Pragmatic sanctions for abolition

Robert Stewart

THE OVERTHROW OF COLONIAL SLAVERY, 1776-1848 by Robin Blackburn

Verso, £27.95, pp.560

Slavery, in one form or another, is always with us. It took its most brutal and degrading form in the black slavery of the New World from the 16th century to the 19th: degrading because the slaves were utterly reduced to chattel status, mere economic instruments in the vastly profit- able triangular Atlantic trade; brutal be- cause of the utter inhumanity of their masters, both the slave-owners themselves and their imperial overlords. A memoran- dum from the Colonial Office in London, officials of which feared that emancipated slaves might choose a life of subsistence cultivation, included this passage:

A state of things in which the negro escaped the necessity for . . . labour would be as bad for him as for his owner. He would be cut off from civilising influences, would have no incentive to better his condition or to impose any but the slightest degree of discipline on himself. Thus he might well become a more degraded being than his ancestors in Africa.

Young slaves who arrived in Jamaica from Africa in the 18th century had a remaining- life expectancy of seven to ten years, a

matter of no consequence to slave-owners because slaves were easy and cheap to replace. In the famous scandal of the Zong slave ship, the ship's master threw ill slaves overboard in order to collect accident insurance, since slaves were uninsurable against death. The slave system prospered on the cheap cost of slaves and the high mortality and low fertility rates among them. Constant replacement of the labour force was an impediment to the develop- ment among the slaves of a rebel con- sciousness.

Every schoolboy knows that the system did arouse the conscience of William Wil- berforce. But it is one of the purposes of Mr Blackburn's book to show, not that the humanitarianism of Wilberforce and his allies in Great Britain, nor that of Condor- cet and the French revolutionaries, played no part in the winning of emancipation, but that the story is far more complex than the simple victory of good over evil. Anti- slavery was a cause that occupied a logical place in the reformist programme of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in the assault against aristocratic, monarchical regimes which Mr Blackburn calls the oligarchy'.

Standing armies, taxation without repre- sentation, mercantile monopolies, abuses of executive power, indebtedness were all thought to embody the threat of enslave- ment. The opposition between freedom and

slavery was absolutely central to political discourse, as it had been for more than a century.

Ideas by their own would have forced no change. What made anti-slavery a matter of practical politics was the 'crisis of empire'.

Mr Blackburn does not overthrow Eric Williams' thesis that the abolition of the slave trade and of slavery itself was achieved because it was in the economic interests of the imperial emancipators to be rid of the system. In 1807, when the British parliament abolished the slave trade, its colonial plantations were well stocked, whereas Cuba, the rising sugar power in the Caribbean, suffered from a severe labour shortage and a gender imbalance which made the continuing import of slaves essential. And in 1833, when the reform ministry of Lord Grey successfully carried the abolition of slavery itself, the annual production of the British West Indies as a percentage of the total imperial production had declined by half to only about two per cent in the previous two decades, and that at a time when the growth of the East India Company's activities in India and the new presence of independent states in Latin America were opening up attractive trad- ing opportunities elsewhere. But Mr Blackburn's long and detailed book is an effective demonstration that Williams thesis was too narrow to tell the whole story. Here anti-slavery is placed in the context of the turbulent age of revolution. The fortunes of abolitionist and liberation- ist movements, bound up in independence struggles and inter-colonial rivalries, rose and fell for all sorts of reasons not directly (though very powerfully indirectly) con- nected with the slavery issue itself. One of the ironies is that, time and time again, the defenders of slavery resorted. to enlisting blacks in their armies, recruiting them with the offer of pay and manumis- sion. War was the condition of social change. The Napoleonic wars, by under- mining the Spanish monarchy, opened the door to colonial independence movements in Spanish America. And Bolivar, a creole aristocrat who led those movements, gained the support of Haiti (which in the 1790s had become the first independent Caribbean state) only by agreeing to free the slaves in the provinces that he liber- ated. And when Venezuela proclaimed .its independence in 1811 (the first Spanish colony to do so), the creole-dominated junta at Caracas enlisted 2,000 slaves in the liberation army, while the royalist defen- ders of the old order encouraged slave resistance to rebel slave-owners in order to strengthen their own forces. Likewise, the commanders of the British force sent in 1796 to recover the islands in the Antilles lost to France overrode planter misgiving,s in Jamaica and raised regiments of blacx

emancipation.

Enlistment7,0(X) by promising them Enlistment fostered self-confidence. In

some instances it led to blacks being placed in positions of responsibility and com- mand. One of the virtues of Mr Black- burn's book is that, 50 years after the unaccountable failure of C. L. R. James' The Black Jacobins to make a lasting impact, it restores to the forefront the efforts of blacks themselves to overthrow tyranny. Toussaint Louverture's exploits are only the central deeds in that part of the story.

And although Mr Blackburn does not quite justify the assertion in his introduc- tion that 'it is scarcely possible to exagger- ate the impact of the Haitian revolution on the fate of colonial slavery' (he allows, for instance, that slave resistance and revolt were not the decisive consideration in the surge of abolitionist activity in Great Bri- tain in the late 1820s and early 1830s), anyone who fancies that emancipation was bestowed upon passive recipients by impe- rial masters roused to benevolence would do well to read him.

Mr Blackburn's narrative takes place in a nchly laid-out setting. The analysis, for example, of the integral place of abolition- ism in the general war on the 'oligarchy' in Great Britain, the chief trophy of which was the Great Reform Act of 1832, integral because it added a social and moral dimen- sion to the economic and political elements Of the reformers' programme, is an absorb- ing piece of sustained argument, all the more valuable because Mr Blackburn (who, like Christopher Hill, is at his best When he forgets that he is a Marxist) displays, for most of the time, a proper respect for the unpredictability of the past. He tells us at the outset that 'in some quarters it is supposed that narrative his- tory has little to offer' and offers instead his belief that socio-economic forces and the discourses of ideology are so inherently antagonistic and contradictory that they Open up a space of political choice and action Which must also be registered if the dynamic of historical development is to be grasped.

Heaven knows what the use of such lan- guage is! But prospective readers should not be put off. In the story that follows there are one or two irritations. Having used the phrase 'illegitimate monarchy' early on to mean simply that the Hanove- n.an line gained no legitimacy from divine right or direct succession (George I was 52nd in line to the throne), Mr Blackburn Will not let go of the phrase, so that it acquires an unnecessary polemical taint; and the indiscriminate use of 'patriot' to mean Chathamites, French Jacobins, col- i - nal liberationists and anyone else with a cau.se against established authority is con- ,'slog. But one or two blemishes aside, the Prose has nothing of the opaqueness which c ,Isrigures so many of the contributions to Mr r .Blackburn's journal, the New Left Review lish ers.. There cheers, too, for the pub- ...ere must, I supose, be a misprint somewhere, but my eye did not catch it.