By Peter Main
Most people’s understanding of the slave trade is probably quite hazy. The more attentive at school might recall maps of the “Triangular Trade”, by which cheap goods from England were shipped to West Africa, exchanged for slaves who were then transported to the West Indies from where sugar and cotton were then brought back to England. A shameful episode, certainly, but it was abolished by Parliament hundreds of years ago – perhaps the more cynical might observe that there was more money to be made in industry.
The aim of this book is not only to set the record straight, England profited from slavery for three hundred years, but to demonstrate how central the trade was for the growth of the whole British economy and, with it, the British bourgeoisie. The author, Steve Cushion, summarises this admirably succinctly in his introduction; “The wealth gained by looting, enslavement, land grabbing and murder in Africa, Asia and the Americas flowed back to Europe and was turned into capital there.”
The book then deals systematically with the profound implications of that seemingly simple proposition. In those three centuries, although much of the form of the English, and then British, state and ruling class was retained, their content was utterly transformed. The sometimes convulsive history by which entirely new social classes were created and jostled for position is presented by a very effective combination of broad generalisation and well chosen, often surprising, examples.
The roots of the trade are traced back as far as Elizabeth I, the last of the Tudors. At that time, England was still lagging behind the Spanish and Portuguese who were already combining the theft of wealth from the New World with the trade in human labour. Learning from their example, in 1563, just 70 years after Columbus’ first voyage, Elizabeth chartered a ship, the Jesus of Lubeck, to a group of merchants to trade slaves across the Atlantic.
For a century and more, as the English established themselves first in the Caribbean, especially on Barbados, and later on the North American mainland, the need for labour was met from many sources; landless labourers driven from the land in England by the Enclosures, indentured labourers from Britain and Ireland, attracted, very often duped, by the prospect of buying land once they had served their seven years of labour; Indigenous peoples, captured and enslaved; Irish peasants transported after Cromwell’s invasion. By the mid-seventeenth century, however, these sources were drying up, while the supply of slave labour from Africa had steadily increased.
The Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 seems to have marked something of a turning point in the institutionalisation of slavery. In gratitude for their financial support in his bid to restore the throne, Charles II granted a charter to a group of businessmen to establish the first English colony on the North American mainland, aptly named Carolina in his honour. The settlers soon found that, by favouring some of the Indigenous people over others, they could provoke inter-communal warfare. This served both to depopulate the land for expansion and to provide a supply of prisoners who could be sold on as slaves to plantations on Barbados. Over the next 40 years some 50,000 Indigenous people were thus transported.
Barbados demonstrates the realities of the plantation system. In the aftermath of a slave revolt, a “Slave Code” was drawn up, partly by one James Drax, owner of the Drax Hall plantation on Barbados, mark the name. The code ordered a “severe whipping” for a first offence by a slave. A second offence would mean “severe whipping, slitting of the nose and branding of the face”. Although thought unlikely, if the punishment happened to result in death, “.. no person whatsoever shall be liable for any fine therefore”. A similar code, for Virginia, was partly drawn up by John Locke, the famous proponent of “natural rights”.
Royal involvement was maintained under James II who was the Governor of the Royal African Company. Between 1672 and 1713, it transported about 5000 enslaved people a year across the Atlantic. Its 500 ships exported the equivalent in today’s money of £45 billion worth of goods to West Africa, transported 170,000 enslaved Africans and returned with 30,000 tonnes of sugar and enough gold to mint half a million one guinea coins.
This makes it clear that, already in the 18th century, the slave trade was playing a central part in the development of an integrated and entirely new economic system. It drove the development of shipbuilding which, in turn, stimulated, for example, the building of port facilities, warehousing, timber, rope-making, sail-making, inland transportation and, at the other end of the trade, so to speak, sugar processing and export.
A less obvious, but ultimately even more important effect, was the development of everything connected to the financing of the trade. Banking played a central role, not so much in providing safekeeping as to supply credit to finance voyages. Increasingly sophisticated financial techniques were needed to cater for trade and investment in very distant lands. In 1802, for example, it was Baring Brothers bank that financed the Louisiana Purchase that doubled the land mass of the USA and made available a huge increase in land for slave plantations. Closely linked to banking, insurance companies thrived, Royal Exchange Insurance, now Guardian Royal Exchange, was founded in 1720 at about the same time as Lloyd’s coffee house became the principal venue for trading shares.
On the plantations themselves, increasing size led not only to greater profits but also greater organisational rigour and division of labour. Managerial techniques designed to extract the maximum from a given workforce were introduced, these established norms such as specialised teams under the control of overseers that are still recognisable today.
These developments became particularly important when plantation owners were rich enough to return home, leaving managers with instructions as to how to run matters while they used their wealth to buy up landed estates and build stately homes. Cushion observes that such instructions not only underlined the owners’ meticulous attention to detail but also their callous ruthlessness. One, Henry Drax, son of James, assumed in his calculations that there would be a 20% per annum death rate among his enslaved workforce. Another calculated that the optimum length of the working life of a slave was seven years, taking into account the likely profit as against cost of upkeep and replacement.
As the physical separation of ownership from management became the norm, the need for precise and systematic record-keeping and accounting established the bureaucratic model of organisation that was to become universal as capitalism became established not only in trade but, crucially, in industry in the 18th and 19th centuries.
One great strength of the book, indeed its central theme, is the impact of this new-found and apparently inexhaustible wealth on English society. These were not simply riches to be enjoyed and indulged, this was capital, wealth to be invested to “make” more wealth. Even where it was used to buy the nouveau riche entry into society through the acquisition of country estates, this stimulated development. The estates were themselves to be efficiently managed, the building of stately homes required a huge volume of materials and development of trades and skills. Ownership of land was very often the first step into the political world as an MP or, via the right marriage, the House of Lords.
Equally, the sheer scale of the trade between England, West Africa and the Caribbean required massive infrastructural development in transport, warehousing and ports. The significance of this is illustrated by the building and operation of new docks in London, the West India Dock. This not only rationalised the business of import and export and greatly expanded the number of ships that could be accommodated, it also required protection of the goods in transit or storage and hence led to the first uniformed police force, the River Police.
On a grander scale, in fact on a global scale, the same considerations ensured the expansion and modernisation of the Royal Navy, the guarantor of safe passage, not to speak of increasing territorial annexations. This, too, stimulated not only shipbuilding and the associated industries but also scientific advances related to navigation, naval architecture and military technology.
Such profound changes in the economy and society also had consequences in the ideological sphere, first and foremost in religion. The central issue was whether enslaved people could, and should, be converted to Christianity. Arguments ranged from the quasi-philosophical, that questioned their status as humans, to the clearly avaricious objection that, if they learned to read the Bible, they might also learn to rebel. The latter was countered, by some, with the idea that knowledge of Jesus might focus their minds on the next life, rather than this one.
Although all such arguments continued, the involvement of the Anglican Church, an arm of the state it is pointed out, legitimised the idea that the enslaved could be baptised but this did not alter their status or their “owners’” rights. One obvious conclusion that could be derived from this was that they were human, but inferior to their masters who, by now, were generally referred to as “White”. It is, clearly, a short step from that to a systematic racist theory of human development.
Above all, inevitably, as the capitalist economy developed and grew, the movement and manipulation of capital itself came to the fore as the City of London became synonymous not only with trade but with finance.
Equally inevitably, the state also became involved and this is neatly illustrated by reference to the South Sea Company, famous for the bursting of the “South Sea Bubble”. Given the dramatic increase in the share price of anything associated with Artificial Intelligence or Bitcoin today, its story is not only of historical interest. It was established by Royal charter in 1711 as a means to manage the national debt which then stood at £9 million, the equivalent of £23 billion today. Those who had lent money to the government by purchase of government bonds, were issued shares in the company to the nominal value of the debt owing to them and were to receive 6% on their investment.
The story of how those shares increased in value or, rather, price, in a matter of a few years until the bubble burst in 1720 is so well known that it has virtually passed into folklore. What is not widely known is that the commercial side of the company, where it made its money, was in the slave trade. Cushion records that even after 1720 the company continued to trade and trafficked a total of 64,399 Africans on 538 voyages between 1711 and 1740. Among the shareholders were Queen Anne and then King George I, Isaac Newton (who lost out) Thomas Guy, the founder of Guy’s Hospital, and Robert Walpole, later the first prime minister, who did very nicely, thank you.
The example of the South Sea Company also shows the ongoing evolution of England’s ruling class, drawing in people and families from relatively humble backgrounds, Newton’s father was a sheep farmer, for example. The primary qualification was business acumen. That was a feature that could appeal equally to the landowning aristocracy, the plantation owners, shipowners and bankers, towards the end of the 18th Century, factory owners could be added to the list.
Although slavery played a central role in the development of capitalist industry and finance, it was precisely that development that began to undermine the business of slavery. In dealing with this, Cushion, drawing on the work of Eric Williams, who later became prime minister of Jamaica, dispels the myth that the principal factor in the abolition of slavery was the campaigning of enlightened Englishmen such as William Wilberforce. Certainly, there were abolitionist campaigns, and the more radical did not limit themselves to opposition only to the trade in slaves, rather than ownership itself, and their campaigns are rightly presented in some detail as are the numerous mobilisations and rebellions of the slaves themselves.
However, ultimately more important was the greater profitability of wage slavery over chattel slavery. Against those who object that slavery remained, nonetheless, a source of profits, Cushion makes the point that it was the relative decline of the whole slave-based economy as compared to the rise and future potential of wage labour, that was crucial.
That was not just a matter of financial projections and calculations. As with all the developments traced, there was a social and political dimension to the Abolitionist movement that expressed the internal dynamics of the still evolving British ruling class. The competing interests worked themselves out over several decades and the resulting twists and turns and changing alliances are presented in some detail but, in a nutshell, the landed aristocracy, the traditional elite, came to have broadly similar interests to the slavery-defending plantation owners. As we have already noted, there was a considerable overlap in personnel anyway and, quite apart from immediate financial advantages, they shared a common identification with the existing political order and, of course, included the royal family in their ranks.
Increasingly, their interests and prejudices put them at odds with the rising industrial capitalists whose accelerating progress can be seen from a succession of landmark legal reforms: 1807, Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1832, the Great Reform Act, 1833, Abolition of Slavery, 1834, New Poor Law, 1846, Importation Act (Repeal of the Corn Laws) and also the Sugar Duties Act, which removed protection from sugar imports.
These legal changes constituted a qualitative development in the UK’s system of government. The 1832 Act, which introduced limited and property-based suffrage, for all its limitations, was the death-knell for the traditional elite’s control of Parliament which was then demonstrated by the Repeal of the Corn Laws. These had kept prices high to the advantage of the landowners, but the disadvantage of the industrialists who resented the consequent higher wages they had to pay.
These reforms, however, did not for a moment threaten the state’s defence of private property and, since it was the state that had deprived the slaveowners of their property, it was considered right and proper that the state (that is, taxpayers) should compensate them for their loss. In practice, this meant a payment of £20 million which was funded by Rothschild and Co buying £15 millions’ worth of government bonds (that is, debt) at 3% interest, a loan that was only finally paid off in 2015 – after total payments of £81 million in interest.
The sudden availability of large sums of capital from the compensation payments played an important role in the expansion of the capitalist system in the UK. The rapid spread of the railways in the 1830s and 1840s is just one example of many and together they financed the “workshop of the world” and the emergence of a consolidated ruling class.
And what of those who had been “freed”? They received precisely nothing, in fact worse than nothing because they were required to remain in their former owners’ service for four years, although this was now referred to as an “apprenticeship”.
The change in British law naturally made no difference to the fate of enslaved people in the USA’s southern states but Cushion, rightly, goes to some lengths to show how British capital continued to benefit from slavery, particularly via the cotton trade, until its final abolition during the US Civil War. In the course of his explanation he points out that what drove that war was not opposition to slavery but competition for the land opened up by the genocide of the Indigenous people of the mid-West. Plantation owners wanted it because their monoculture of cotton had depleted the soil, Northerners wanted it for commercial agriculture.
The Civil War also impacted Britain with much of the capitalist class, especially the cotton manufacturers, siding with the South while the working class, including the textile workers of Lancashire, despite the hardship caused by the shortage of cotton, supported the North. The campaign in support of the North played a significant role in the re-emergence of the organised labour movement after the defeat of the Chartists. Indeed, it provided the background to the founding of the International Working Men’s Association, the First International, which instructed Karl Marx to write to Abraham Lincoln, congratulating him on his electoral victory.
Against any suggestion that slave production was quite separate from capitalism, Marx insisted, “where commercial speculations figure from the start and production is intended for the world market, the capitalist mode of production exists, although only in a formal sense, since the slavery of Negroes precludes free wage labour, which is the basis of capitalist production. But the business in which slaves are used is conducted by capitalists…”.
Even after the ending of slavery in the West Indies, the plantation owners expected to be able to exploit “their” workforce and this ensured that both ongoing repression and ongoing resistance formed a central part of the legacy of slavery referred to in the book’s title. Nevertheless, times were changing and so was British capitalism.
The sudden injection of huge sums of capital into British industry also had an impact on the further reaches of the British Empire. Cotton production, for example, was redirected to Egypt while sugar was transferred to India, to the great detriment of the peoples of both regions. These moves were examples of a general shift in the emphasis of the Empire towards the East and this can also justifiably be seen as part of slavery’s legacy.
Certainly, the impact of the British was much the same wherever they went. With the victory of the industrialist wing of the British bourgeoisie, “Free Trade” became the war cry, justifying, for example, the destruction of the Indian textile industry and the waging of the Opium Wars on China. Similarly, the settling and development of Australia and New Zealand drew not only on the wealth that originated in the Caribbean but also on the racism that justified the seizure of lands and the effective marginalisation of the indigenous peoples.
One aspect of the legacy of the slave trade that tends to be overlooked is its impact on the African societies from which they were abducted. The sheer scale of the loss of population, numbering millions, coupled with the measures taken to ensure their enslavement, guaranteed the disruption and retardation of development, especially in West Africa. The resulting impoverishment paved the way for the “scramble for Africa” through which virtually the entire continent was seized by one or other of the European powers. This is quite rightly referred to but is surely worth a book of its own.
The concluding chapter deals with the implications of the slave trade for today. This necessarily covers many aspects but one central theme is reparation. While it is clearly impossible to put a price on the suffering slavery entailed, some idea of just how important a factor it was in the building of the British economy is given by a calculation of the total sum “saved” by capital by enslavement rather than employing wage labour. By taking average English wages over the 220 or so years before emancipation and multiplying it by the average recorded number of slaves a figure, in modern currency, of £2,500 billion is produced.
That is only the beginning of it – the costs in terms of the social, environmental and cultural, let alone economic, consequences in the West Indies are quite literally incalculable. To them must be added the effects of racism and low wages for those descendants of slaves who were encouraged to emigrate to the “mother country” after the Second World War.
Such considerations prompt the question, “How could the debt be repaid?” – and to whom exactly? One approach, which recognises the role played by slavery in the formation of still active corporations, is to demand compensation from them along the lines of the calculation outlined above, with the form of the reparations being decided by the descendants themselves.
More generally, the point is made that reparation, “… means implementing measures of compensation at different levels, including the call for apology and recognition, but also for collective investments that would address the structural inequalities and racial discrimination that people of African heritage still suffer, both in Europe and North America, as well as in the Caribbean, in terms of accessing education, health systems, income, housing and labour markets, to name just a few.”
The justice of such goals is not in question but, as Cushion goes on to point out, any discussion of policies that might go some way towards achieving them always takes place within the existing, capitalist, framework. Although it is obvious there would have to be a sustained transfer of wealth from the corporations and states that benefited most from slavery, with the UK foremost among them, the experience with proposals to combat climate change underlines the adamant refusal by those responsible to part with a penny of their capital for “the common good”. With regard to slavery specifically, their attitude is typified by the refusal of Sir Richard Drax, today’s owner, to hand over Drax Hall to the people of Barbados.
That, essentially, sums up the reality of the present situation; the legacy of slavery in the British Empire is a thoroughly shameful one, but perhaps the worst and, unfortunately, the longest lasting legacy, is the British ruling class.
