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Authors: Niall Ferguson

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As we have seen, the first British emigrants to America had been drawn by the prospect of freedom of conscience and cheap land. But the attractions of emigration were rather different to those with only their labour to sell. For them, it had little to do with liberty. On the contrary, it meant consciously giving up their liberty. Few such migrants crossed the ocean using their own resources. Most travelled under a system of temporary servitude, known as ‘indenture’, which was designed to alleviate the chronic labour shortage. In return for the price of their voyage out, they would enter a contract pledging their labour for a set number of years, usually four or five. In effect they became slaves, but slaves on fixed-term contracts. This they may not have realized on leaving England. When she arrives as a planter’s bride in Virginia, Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders needs to have it explained to her by her mother (and mother-in-law) that:
the greatest part of the Inhabitants of the Colony came thither in very different Circumstances from England; that, generally speaking, they were of two sorts, either (1) such as were brought over by Masters of Ships to be sold as Servants, such as we call them, my Dear, says she, but they are more properly call’d slaves. Or (2) Such as are Transported from Newgate and other Prisons, after having been found guilty of Felony and other Crimes punishable with Death. When they come here, says she, we make no difference: the Planters buy them, and they work together in the Field till their time is out ...
 
Between a half and two-thirds of all Europeans who migrated to North America between 1650 and 1780 did so under contracts of indentured servitude; for English emigrants to the Chesapeake the proportion was closer to seven out of ten. Settlements like Williamsburg, the elegant colonial capital of Virginia, depended heavily on this continuing supply of cheap labour, not only to work in the tobacco fields but to provide the whole range of goods and services that the emerging colonial aristocracy expected. Like slaves, indentured servants were advertised for sale in the local newspaper, the
Virginia Gazette
: ‘Just arrived ... 139 men, women and boys. Smiths, bricklayers, plasterers, shoemakers ... a glazier, a tailor, a printer, a book binder ... several seamstresses ...’
Although the majority of indentured servants were young men between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one, one rather older indentured labourer was the forty-year-old John Harrower, who kept a simple journal of his experiences to give his wife when he could afford to have her join him. For months Harrower had roamed his native country, looking for work to try to support his wife and children, but in vain. His diary entry for Wednesday, 26 January 1774, explains in a nutshell what was really driving British migration by the late eighteenth century: ‘This day I being reduced to the last shilling I hade was oblidged to engage to go to Virginia for four years as a schoolmaster for Bedd, Board, washing and five pound during the whole time’. This was anything but a bid for freedom; it was quite simply a last resort. Harrower goes on to describe the horrific conditions below deck when his ship, the
Planter
, encountered a fierce Atlantic storm:
At 8 pm was obliged to batten down both fore and main hatches, and a little after I really think there was the odest shene betwixt decks that ever I heard or seed. There was some sleeping, some spewing, some pishing, some shiting, some farting, some flyting, some damning, some Blasting their leggs and thighs, some their liver, lungs, lights and eyes. And for to make the shene the odder, some curs’d Father Mother, Sister, and Brother.
 
To underline the full extent of their loss of liberty, the passengers were whipped or clapped in irons if they misbehaved. When Harrower finally landed in Virginia after more than two gruelling months at sea his basic literacy proved an asset. He was taken on as tutor to the children of a local plantation owner. Unfortunately, this was as far as his luck went. In 1777, after just three years away from home, he took ill and died, before he could pay for his wife and children to join him.
Harrower’s experience was typical in two respects. As a Scot, he was typical of the second wave of migrants to the American colonies after 1700: the Scots and the Irish accounted for nearly three-quarters of all British settlers in the eighteenth century. It was men from the impoverished fringes of the British Isles who had least to lose and most to gain from selling themselves into servitude. When Johnson and Boswell journeyed through the Highlands and Islands in 1773 they repeatedly saw signs of what the latter disapprovingly called ‘this epidemical fury of emigration’. Johnson took a more realistic view.
Mr Arthur Lee mentioned some Scotch who had taken possession of a barren part of America, and wondered why they should choose it. Johnson. ‘Why, Sir, all barrenness is comparative. The Scotch would not know it to be barren.’ Boswell. ‘Come, come, he is flattering the English. You have now been in Scotland, Sir, and say if you did not see meat and drink enough there.’ Johnson. ‘Why yes, Sir; meat and drink enough to give the inhabitants sufficient strength to run away from home.’
 
Neither man grasped that what was really ‘clearing’ men and women from their homes in such numbers was the combination of ‘improving’ – that is, rack-renting – landlords, and a succession of dismal harvests. The Irish were even more likely to be attracted by the prospect of ‘happier climes, and less arbitrary government’. Two-fifths of all British emigrants between 1701 and 1780 were Irish, and the migration rate only increased in the succeeding century as the introduction of the potato from America and exponential population growth led the island towards the calamities of the 1840s. This flight from the periphery gave the British Empire its enduringly Celtic tinge.
13
Harrower’s premature demise was also far from unusual. Around two in five of the new arrivals died in their first couple of years in Virginia, usually because of malarial or intestinal disorders. Surviving such ailments was the process known euphemistically as ‘seasoning’. Those who pulled through were often distinguished by their sickly complexions.
Provided the supply was maintained, indentured labour could work in Virginia, where the climate was bearable and the main crop relatively easy to harvest. But in Britain’s Caribbean colonies it simply did not suffice. It is often forgotten that the majority – around 69 per cent – of British emigrants in the seventeenth century went not to America but to the West Indies. That, after all, was where the money was. Trade with the Caribbean dwarfed trade with America: in 1773 the value of British imports from Jamaica was five times greater than those from all the American colonies. Nevis produced three times more British imports than New York between 1714 and 1773; Antigua three times more than New England. Sugar, not tobacco, was the biggest business of the eighteenth-century colonial empire. In 1775 total sugar imports accounted for nearly a fifth of all British imports and were worth more than five times tobacco imports. For most of the eighteenth century, the American colonies were little more than economic subsidiaries of the sugar islands, supplying them with the basic foodstuffs their monoculture could not produce. Given the choice between expanding British territory in America and retaining the French sugar island of Guadeloupe at the end of the Seven Years War, William Pitt favoured the Caribbean option since: ‘The state of the existing trade in the conquests in North America, is extremely low; the speculations of their future are precarious, and the prospect, at the very best, very remote’.
The problem was that mortality on these tropical islands was fearful, particularly during the summer ‘sickly season’. In Virginia it took a total immigration of 116,000 to produce a settler community of 90,000. In Barbados, by contrast, it took immigration of 150,000 to produce a population of 20,000. People soon learned. After 1700 emigration to the Caribbean slumped as people opted for the more temperate climes (and more plentiful land) of America. As early as 1675 the Assembly of Barbados was driven to complain: ‘In former tymes Wee were plentifully furnished with Christian servants from England ... but now Wee can gett few English, having noe lands to give them at the end of their tyme, which formerly was theire main allurement’. There had to be an alternative to indentured labour. There was.
From 1764 until 1779, the parish of St Peter’s and St Paul’s in Olney, Northamptonshire, was in the care of John Newton, a devout clergyman and composer of one of the world’s best-loved hymns. Most of us at one time or another have heard or sung ‘Amazing Grace’. What is less well known is the fact that for six years its composer was a successful slave trader, shipping hundreds of Africans across the Atlantic from Sierra Leone to the Caribbean.
‘Amazing Grace’ is the supreme hymn of Evangelical redemption: ‘Amazing Grace how sweet the sound / That saved a wretch like me! / I once was lost, but now am found, / Was blind but now I see’. It is therefore tempting to imagine Newton suddenly seeing the light about slavery and turning away from his wicked profession to dedicate himself to God. But the timing of Newton’s conversion is all wrong. In fact, it was after his religious awakening that Newton became the first mate and then the captain of a succession of slave ships, and only much later that he began to question the morality of buying and selling his fellow men and women.
We today are of course repelled by slavery. What we find hard to understand is why someone like Newton was not. But slavery made overwhelming sense as an economic proposition. The profits to be made from cultivating sugar were immense; the Portuguese had already demonstrated in Madeira and São Tomé that only African slaves could stand the work; and the Caribbean planters were willing to pay roughly eight or nine times what a slave cost on the West African coast. Although the business was risky (Newton called it a sort of lottery in which every adventurer hoped to gain a prize), it was lucrative. Annual returns from slaving voyages during the last half century of British slaving averaged between 8 and 10 per cent. Small wonder that slave trading struck Newton as a ‘genteel occupation’, suitable even for a born-again Christian.
The numbers involved were huge. We tend to think of the British Empire as a phenomenon of white migration, yet between 1662 and 1807 nearly three and a half million Africans came to the New World as slaves transported in British ships. That was over three times the number of white migrants in the same period. It was also more than a third of all Africans who ever crossed the Atlantic as slaves. At first the British had pretended to be above slavery. When one early merchant was offered slaves in the Gambia, he replied: ‘We are a people who did not deale in any such commodities, neither did wee buy or sell one another, or any that had our owne shape’. But it was not long before slaves from Nigeria and Benin began to be sent to the Barbados sugar plantations. In 1662 the New Royal African Company undertook to supply 3,000 slaves annually to the West Indies, a number which had risen to 5,600 by 1672. After the company’s monopoly was done away with in 1698, the number of private slave traders – men like Newton – soared. By 1740 Liverpool was sending thirty-three ships a year on the triangular trip from England to Africa to the Caribbean. This was the same year that James Thomson’s song ‘Rule Britannia’ was sung, with its stirring avowal: ‘Britons never, never shall be slaves’. Long since forgotten was the earlier prohibition on buying them.
Newton’s involvement with slavery began in late 1745 when, as a young sailor, he entered the service of a trader named Amos Clow who was based on the Benanoes Islands, off Sierra Leone. By a curious inversion he soon found himself being treated as little more than a slave by Clow’s African concubine. After more than a year of sickness and neglect, Newton was rescued by a ship called the
Greyhound
; and it was aboard this vessel, during a storm in March 1748, that the young man had his religious awakening. Only after that did he himself become a slave trader, taking command of his first slave ship while he was still only in his twenties.
John Newton’s journal for 1750 – 51, when he was in command of the slave ship
Duke of Argyle
, lays bare the attitudes of those who lived and profited by the trade in human lives. Sailing up and down the coast of Sierra Leone and beyond, Newton spent long weeks bartering goods (including ‘the all commanding articles of beer and cyder’) for people, haggling over the price and the quality with the local slave traders. He was a choosy buyer, avoiding old ‘fallen breasted’ women. On 7 January 1751 he exchanged eight slaves for a quantity of timber and ivory, but felt overcharged when he noticed that one of them had ‘a very bad mouth’. ‘A fine manslave, now there are so many competitors’, he complained, ‘is near double the price it was formerly’. Note the word ‘it’. He noted on the same day the death of ‘a fine woman slave, No. 11’. But if the Africans were just numbers to Newton, to the Africans Newton seemed a diabolical figure, even a cannibal. Olaudah Equiano was one of the few Africans transported to the British West Indies who left an account of his experience. In it, he testifies to the widespread suspicion that the white (or ‘red’) people were followers of
Mwene Puto
, the ‘Lord of the Dead’, seizing slaves in order to eat them. Some of his fellow captives were convinced that the red wine they saw their captors quaffing was made from the blood of Africans and that the cheese on the captain’s table was made from their brains. Similar fears clearly actuated the slaves in Newton’s hold, who put ‘their country fetishes’ in one of the ship’s water casks, ‘which they had the credulity to suppose must inevitably kill all who drank of it’.
BOOK: Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power
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