding firm support from the Viceroy himself. Congress too now utterly rejected its prior perspective on indentured servitude. Instead of offering a continuation of the older Europeans’ pathway to full equality in self-governing colonies it had merely become a new form of serial servitude, rejected even by the descendants of African slaves: “When slavery was abolished, they chose the Indians, of all people . . . as a substitute for this system of slavery . . . Negroes would not look at this system; even the indigenous inhabitants of Fiji often point a finger of scorn at the Indian people who would consent to the degradation of their men and women in this way.”35 Anti-imperialism found growing sympathy in the Indian press. The 1916 Easter Uprising in Ireland offered further opportunities for ominous suggestions that only Home Rule in India would assure the passage of prohibition. The British government continued to deflect demands for immediate prohibition. In the spirit of the old “apprenticeship” system used by the British in slave emancipation it stressed the need for a “transitional period” of five years. By the beginning of 1917 almost every public statement by the government or in the Indian press, whether in English or in indigenous languages, acknowledged that the time had come for complete and immediate abolition 293

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry of indentured immigration. In 1914, Gandhi had agreed to postpone calling for civil disobedience for three years. Those in the Congress who favored keeping the process within moderate boundaries warned the government that a new disobedience campaign would escalate the agitation by targeting recruiters. This would open the door to another round of repression with incalculable consequences. Meanwhile, another wave of public meetings was sweeping through the country. Hindus, Muslims and Christians sponsored ecumenical gatherings, competing in public demonstrations of their collective unity. Petitions flowed into the government of India. Women joined lodges of the Home Rule League and protested against a system that dishonored womanhood. Charges of sexual abuses suffered by coolies under the Union Jack were relentlessly publicized.36 Gandhi’s moment had arrived. In January 1917 he announced that unless the emigration was ended a satyagraha would begin at the end of May. The resistance movement coincided with a serious conjunction of international crises for Britain. Indian recruits were needed for a major British offensive in Mesopotamia. In February the German government launched a campaign of unlimited submarine warfare. In March fully 25 percent of British-bound shipping was lost at sea, leaving the country with only a six-week supply of wheat. In Eastern Europe a revolution against the Tsar of Russia, amidst a breakdown of military discipline, raised serious questions about the Allies’ ability to prevail in Europe. In London another reluctant Secretary of State for India, Austen Chamberlain, finally and quietly halted indentured migration from India. He did so without a whiff of a humanitarian rationale. Gandhi was certainly right in modestly assessing the threatening role of passive civil disobedience. Potential satyagraha, he later wrote, helped to bring about the end of the indenture system.37 The ending of indentured emigration bore little resemblance to the earlier abolitions of the British slave trade and slavery. There was far less parliamentary discussion before or after its termination. A few days before Gandhi’s deadline the government of India’s Gazette published a note even more tersely worded than Act V of 1843. A single sentence stated that, due to the exigencies of war, the recruitment of indentures had been stopped and would not be revived. No moral or humanitarian rationale accompanied the note. Nor did it directly impact the overwhelming majority of indentured servants already serving in the British dominions.38

Conclusion Historians increasingly insist on the need to treat slavery as a globally and temporally variegated institution. The same admonition must apply to those studying abolitionism from the late eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Moments of declining popular participation in British antislavery, such as the early 1840s, constrained abolitionists to come to terms with the rise of 294

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry indentured servitude. At the moment of its inauguration the Indian indenture system was part of a broader system of master–servant relations within Britain, its empire and the larger world. Abolitionists adjusted to accommodate limited forms of constraints on labor and service. For the rest of the nineteenth century humanitarian criticism both in Britain and India ceased to oppose indentured migration in principle. This compromise “became integral to the operation of the system itself.”39 Indian mobilization against indentured emigration initially focused on conditions of non-indentured Indians in the imperial diaspora rather than on struggles to rectify fundamental violations of humanity or to establish global standards of free labor. The government of India continued to sanction a variety of forms of servitude and coercive practices within India itself. Even after at the end of the First World War India’s representative at the creation of the International Labor Organization requested and received exemption from certain obligations to labor, based on India’s state of industrial development, climate, etc. When Indian nationalists campaigned against overseas indentured migration early in the twentieth century the process was clearly driven by events on three continents. Only after a generation of persistent white-settler determination to confine all Indians in a position of permanent inferiority did the Indian elite finally make the cause of indentured migrants an object of popular mobilization. The national mobilization against indentured migration thus highlighted both the strengths and limitations of Indian demands for egalitarian citizenship. Many subsequent mobilizations for greater equality would come from less inclusive civil mobilizations within India and between Indians.40 Divisions within the subcontinent apparently presented more obstacles to such a comprehensive nationwide replication of other reform movements.41 If India’s mobilization against indentured overseas migration left many forms of Indian servitude intact that movement still bears comparison with those of earlier British social mobilizations against the slave trade and slavery. Like its British predecessors the Indian mobilization achieved an overwhelming and persistent national consensus in demanding elimination of a specific system. The mobilization united many of the same categories of participants: the educated and politically permanent elites; a broad spectrum of religious authorities; urban and rural communities; both women and men, and broad regional extension. In all those respects the anti-indentured migration movement fulfilled George Thompson’s dream. Finally, in comparative perspective this Indian movement is noteworthy for a final reason. It ran its course with far less deadly violence than those of most of its abolitionist predecessors during the long nineteenth century. Gandhi’s policy of collective non-violent resistance over two decades in South Africa and another in India on this question may also have been less costly of human life than even the vaunted British abolitionist project between 1788 and 1838.42 295

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry Notes 1. George Thompson, Addresses, Delivered at Meetings of the Native Community of Calcutta (Calcutta: Thacker and Co., 1843) 8–12, and 129. 2. C.A. Bayly questions the general British assumption that early nineteenth-century India lacked the equivalent of Western civil societies. He maintains that India possessed the equivalent of that public sphere in the form of an “ecumene” (Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780– 1870 (Cambridge, 1996), 199–211). Whatever the similarities, India does not appear to have developed social or political counterparts to some transatlantic civil society mobilizations agitating for the termination of slavery and other forms of servitude before the late nineteenth century. See S. Drescher, “Civil Society and Paths to Abolition,” Journal of Global Slavery 1:1 (2016), 44–71. 3. (Addresses, 127–130, 145–146). 4. The Liberator, November 17, 1843. As early as 1839 Thompson’s speeches for the British India Society had identified India exclusively with free labor. India was the antidote to slavery in the Americas and the slave trade in Africa. From India Britain would “call into activity the energies of one hundred millions of willing husbandmen in a competition between the free labor of the East and the slave labor of the West . . . (loud applause).” See Thompson, Lectures on British India delivered in Manchester in October 1839 (Pawtucket, RI, 1840). 5. The Friend of India even appealed to the British Anti-Slavery Society to “apply its flapper” to the dull ears of Parliament in order “that something shall be done to remove the stain.” See Friend of India, October 21, 1841 and February 9, 1842. 6. Friend of India, January 18, 1843. 7. Indrani Chatterjee, Gender, Slavery and Law in Colonial India (Oxford, 1999), 213–224. 8. See, inter alia, Manchester Courier, September 3, 1858; Bradford Observer, October 6, 1868; Glasgow Herald, October 10, 1868; Manchester Times, October 10, 1878; Edinburgh Evening News, August 5, 1873; October 10, 1878; Edinburgh Evening News, August 5, 1873; September 12, 1882, The Citizen (Gloucester, April 29, 1889), Dover Express, November 1, 1889; Yorkshire Herald, July 22, 1890. 9. For the Paris Conference, see Special Report of the Anti-Slavery Conference Held in Paris (London, 1867). Remarkably, less than a year earlier the ASR published an article on the “Prohibition of Slave-Grown Produce” (October 1, 1866, 250). There it identified the products of the slave labor of Brazil and Cuba and the forced labor of Egypt and India as targets of abolitionism. On India as the model for Egyptian abolition see “The Abolition of Slavery in India and Egypt,” ASR, March 19, 1883, 63–66; April 16, 1883, 112; April 21, 1884, 79–80. 10. Thompson Addresses, 45. 11. See Marina Carter, Servants, Sirdars and Settlers: Indians in Mauritius, 1834–1874 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), ch. 1. On the origins of the indenture system see also Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labor Overseas 1830–1920 Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994); and Madhavi Kale, Fragments of Empire: Capital, Slavery and Indian Indentured Labor in the British Caribbean (Philadelphia, 1999). 12. See Robert J. Steinfeld, Coercion Contract and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2001), 39–53, and 249. 13. Pro and con, printed in The Friend of India (Calcutta), June 7, 1838, “Exportation of coolies from India”; as well as in the ASR, March 11, 1840, p. 47; The Friend of India. December 3, 1840, p. 770; December 10, 1840, p. 791; December 17, 1840; February 4, 1841, 67–68. One commentary judged coolie testimony to be “very

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14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

captivating” (emphasis in the original). See also, ibid., the issues of February 18, 1841; May 1, 1841; May 13, 1841; March 31, 1842; June 7, 1842; October 20, 1842. Allusions to the traffic in “cooly flesh” to “the odious African slave trade” appeared in the British press as well. See Liverpool Mercury, May 17, 1839. All newspaper citations are from Gale Digital Collections of nineteenth-century newspapers. See also Tinker, A New System of Slavery, 236–237; and Marina Carter, Servants, Sirdars and Settlers, for evidence of the impact of antislavery agitation on Indian migration to Mauritius, p. 26, Table 1.3: “Annual Immigration to Mauritius.” The initial ban was quite successful. From 1838 to 1839 indentured migration dropped by 90 percent. The following year it dropped another 90 percent. Madhavi Kale, Fragments of Empire: Capital, Slavery, and Indian Indentured Labour Migration in the British Caribbean (Philadelphia, 1998, 29–33) summarizes the extent to which the anti and pro-indenture strategies were mobilized. See Westmoreland Gazette, July 9, 1842; “Emigration of Coolies” ASR March 9, 1842, 37. Northrup, Indentured Labor, 156–157. Over the long run 65 to 80 percent of Indians in the British overseas colonies chose to remain after the expiration of their contracts. Some others, who returned to India, later signed new contracts. See David Northrup, “Overseas Movements of Slaves and Indentured Workers,” in Cambridge World History of Slavery, Vol. 4: From A.D. 1804 – A.D. 2016, ed. David Eltis, Stanley L. Engerman, Seymour Drescher, and David Richardson (New York, 2017), ch. 3. On labor discontent see Tinker, A New System of Slavery, 226–231, 240, 306–307. In India itself, the great uprising of 1857 was a stimulus to indentured migration and produced a peak of migration at the end of the 1850s. Northrup, Indentured Labor, 66. For Natal, See Northrup, Indentured Labor, 146–148. On the pattern of migration restriction in global perspective, see Adam M. Mc.Keown, Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders (New York, 2008) ch.7. Northrup, Indentured Labor, 133. The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (Delhi, 1959), 8:77. See Karen A. Ray, “The Abolition of Indentured Emigration and the Politics of Indian Nationalism,” PhD Dissertation, McGill University, 1980, 18–20. Ibid., 24–26. See Kevin Grant, A Civilized Savagery: Britain and the New Slaveries in Africa, 1884–1926 (New York: Routledge, 2005), ch.3. For the development of the principle of racial priorities in imperial and global context see McKeown, Melancholy Order, ch.7, “The Natal Formula” and the Decline of the Imperial Subject, 1888–1913,” 185–214. (London) Times, December 18, 1906; and August 20, 1907, August 23, 1907, July 30, 1908, August 17, 1909. Ray, “Abolition of Indentured Emigration,” 26. The Cornishman, January 16, 1908. Ray, “Abolition,” 41–55; and Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi before India (New York, 2014), 342–350. The tactical element in this process was obvious. Recruitment remained open to other colonies in the British and Dutch Caribbean, East Africa, Fiji, Ceylon, the Straits Settlements, the Malay States as well as in South India and Assam. Compare the shifting perspectives in The Times editorials in January 8, 1913; July 13, 1913; July 31, 1913; October 1, 1913; November 19, 1913; and December 23, 1913. Exacerbating the physical treatment of women, South African jurists implied that Transvaal’s immigration restriction laws raised questions about

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30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39.

40.

41.

42.

whether any Indian woman in a polygamous network could claim legal status as married. Rodhika Mongia, “Gender and the Historiography of Gandhian Satygraha in South Africa,” Gender and History 18:1 (April 2006), 130–149. On the reaction in India, see Ray, Abolition, 163–174. Ray, “Abolition,” 146, citing the Report of the Twenty-Sixth National Congress (Calcutta, 1912), 105–106. Jeremy Martens; “Between Two Fires”: Racial Populism, Indian Resistance and the Beginnings of Satyagraha in the Transvaal, 1902–1906, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 44:4 (2016), 662–648. See also, Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser January 2, 1908; reporting and the Devon and Exeter Daily Gazette, reporting on Muslim public protest in Lahore. Ray, “Abolition,” 167–168. Leader (Allahabad), December 24, 1913, quoted in Kale, “Abolition,” 174. Ray, “Abolition,” 223. Ray, “Abolition,” 276. Ibid., 376–380, Appendix II, “Protests against The Continuance of Indentured Emigration in the Colonies.” M.K. Gandhi, Stories of My Experiments with Truth, 401, quoted in Ray, “Abolition,” 369. The transoceanic migration of 1.3 million Indians was little more than a tenth of the enslaved Africans transported to the Americas. Over its entire century of existence Indian overseas indentured migration was equal to more than twothirds of its transatlantic counterpart in the century between 1750 and 1850. See Voyages Web site: www.slaveryvoyages.org/tast/assessment/estimate.faces?yearFr om=1501&yearTo=1866. See, inter alia, Rachel Sturman, “Indian Indentured Labor and the History of International Rights Regimes,” American Historical Review 109:5 (December 2014), 1439–1465. On the position of the Anti-Slavery Society, see Heartfield, The British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, 103–107. See the following chapters in the Cambridge World History of Slavery, Vol. 4: AD 1804 – AD 2016, ed. David Eltis, Stanley L. Engerman, Seymour Drescher and David Richardson (Cambridge, 2017): Gwyn Campbell and Alessandro Stanziani, “Slaving and Bondage in the Indian Ocean World: The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries” (ch. 10); Indrani Chatterjee, “British Abolitionism from the Vantage of Pre-Colonial South Asian Regimes” (ch. 19); and especially, Alessandro Staziani, “Slavery in India” (ch.11). Rupa Viswanathan, “Spiritual Slavery, Material Malaise: ‘Untouchables’ and religious neutrality in colonial South India,” Historical Research 83: 219 (2010), 124–145. Benedict Hjejle, “Slavery and Social Bondage in South India in The Nineteenth Century,” Scandinavian Economic Review 15:1/2 (April, 1967), 71–126. P. Sanal Mohan, Modernity of Slavery: Struggle against Caste Inequality in Colonial Kerala (Oxford, 2007); and a careful delineation of one process of emergence from enslavement in India over the course of a century between the 1850s and the 1960s may be found in Paul E. Baak, “About Enslaved Ex-slaves, Uncaptured Contract Coolies and Unfreed Freedmen,” Modern Asian Studies 33:1 (1999), 121–157. On the other hand, although he was often able to replicate his model of nonviolent resistance for three more decades in challenges to British imperial rule in India, his strategy and goals had significant limitations. A significant amount of coerced labor and slavery has persisted in India into the twenty-first century. For current estimates see Kevin Bales’s Global Index of Slavery for 2016, Bales, “Contemporary Coercive Labor Practices – Slavery Today” in Cambridge World

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pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry History of Slavery, ch. 28, and B.W. Higman, “Demographic Trends among Coerced Populations,” ch. 2, in ibid. For the contemporary definition of slaves see Jean Allain, ed., The Legal Understanding of Slavery: From the Historical to the Contemporary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

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INDEX

Abbé Gregoire 124 Abbé Raynal 67 abolition of slavery 43–5, 47–9, 67, 69–83, 143–5, 181–4, 199–203, 236–9, 245–53, 255–8; in Brazil 220; decree 252–3; decree issued in 1846 252; definitive 210; denounced by the Jamaica Assembly 80; favored in Britain by a proportion of a-hundred to one 159, 221; gradual 125, 206, 252, 254; immediate 72, 77, 84, 86, 293; international 163, 192, 208; in mainland Spanish America 167; passage of 76, 79, 182; and peace negotiations 223; petitions 80, 201; process 60, 78, 86, 236, 238, 246, 251; and public opinion 72, 145, 203 abolitionism 60–61, 77–8, 80, 86–7, 93–5, 97–8, 108–12, 180–181, 192–3, 246–9; branding of 61; in Britain and France 167; and the Chartists 272–3; in civil society 295; Euro-American 141; political 141, 193, 230; popular 86, 110–111, 182, 203–4; radical 98, 229, 233; and the World Antislavery Convention 250 Abolitionist Society 166, 251 abolitionists 41–6, 67–87, 107–12, 143–6, 162–8, 182–90, 205–13, 228–39, 246–57, 262–74; agendas 248, 263–4; American 133, 166, 225, 228–9, 248, 266, 282; Anglo-American 282; Brazilian 233–5; British 157–60, 164–7, 202, 207–8, 221, 224, 250, 252, 263, 265–8; delegations 179, 266; elections 247; French 158, 164, 166, 224–5, 253; hostility against Lascelles and Wilberforce 78; mobilizations

49, 69, 87, 205, 222, 224, 235, 273; movements 46, 120, 202, 210, 219, 246, 253, 263; newspapers 79, 110; parliamentary 207; petitions 70, 83, 99, 165, 221, 229–30, 233; pressures on the French government 124, 182, 284; process xiii, 220, 262; prominent 70, 127, 265; in relation to tropical colonial situations 96; societies 157, 220, 232, 237, 247; surge in support 43, 45, 70, 188, 264; victories 68, 79; women 121–2 Aborigines Protection Society 268 abuses 75, 105, 249, 284–5, 290, 292–4 Adam, William 97, 267 Adams, John 48 Adelman, Jeremy 167 Africa 3–4, 6, 10–13, 18–22, 27, 179–80, 184–9, 192, 253–5, 287–8; and the abolitionists concerning 43, 187; coerced laborers 7, 25; colonies 185–6; wars and raids for slaves 28 African enslavement 4, 191 African migration stream 10, 192 African slavery 1, 3, 6, 9, 11, 27 African slaves 5, 10–12, 20, 22, 24, 26–7, 30, 46, 54, 144; enchained 84; imported 12; outnumbered 6; for West Indies 144 African trade 43, 45, 47, 183 Africans 3–12, 14–15, 18–20, 22, 27, 143, 145–6, 183, 209–10, 289–90; coerced 7; and the economic rationality of substituting European slaves for 7; enslaved 4, 8, 26, 143, 159; and European-slave substitution for 4; and the “Europeanization” of American slave labor 7; imported 144;

301

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry seventeenth-century 16; and slavery 8; transported 9–10, 16 Afro-American slaves 120, 184, 248 agitation 78, 86–7, 93, 119, 125, 159, 257, 265, 291, 293–4; extraparliamentary 60; factory 103–5 agricultural laborers 104 agricultural units 7 All-India Muslim League 290 Allain, Jean xiv Alonso, Angela 233 America 10, 15, 170; and mass suffrage 233; and postwar reconstruction 239 American abolitionists 133, 166, 225, 228–9, 248, 266, 282 American Antislavery Society 229 American audiences 213, 234 American Civil War 3, 112, 128, 135, 167, 208–9, 231–2, 247, 288 American colonies and colonists 48, 200, 204 American Constitution 50 American Declaration of Independence 228 American enslavement 51 American Freedman’s Aid appeal 106 American Revolution 41–2, 44, 47, 130, 210 American ships 49, 53 American slavery 7, 49, 209, 268 American trade 43, 53 American transatlantic slave trade 50 American War of Independence 41–2, 56, 181, 184, 209 Americans 12, 30, 42, 44, 49–51, 204, 209–10, 225, 229, 234; and abolition 50, 230, 234, 248; admonished by Richard Price on the need to end their ‘odious slavery’ 45 Amis des Noirs (reconstituted as the Circle Social) 57, 122, 124, 127, 157–61, 166–7, 205, 221, 225 Anglo-African slave trade 5, 50, 53, 67, 182, 185, 190, 208–9, 232, 263; and anti-slave trade treaties 187; to Brazil and Cuba 209; and India 57 Anglo-America 6, 130, 133, 157, 200, 210, 233, 235; asylums and penitentiaries 110; conflict 42, 45; religious discourse 81; transatlantic slave trades 199, 210 Anglo-French 220; antislavery

conference (Paris) 164; comparisons 119, 126; relations 52; slave trade 163; treaties 183 anti-abolitionists 70–71, 101, 264 Anti-Corn Law League 272 Anti-Indentured Emigration League 292 Anti-Slavery Reporter 250, 261, 264, 266–8, 270, 272, 283 antislavery xiii, 86–7, 93–5, 97–108, 110–111, 125–30, 132–4, 168–70, 257–8, 267–73; action 129, 156; activism 46; agents 104; agitation 102, 120, 266; associations 274; campaigns 262; candidates 100; and civil society in Britain and France 128, 155–70; commitment 76, 107; evangelical 93; identified 86, 168, 255; ideology 95, 98–9, 103; idiom in public petitions 102; initiatives 74, 248; legislation 258; massive women’s involvement 130; meetings 105–7, 167, 273; movement 42, 93, 98, 101, 110–111, 129, 134–5, 166, 225, 229; organizations 112, 237; periodicals 266; petitions 106, 126–7, 148, 221, 248, 273; popular 68, 75, 77–8, 125, 135; projects 247, 268; propaganda 99, 104; sentiments 128, 157, 199, 220; signatures 103, 127; societies 105, 125, 157, 167, 251, 270–271; stimulated 42; symbolism 94, 98, 106–7, 109–10; women 127, 133; and women’s rights groups 129–30; and the working class movements 102 Arab slave trade 255 associations 126, 132, 135, 221, 234, 274 see also social movements Atlantic Islands 9, 11–12, 14, 16 Atlantic slave trade xiii, 18, 70, 145, 167, 188, 191, 208, 210, 223 Atlantic system 2, 7–8, 15–16, 31, 142 atrocities 4, 46, 146, 164, 169, 288; and the Berbice revolt in 1763 147; of slave revolts 146 Baines, Edward 102–3 bankruptcy 51–2, 185, 204–5 Barbados 17–18, 25, 27, 31, 142, 146, 165, 206, 224 Batavian National Constituent Assembly 162 Battle of the Saintes 44, 46 Beaumont, George 105

302

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry Bedford 83–4 Berbice revolt in 1763 147 Bey, Ahmed 252–3 Birmingham Political Union 106–7 black slaves 11, 13, 29, 99, 103, 105, 107, 119 black women 124, 134 Blackburn, Robin xiv, 1–2, 42, 106 blacks 26, 29, 56, 58, 98, 104–5, 109, 123–4, 225, 231; Caribbean 229; freeing of 147, 185, 229, 268; impoverished 56 Bloch, Marc 155 blockades 191–2 Boer War 287 Bolt, Christine xiv Bolton petition 100 Bolton Reform election parade 100 Bonaparte, Napoleon 124, 162, 246; and the brutal and catastrophic failure in Saint-Domingue 222; and the decree to end the French slave trade 247; and forcing a second slavery on the French tropical colonies 125, 127, 164, 213, 237 bondage 10, 23, 29, 31, 156, 220, 237, 249, 261, 281 boycotts 120–122, 129, 264; campaigns 125, 222; international 246; mass sugar 159; and mobilizations 129; movements 122, 205; slave sugar 121, 221 Bradford 105–7 Brazil 12–14, 20, 24, 190–192, 209–10, 219–20, 223, 228, 231–5, 237–9; antislavery activity 233; emancipation 234; newly independent 210; slave importation 232; slavery in 20, 232, 235, 239; slaves 236; trade 190, 232 Brazilian 190, 220, 231, 233–5; abolitionists 233–5; church 239; plantations 12, 20; slave trade 231 Brewster, Harriet 133 Britain 41–4, 51–3, 55–8, 72–4, 85–6, 143–8, 157–60, 187–93, 231–5, 246–9; and the absence of a female presence within the antislavery movement 134; agricultural laborers 104; and the anti-Jacobin fear 86; and antislavery petitions 122, 208; and dominion in India 249; and France 119–20, 128, 158, 160, 167, 221–2, 231; and the

hypocritical sanctioning of slavery 267; and imperial expansion in India 248, 291, 295; and Mauritius slave colonies 262; and the Napoleonic wars 162, 223; and the post-Napoleonic abolitionist policy 190; post-war 42, 46, 48, 51; and rejection by the French legislature 164; and self-limitation on territorial expansion 191; and the slave colonies 27, 250; and slave emancipation 124, 131, 146, 166, 225, 229–30, 237, 283, 285; and small European governments 247 British abolition 41, 67, 69, 180–182, 192–3, 200–201, 203, 207–9, 211–13, 233–5; demands 213; by enacting slave emancipation 246 British Abolitionist Movement 41, 50, 159 British Abolitionist Society 247, 249, 256 British abolitionists 157–60, 164–7, 202, 207–8, 221, 224, 250, 252, 263, 265–8 British antislavery 110, 125, 130, 132, 134–5, 250–251, 262, 271, 290, 294; campaigns 127; historiography 93; mobilisation 41; movement 125, 156; traditions 169; women 127, 130, 133–4 British Antislavery Society 232, 237, 251, 261–2, 264–6, 270, 272, 274, 282, 284 British civil society 159–60, 163, 223, 246, 271, 274 British colonies 43, 53, 144, 166, 183, 209–10, 212, 230, 284, 286; population 43; ruling of 183; slave emancipation 164, 179; uprisings 165, 224 British East India Company 262 British government 144, 182–3, 185, 191–2, 247, 249, 251–3, 264, 266, 268; and the acquiescence in the racial laws of the newly self-governing territories of the Transvaal and Orange River 289; allows blockades and armed interventions 191; and moves decisively towards general emancipation 252; policy on accumulating slaves 144 British imperialism 180–181, 189 British India Society 261, 266, 268, 271, 274, 281 British liberty 42, 51, 82, 99 British newspapers 43, 50, 52, 79–80, 158, 204; see also British press

303

pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry British Parliament 67, 110, 125, 169, 184, 247, 281, 289 British press 48–9, 52, 57, 79, 129, 282, 290 British Slave Emancipation Bill 250 British slave trade 46, 67–8, 120, 125, 143–5, 158, 160, 165, 180, 182–4; abolition of 81, 179–80, 213; and slavery 48, 200, 203, 294; and traders 145, 203 British Sugar Colonies 46 British Transatlantic Slave Trade 54 British West Indies 49, 53–4, 146, 181, 204; see also West Indies British women 126, 129–30, 132, 134, 165, 221, 224 Brown, Christopher 42, 44–7, 56, 61 Brown, John 167 Bunting, Jabez 100–102, 108 Burdett, Francis 74 Burke, Edmund 43, 67, 219 Buxton, T. F. 149, 188 Cahiers de doléances 122–3, 159 Calcutta 281–2 campaigns 83, 120, 126–7, 129, 159, 161, 163, 165, 222–4, 268; advertising 45; anti-apprenticeship 126; antisaccarite 159; antislavery 282; contested 77; diplomatic 190; early 170; electoral 72; extra-parliamentary 130; final 110; first provincial 201; first publicity 45; for human rights 161; indecisive winter 79; nationwide 68, 76, 202; new disobedience 294; political 288; popular 68; public 248 Capitalism and Slavery xiii, 41, 180 Caribbean 3, 15–16, 18–21, 23–6, 143–4, 160, 162, 182, 222–3, 264; apprentice system 284; colonies 53, 182; free ports 54; insurgencies of Demerara 222, 229; islands 8–9, 192, 206; revolutions 164, 224; security 206; slave revolution 27, 182, 205 Casement, Roger 169 Castilho, Celso Thomas 234–5 Castlereagh, Robert Stewart 82–3, 85–6, 163, 207, 223 Catholic abolitionist populations 233 Catholic Church 132 Catholics 75, 79, 165, 224; bishops 129; clergy 166, 225

Central Africa 188 Central America 9, 209 Chamberlain, Austen 294 Chamberlain, Joseph 286 chapels 105, 147–8, 272 Chartist Movement 272–3 chattel slavery 6, 22, 109 child labor 149, 272 Chinese 288–9; coolies 168, 288; indentured 287–8; laborers 168, 288; slavery 288 Christianity 32, 245, 255 Christians 8, 32, 148, 156, 251, 281, 291, 294 civil rights 238, 274 civil society 157–8, 160–161, 166–7, 219–20, 222–3, 225–8, 231, 236–7, 245–6, 252–3; and abolition in the East 255; activism 170, 223; in Brazil 233; British 159–60, 163, 223, 246, 271, 274; comparative perspective on xiv; disruptions 161; emancipation of 238; fragmented 161, 222; French 164, 221–2, 224; and the judicial systems 246; mobilization of 161, 167, 170, 221, 247, 255–6; petitions 253 civil war 23–5, 52, 106, 163, 199, 220, 223, 229, 238, 248 Clarkson, Thomas 61, 67–71, 84, 87, 103, 106, 120–123, 202–3, 205, 207 clothiers 72–3, 76, 78 Cobbett, William 98, 100, 102, 131, 180 coerced labor 3–5, 7, 10–11, 22, 26, 142, 186, 286; lifelong 25; migrations 8, 191; mobilizations 288; models 12; unregulated 191 coerced migrations 9, 24–5, 193 coffee 54, 121, 143, 274 Coignet, Clarisse 129 Colley, Linda 60, 80, 87, 130 colonial slaves 109, 123, 128, 146, 158, 246–7, 263; adult 104; Dutch 162; French 253; Western 142 colonialism 168, 181 colonies 54–5, 58, 103, 144–5, 161, 166–7, 184–6, 205–6, 247–8, 284–5; American 48, 200, 204; British 43, 53, 144, 166, 183, 209–10, 212, 230, 284, 286; Caribbean 53, 182; competitive 184; conquered 70, 145; emancipated 266; ex-slave 272, 284; French 53, 124, 205–6, 222; self-governing 185, 286,

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pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry 232; domestic coerced labor force 21; English interaction 11; English ratio 21; slave trade 18, 21; trading institutions 53 Dutch East India Company 20 Dutch West India Company 20, 53

289, 293; slave 16, 18, 222; sugar 54, 121, 205, 249 Combination Act 94 conditions 22, 99, 120, 132, 247, 249, 263, 281, 283, 289; children’s 104; of civil society 263; colonial slave 99; constraining 27; domestic 101; flourishing 59; gang labor 16; industrial 110; intolerable working 148; lifelong 19; pitiful 50; of slavery 249–50, 261, 268; of women 120 Congress of Vienna 84–5, 125, 163, 190, 208, 210, 223 convicts 4–5, 11, 14, 22–3; British 3; Dutch 21; European 3; and prisoners of war 22; Spanish 10 coolies 168, 283–4, 286–8, 290, 293–4 Corn Laws 272, 274 “Cornwallis Code” 249, 263 cotton industry 54–5, 70–71, 121–2, 264, 282 cotton wool 54, 56 counter-abolitionists petition campaigns 97 counter-mobilizations 266, 284; Cuba 248; Southern political 229–30 Coupland, Reginald 93, 179–80 Crimean War 226 Cuban slave trade 182 Curtin, Philip D. 9, 57 Danish colonies 143 Danish West India Company 53 Davis, David Brion 94–5, 98, 110 de Lafayette, Marquis 58, 157, 221 de Tocqueville, Alexis 132, 164, 225, 228, 250 death 4, 30, 56, 81–2, 124, 147–8, 193, 207, 229, 238 debates 70, 79, 133, 265, 288–9 decree of abolition 252–3 Demerara (Dutch Guiana) 142, 144, 146–8, 150, 165, 206, 211, 224, 229, 291; cycle of insurgency 147, 149; insurrection 146, 165; and the rebel leaders 147; revolt 148, 225; slaves 206; uprising 146, 148, 165, 206, 225 deportation 12, 14, 24–5 Dickson, William 205 Dixon, P. F. 102 Douglass, Frederick 166, 213, 225 Dutch 8, 16, 18–22, 28, 52, 162, 182,

Easley, Roxanne 226 East India 122, 267; cotton (”free labor”) 122; slavery 267; sugar 264, 282 East India Company 57, 249–50, 257, 261–2, 265 economic incentives 32 elections 72–4, 78, 98, 229–31, 238, 270, 288; abolitionist 247; contested local 70; national 236, 288; parliamentary 69, 247, 288 Elsdale, Samuel 81 Eltis, David xiv, 2–9, 16, 18, 20–25, 27, 29–30, 208 emancipation 93–100, 105–10, 148–9, 165–6, 212–13, 224–8, 230–234, 236–9, 248–51, 268–73; abolitionist demands for 148, 246; accelerating of movement 237; agitation 96, 100; agitation (propaganda) 96; American slave 238; Atlantic colonial 270; black 100; campaigns 95, 100, 106, 109; civil society 238; colonial 253; compulsory 252; decree of 166, 226; of European women 130; first revolutionary 167, 237; global 250; immediate 104, 107, 111, 126–7, 145; and the last Catholic nation enacting 255; of metropolitan serfs 158; of metropolitan serfs to colonial slaves 158; petitions 97, 99, 106–7; and political reform 100; postponed 167; process 141, 228, 231, 249, 253; and repressions 132; rhetoric 86; systems 237; of women 123, 135 Emancipation Act 1833 110, 149, 226 Emancipation Bill 103, 106, 109–10, 126 enslavement 3, 5–6, 13–14, 255; in Africa 4, 191; alleged 250, 270; in America 51; brutal 250; costs 4, 29; primary 31; procedures 30; process 254; profitable 254; sanctioned 245 enslaving 5, 7, 12–14, 19, 21, 25; fellow believers 156; fellow Europeans 2, 5, 16, 31; foreigners 21 Equiano, Olaudah 43, 201

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pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry French petition campaigns 122, 166, 225 French Revolution 55, 86, 119, 124, 132, 157, 166, 205, 209 French slave emancipation 128, 161, 164, 237 French slave trade 82–5, 184, 209, 247 French sugar colonies 121, 205 French women 123–4, 127–9 Friend of India 282, 284

Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies 46 Europe 2–5, 10–14, 18–21, 27–8, 30–32, 50–54, 157–9, 169, 192–3, 246–7; abolitionist societies 253; imperial dominions 168; laborers 7; and mobilization 255; powers 28, 30, 192–3; and slavery 3–4, 7, 14, 19, 31, 254; slaves 14–15, 19 Europeans 1–8, 10–11, 13–16, 18–22, 26–7, 30–31, 186, 191–3, 257, 285; and the appetite for African slaves 5; enslavement of 2, 4, 6, 10, 12–13, 19, 31, 190 evangelical reformers 95 extinction of slavery 108, 219–20, 250 factories 96, 103, 105, 110, 149; child labor 104; and children 100, 102–3, 105, 108, 110; owners 107–9; rallies 104, 106; and the reformers 102, 108; slave trade 181 factory movements 102–5, 107; in Leeds 103; in Yorkshire 107 Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal 72 Foreign Slave Trade Abolition Bill 69–70, 75, 78–9, 159 France 52–4, 57–8, 83–5, 122–4, 127–8, 130–134, 157–61, 163–4, 166–70, 219–26; divided 142; and re-enslavement 142 free labor 6, 30, 96, 122, 184, 230, 264, 266, 268, 282; commodities 234; cotton; market 96; producers 282; societies 6; sugar 274 French Abolition Society 127–8, 163, 224–5, 247, 252 French abolitionists 158, 164, 166, 224–5, 253 French antislavery 122–5, 127–8, 131, 247 French-Caribbean revolutions 161, 210, 222, 225 French civil society 164, 221–2, 224 French colonial slaves 253 French colonies 53, 124, 205–6, 222 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizens 155 French empire 160, 162, 205, 219, 222, 225, 237 French government 52, 124, 132, 164, 224, 247, 253

Gambia 189 Gandhi, Mohandas K. 286–7, 290–291, 294 Garrison, William Lloyd 166–7, 213, 225, 267 George III 80–83 globalization of human rights 156, 168 governments 23–4, 49, 83–4, 127–9, 143–5, 185, 252–3, 262–3, 289–91, 293–4; central 235; of India and Britain 284, 291; local 227, 234; state 238 Great Britain see Britain Gregoire, Abbé 124 Haiti 31, 124, 142–6, 162, 164, 167, 206, 209, 222–3, 237; and emancipation 248; and independence 143; Napoleon’s defeat in 223; postrevolutionary 146; and the war of independence 79 Haitian Revolution 142–3, 145, 164, 206, 210, 224, 236 Heap, Rev. Henry (Vicar of Bradford) 106 Hindoos 263 Hindu 290–291, 294; caste proscriptions 292; laws 249, 263, 270; slaveholders 282 Holland 52–3, 58 Home Rule League 294 House of Commons 72, 75, 101, 126, 131, 202, 206, 219, 222, 273 human rights 41, 59, 125, 155–6, 158–9, 161, 163, 166, 169; contemporary 155–6, 170; fundamental 169; prevention of 170; projects 170; universal 165 Ibero-American empires 210 imperialism 155, 168, 179–81, 184, 189;

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pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry British 180–181, 189; cultural 258; Muslim 193 indenture system (India) 290–292, 294–5 Indentured Cooly Protection Society 292 indentured labor 274, 284–5 independence 41, 51–2, 181, 184, 187, 209–10, 222, 224, 228, 237; national 82; political 257 India xiv, 57, 187, 192, 248–51, 254–8, 261–71, 273–4, 281–7, 289–95; coal miners 290; commodities of 282; and the exports of rum 55; and the indenture system 290, 294–5; and indigenous forms of servitude 282; and mobilization against indentured emigration 295; model of emancipation 256; and the path to emancipation 248–51; and the practice of slavery 13, 111, 265, 267, 274, 282; servitude and the indenture system 290–292, 294–5; and slavery 13, 249, 271, 282; state of industrial development 295; suspends all indentured migration to Natal 290; and the unity of the nationalists 293, 295 Indian government 250–251, 255, 261–3, 270, 273–4, 282–4, 286–7, 289–95 Indian mobilization 295 Indian National Congress 286 Indian Ocean 12–13, 16, 182, 193, 251, 262–3, 272, 286 Indian Opinion (Gandhi’s newspaper) 290 Indians 9–10, 14, 264, 274, 281–7, 289–95; communal 290; compulsory fingerprinting of 290; educated 287; free 286; legally domiciled 286; migrating to the Transvaal 289; in Natal 285; non-indentured 295; and the segregation of 290; and the servility of 264, 290–292, 294–5; slave trade in 9; in South Africa 288, 290 Jacobin Society 121, 160 Jamaica 17–18, 54–5, 74, 77, 103, 134, 141–4, 146, 149, 224; and the contingent of Maroons 185; and the exports of sugar 143; uprisings 149, 207, 236; and the warning to the British government of impending ruin 80

Jefferson, Thomas 158, 211 Jewish abolitionists 165 Jewish children 11 Jews 8, 19, 30, 123, 269; adult Spanish 12; refugees 12 Journal of Global History xiii labor 1, 3, 6–8, 10, 13–14, 26–30, 226–7, 283, 287, 295; coerced 3–5, 7, 10–11, 22, 26, 142, 186, 286; collective 125; colonial 21, 96; colored 288; compulsory 162, 248; ex-slave 239; indentured 274, 284–5; metropolitan 95, 97, 288; skilled 12; slave 8, 15, 20, 30, 193, 253–4; voluntary 30, 192 labor force 1, 11, 15–16; coerced 7; indentured 286; new European 20; productive 160; unskilled 10; white artisanal 288 laborers 6, 13, 22, 101, 109, 188, 230, 268, 283; child 102; coerced 21; English pool of coerced 21; indentured 192, 283–5, 287; potential 11; ready-to-work plantation 4; self-disciplined 165, 225; slave 8, 15, 19–20, 30, 193, 253–4; wage 121 Lascelles, Henry 72–3, 76–7; name associated with the slave trade 73; supporters of 73, 76 “Lascelles and Liberty” (title of handbills and verses) 76 Lascelles Henry, slave-driving 76 League of Armed Neutrality 42 Leeds Times 108 The Lesser Antilles in the Age of European Expansion 18 liberty 19, 22–4, 26, 45, 48, 57, 60, 81–2, 155, 187; British 42, 51, 82, 99; civil 20; political 228; post-war 49; and slavery 23, 81 London Abolition Committee 69 London Anti-Slavery Society 261 London Committee (also called The Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade in London) 45, 49, 201–2, 205, 270 Mauritius 182, 208, 211, 262–3, 283–4 Midgley, Clare 120, 122, 125 migrants 4, 8, 22–3, 162, 185, 284; black 82; forced 23; indentured 286, 295; non-indentured 285

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pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry migration xiii, 1, 11–12, 15, 181, 284, 289–90; and bonded labor 192; coerced 9, 24–5, 193; enforced 22, 24; indentured overseas 295; putative European slave 18; transoceanic slave 189; unfree labor 191; voluntary overseas 29 Migrations, Trade, and Slavery in an Expanding World xiii military 13, 51, 123, 190, 226, 236, 263; campaigns 13, 49; conflicts 52, 199, 248; counter-civil society 167; despotism 237, 281; discipline 294; mobilizations 162, 219; occupations 161, 199; recruitment 19, 208; service 4, 162 Moral Capital 42 Muslims 8, 19, 156, 249, 251–2, 254–5, 257, 294; countries 254, 257; imperialisms 193; rulers 247–8, 254, 256; rulers, and clerics 254; rulers, recalcitrant 255; slavery and slaveholders 13, 248, 254, 282; societies of 257 Nabuco, Joachim 220, 231, 234, 236–9 Napoleonic Wars 80, 99, 146, 182–3, 193, 208, 247, 263 Natal 211, 285–7, 289–90; and disabling legislation 287; government of 286–7; and the Indian community 286; and the large resident Asian population 287; and the policy on behalf of its Indian subjects 286; whites impose a series of voting restrictions 285–6 negro slaves 99, 104, 107–8 newspapers 43–5, 49–50, 52, 55, 58, 84, 101, 132, 200–201, 204; abolitionist 79, 110; British 43, 50, 52, 79–80, 158, 204; local 78, 111; major 201; provincial 157, 221; public 75; subsidized pro-abolitionist 231 non-conformist chapels 148 Oastler, Richard 102–6, 109 Ottoman Empire 251, 255–6 Paris International Anti-Slavery Conference 283 Parliament 43–6, 49–50, 75–9, 82–6, 96–9, 159–60, 200–207, 219–24, 262–5, 267–9; flooded with antislavery

petitions 122; national 221; new 288; petitioned 131; for unconditional emancipation 106; unreformed 100 parliamentary debates 55, 157, 165, 200, 224, 265 parliamentary elections 69, 247, 288 parliamentary investigations 159, 285 peace 18, 23, 44, 53–4, 58, 82–4, 183, 204; celebrations 84; festivals 82, 84; negotiations 163, 223 peace treaties 44, 203, 208, 210, 223 petition campaigns 48, 84–5, 128, 202; British 122; and counterabolitionists 97; French 122, 166, 225; nation-wide 68; national 69, 126; slave-trade 82 petitions 70–71, 83–6, 97–100, 126–7, 131, 158–9, 165–6, 200–204, 223–5, 245–6; and the campaigns 273; communal 226; company’s 185; early 125, 166; elite 233; greatest single 164–5, 207, 224; hostile 233; “a huge featherbed of a petition” 126; for immediate emancipation 126; local slave-trade 84; Manchester political Reform 99; mixed gender 126; national 126, 163; religious denominational 221; signing of 70, 83, 159, 221; women’s 126–7, 131; Yorkshire and Lancashire 80 plantation slavery 14, 249, 262 plantation system 15, 20, 22, 27 political reform 58, 100 Poor Law Amendment Act 1834 110 popular abolitionism 86, 110–111, 182, 203–4 popular mobilizations 68–9, 87, 129–30, 159–61, 169, 221–2, 232–3, 239, 251, 256 popular petitions 125, 202, 271; see also petitions popular religious movements 246 Portugal 11–14, 20, 31, 53, 85, 119, 131; early pre-eminence in the slave trade 14; incarceration in 14; laborers in 13; and the low population base of 13; and the mass roundup of Jewish children in 13; the pioneer of Atlantic slavery 11; relief from repayment of large war debts to Britain in exchange for anti-slave trade treaties 247; and the Sephardic refugees of 1492 12;

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pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry sixteenth-century 13; and Spain as the other major slaving nation 85, 119; and the warning that Brazil will substitute free European for forced African labor 223 Portuguese 4, 8, 11–14, 16, 20–21, 50, 85, 191, 223, 232; Africa 169; allies 247; dependence on trade 12; dominance of the slave and sugar trades 15; empires 199; exiles 13; expansion 12; government 85; metropolitan outflows 12; migrants 11; monarchy 11, 13, 199; plantations 11, 14; shipping 11 post-emancipation 134, 165, 224; colonial rule 161; discussions 253; transitional 265 post-war Britain 42, 46, 48, 51 Preston Pilot 101 prisoners of war 4–5, 14, 16, 18, 22, 51 The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution 94 The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture 94 prohibitions 49, 68, 70, 209, 292–3 public opinion 67–8, 70, 72, 85–6, 126, 146, 159, 229, 231–3, 236 public petitions 102, 201, 236 Puerto Rico 133, 143, 209 Quakers 44–7, 61, 82–3, 105, 110, 205, 269; late-arriving abolitionist 77; and non-support of the use of force 188; publicity campaigns 46–7 Ramsay, James 45–7 re-enslavement 142, 162, 223 The Record (Anglican publication) 101 reform 87, 93, 95, 98–9, 105, 204–5, 222, 227, 249, 252; abolitionism and movements to 95, 100–101, 295; domestic 93, 98, 102, 107; economic 266; electoral 234; factory 103, 110; industrial 102, 111; parliamentary 58, 75, 95, 207, 212 Reform Act 100, 102 Reform Bill 60, 94, 98, 100 reform petitions 126; see also petitions reformers 95, 239, 257; early twentiethcentury 258; political 101; slavery and factory 102, 106 refugees 12, 20, 26, 52, 164, 185, 224; Continental religious 26; converted 12;

returning colonial 164, 224; voluntary black 185 religious 8, 132, 181, 210, 245, 251, 269, 291; codes 245; convocations 87; denominations 73, 246; disloyalty 12; dissenters 201–2; institutions 134; movements 246; sanction of slavery and enslavement 254, 270 revolution 123–4, 132–4, 141–4, 161–2, 166, 199–200, 203–7, 209–11, 222–3, 225–6; in the Batavian Republic 162; bloody 166, 213, 225; constitutional 199; domestic 209; financial 28; in Haiti 237; home-grown slave 206; major 163, 238; militarized 236; in Paris 86; racialized 233; SaintDomingue 42, 143, 146, 159–60, 165, 222, 225, 236; state-sponsored administrative 52 Revolutionary Convention 124 Richardson, David xiv, 245, 247, 251 Roman Catholic disabilities 76 Roman Catholic Relief Bill 77 Roman Catholics 76; see also Catholics Russell, Lord John 187–8 Sadler, Michael 102–4 Saint Domingue 124, 162, 205–6, 209; revolution 42, 143, 146, 159–60, 165, 222, 225, 236; slave revolt in 141, 205–6, 265; slaves of 124 Santo Domingo 209 Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher xiii–xiv Schoelcher, Victor 127–9, 149, 164, 166, 226 Scotland 25–6, 78, 81, 205 Second World War 180 Sedition Act 1795 94 servitude 4, 155, 228, 267, 282, 285, 293, 295; hereditary 22; indentured 284–6, 288, 292–3, 295; Indian 290–292, 295; involuntary 30; lifetime 31; serial 293 Shapiro, Gilbert 122–3 Sharp, Granville 46 Sierra Leone 56–7, 103, 162, 184–9, 191, 208 signers (of petitions) 71, 126–7, 159, 165–6, 201–2, 221, 224–5 slave colonies 16, 18, 222; brimming with freshly imported Africans 144; British 250; emancipated 270; foreign 181; launching of new 245; Mauritius 262

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pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry slave deaths 169, 225, 251, 257 slave emancipation 126, 130, 135, 165–7, 200, 203, 206, 212, 269, 271; advocating for 202; anniversary of the final British 213, 273; colonial 129; solemn ceremonies hailing 262; universalizing of 162; West Indian 285 Slave Emancipation Bill 265 slave-grown sugar 120, 202, 232, 264 slave labor 8, 15, 20, 30, 193, 253–4; new 20, 209; system 7, 96–7; transatlantic 264 slave laborers 19 slave markets 49, 51, 252 slave populations 19, 26, 142, 209, 230, 248; indigenous 249; largest 220 slave revolts 141–2, 144, 146, 205–6, 232, 246, 265 slave revolutions 86, 121, 143, 160, 182, 205, 222, 246 slave ships 46, 143, 203 slave societies 18, 25, 238, 264 slave sugar boycotts 121, 221 slave systems 12, 48, 149, 155, 159–60, 181, 228, 248; ending Britain’s imperial 224; expanding 160, 222 slave trade 41–5, 47–50, 70–86, 163–4, 168–70, 183–7, 189–93, 203–8, 210–212, 253–5; abolition of 47, 54, 57, 125, 181, 190–192, 200, 203, 247, 254; in Africa 85, 169, 253; and anti-slavery 48; deadly 193; early modern 8; factories 181; foreign 71; intercontinental 141; new 192, 284; and plantation slavery 14; seaborne 247; and slavery 60, 125, 156, 163, 170, 180, 200, 208, 266, 271; transatlantic 5, 14–15, 19, 41, 53, 156, 162, 164, 183, 188–91; transoceanic 181, 190, 224 slave traders 9, 18, 74, 86, 185; Arab 255; British 145, 203; French 209; intraMuslim 254 slave uprisings 144, 212, 268, 291; combined 230; final Jamaican 212; frequent 210; large-scale British 146; massive 141, 164, 250 slaveholders 119, 160, 184, 210, 248–9, 263, 266; Hindu 282; Muslim 13, 248, 254, 282; profiting 281; Southern 179; United States and Cuba countermobilizations by 248

slavery 18–19, 143, 164, 168, 191, 232; and abolition 220; and Africans 8; in Barbados 25; in Brazil 20, 232, 235, 239; in Britain and France 103, 160; conditions of 249–50, 261, 268; in East India 264; extinction of 108, 219–20, 250; and factory reformers 102, 106; immediate abolition of 101, 104, 128, 149, 207; and indentured labor 285; in India 250, 262, 264, 269, 271, 274, 281–2; institutionalizing 25; international 167, 257; in Malabar 268; Roman and Medieval Muslim 141; Roman juristic designation of 157; in Saint-Domingue 162; sanctioning of 245–6; suppressing of 192; system of 107; termination of 150, 199, 220, 272, 284, 286–7, 294; in Tunisia 255; in Washington DC 229; white 106, 109 Slavery Abolition Bill 202 Slavery and Antislavery in Spain’s Atlantic Empire xiii slaves 1–4, 10–16, 18–21, 26–8, 141–9, 209–10, 234–6, 252–4, 261–4, 266–72; called from “death to life” 212; and children 108; colony’s 142; and crew 203; disaffected 256; emancipated 227; foreign 162; freed 49, 129, 185, 230; French colonial 253; kidnapped 269; liberated 190; and non-slaves 142, 149; outbidding of 26; traffic in 192, 251; “wage” 109, 272; Western colonial 142; white 105 Smith, Adam 30, 67, 94–5 social movements 87, 221, 272; Abolitionist Society 166, 251; Aborigines Protection Society 268; American Antislavery Society 229; Anti-Corn Law League 272; Birmingham Political Union 106–7; British Abolitionist Society 247, 249, 256; British Anti-Slavery Society 106, 188, 232, 261–2, 264–6, 270, 272, 274, 282, 284; British Antislavery Society 232, 237, 251, 261–2, 264–6, 270, 272, 274, 282, 284; British India Society 261, 266, 268, 271, 274, 281; Chartist Movement 272–3; French Abolition Society 127–8, 163, 224–5, 247, 252; French Abolitionist Society 127, 163; London Abolition Committee 69

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pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry 266; and Brazil 219; Congress 248; and France 158, 169; House of Representatives 248; and the new states 143, 209 United States of America see United States uprisings 142, 146–7, 160, 165, 184, 206, 224–5, 237, 246; Barbados and Jamaica 236; British colonial 165, 224; Jamaica 149, 207, 236; peasant 227; regional 226

The Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade in London (known as the London committee) 201 South Africa 182, 211, 263, 285, 287–91, 295 Southern slave system 179, 229–30 Spain 10–14, 26, 42, 53, 85–6, 119, 131, 182–3, 237, 247; authoritarian domination of 183; and Brazil 237; conquering expeditions 9; failed colonization policy of 26; and France 53; and its empires xiii, 51, 54, 199–200, 209–10; prosperous sixteenth-century 10 Spanish America 199, 203, 236; mainland 167; revolutions 231 sugar 12, 17, 54, 56, 121–2, 143, 157, 160, 182–5, 264; cheap 274; colonial 120; colonies 54, 249, 268; Indian 264; islands 11, 16, 55; riots 120–121, 123; slave-grown 120, 202, 232, 264 sugar colonies 121, 205 Temperley, Howard xiv, 179 Ten Hours Bill 102, 104–6, 108 Thompson, George 101–2, 265–6, 268, 274, 281–3, 295 The Times 79, 273 trade 8, 53–5, 75, 99–100, 143, 188, 192–3, 202–4, 208, 210–212; abolition 179; in Africans 183; depression 49; of foreign colonies 54; free 121–2, 271, 273; inhuman 43; intercontinental 193; international 179; long-distance serf 25; protectionism 272; seaborne 192; semitropical 191; textile 201 traffic 86, 183, 192, 207, 245; abominable 75; debasing 101; infamous 145, 206; in slaves 192, 251; transcontinental 208 transatlantic 20, 191, 193; colonial slaveowners 249; cruelty 93; diaspora 56; migrants 15; networks 30; settlements 13; slave labor 7, 11, 49, 119, 121–2, 135, 156, 182, 190, 249; slave trade 213 Transvaal 287–91 Tunisia 251–5 United Nations 155, 256, 258 United States 48–53, 55, 132–4, 204, 209–11, 219–20, 226, 228–31, 237–8,

West Africa 11, 187–9, 191, 204, 208 West India Company 20–21, 53 West Indies 43–4, 46, 53–5, 95–7, 99–101, 104, 108–9, 179–81, 203–4, 263–5; attack on abolition 94, 144; interest 67, 75, 100; investors 21; plantations 111; planters and merchants 54; protection 270 Whig candidates 107–8 Whig government 76, 83, 188, 268 Whigs 72, 76, 79–80, 83, 102, 108, 269 whips 57, 104, 188 Wilberforce, William 70, 72–3, 76–8, 82, 93–4, 100–101, 103–4, 145, 179–80, 205–6; birthplace 179; charged by Radicals with hypocracy 94; and Henry Lascelles 72–3, 76; and his abolitionist supporters 76, 103; and Robert Castlereagh 86; transformed by abolitionism 61 Williams, Eric xiii, 41, 93, 180–181 women 119–31, 133–5, 159, 165–6, 202, 221, 224–5, 283, 290, 293–5; abolitionist 121–2; autonomous 125, 128; British 126, 129–30, 132, 134, 165, 221, 224; British antislavery 127, 130, 133–4; emancipation of 123, 135; equal political rights for 123; French 123–4, 127–9; movements of 124, 127, 130, 134–5; participation in the public arena 119, 126–7, 130, 133, 135; petitions of 126–7, 131 woollen manufacturers 72 workers 3, 98, 100, 128, 148, 166, 202, 225; black 148; free 184; industrial 272; plantation-bound 4; urban 166, 225 workhouses 4, 29, 111 working classes 93, 97–9, 101, 104, 106–7, 130, 165, 273

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pat h ways f ro m s lav e ry working classes: attitudes 97; culture 102; leaders 272; privation of 99; rally in Manchester 98; response to the American Freedman’s Aid appeal 106; signatures in favor of emancipation 97 World Anti-Slavery Convention 133, 188, 250–251, 267, 272–3, 284 York Herald 77 Yorkshire 69–70, 72–4, 76, 95, 103, 107–8; antislavery mobilization 103; election 77, 80; electors 76; factory

movement 107; freeholders 76; women 73 “Yorkshire Slavery” (manifesto by Richard Oastler) 103, 109 Zanzibar 255 Zilfi, Madeline C. 256 zones 24, 30–31, 141, 254, 256; of euroslavery 31; for foreign slaves 162; plantation 2, 4, 19; slave-dependent 210; slave-free 157; of slavery 141 Zong massacre (slave ship) 46, 48, 61

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