The Transformation of the World (181 page)

The pattern of making slave systems harsher as a reaction to emancipatory advances was repeated in the 1830s and 1840s. After a brief transitional period of dwindling quasi-slavery, emancipation became legally binding in 1838 in the British Caribbean colonies and South Africa, bringing freedom to 800,000 men, women, and children. This was state emancipation, not the result of a Haitian-style revolutionary war, but the economic and social consequences were similar in the British West Indies. With the dissolution of large plantation enterprises on islands such as Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad, and Antigua, agriculture reverted to a pattern of small-scale subsistence farming and largely ceased to generate imperial wealth through exports. Monetary compensation flowed from the public purse into the hands of the planters, who often lived in England as absentee owners and failed to invest the money in the Caribbean. (In South Africa, similar compensation was to a large degree injected into the local economy, with vitalizing results.) For apologists of slavery, especially in the southern United States, all this confirmed that the supposedly moral progress of emancipation was more than outweighed by an economic regression that was harmful to everyone concerned. The experience of the British Caribbean hardened the resolve of plantation owners to prevent the same from happening elsewhere.
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Antislavery: A British Answer to the French Revolution

In the “Age of Reason,” few Europeans took exception to the slave trade, which acquired growing importance in the eighteenth-century Atlantic area. Individual critical voices such as those of Montesquieu, the Abbé Raynal, or Condorcet could not disguise the fact that slavery seldom clashed with the moral
sensitivities or even the natural law theories of the Enlightenment. Since it was almost exclusively a question of enslaving black Africans, a traditional European revulsion at all things black also came into play. Although Enlightenment thinkers still cherished the unity of the human race—and did not, like many theorists of the nineteenth century, seek to divide humanity into separate species defined by race—it was nevertheless a common view in early modern Europe that people with black skin were outsiders, more alien than Arabs or Jews.
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The humanitarianism motivating the founders of antislavery societies in the 1780s stemmed less from the high theory of the age than from two other sources: (a) a renewal of Christian ideas of brotherhood on the margins of established religion, and (b) a new patriotism that saw the superiority of a nation not only in its economic achievement or military strength but also in its ability to show the way for the rest of the world in law and morality. This combination was peculiar to Britain. More an attitude than an articulated theory, it initially fired only a small number of activists, including some former black slaves such as Olaudah Equiano (1745–97).
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But it soon found a strong resonance in the British public, which indeed entered a new phase of its development as a result of the antislavery movement. Antislavery became a watchword that at its height rallied hundreds of thousands in nonviolent extraparliamentary action. In a political system in which the sovereignty of Parliament still lay with a tiny oligarchy, they donated money to support runaway slaves, attended mass events that reported on the horrors aboard Atlantic slave ships and on Caribbean plantations, and signed petitions to the lawmakers in Westminster. Consumer boycotts of Caribbean sugar kept up the pressure on slaveholder interests. Against this background, and following a series of detailed hearings, members of both Houses of Parliament voted in March 1807 to prohibit the slave trade on ships flying the British flag as of January 1, 1807. A similar decision had been thwarted in 1792, but at this second attempt it actually went through. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge voiced in 1808 what was in the minds of many: the conquests of Alexander and Napoleon looked “mean” in comparison with the triumph over the slave trade.
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Historians are agreed that this spectacular demise of a core imperial institution cannot be explained by economic factors alone.
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The slave-based plantation economy had reached a peak of efficiency and profitability toward the end of the eighteenth century, some owners had amassed huge fortunes, and nothing in the national economy required change in the existing practices. Adam Smith's argument that free labor was more productive than forced labor was by no means the majority view among British economists. What tipped the scales were motives at the level of ideas, capable of inspiring sufficient members of the political elite who had no direct stake in the West Indies. Taken together, these may be seen as Britain's ideological response to the French Revolution and Napoleon.

Especially in its initial phase, before the Reign of Terror, the revolution had inscribed on its banner a universalist conception of humanity to which the
mere affirmation of particular national interests was not a convincing response. There was little that conservative ideologues could marshal against the powerful Declaration of Human and Civil Rights, unless one defined an alternative field of transnational universalism. One such field was slavery. The revolutionary National Assembly in Paris, in which plantation interests carried considerable weight (as they did in the British Parliament), had engaged in petty delaying maneuvers. It is true that in 1794 the Convention finally prohibited slavery in all French possessions and extended citizenship to all male inhabitants of France and the colonies regardless of skin color. But in 1802 Bonaparte as first consul made both slavery and the slave trade legal again. Within a few years, therefore, France lost its position as opinion leader on this issue and reverted to the selfseeking habits of the ancien régime. In Britain, locked in struggle with Napoleon during the years before the Act of 1807, the patriotic public took the ideological initiative, relying on the fact that no other country in the world had
institutional
guarantees against (monarchical or revolutionary) arbitrary rule. These guarantees had only to be applied to the colonies.

Such political motives might easily be combined with individual reasons for action. Active support for the abolitionist cause made it possible for a huge number of male and female citizens to display their commitment ahead of the still pending democratization of the British political system, and to find relief from a burden that was increasingly experienced as collective guilt. The rhetoric of leading abolitionists was designed precisely to convey an identification with the victims, for which the way had been paved by sentimental novels of the eighteenth century and popular themes of liberation from tyranny (Beethoven's
Fidelio
dates from 1805).
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The major abolitionist literature mixed humanitarian-ethical appeals with arguments relating to the military and imperial interests of the nation;
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the great global contest with France inevitably affected all areas of British politics. But this backdrop changed in 1815. The slave trade was sharply reduced as a result of Britain's withdrawal, and the Royal Navy, ruler of the waves, assumed the right to seize ships of other countries and to free any slaves they found in them without regard to formal ownership. This could not eliminate the trade altogether (there are grave doubts as to the effectiveness of naval police actions), but it did prevent others from filling the gap left by the British, albeit at the price of a number of diplomatic incidents (e.g., with France). Also in 1807 the US Congress forbade the involvement of its citizens in the African slave trade, effectively making it illegal to import any more slaves.

The moral impetus of abolitionism was strong enough to ensure that, even in the later times of intensified imperialism, a horror of slavery remained alive in the British public. Antislavery continued to be a watchword capable of mobilizing people. Thus, when it was discovered in 1901 that the chocolate firm Cadbury's—to the disgust of its Quaker founders –had been using cocoa beans produced with slave labor on the Portuguese Atlantic island of São Tomé, humanitarian groups
started a fierce campaign against both Cadbury and the Portuguese government, eventually forcing the Foreign Office to take the matter up diplomatically.
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India: Abolition in a Caste Society

Slavery in the British Empire unraveled in several different ways. In the Caribbean, abolition weakened the plantation economy, but British planters received compensation for their losses. In South Africa, the whites (Afrikaners, but also British) whose agriculture rested on the exploitation of slaves—notably in wheat and wine production—experienced the new law as a direct assault. The Great Boer Trek to the interior, which began in the mid-1830s, was not least a response to the new humanitarian rhetoric of the twenties, to the undermining of patriarchal authority by egalitarian legislation, and to the liberalization of labor relations in the Cape of Good Hope.
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In the multifarious social landscape of India, abolition was gradually enforced only from the early 1840s on. Here, unlike in the Caribbean, there was not a single, clearly structured system of slavery; the boundary between chattel slavery and other forms was hard to define, and fine gradations of servitude existed in the legal codes and customary laws of various communities. There was domestic slavery and agricultural forced labor; women were sold for sexual services and children given away to strangers in times of famine; the bondage of insolvent debtors often bordered on slavery, especially if parents passed their debt on to the next generation.

In such conditions, British and Indian reformers had to proceed cautiously and with regionally differentiated strategies. In Muslim parts of the country, where slavery had deep roots, the ruling elites were not challenged in too provocative a manner, while Hindu areas raised the difficult problem of establishing the point at which the subjugation of lower castes could be described as a form of slavery. The situation was not always as clear-cut as in Kerala, where members of the lower castes in the early nineteenth century could be legally bought and sold, pledged as security, or even killed by their master with impunity. (Indian society today is still quite receptive to debt bondage and forms of child labor akin to slavery.) On the whole, however, a long process of emancipation got under way there before the middle of the century. The year 1843 was a legal turning point, since from then on the courts in India refused to enforce claims based on a debtor's ostensible slave status.
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Many who left India in later decades to work as contract laborers did so to escape the even harsher conditions of a slavery that was in only slow retreat.

French and Dutch Abolition

Despite strong British pressure, France took its time over abolition. Until 1848 governments were content to placate London by paying it lip service, and a humanitarian abolitionist movement found little support among the French public. During the Restoration period (1815–30), the colonial administration acted in close concert with planters' interests. In the Caribbean, the slavery
system of the ancien régime was revived in a weaker form, and on the Indian Ocean sugar island of Réunion (at exactly the same time as in Spanish Cuba) a plantation economy was actively built up. Before the free-trade era, moreover, it remained possible to reserve the French sugar market for colonial produce. Paradoxically, it was the government of Charles X, a particularly reactionary regime even by the standards of Restoration Europe, which signed a bilateral trade agreement with Haiti in 1825 and set a European precedent by recognizing the breakaway black republic in return for exorbitant compensation to dispossessed French landowners.
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The July Monarchy, which replaced Bourbon rule in 1830, ended the secret slave trade in the French colonies that had so antagonized Britain, keeping the planters on a shorter leash and looking more to the political model of contemporary Britain than to the past of the ancien régime.

Yet it was only during the 1848 Revolution that a small group led by Victor Schoelcher (a businessman's son who had seen the poverty of Caribbean slaves at first hand in 1829–30) successfully campaigned for the legal suppression of slavery. This breakthrough was due to the fact that aside from narrow interest groups, the institution of slavery had fewer and fewer supporters. Many prominent intellectuals, from Tocqueville to Lamartine to Victor Hugo, had championed the abolitionist cause in the 1840s, and the new republican regime could bring the situation in the colonies under control only by subduing the planter elites. The republic and the subsequent monarchy of Napoleon III cast themselves in the role of well-meaning patriarchal overlords ruling dark-skinned colonial subjects.
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France never had a broadly based mass movement against slavery that remained active over a long period.

In 1863 the Netherlands became the last Western European country to abolish slavery in its American possessions, above all in Surinam. Here too, there was a transitional period of quasi-slavery, which lasted until 1873. And, as in the cases of Britain and France (but unlike in the United States or Brazil), slave owners were compensated out of the public purse; the funds were covered directly by income from the Netherlands East Indies, which in the middle decades of the century sharply increased under the so-called cultivation system. Indonesian forced laborers thus paid for the liberation of Caribbean slaves.
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The abolition of slavery in the colonies was a delayed domino effect, in a way already triggered by the Haitian Revolution that sent shock waves through the world of Western slavery. After Britain's opening move, no Western European country that wanted to be seen as civilized could long afford to remain outside the ongoing dynamic. Russia's elimination of serf status in 1861 should also be seen as part of this European trend; it was largely a state-driven project, in which neither peasant revolts nor a public movement in favor of free labor conditions played much of a role. In the eyes of Tsar Alexander II and his advisers, serfdom was a blot on the international reputation of the Empire, and one that stood in the way of social modernization.