From the end of the 17th century right up to the 1850s Britain was involved in the international slave trade. And in parts of the British Empire, it was bound up with slavery itself. While there are many episodes in history in which the country can take pride, and managed to do the right thing, this is emphatically not one of them. Not only is it a lasting stain on Britain’s reputation. But 150 years of the country’s involvement in slavery has had long term political, cultural and social ramifications, leaving a legacy with which Britain has yet fully to come to terms.
There are myths attached to the subject, of course. Slave
ownership involved not just a few hundred rich merchants based in Liverpool,
Glasgow and Bristol, but nearly 50,000 people. And while the slave trade was
banned by Parliament in 1807, slavery itself was not outlawed until after 1833.
Even then exceptions meant there were British slave owners in the Empire until
the 1850s. You could even argue that the later use of indentured labour in
South Africa, Guyana (formerly British Guiana) and Fiji was just another form
of slavery, though with better conditions.
British slavery background
Of course slavery dates back far earlier, to pre-Roman
and then Anglo Saxon times. And indeed, throughout Britain’s history people
were carried into slavery from these islands by a succession of raiders like
the Vikings and Barbary pirates. The ownership and use of slaves lasted until
after the Norman Conquest in Britain itself, but it was revived in the Age of
Discovery with slaves taken from Africa to the Americas. The Elizabethan pirate
John Hawkins is recognised as the ‘pioneer of the English slave trade’.
John Hawkins
In the late 17th century James II founded
the Royal Africa Company. It transported more slaves from Africa to the
Americas than anybody else during the transatlantic slave trade. British
involvement would now take off. With the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht British slave
traders were awarded under the contract Asiento, permission to trade 144,000 slaves a year to Spanish America. From then on
the numbers involved increased vastly. The trade reached its peak year in 1792.
Of the huge number - 12m - of slaves transported from
Africa, about 6m were sent to Brazil and other Latin American countries. The
numbers for the Caribbean were fewer, at about 5m, of which maybe 2m went to
the British Caribbean. Others went to the French, Spanish and Dutch colonies. Britain
was clearly the dominant player. It’s estimated that up to 40% of all slaves
sent to the Americas were carried in British ships. The conditions were
dreadful and the cruelty involved was shocking.
Toward abolition
From the mid-18th century there was a
growing tide of opinion in Britain to end the slave trade. But it took 50 years to achieve this given the high numbers who were benefiting, plus a lack of parliamentary heft. The
opposition was led by non-conformists, especially Quakers, who under the Test
Act could not become MPs. The Church of England was either compliant or dragged
its feet. Probably the leading figure among abolitionists was Thomas Clarkson,
a brilliant Cambridge essayist and pamphleteer. His energy (covering 35,000
miles on horseback in the 1780s) in publicising the evil trade and rousing
local oppositionist groups was key in raising awareness.
Slaves chained to be moved
Clarkson’s group, the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, ran a national movement to mobilise public opinion. They persuaded the Anglican MP William Wilberforce to introduce his first bill in parliament in 1791. Motions in favour of abolition were introduced almost every year, but Parliament refused to pass them. Then war with France effectively put things on hold. The campaign revived in 1804 and Clarkson returned with renewed energy and enthusiasm. He successfully concentrated on winning over MPs to back the cause and the slave trade was finally abolished by Parliament in 1807.
Abolition not only affected the trade in British and colonial based vessels, but their supply and fitting by British workers. Sailors could not man the ships nor could these be insured. Britain took on the role of international policeman as naval squadrons were sent to patrol the West African coast and the Caribbean searching for slavers. The Navy bombarded slaving settlements. Britain encouraged other forms of trade such as palm oil. It signed treaties with slave trading countries like Spain, the Netherlands and Portugal leading to the gradual suppression of the trade in slaves with the Americas.
No legislation was ever passed in England to legalise slavery, unlike in Portugal, for instance. And successive court cases declined to recognise it, ordering the freeing of individuals under habeas corpus. By the mid-18th century there may have been 10,000 freed or runaway African slaves in London. Some of them were prominent in society, like Ignatius Sancho and Olaudah Equiano.
Scale of compensation
Once the trade was abolished it took another 25 years
for slavery itself to be made illegal. This happened throughout the British
Empire under the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act, when 800,000 Africans, the legal
property of Britain’s slave owners, were formally freed. The Act provided for financial compensation of £20m from
the British taxpayer to the slave owners. This huge sum is equivalent to nearly
£20bn today and probably closer to £100bn in per capita terms given the far higher population. Amounting to
an eye watering 40% of total 1834 government spending, the compensation bill was
the largest bailout in British history until that of the banks in 2009.
The records of the Slave Compensation Commission, set
up to administer and evaluate payment claims, are now being examined by a
special University College London team. Their detailed work shows that an
astonishing 46,000 British people were involved. In per capita terms the highest
numbers were in Scotland. It was mainly ordinary people - tradesmen, country
vicars and widows - who were implicated. Just one reason why change took so
long. A pretty poor deal for the slaves, too. Says historian David Olusoga,
“Not only did the slaves receive nothing …they were compelled to provide 45
hours of unpaid labour each week for their former masters, for a further four
years after their supposed liberation. In effect the enslaved paid part of the
bill for their own manumission”.
The scheme’s biggest beneficiary was John Gladstone,
father of the Victorian prime minister. He was paid £107,000, the modern
equivalent of £90m, for the 2508 slaves he owned across nine plantations. The
Bishop of Exeter was involved, too. Beneficiaries weren’t just slave owners but
those whose business interests derived from slavery, like sugar processing and
textiles. There were numerous smaller fry, as well. Many middle class owners
had a few slaves but no land in the Caribbean. They rented their ‘property’ out
to plantation owners in work gangs. Out of sight out of mind, perhaps, and 3000
miles away. One reason the whole business could so readily escape scrutiny.
Collective discomfort
Many people seem uncomfortable with this aspect of
British history even though it has long been taught in schools. It undermines a
preferred heroic national narrative. Accordingly they have wanted it swept
under the carpet or somehow airbrushed away. At the 2021 centenary
of the Tulsa racial massacre, President Biden put it well. “We can’t just learn
what we want to know - and not what we should
know”. In Britain there has been absurd and infantile criticism of those
wanting to ‘re-write our history’. But isn't that actually what historians do?
William Wilberforce
Of course you can’t judge people of 250 years ago by current attitudes and standards. Few in the early 18th century would
have seen much wrong with lifting millions of people they viewed as racially
inferior from Africa to work on plantations in the Americas or the Caribbean. In
fact the slaves were sold to the traders by Africans - in the 1750s King Tegbesu
of Dahomey alone was earning £250,000 a year from selling people into slavery.
It’s also true that Britain was not the first country
involved in the slave trade. Portuguese and Spanish ships were transporting
Africans to the Americas from the 15th century. Arab traders were
active in the other direction right into the 20th century. And it’s
also true that after the slave trade in the British Empire was ended, the Royal
Navy confronted the practice not only where British ships were involved, but in
the case of other countries too. Regular patrols off the Bight of Benin were
effective in reducing the trade.
Forgetting slavery
Still, for ages the story of British slavery was buried. 18th
century families who grew rich on the trade or from selling slave-produced
sugar concealed an uncomfortable past. Olusoga is clear. “Few acts of
collective forgetting have been as thorough and as successful as the erasing of
slavery from Britain’s ‘island story’…the abolitionist crusade, first against
the slave trade, and then slavery itself, has become a figleaf behind which the
larger, longer and darker history of slavery has been concealed”.
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