Abstract
In his landmark study, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (1975), David Brion Davis linked the first two decades of the anti-slavery movement to increasing domestic concern in Britain about the problems of under-employment, labour discipline, and labour management. Scrutinizing the writings of many leading abolitionists, including prominent Quakers, Davis argues that they were less concerned with how emancipated slaves might express their capacity for freedom than with devising substitute schemes for the labour discipline of slavery.1 This essay examines the imperial dream, popular with some abolitionists, of making the transatlantic slave trade redundant by setting up free plantations in Africa to raise West Indian crops. While the aim of this scheme was to end slavery by undermining the sugar islands’ economy, there were of course commercial motives for developing Africa’s rich natural resources. Furthermore, linked to these commercial prospects were speculations on both sides of the slavery debate as to how Africa might compensate Britain for the financial loss of its American colonies.
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Notes
David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (London: Cornell University Press, 1975), pp. 358, 455, 30.
Henry Smeathman, Plan of a Settlement to be made near Sierra Leona, on the Grain Coast ofA frica (London: Stockdale, 1786).
‘Copy of two Letters addressed to Dr. Knowles, on the Rice Trade of Africa. By Dr. Smeathman’, The New-Jerusalem Magazine, or a Treasury of Celestial, Spiritual, and Natural, Knowledge: By Several Members of the London Universal Society for Promotion of the NEW CHURCH (London: Printed for the Society, 1790), 279–94 (p. 290); dated 21 July 1783; hereafter abbreviated to Smeathman to Knowles, New-Jerusalem Magazine. Smeathman’s transatlantic ambitions were later to be achieved by Thomas Peters, an ex-slave and loyalist soldier who led his people to Sierra Leone from Nova Scotia.
An account of Smeathman’s life was given by his sister-in-law Elizabeth to John Coakley Lettsom, in a letter of 3 January 1787; see Thomas Joseph Pettigrew, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the late John Coakley Lettsom, with a Selection of his Correspondence, 3 vols (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1817), II, pp. 252–62.
On Smeathman’s role in this, see John Castles, ‘Observations on the Sugar Ants. In a Letter from John Castles, Esq. To Lieut. Gen Melvill, F.R.S.’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 80 (1790), 346–58 (pp. 349–50).
For a recent reference to Smeathman’s work on termites, see Edward O. Wilson, The Insect Societies (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1971).
Stephen Braidwood quotes Hanway in Black Poor and White Philanthropists: London’s Blacks and the Foundation of the Sierra Leone Settlement, 1786–1791 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1994), p. 101.
Smeathman to Cumberland, 10 October 1783, British Library, Cumberland Papers, Vol. IV, 1783, 1784, BL Add. 36494, fo. 168.
I take the term ‘natal alienation’ from Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 7–8.
Robert Southey to Grosvenor Bedford, 14 December 1793, in Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, ed. Charles Cuthbert Southey, 6 vols (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1849–50), II, p. 196.
‘Some Account of the Termites, which are found in Africa and other hot climates. In a Letter from Mr. Henry Smeathman, of Clement’s Inn, to Sir Joseph Banks, Bart. P.R.S.’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 71 (1781), 139–92; hereafter abbreviated in text to ‘Some Account’. For Banks’s admiration of weaver ant colonies in New Holland, see The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks: The Australian Journey, ed. Paul Brunton (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1998), pp. 93–5.
In the unsettled 1780s, for instance, it was reported that instead of being neuter, all working or common bees were ‘females in disguise’, a discovery leading to the ‘new and singular’ doctrine that it was from ‘common’ eggs alone that queens were reproduced; see review of the new edn of Chambers’s and Rees’s Cyclopwdia: or, an Universal Dictionaty of the Arts and Sciences, in Critical Review; or, TheAnnals ofLiterature, 65 (Jan. 1788), 4–5.
The Works of Virgil: ContainingHis Pastorals, Georgics, and Aeneis. Translated into English Verse by Mr. Dryden, 2nd edn (London: Jacob Tonson, 1698), p. 186.
Robert Southey, unsigned review of P. Colquhoun’s Propositions for ameliorating the Condition of the Poor [Treatise on Indigence, 1806], in Quarterly Review, 8, 16 (December 1812), 319–56 (p. 355).
See Paul Erdmann Isert, Letters on West Africa and the Slave Trade: Paul Erdmann Isert’s ‘Journey to Guinea and the Caribbean Islands in Columbia (1788)’, trans. and ed. S. A. Winsnes (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 1992), p. 149. Isert gives a detailed account of how these marriages worked in his ‘Ninth Letter’, pp. 156–7.
Smeathman to Drury, 5 March 1774 [Extracts from Smeathman’s Letters], Uppsala University Library, MS D.26, p. 37.
Henry Smeathman to Joseph Banks, Bananas, 12 April 1773, Waller Manuscript Collection, Uppsala University Library, gb-01577, p. 5a [fo. 162/p. 9].
For Banks in the 1770s as both ‘The Fly Catching Macaroni’ and the serious man of empire, see Gillian Russell, ‘An “Entertainment of Oddities”: Fashionable Sociability and the Pacific in the 1770s’, in A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840, ed. Kathleen Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
For the link between scientific observation and sexual voyeurism, see Alan Bewell, ‘On the Banks of the South Sea’, in Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Representations ofNature, ed. David Philip Miller and Peter Hanns Reill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 173–93.
Fothergill to Linnaeus, April 1774, in Chain of Friendship: Selected Letters of Dr John Fothergill of London, 1735–1780, ed. B. C. Corner and C. C. Booth (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 409.
Dru Drury, printed description of his entomological collection in 1788, quoted in Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 215.
Linnaeus in 1737, quoted in David C. Stuart, The Plants that Shaped our Gardens (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. x.
Eugene Marais, The Soul of the White Ant [1937], trans. Winifred de Kok (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973).
See William Dickson and Joshua Steele, Mitigation of Slavery, in two Parts (London: R. and A. Taylor; Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1814), p. 454. Also, ‘I attribute all the extreme good health I enjoyed by intervals in Africa, with the soundness of my constitution at this hour, to the great quantity of hard labour I then sustained’ (Smeathman to Knowles, New-Jerusalem Magazine, p. 292).
Kathleen Wilson, ‘The Good, the Bad, and the Impotent: Imperialism and the Politics of Identity in Georgian England’, in The Consumption of Culture, 1600–1800: Image, Object, Text, ed. A. Bermingham and John Brewer (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 237–62 (p. 242).
Bernard Mandeville, ‘Sixth Dialogue’, The Fable of the Bees, ed. F. B. Kaye, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), II, p. 284.
John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. A. Fowler (London: Longman, 1971), VII, 485–9.
See ‘Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America’, in J. Hector St John de Creveceeur, Letters from an American Farmer: and Sketches ofEighteenth-Century America, more Letters from an American Farmer, ed. Albert E. Stone (New York: New American Library, 1963), p. 247; hereafter cited as Letters. The chapter ‘Ant-hill Town’ was not published until 1925.
Maurice Maeterlinck believed that termite civilization, ‘although fierce, sinister and often repulsive’, was superior to that of bees, ants, and even man himself; see The Life of the White Ant, trans. A. Sutro (London: Allen and Unwin, 1927), pp. 18–19.
Dryden, Works of Virgil (1698), pp. 269, 363.
The first volume of Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire appeared in 1776.
Edward O. Wilson, ‘Little Things that Run the World’, Conservation Biology, 1, 4 (1987), 344–6.
James Thomson, The Seasons and The Castle oflndolence, ed. James Sambrook (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), pp. 159–60.
Goldsmith, Deserted Village, 391; Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 3 vols (New York: Modern Library Edition, 1995), II, p. 1219.
Creveceeur, Letters, p. 247. In his dedication to Letters from an American Farmer, Creveceeur refers to the provinces of North America as ‘the cradle of future nations’, p. 29.
Goldsmith, Deserted Village, 394. For British fascination with imperialist accumulation, and the association of women with empire, see Laura Brown, ‘The Romance of Empire: Oroonoko and the Trade in Slaves’, in The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature, ed. Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown (New York: Methuen, 1987), pp. 197–221.
George Cumberland, ‘To the Editor of the Monthly Magazine. Mr. Cumberland’s Plan for the Protection and Restoration of Females’, Monthly Magazine, 37 (1 April 1814), 199–203 (p. 200).
Hester Lynch Piozzi, Observations and Reflections made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, 2 vols (London: A. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1789), I, p. 127.
J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 109.
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Coleman, D. (2004). Henry Smeathman, the Fly-Catching Abolitionist. In: Carey, B., Ellis, M., Salih, S. (eds) Discourses of Slavery and Abolition. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230522602_10
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