EP 01 - Money not Morality ended British Enslavement

Money not Morality ended British Enslavement

- Episode 01 -

Slavery was even worse than we thought

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#54 Slavery was even worse than we thought

Saturday 27 August 2022

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William Wilberforce, MP and anti-slavery campaigner, who contributed to the passing of the Slave Trade Act of 1807 banning trade in ships

The usual story goes that slavery was banned by the British in 1833 after a long campaign led by the moral reformer William Wilberforce.

What made it all the more remarkable was that capturing slaves in Africa, transporting them to the Caribbean and cruelly forcing them to work on sugar plantations, was an enormously profitable business. It was, wrote the historian Simon Schama, ‘a Klondike of money.’

The thing is that, for many decades now, many – perhaps most - historians who have studied this evil episode have come to the conclusion that the reality was entirely different. It was worse.

The enslavement of African people was every bit as mind-numbingly brutal as we had always thought. But the British did not ban it for moral reasons. They only finished with it because it wasn’t making a profit any more.

One in six of the enslaved died between Africa and the British Caribbean islands. Many more died within a year of arriving. Of all those who arrived, one in 25 died each year. That was more than were being born and far more than were surviving their first year of life.

British slave owners were treating their enslaved workpeople so badly that they had no option but to keep on importing new ones. And that turns out, as we shall see, to be key to the collapse of the whole system.

Anti-slavery medallion: 'Am I not a man and a brother?' by famous Quaker pottery-makers Wedgwood, for the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade founded 1787

'The only thing British kids need to know about the slave trade is that we ended it'

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s publicity guru, Bernard Ingham, once announced that ‘the only thing British kids needed to know about the slave trade was that we ended it.’
Anyway, Mr Ingham, you’re wrong.

The Danish banned the slave trade in 1792, fifteen years before the British. And it had been banned in one after another of the northern states of America – Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut and others between 1763 and 1804.

And the slave trade had been completely banned in the new United States in 1787, though the new Congress left a period of 21 years until the ban would come into effect.

But, of course, pompous English politicians – not to speak of school text-books - have for generations been puffing up the British because they supposedly banned the slave trade in a great outburst of public breast-beating and saintly morality. They banned it even though, we’re told, it was against their economic interests.

In 1938 Eric Williams took on the establishment with his doctoral thesis arguing it was money not morality that ended British Enslavement

Eric Williams, 1st PM of Trinidad & Tobago 1962-1981 who, as a young Oxford doctoral student, proposed that it was money not morality that ended British Enslavement in the Caribbean

The British have always loved the story that their empire was not only bigger than everybody else’s, but also better. The enslavement of millions of Africans is therefore, as you can imagine, a bit of an embarrassment.

So the Brits square the circle by loudly proclaiming that while everyone enslaved people (which wasn’t true), the Brits were the first to ban it (which wasn’t true either.) And that they banned it for high moral reasons, even though they were making a stack of money out of it.

But then, in 1938, a young Trinidadian historian at Oxford submitted his doctoral thesis. It was about the ending of enslavement. Contradicting the establishment historians Williams’ thesis argued that the abolition of slavery had had very little to do with an unselfish or moral campaign, by Wilberforce or the common will, the state or anyone else.

What Williams argued was that ‘the reason for the attack [on slavery] was not only that the West Indian economic system was vicious, but that it was also so unprofitable that for this reason alone its destruction was inevitable.’

What the young Eric Williams was fundamentally saying was that slavery had been ended primarily and cynically not for moral reasons but because it wasn’t making money any more.

Well, Williams got his doctorate despite the fact that he was contradicting all the establishment historians, but it was made perfectly clear to him that it would never be published.

He eventually got work at Howard, Washington’s black university, and in 1944 got his thesis published in the States as Capitalism and Slavery. Six years after he had submitted his thesis.

British slave ship under the new Regulated Act for better conditions of 1788. If you examine carefully how the enslaved were to be packed into the ship you'll experience overwhelming claustrophobia and horror.

In this series we’ll try to show you that the best and latest research pretty solidly backs Eric Williams up - with his view that it was money not morality that ended British Enslavement.

Writing in 1938 Williams did not yet have the evidence to prove his point. But he could sniff a story, get the sense where the truth might lie, know where to look. Williams’s nose pointed him to the fundamental conclusion that enormous political and economic changes like the abolition of enslavement never take place just because of moral campaigns. And even before researching this subject we felt drawn to agree with this simple hypothesis.

Look through the whole of history and you find that key moments always take place because of politics and economics. Williams argued that the abolition of slavery had been no exception. So the question for every historian studying the ending of enslavement today, is still, was Eric Williams right?

And we'll start trying to answer that question next time, at the History Café.

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