There have been many articles in the left press and the media on the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. Here David Packer analyses the forces that led to its abolition and subsequently the slave mode of production itself in the New World.
There is much controversy about the reasons for the abolition of the slave trade and the subsequent progressive abolition of the slave system itself in the New World. Some have argued that in Britain, it was the power of the moral/Christian arguments presented by the abolitionist movement, led by the great parliamentarian, William Wilberforce. The perpetration of this myth was the intention of the official ‘Wilberfest’ promoted by the British state. Others have pointed to the international impact of the French Revolution, or emphasise the growing crescendo of slave rebellion in the New World colonies, or inter-imperialist competition between the European powers, or to changing economic conditions in the development of capitalism.
I argue that all these historical questions combined in a complex dialectic, but the underlying force at play was the changing economic requirements of capitalism in Britain and in North America. [1] In addition, after the British abolition of the trade and its attempts to suppress it internationally, important changes in the relations of production and reproduction of the slave mode of production occurred. This resulted in changes in the relation of social forces between slaves and masters, which made slavery increasingly untenable.
Critical events: Haiti and the slave revolts
The vital changes that brought the transatlantic trade to an end occurred not in Europe, but in the colonies where the slaves were put to work in the plantation system. Although the abolitionist movements in Britain, the USA, France and elsewhere were important, they played a secondary or auxiliary role to the struggles of the black slaves themselves.
Political and social change inspired by the American and French Revolutions, stimulated both slave revolts and abolition movements alike, which often became inextricably linked with independence movements. The 1791 slave rising in Saint-Domingue (Haiti), which transformed into a struggle for self-determination and national independence, was two years after Revolution in France and the first successful slave revolution. In response, the French revolutionary government was inspired to abolish slavery in 1794, though this was restored under Napoleon in 1802. The final victory of Haiti’s ‘Black Jacobins’ over British invasion and then Napoleon’s attempt to re-take the island in 1803 led in 1804 to recognition of Haiti’s independence. [2] In 1816 Simon Bolivar was inspired and materially aided by the revolutionaries in Haiti, in the invasion of mainland South America that eventually defeated the Spanish Empire. The army included many black troops.
In British Jamaica the continuing resistance of the Maroons (warrior communities of escaped slaves) were a constant thorn in the side of the colonial government and the planters, despite the compromise treaty that resulted from the Maroon Wars led by the woman liberation fighter, Nanny of the Maroons, fifty years earlier. Also it was the revolt of 20,000 slaves in Jamaica in 1831, and its horrific repression, which influenced the passing of the 1833 bill abolishing slavery itself in all British colonies - which only finally took effect in 1838 after £20 million in compensation was paid to the planters for their loss of property (£20 billion in today’s money).
In the US, the slave trade had also been formally abolished in 1808, however, despite the efforts of abolitionist movements the US flag continued to be used by slavers to avoid the stop and search blockade organised by the British Navy. At the same time a successful internal trade in slaves continued on a far larger scale than foreign importation. It was only with the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 that serious efforts to suppress the slave trade began.
The movement for abolition in Britain
The slave rebellions stimulated abolitionist movements everywhere, however even after the abolition of the trade slavery in the colonies continued and even Wilberforce defended this on the grounds that slaves had to be educated and prepared for their freedom to avoid disaster.
The British abolition campaign was formally founded as a nationally organised campaign in 1787, in the aftermath of the American War of Independence, although some of its leaders and component organisation, such as the Quakers, had been active before that date.
Anti-slavery movements in Britain and America took the form of a radical, mostly protestant, non-conformist Christianity, although William Wilberforce, its parliamentary leader in Britain, was a radical evangelical Anglican and a Tory. However, abolitionists were originally a small minority of Christians, including among Protestants, and Christianity as a religious movement was not for most of its history anti-slavery. It is dishonest for Christian churches today to dress in the mantle of the anti-slavery movement. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth century most Christians, especially their leaders, defended slavery as Christians had done since the Roman Empire and the teachings of such early authorities such as St. Augustine. [3]
There was a more radical wing of abolitionism. Thomas Clarkson, unlike his Tory friend Wilberforce, or the evangelicals, was a sympathiser of the French Revolution. In many ways he was the central leader of the movement but is only commemorated by a small plaque in Westminster Abbey, compared to the large marble statue of Wilberforce. There are many examples of Wilberforce’s political and social conservatism, for example, he supported repressive legislation, introduced by his friend William Pitt, after the outbreak of war with revolutionary France.
Despite the advances of the enlightenment and of socialism, during the eighteen and nineteenth centuries most ideas and political causes were still expressed in religious form. And this includes abolitionists and the slave owners, traders and investors. The Anglican Church along with several Bishops owned slave plantations in Barbados, among the most brutal in the Caribbean. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, which owned the Codrington plantation on the same island, had the word ‘Society’ branded on the chests of their slaves like the logo markings on other forms of property.
If the motives of the slaves themselves for resistance and revolution are clear, the motives for the abolition movement in Britain are less so. First, it was not just a moral crusade by a few upper class leaders but a political movement with a social base that was mainly plebeian who saw slavery as a threat to their own liberties. The movement was a broad alliance of artisans, small farmers and other petit-bourgeois layers, together with exploited workers, many of whom sympathised with the egalitarian and democratic ideals of the French Revolution and in a few cases socialism, but whose leaderships were often drawn from the articulate professional classes and the gentry, like Wilberforce himself, and his allies in parliament.
It was this broad, multi-class mass movement, far more than a single issue campaign, which included many of the 10-15,000 black people living in London at the end of the eighteenth century, which is virtually absent from the Wilberforce biopic, Amazing Grace.
Economic shifts
Underlying both these political and social movements, systemic developments in the growing world capitalist economy were taking place; in the vanguard was British imperialism and its industrial revolution.
The New World plantation system was a highly developed form of the slave mode of production that, unlike ancient slavery, was integrated into and increasingly driven by a growing capitalist world market. In Capitalism and slavery, Eric Williams argued that the profits from New World slavery had significantly contributed to the ‘primitive accumulation’ of capital that enabled the industrial revolution, especially in Britain. However, by the end of the 18th century, the profitability of plantation slavery was in decline and so was the slave system as a whole. This latter point is contested at least for the period before the abolition of the slave trade. However, it was certainly in decline relative to the overall development of British capitalism, which is Williams’ main point. It had played a crucial role during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the process of accumulation of capital, but became increasingly secondary and eventually marginal to later development. There were now more profitable outlets in industry and commerce for investments than in the dirty slave business.
At its high point towards the end of the eighteenth century the Atlantic triangular trade supplied about one third of all European imports and could make up to 200 percent profit on investments. In Britain a copper and brass industry was created along the Avon valley to supply Bristol with quality metal goods to be traded for slaves in Africa. Similarly the iron industries of the Severn valley did the same. Wealth poured into ports such as Bristol, London, Liverpool and Glasgow, which provided more capital for investments and credit to kick-start the industrial revolution. By 1770 ‘Britain’s colonial markets absorbed 38% of her exports’. [4] But it was during the last quarter of the eighteenth century that industrial take-off occurred leading to a gradual relative decline in the importance of the slave colonies.
It was the existing dynamism of emergent British capitalism based on wage labour that enabled Britain to become the dominant slaving nation. By the end of the eighteenth century there were fifty factories in Manchester alone employing hundreds even thousands of workers. [5]
Rapid industrialisation required new larger markets and drew in more and more capital investment, pushing the Atlantic trade system into relative decline. British capitalism had outgrown the triangular trade.
Imperial competition
There were other factors in the equation. We have mentioned the revolutionary 1791 victory of the Black Jacobins in Haiti, now a dangerous beacon to slaves everywhere. At the same time, the loss of Haiti was seen in Britain as a welcome blow to French interests, which had been more dependent on slave profits than the British. Although Britain had been the premier slaving nation, slavery now appeared to benefit Britain’s competitors more than Britain itself. Prior to revolution in Haiti, this one large island colony had provided France with two thirds of it foreign earnings. In particular, Napoleonic France needed the profits from slavery more than industrialising Britain did.
The abolitionists, whose ideology corresponded to the interests of egalitarian and democratic artisan and proletarian classes in alliance with Christian fundamentalists had started with the support of only nine MPs. But, political instability in the colonies, changing economic priorities and now war with France, led a once marginal anti-slavery lobby to gradually gain ground within sections of the ruling class and their representatives in parliament, which now turned to support measures against the slave trade.
In May 1806 parliament passed an act, supported by the abolition movement, banning British subjects from participating in the slave trade with France and its allies. The pro-slavery lobby was outmanoeuvred because the bill was presented as a patriotic war measure directed against French interests. It was a major blow to the slave trade and laid the ground for the 1807 act of abolition. The Royal Navy’s subsequent campaigns against the international slave trade were presented as a moral crusade by Britain, but was much more a form of economic war against its less economically developed competitors.
An Alternative view
Mike Macnair in Weekly Worker states that the evidence does, ‘not suggest even a relative decline in the profitability of plantation slavery and the slave trade at the time of the rise of the anti-slavery movement.’ [6] He continues, ‘We have to set the purely cynical narrative on one side. The 1807 ban on the slave trade was not a cynical manoeuvre in British capitalist interests. It was a limited concession dragged out of a hostile capitalist establishment by an organised mass campaign.’ It was of course both these things and more. After the death of William Pitt and a governmental crisis, the abolitionist campaign made significant headway in the general election. The abolitionists were able to obtain pledges from many candidates to vote for abolition. Macnair considers that: ‘The immediate political context made it a little easier to drag this concession out.’
This view fails to adequately explain the shift in bourgeois public opinion behind the abolitionist movement at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and the growing intensity of slave resistance in the colonies. It was the forces of political resistance, both of the abolitionists in Britain and especially rebellion in the colonies together with revolution in Europe that were decisive.
Macnair makes clear his view that it was the British abolition movement, ‘the first modern citizens movement’, that was central to the abolition of the slave trade. This emphasis is derived from the popular account of it found in Bury the Chains, by Adam Hochschild (2005). I do not wish to minimise the importance of the abolition movement, (the sugar boycott led by Clarkson, opposed by Wilberforce, signed up 300,000 supporters), or even its reformist leaders like Wilberforce, but this slanted view underestimates the international context, in particular the growing resistance of slaves themselves, most notably in revolutionary Haiti. It also underestimates the ‘cynical’ response of capital to its changing needs.
The decline and fall of the colonial slave mode of production
After the British abolition act of 1807 the trade went underground and ceased in stages. Although in 1820 the plantations were still profitable, by then the policing of the seaways by the British navy was taking its toll. Profits and investment were in relative decline. Historically all large-scale slave systems require a constant replenishment of cheap stolen labour power for an adequate realisation of surplus value. However, if these conditions fail, at a certain point the costly reproduction of labour –‘slave breeding’ - that had previously been discouraged, except in North America, becomes a rational economic choice.
Growing shortages of labour, which could not be adequately solved by smuggling slaves, forced the plantation owners to institute a labour regime of hutted slaves, who were now encouraged to raise a family, often maintained by small plots of land, and who could work together as a family on the master’s plantation. It was only in North America where the internal reproduction of slave labour proved viable in the long term. [7] This was the system that came to predominate during the nineteenth century. It was different in important respects to the far more profitable and brutal all male slave gang system (who lived in guarded barracks), which had predominated during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the Caribbean. In eighteenth century Barbados four out of ten slaves died in three years due to brutality and overwork. This inhuman system, with parallels in the Roman ergastulum at the time of Spartacus, is marked by great gender inequality, with mostly segregated female slaves representing less than a quarter of the slave population, who were employed in the great house as servants, or in market gardening, processing, etc.
Although inhuman, cruel and highly exploitative, the hutted slave is only a step away from a dependent tenant, or a system of peonage. The successful encouragement of family life required better conditions creating greater self-respect, social solidarity, and a better relationship of forces in relation to the master class. Slave resistance could no longer be contained.
As Norman Traub summarises: ‘Slavery perished because it became politically [I would also add economically] untenable, perishing in stormy class struggles in the colonies and the metropolis.’
Dave Packer is a longstanding member of the Trotskyist movement in Britain. Packer has held a number of leadership roles in the International Socialist Group and the Fourth International. Dave is a former editor of Socialist Outlook.
NOTES
[1] See, Eric Williams, (1944) Capitalism and Slavery and the more recent and detailed account in Robin Blackburn, (1988) The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery 1776- 1848; also the companion volume, (1997) The Making of New World Slavery. For a good comparative discussion of slavery, ancient and modern, see David Turley, (2000) Slavery.
[2] See CLR James, (1938) The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, Laurent Dubois, (2005) Avengers of the New World: The story of the Haitian Revolution, also, a recent article Norman Traub, Slave Revolts that Blazed a Revolutionary Trail for All, Socialist Resistance, no.44. April 2007, which in addition discusses the historical consequences of the slave trade for Africa and its continued imperialist exploitation.
[3] See G.E.M. de Ste. Croix, (1981) The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World.
[4] See Norman Traub, above.
[5] Chris Harman, (1999) A Peoples History of the World, Chs. 5 & 6.
[6] See Mike Macnair, ‘Abolition and working class solidarity’, Weekly Worker, 664, March 15 2007. This is one of the more interesting recent articles on abolition, although controversial in places. Paul Hampton of Workers’ Liberty also wished to accentuate the central role of the British abolition campaign and mass action, emphasises ‘the role of the workers.’ www.workersliberty.org/node/7560.
[7] In 1800 there were 3 million slaves in North America which grew mainly through internal reproduction to 6 million in the 1860s. However, during the eighteenth century 1.6 million slaves were taken to the British Caribbean but at its end in the 1830s there was a population of only 600,000 slaves. See Harman, A Peoples History of the World, Chs. 5 & 6.
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