Abstract
While the point might be argued for the eighteenth century, there can be no doubt that in the nineteenth British influence over the West Indian colonies was considerably greater than that of the West Indies over Britain. The abolition of first the slave trade, then slavery itself, and finally the sugar duties were only three events which shaped colonial development. Yet we should not allow this to obscure the fact that the slave colonies had important effects on the British perception of their own society. Reversing the traditional direction of examination of nineteenth century cause and effect makes it possible to gain new insights into the attitude of mind which resulted in abolition. It also allows us to highlight some of the contradictions inherent in the world view of the metropolitan propertied class of the early nineteenth century — contradictions which eventually brought about changes in that world view.
The author wishes to thank Stanley L. Engerman for valuable suggestions both before and after his reading of an earlier version of this essay. The remaining errors are of course the author’s own.
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Notes and References
See David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Ithaca, 1975);
Roger T. Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760–1810 (1975);
Seymour Drescher, Econocide (Pittsburgh, 1977);
Howard Temperley, ‘Capitalism, Slavery and Ideology’, Past & Present, 75 (1977) 94–118.
For a partial synthesis of these and a development of the argument in this paragraph see Stanley L. Engerman and David Eltis, ‘Economic Aspects of the Abolition Debate’, in Seymour Drescher and Christine Bolt (eds) Anti-Slavery, Religion and Reform (Folkestone, 1980).
Seymour Drescher, ‘Capitalism and Abolition’, in Roger T. Anstey and P. E. H. Hair (eds), Liverpool, the African Slave Trade and Abolition (Liverpool, 1976) pp. 167–95.
James Walvin, ‘The Public Campaign in England against Slavery, 1787–1834’, in David Eltis and James Walvin (eds), The Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade (Madison, Wisconsin, 1981), pp. 63–79.
David Brion Davis, ‘The Emergence of Immediatism in British and American Anti-Slavery Thought’, Mississippi Valley Historical Review, XLIX (1962–3) 209–30, in particular pp. 219–22.
Thomas More Madden (ed.), The Memoirs (chiefly autobiographical) from 1798 to 1886 of Richard Robert Madden (1891) pp. 95–7.
The issue addressed by David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, 1966).
Drescher, Econocide, pp. 142–86; W. A. Green, ‘The Planter Class and British West Indian Sugar Production before and after Emancipation’, EcHR, XXVI (1973) 448–63.
In the continuing debate on the US slave economy, the latest chapter of which was triggered by Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross (Boston, 1974), the high efficiency of the southern plantation relative to the northern farm appears to have been accepted by all participants. Differences remain on the origin of the efficiency but no one is arguing that the planter would have been better off with free labour.
See Paul David et al., Reckoning with Slavery (New York, 1976) pp. 202–23;
Fogel and Engerman, ‘Explaining the Relative Efficiency of Slave Agriculture in the Antebellum South’, American Economic Review, LXVII (1977) 275–96 and replies by Donald F. Schaeffer and Mark D. Schmitz, Paul A. David and Peter Temin, and Gavin Wright, ibid., LXIX (1979) 208–26. An additional element of the northern critique of the southern economy not present in the British case was the South’s failure to industrialise.
See Eugene D. Genovese and Elizabeth Fox Genovese, ‘The Slave Economies in Political Perspective’, Journal of American History, vol. 66, no. 1 (June 1979) 7–23. Abolitionist explanations of planter behaviour were usually given in terms of the ‘passions of man being excited’ by the exercise of supreme power to the point where the planter could not discern where his best interests lay.
Reginald Coupland, Wilberforce, a Narrative (Oxford, 1923) pp. 405–46.
A. W. Coats, ‘Changing Attitudes to Labour in the mid Eighteenth Century’, EcHR, II (1958–9) 35–51; Stanley L. Engerman, ‘Coerced and Free Labor: Property Rights and the development of the Labor Force’ (forthcoming).
Undated memorandum in PRO CO 320/1 cited in W. L. Burn, Emancipation and Apprenticeship in the British West Indies (1937) p. 105.
Sturge and Harvey, p. 51. See also William Knibb’s evidence in Report of the Select Committee on West Indian Colonies (PP 1842, XIII) p. 422,
and Philip Wright’s discussion in Knibb the Notorious (1973) pp. 229–30. Mary Turner, however, following Hinton’s lead in his Memoir of William Knibb (1847) p. 207, suggests that the Baptists envisaged a newly structured economy built on small proprietors in Slaves and Missionaries (forthcoming). But note that prosperity was still linked indissolubly with market participation even though Knibb acknowledged the possibility of a decline in sugar exports (Knibb to Sturge, 5 Jan 1839; Hinton, p. 310).
D. L. Murray, The West Indies and the Development of Colonial Government 1801–1834 (Oxford, 1965) pp. 104–5, 141–2 and 153–4; J. Stephen, The Slavery of the British.
Henry Brougham, An Enquiry into the Colonial Policy of the European Powers (Edinburgh, 1803) vol. II, pp. 507–18. This was an extension of the stages model widely current at the time — see the discussion in Philip D. Curtin, Image of Africa, British Ideas and Action 1780–1850 (Madison, Wisconsin, 1964) pp. 63–5.
William Taylor, Report from the Select Committee on the Extinction … (PP 1831–2) p. 29. For evidence of this view see Sturge and Harvey, p. 72; James Cropper, The Interests of the Country and the Prosperity of the West Indian Planters mutually secured by the immediate abolition of slavery … (1833) p. 25; Woodville K. Marshall (ed.) The Colthurst Journal (New York, 1977) p. 166; Report from the Select Committee on the Laws and Usages … (PP (Lords), 1831–2) p. 617.
For a later exposition see W. Neilson Hancock, The Abolition of Slavery Considered with reference to the state of the West Indies since Emancipation (Dublin, 1852) pp. 5–7.
Report from the Select Committee on the Extinction … (PP 1831–2, XX) pp. 151–2, 161 and 170. See Buxton’s speech in PD, 3rd series, XXVIII (19 June 1835) Col. 924 and Governor Sir Charles Metcalfe’s summary of the issue cited in Douglas G. Hall, Free Jamaica, 1838–65: An Economic History (New Haven, 1959) pp. 158–9.
The best summaries of British emancipation plans are in Lowell J. Ragatz, The Fall of the Planter Class in the British West Indies, 1763–1833 (New York, 1928) pp. 449–52 and Burn, pp. 107–14.
See in particular John Davy, The West Indies, Before and Since Slave Emancipation (1854) and
William G. Sewell, The Ordeal of Free Labor in the British West Indies (New York, 1862).
The best general survey is William A. Green, British Slave Emancipation: The Sugar Colonies and the Great Experiment, 1830–65 (Oxford, 1976), but for outstanding surveys of individual colonies see Hall, for Jamaica, and
Alan H. Adamson, Sugar without Slaves (New Haven, 1972) for British Guiana.
N. Deerr, The History of Sugar (1949–50) pp. 193–203. For a summary of Deerr’s figures and more recent work see Stanley L. Engerman, ‘Notes on the Patterns of Economic Growth in the British North American Colonies in the Seventeenth, Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, to appear in Paul Bairoch and Maurice Levy Leboyer, Disparities in Economic Development since the Industrial Revolution.
Macpherson makes the distinction between a market economy where the self-employed sell their produce on the open market, and a market society where labour itself is a marketable factor of production: C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford, 1962) p. 48. Most abolitionists would probably have been happy with the former if it had been consistent with the maintenance of exports.
For the development of internal markets see Sidney Mintz, ‘Slavery and the Rise of Peasantries’, Historical Reflections, VI (1979) 213–42 and his Caribbean Transformations (Chicago, 1974) pp. 180–224;
Gisela Eisner, Jamaica, 1830–1930: A Study in Economic Growth (Manchester, 1961).
For production of a minor export staple see J. S. Handler, ‘The History of Arrowroot and the Origin of Peasantries in the British West Indies’, Journal of Caribbean History, II (1971) 59–83.
Philip D. Curtin, Two Jamaicas (Cambridge, Mass., 1955) pp. 122–57;
Douglas G. Hall, ‘The Flight from the Estates Reconsidered: the British West Indies, 1838–42’, Journal of Caribbean History, X (1978) 8–34; Brian W. Blouet, ‘Land Policies in Trinidad, 1838–50’, ibid., VII (1976) 43–59; Woodville K. Marshall, ‘The Ex-Slaves as Wage Labourers on the Sugar Estates in the British Windward Islands, 1838–1846’, paper presented to the 1979 ACH meetings, Curacao; Adamson, pp. 34–56; the most convenient survey is in Report of the Select Committee on the West Indian Colonies (PP 1842, XIII) in particular pp. 1, 3, 46, 93, 116–17, 121 and 299–303.
Howard Temperley, British Anti-slavery, 1833–1870 (Columbia, SC, 1972) pp. 121–36;
Christine Bolt, The Anti-Slavery Movement and Reconstruction (Oxford, 1969) pp. 1–25.
The Colonial Office commitment to maximising sugar output lasted till the 1880s. See William A. Green, ‘James Stephen and British West India Policy, 1834–1847’, Caribbean Studies, XIII (1972) 33–56 for a discussion of the harder official line of the 1840s.
E. M. Davis to Elizabeth Pease, 15 Feb 1842, in Clare Taylor, British and American Abolitionists (Edinburgh, 1974) p. 167; Temperley, p. 157.
The emergence of this group which may be traced back to James Cropper and before him William Roscoe and his Jacobinical friends (see Kenneth Charlton, ‘James Cropper and Liverpool’s Contribution to the Anti-Slavery Movement’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, CXXIII (1972) 57–80) is one of the most striking developments in British abolitionism between the 1780s and the 1840s. It is not that Tory dominance of the movement concurrently disappeared but that the movement could always lay claim to the sympathies of the economically progressive, whether they were Tory, Whig or radical. In the 1780s the nexus of this group was Tory, by the 1840s it was located predominantly amongst the latter two.
Henry George Grey, The Colonial Policy of Lord John Russell’s Administration (1853) vol. II, p. 303. Grey was probably the most doctrinaire ‘moderniser’ to hold cabinet rank at this time. He was a convinced abolitionist, of course, but when Undersecretary for the Colonies in 1832 (as Lord Howick) he advocated the harshest of the emancipation plans considered by the Colonial Office. Ten years later he attempted to get the 1842 Select Committee to include resolutions incorporating similar measures in its report. His record as Colonial Secretary, 1846–52, is described in Adamson, pp. 50–5.
Gilbert Osofsky, ‘Abolitionists, Irish Immigrants and Romantic Nationalism’, American Historical Review, LXXX (1975) 889–912;
Carl Siracusa, A Mechanical People; Perceptions of the Industrial Order in Massachusetts, 1815–1880 (Middletown, Conn., 1979) pp. 144–8;
Peter F. Walker, Moral Choices: Memory, Desire and Imagination in Nineteenth-Century American Abolition (Baton Rouge, 1978) pp. 15–20.
James Haughton, Should the holders of slave property receive compensation on the abolition of slavery (Dublin, 1853) pp. 1–13.
Haughton, pp. 1–8; W. Neilson Hancock, pp. 10–14; John Candler and G. W. Alexander, The British West Indies in 1850 (1851);
[W. E. Forster], ‘British Philanthropy and Jamaica Distress’, Westminster Review, LIX (1853) 171–89;
Charles Buxton, Slavery and Freedom in the British West Indies (1860).
Douglas Lorimer, Colour, Class and the Victorians (New York, 1978) pp. 127–8.
For earlier and more private abolitionist criticism of the Jamaican labourer see Lewis Tappan to John Scoble, 31 July 1844, in Annie Abel and F. J. Klingberg, ‘The Correspondence of Lewis Tappan and others with the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society’, Journal of Negro History, XII (1929) 317.
W. Emanual Riviere, ‘Labour Shortage in the British West Indies after Emancipation’, Journal of Caribbean History, IV (1974) 10; Stanely L. Engerman, ‘Economic Aspects of the Adjustments to Emancipation in the United States and the British West Indies’ (forthcoming).
Herman Merivale, Lectures on Colonization and the Colonies (1861) p. 303.
Report of the Select Committee on the West Indian Colonies (PP 1842, XIII) p. iv. For the benefits of abolition as perceived by American abolitionists see James M. McPherson, ‘Was West Indian Emancipation a Success? The Abolitionist Argument During the American Civil War’, Caribbean Quarterly, IV (1964) 28–34.
Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians (1961) p. 3.
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© 1982 Michael Craton, Seymour Drescher, David Eltis, Betty Fladeland, David Geggus, B. W. Higman, C. Duncan Rice, James Walvin
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Eltis, D. (1982). Abolitionist Perceptions of Society after Slavery. In: Walvin, J. (eds) Slavery and British Society 1776–1846. Problems in Focus Series. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16775-3_9
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