The two day colloquium on 30 and 31 March Emancipation, Slave
Ownership and the Remaking of the British Imperial World organised by the
Legacies of British Slave-ownership project based at University College London
was very stimulating.
The speakers were very interesting and for once at
a conference there was plenty of time for discussion and dialogue. But there
was a tension within it. We did not learn much about the detailed findings
emerging from the Legacies project itself, with which I have had close dealings
since its start. This is because the sheer scale of the material means that the
interactive database is not yet ready to go public. Despite the fact that the
funding ends at the end of May the team: Catherine Hall, Nick Draper, Keith
Mclelland, Ben Mechen and Rachel Lang
will be working over the summer to get the database live. The lack of a
detailed summary of findings did mean that for many the discussions were not
rooted in a solid base of empirical evidence, and given the multi-disciplinary
and international nature of the audience, including many non-academics, there
was an assumption that everyone knew a considerable amount more than they did,
including many of the books and writers referred to. In my from the floor contributions I kept trying to get the link
back to the work of the Legacies Project.
There are key questions about the next stages of
the Legacies Project:
·
Once
the funding has ceased how will the data base be maintained as an interactive
resource?
·
Does
the analysis of the data alter any of the findings and conclusions in Nick
Draper’s book which underpins the Project?
·
In
particular is Nick’s incisive conclusion still underpinned by the additional
work of the Project:
'... British colonial slavery
was without a doubt privately profitable, at some periods and in some
colonies spectacularly so. Those profits were extracted in the first instance
from the appropriation of the labour of the enslaved. But the profits for
owners of the enslaved in British society were also sustained by a system of
protective tariffs under which higher duties were paid by the British people on
foreign-grown tropical produce, especially sugar. These duties as a whole in
turn helped fund the expansion of the British state while shielding the
wealthier sections of the population from more progressive taxation regimes. A
section of the British elite thus utilised its political influence for more
than two centuries to defend its interest at the presence of the enslaved and
at the expense of the mass of the British people. (Editor's emphasis.) When
that system was brought down, by the combined effect of resistance of the
enslaved and popular political activity by abolitionists, the slave-owners
received one final transfer payment in the form of slave-compensation.' (p.
14-15)
·
Can
the funding be found to enable to team to analyse the Cape Colony and Mauritius
compensation records?
What are the Legacies?
There
are a whole range of legacies cutting across economics, politics and culture
around questions such as:
·
What
did those who received the compensation do with the money: luxury expenditure,
capital investment, land purchase?
·
What
were the labour control systems implemented in the various islands of the
British West Indies?
·
Which
owners remained in business in the West Indies?
·
What
were the reactions of the apprenticed and then freed slaves and the imported
indentured labour?
·
What
were the attitudes towards Africans and people of African heritage and towards indigenous
peoples elsewhere in the world?
·
What
was the effectiveness of Royal Navy action against slave trading?
·
What
happened to the slaves captured by the Royal Navy?
·
How
did the moral evangelical wing of the abolition movement influence the
development of Empire policies?
·
What
were the continuing influences of the West India lobby on the development of
Empire policies?
·
Why
did the Government tolerate the involvement post 1838 of British investors and
firms in other slave economies?
·
How
was the British involvement in slavery re-written in history writing and
fiction?
·
Why
did the Government allow the adoption of free trade principles in such a way
that they benefitted other slave economies?
·
Why
were the advocates of free labour unable to prevent the unqualified adoption of
free trade principles?
·
How
did slavery and abolition effect the Black presence in Britain?
·
What
have the long term legacies of slavery in the British West Indies?
·
Is
there a case for reparations/compensation to the descendants of Africans
kidnapped and sold into New World slavery by the British State, by the
successors to companies and descendants of families involved?
The Nature of the Slavery
Business
Through
the discussions it became clearer that the experience and operation of chattel
plantation slavery differed between different countries, and especially between
islands in the Caribbean. The experience of the small islands was often very
different to Jamaica, Barbados and Trinidad. Therefore there needs to be
considerable caution about the generalisations made on the basis on individual island
analysis.
There
were different dynamics, including geography and fertility, as well as the
balance of population between slave, free coloured and white.
Similarly,
although British was meshed in the slavery business and gave state sanction
until 1807 in relation to the slave trade and up to 1833 in relation to
slavery, the way in which the British elite, the aristocracts, the landowners
and the businessmen related to the business was highly complex. Like all
capitalist activity there were those who were successful, those who were not,
and those who profited from the failure of others. If we treat each branch of the business as
separate then we can draw the wrong conclusions. Chris Evan’s paper on Wales at
the Colloquium underpinned the need to understand that the engagement in the
slavery business took different forms, partly based on geography. Because of
its geographic position there is little evidence of direct slave trading from
North East ports, but what the work I have been involved in from 2007 on slavery and abolition in the North
East has shown is how the region’s elite and movers and shakers were involved
from the supply of shackles and hoes and coal and the establishment of the
South Sea Company through to plantation
ownership.
The Nature of Capitalism
We
need to remember that leading merchants had multiple interests. In the North
East Ralph Carr’s were in Barbados, the American colonies and Europe. Like him
other capitalist businessmen seized the opportunities where they presented themselves,
and this could be done flexibly as circumstances changed. Therefore for many
the ending of slavery and the replacement apprenticeship system in the British
West Indies in 1838 did not stop them taking advantages of new opportunities,
like investment in the capital infrastructure projects like the railways in
Britain, in Australia and in the slave economies in the USA, Central and Latin
America.
To
this day capitalism continues to move around the world to where the extraction
and maximization of profit is easiest and to exploit labour in many different
ways. Perhaps the more far seeing merchants involved in the West Indies trade
up to 1833 realised that it would be increasingly difficult to continue slavery
in the British West Indies given the ability of the abolition movement to
mobilise public opinion. It proved much more difficult to mobilise that opinion
in relation to the slavery businesses of other countries, especially once free
trade brought down prices of goods imported from them.
The Back Story
As
the compensation data is a snap shot in time, we need the back story on who
were the previous owners of plantations being claimed on. The N. East work has shown
that a former unknown major Newcastle based West India merchant, with diverse
investments in the Tyneside economy, bought out the interests of many small
owners in the early part of the 19thC. This eminence gris of Tyneside is John
Graham Clarke. But he was more than just an owner and investor. He had his own
fleet of ships going back and forth to the West Indies. He had close
connections with the powerful Barrett family in Jamaica. Edward Moulton Barrett married Clarke's
daughter Mary. Their daughter was the poetess Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose
close confidant was the family's free coloured Mary Trepsack who Nick has shown
received compensation of n.£227 for 11 slaves owned on the Barrett's Cinnamon
Hill and Cottage estates in Jamaica. Goodin Barrett sent over his six children
by his slave mistress to be looked after by Clarke. One of Clarke's sons John
Altham married Mary Elizabeth Parkinson, daughter of another prominent Jamaican
slave owner Leonard Parkinson. The dowry included 500 acres in Frocester,
Gloucestershire. When Clarke died in 1818 the inheritance was subject to a
family legal dispute in the Chancery Court which was not resolved for several
years.
Resident or Absentee Plantation
Owners
The
existence of these kind of connections and networks based on business and
marriage show that we should not see absentee and resident slave plantation
owners as completely separate interest groups. There is plenty of evidence of
travel in both directions. Sons were sent for education and daughters for marriage.
The North Easterners settling in South Carolina in the 18thC and playing an
important role into the American Revolution have been described as a Mafia. How
long their connections with Britain continued after the Revolution with
extended family and school and university friends has yet to be
researched.
Multiple Identities
One
of the strengths of Nick’s analysis is to uncover the multiple identities of
those involved in slave ownership. As he said at the Colloquium while most
supported the anti-reform and Tory party, many were pro-reform (e.g. Lord
Holland), and were able to work with abolitionist campaigners on matters of
mutual concern and agreement such as lobbying against the East India Company.
In Graham Clarke's case, James Losh, a leading Newcastle lawyer and abolitionist
campaigner, was a friend who gave evidence that Clarke had been in sane mind
when he signed a codicil to his will disinheriting one of his sons as a
waistral.
Biographies
It
will be important to build up the biographical sketches on the database. In his
book Nick cited George Fife Angas as a London based merchant with interests in
British Honduras and in colonising Australia. What Nick did not know at that
time is that the Angas family business had been built up in the North East and
that George was an active abolitionist and supporter of missionary efforts. The
Legacies Project organisers urge those with information such as this to add it
when the database is live. But it needs to be remembered that this will take a
lot of time for those of us who can supply information.
The
significance of some people only becomes apparent because of biographical,
family, local and regional studies. The Hankeys received attention in Nick’s study,
but not the whole extent of their involvements. They were involved in Grenada
sugar plantations with the Northumberland Trevelyans. That became clear from
the work in the North East in 2007 from the Trevelyan papers, which were cited
by Catherine Hall at the Colloquium.
Investment of Compensation
One
of the most important aspects of the project has been to try and see whether there was any direct
evidence of slave compensation money being invested in land and industry in
Britain. The Colloquium did not really give us a full picture of the Project’s
findings on this.
Since
the records give an undue emphasis to those with London addresses, again
without considerable research into their total land and property interests, it
is not clear how slave ownership wealth permeated property and estate building
and re-modellings elsewhere in Britain. Thinking about Chris Evans excellent
presentation how many owners of land in, but not resident in, Wales received
compensation? And the same goes for Ireland. And while we think about Wales it
is as well to remember that the free man of colour Nathaniel Wells of
Piercefield in Monmouthshire, received just over £1,400 in 1837 for 86
slaves. Many slave owners provided for
the sons and daughters of their liaisons with slaves and free coloured women.
As Nick’s study has shown the four children of Susanna Johnson, by Dugald
Campbell, were beneficiaries of annuities. In 1813 all four were in London.
They and a grand-daughter were compensation beneficiaries. The attorney William
Hinds Prescod settled money on his four free coloured children and their
mother, received compensation on 122 slaves, and three of the children received
compensation for one each. Although there are not many more examples Nick has
agreed to pull together the information about them to enable their stories to
be investigated.
Inter-connections With Other Slave Economies
Throughout
the Colloquium we were reminded of the other slavery business economies, of
Holland, France, Portugal and Spain. What was not reported was any further
analysis and conclusions on the compensation noted by Nick in his book as
having been given to Dutch, French and Spanish slave owners particularly in the
newer colonial acquisitions like Trinidad and British Guiana. This is not just
a reminder of the fact that the Caribbean had been an area of considerable
dispute and conflict, with islands changing hands at various times, but also a
reminder of the inter-links between the different European slave economies.
We
still need analysis of the compensation granted in Cape Colony and Mauritius.
It will add further to our understanding of the inter-links. This presumably will
require collaboration with the Dutch and the French.
In
one of my from the floor contributions |stressed the need for dialogue between
those studying the slavery businesses in each country to tease out the interconnections,
not just the military and naval rivalry, but also the business co-operation. It
should not be forgotten that when William of Orange invaded Britain the coup
d’etat of 1688 he brought with him 200 slaves who marched with his army from
the south west to London. What happened to them? How many stayed? Did they go
back to Holland or back to the Dutch slave colonies?
The Networks
There
was stress during the Colloquium on the crucial importance of networks. This is
illustrated in the North East work. Although
the Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica was nearly 3 decades after final
Emancipation, Nick’s analysis of the
compensation connections of members of the Governor Eyre Defence Fund is a
useful precedent for examining the memberships of a wide range of civil,
economic and political organisations to see the wider networks and influence of
those who were recipients themselves or were members of families that had
received compensation. The database is designed to enable networks and connections
to be searched, but the quality of the results will depend on the additional
biographical information put into it by others.
Racism
There
were a lot of assumptions made about the development of British racism without
a proper acknowledgement that like slavery and free trade these were subject
to dispute, and that not all British
were overtly ‘racist’.
Control of Labour
Slave
owners, managers and overseers always had the problem of how to ensure the
slaves worked. Punishment and cruelty were usually the remedies used. After
emancipation indentured labour brought people to the West Indies to ensure a
compliant work force since the freed slaves and their descendants were not keen
to work as wage labourers. But indentured labour was already being used in the
British West Indies, so the system was building on experience. Much of the
literature about control problems comes from those exercising the control. The
interviews with former slave apprentices gives their perspective. Watching in
Britain activists in the emerging working class movement after the deep disappointment
of the Reform Act not giving a wide franchise down into the working class,
articulated the concerns they had about the introduction of free labour and
labour control mechanisms into the British West Indies. e.g. The Poor Man’s Guardian. Increasingly
the movement saw workers in Britain as ‘wage slaves’, and attacked their
employers supporting emancipation up to 1838 and from 1838 in the United States
as hypocrites. It became clear in the discussion that the issues of how to
control wage labour in Britain and in post emancipation British West Indies
need to be looked at together because it was the same people involved in the debates
and devising the policy solutions.
Since
capitalism exploits labour in whatever form it can be organised, Catherine Hall
was right to stress that the issues of rights are part of the debate. So we need to look at the development of
various rights agendas in the debates in Britain and their cross-links with
pre- and post- emancipation British West Indies. At a
Reform League public meeting in February 1866 Executive Committee member John
Baxter Langley explained the differences between what the League and other
reformers stood for. He linked the argument for manhood suffrage to the
atrocities in Jamaica committed by troops under General Eyre's command the
previous year. He discussed the rights of labour, and then condemned British
rule in Ireland and India, as part of his justification for manhood suffrage. Once the news of the
Eyre atrocities reached Britain, town mayors all over the country organised
local protest meetings, including in North Shields, Newcastle, South Shields
and Darlington in December 1865. At the Newcastle meeting, the leading radical
Joseph Cowen denounced Governor Eyre, and demanded an inquiry. 300 mayors from
towns and cities all over the Britain went to Downing St to demand the
suspension of Eyre as Governor of Jamaica. Newcastle Daily Chronicle's
editorial wrote:
'We have a right to
see that our coloured countrymen are not wronged. But it is not so much out of
regard for the rights of the negro as out of regard for the honour of England
that we are disposed to demand the strictest justice. We owe it to England even
more than we owe it to the outraged blackman that the crimes committed under
English authority should be adequately and justly punished.'
Supporters of the Eyre
Defence and Aid Committee, presided over by the Earl of Shrewsbury, a landowner
in Jamaica, included Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, Alfred Lord Tennyson and
Charles Dickens, 71 peers, 6 bishops, 20 MPs, 40 generals, 26 admirals, 4,000
clergymen, and 30,000 others. They saw an analogy with the potential for riot
among British workers. One commented that the negro 'is in Jamaica as the
costermonger is in Whitechapel; he is very likely nearly a savage with the mind
of a child.' When a banquet was held in
Eyre's honour at Southampton, the Daily
Telegraph feared that a Jamaica Committee counter-rally would trigger a
riot, calling those it thought would make up the mob, 'negroes'.
British Black History
Another
part of the legacy is the history of black people in Britain. I stressed that this
dimension was not addressed at the Colloquium. Kathy Chater whose work on
parish records has been a major contribution.
Conclusion
So
the Colloquium was an important event keeping a wide range of people
connected with the Legacies Project and having a good opportunity to discuss
the issues and to suggest different interpretations and flag up the next stages
of research. The Project is following up with a special event looking at aspects
of other slave economics. Once the database goes public there will be a rich
source of material for people to look at, add to and use for further
investigation of the legacies issues.
