Context – Morality and Economy
It was often marginalised groups, such as former slaves, and, following the abolition
movement, women, who tested and deployed these new ideas as a means of arguing for an
extension of these rights to excluded or oppressed groups. The Haitian slave rebellion, the
first successful slave rebellion to result in the birth of an independent country, drew on
French revolutionary and Enlightenment ideas. Another historiographic landmark, The Black
Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, published by Trinidadian
writer and critic C.L.R. James in 1938, depicts the Haitian revolution as developing in
concert with the ideologies and doctrines of the French revolution. Following a series of
revolts across the French Caribbean, in 1791 plantation workers in Saint-Domingue, (which
would become known as Haiti after independence) rebelled against the planter classes that
ruled the island and began to establish their own government. They achieved emancipation
in 1794, and after defeating Napoleonic forces eight years later, became an independent
nation in 1804.
James, and later historians, argued that the growth of Afro-Caribbean intellectual networks
and the application of new conceptions of universal rights and freedom in Haiti was a
development as important as the French revolution unfolding in Europe. In the immediate
aftermath of the successful revolution, U.S. and European colonial governments feared the
possibility that the revolt might spread across the region, and therefore imposed trade
sanctions on the new country to isolate it from its neighbours, and indeed the revolution
became seen as an inspiration for emancipation movements across the Caribbean. Bayly
notes that the new Haitian government and military dealt Napoleon’s armies their first defeat
on land, after Napoleon had attempted to reverse a decree liberating slaves across the
French Caribbean, and that earlier the Haitian revolution had in fact helped to preserve the
French revolution by occupying thousands of British troops elsewhere.1
Black Jacobins was a major source of inspiration for Eric Williams, another Trinidadian
scholar challenging a Eurocentric account of the Atlantic world in Capitalism and Slavery,
published in 1944 and developing a thesis put forward in his D.Phil. dissertation. Both James
and Williams wrote in the shadow of the second World War, growing tides of anti-colonial
nationalism, often entwined with an economic critique of colonialism, and a growing lack of
faith in the world that European colonialism had produced. Although earlier historians had
seen the British abolition movement as a moral, humanitarian, and religiously-motivated
response to a practice increasingly recognised as an atrocity, Williams, an Oxford-trained
historian, and later the first Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, argued instead that the
slave trade ended because it had ceased to be profitable.
British historiography on the slave trade from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century
was based around an evangelical narrative of moral awakening and humanitarianism.
Thomas Clarkson, an early organiser of anti-slavery movements and the first to provide an
historical account of abolition, developed a progressive narrative as early as 1786 that
placed ‘Christian altruism’ as the driving force behind the movement.2 Clarkson’s
historiographic tradition was continued by John Seeley in 1883 and Reginald Coupland as
late as 1933, whose work continued to present abolition as a humanitarian ‘gift’ from Britain.
1
BMW p. 99
Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism. Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2006, pp. 3-4. Clarkson’s History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment
of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament was published in 1808.
2
In 1771, James Somersett, purchased as a slave by Charles Stewart, a customs officer in
Boston, brought a case against his owner for unlawful imprisonment when he was confined
on a ship bound for Jamaica to be sold for plantation labour. His advocates argued that while
slavery was legal in the British crown colonies in North America, where Somsersett had
been purchased by Stewart, slavery was illegal in England as it was not recognised by
English common law or Parliament. English contract law, further, did not allow a person to
enter into slavery, or for a labour contract to be enforced without the consent of both parties.
Therefore, when Stewart brought Somsersett to England, Somsersett ceased to be property.
Abolitionist Granville Sharp backed Somersett’s case as an important test case, and was
highly profiled in the press. Whereas Reginald Coupland saw the Somsersett trial as the key
first step in a legal and humanitarian challenge to slavery, focussing on Sharp, later
historians have questioned the impact of the trial. Many at the time were concerned with the
precedent that the case might set in undermining the recognition of slaves as property. Yet
in the end, it only prevented the forced removal of slaves from England, and contested
slavery on technical legal rather than humanitarian or moral grounds, and later historians
have questioned the prominence of the Somsersett trial, arguing that other test-cases, like
the Zong trial,3 were more important in bringing about the end of slavery.
These histories celebrated English progress, and justified later imperial expansion as based
primarily in Liberal ideals of benevolence and morality: the fight against slavery, as
Christopher Brown argues, gave Britain ‘moral capital’ to draw upon in the expansion of
empire. By suggesting instead that abolition was driven primarily by economics, Williams
undermined this body of argument by moving the argument away from ideology toward
socio-economic interest. Williams argued that Caribbean plantations had suffered economic
decline with the rise of industrial capitalism in Britain, and that the shift away from slave
production was thus driven by the bottom line rather than humanitarianism. Although
historians now dispute his economic analysis, he precipitated a fundamental shift in the
historiography. Barbara Solow and Stanley Engerman wrote that Williams “defined the study
of Caribbean history, and its writing [William’s Capitalism and Slavery] affected the course of
Caribbean history... Scholars may disagree on his ideas, but they remain the starting point of
discussion.”4
Although Williams’ book was influential in Caribbean and U.S. historiography, it was not
published in Britain until 1964, and so there was a time lag between its publication and the
first major challenges from British historians. Seymour Drescher’s 1977 Econocide was the
most significant challenge to the ‘Williams Thesis’, followed by Capitalism and Antislavery
3
From Andrew Opitz, ‘Atlantic Modernity and the Wreckage of History’, Cultural Critique, vol. 68
(Winter 2008) p. 251: “In September 1781, the British slaver Zong set sail from the western coast of
Africa en route to the busy slave markets of Jamaica. In addition to its captain, Luke Collingwood, and
a distinguished passenger named Robert Stubbs, the retiring governor of a coastal slave fort, the ship
had a crew of seventeen sailors and a cargo of 440 Africans bound for sale and slave labor in the
colonies. Disease and insufficient provisions made the transatlantic crossing particularly hellish and,
as the Zong approached Jamaica, Captain Collingwood determined that he could best serve the
interests of the voyage's investors by throwing the feeblest slaves overboard. Since the Zong was
protected by a marine insurance contract, the owners could then seek compensation for their lost
"property." Captain Collingwood's financial calculations led to a mass killing that would one day be
called the Zong Massacre. Over the course of three days, the slavers forced 133 shackled human
beings into the ocean. The ship's sole passenger, Governor Stubbs, passively watched the atrocity
unfold from belowdecks as body after body plunged into the sea beneath his cabin window. Stubbs
would later be called to testify at a trial in Liverpool, but the horrifying events he witnessed were
viewed by the court as potential insurance fraud rather than cold-blooded murder.”
4
Barbara L. Solow and Stanley L. Engerman. British Capitalism and Caribbean Slavery: The Legacy
of Eric Williams. Cambridge University Press, 1987, Introduction.
and The Mighty Experiment. In Econocide, Drescher argued that abolition was a form of
‘economic suicide’ as the plantation slavery system had continued to return enormous profits
for British investors. But he did not entirely return to Clarkson’s evangelical argument.
Instead, he focussed on the emergence of new kinds of political association that made use
of new forms of mass mobilization to put pressure on the slave system. In this, he actually
reinforces a part of the Williams Thesis. Both argue that rising groups associated with new
industries rather than landed wealth had an interest in depicting the plantation slavery order
as corrupt and immoral as a means of consolidating their own social and economic position.
Drescher argued that industrialization, therefore, was more important in the social changes
that it brought about than in its immediate challenge to the Caribbean plantation economy.
Other historians have opened the ‘public sphere’ organising against slavery to include black
Atlantic writers, like Olaudah Equiano, and individuals whose activism, narratives and
intellectual contributions provided the evidence and test cases that underpinned the
antislavery movement. Pressure from below in the form of slave rebellions that founded
themselves on ideologies of freedom and humanitarianism, like that in Haiti, continued to
challenge the plantation system. João Pedro Marques, in Who Abolished Slavery?, argued
that slave revolts and not abolition movements drove emancipation: ‘revolts were always
ways of fighting slavery; and ... the decision to end the system of slavery in most Western
nations was for the most part the outcome of such revolts.’5 The bloody Demerara slave
rebellion of 1823, in which hundreds of slaves were killed and a British parson, John Smith,
sentenced to death for his role in supporting the slaves, provided a major impetus to those in
Britain seeking total abolition of slavery and not just the ending of the trade. Jack Gladstone,
who led one of the Demerara rebellions, also became a prominent figure in the abolition
movement after his deportation. (See sources from Module 2 for more on the ‘black
Atlantic’ intellectual world.) These examples suggest that we cannot limit our
understanding of abolition to British popular movements, but have to take into account
growing pressure from across the Atlantic world, and especially from slaves and former
slaves.
European observers and slave traders in the nineteenth century blamed African society for
‘inventing’ and perpetuating the system of Atlantic chattel slavery. Putting an end to slavery
in Africa was cited as a major reason for the formal colonisation of Africa by Joseph
Chamberlain at the Berlin Conference in 1884-85. In a speech on “The True Conception of
Empire” given in 1897, Chamberlain declared that “You cannot destroy the practices of
barbarism, of slavery, of superstition, which for centuries have desolated the interior of
Africa, without the use of force.”6 Yet the practice of slavery as it evolved from the early
modern period was very much, as we have seen in the former module, a collaborative effort,
involving traders, governments, armies and navies across the Atlantic world. While some
coastal African kingdoms and traders profited from the trade, others opposed it, and none
today would argue, as Chamberlain did, that Atlantic slavery was an ‘African’ invention, or
that its abolition was a purely British humanitarian movement.
5
Joao Pedro Marques, Seymour Drescher, and P. C. Emmer. Who Abolished Slavery?: Slave
Revolts and Abolitionism: A Debate with João Pedro Marques. New York: Berghahn Books, 2010.
6
Charles W. Boyd, ed., Mr. Chamberlain's Speeches (Boston, 1914) Vol. II, pp. 1-6.