EP 03 - Money not Morality ended British Enslavement

Money not Morality ended British Enslavement

- Episode 03 -

The Ship that sank and took the slave trade down with it

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#56 The Empire Strikes Back

Sunday 10 September 2022

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Map of British Caribbean from 1900, with Jamaica far to the left of the other islands

How Jamaica getting stranded heralded the end for British enslavement

When Britain’s north American colonies broke away and set themselves up as the United States, it was a disaster for all Britain’s Caribbean islands.

They had always bought almost all of their food and supplies from the North American mainland, traded in American ships and sold some of their rum and sugar there.

The planters pleaded to be allowed to trade with the new United States exactly as before. But the British government flatly refused to let them. The problem was that Britain’s foreign and commercial policy had always been built on the fundamental idea that Britain’s colonies could only trade with Britain or other colonies, and only in British ships.

It was a system known as the Navigation Laws. And those laws now banned the British Caribbean islands from trading with north America or in American ships because the United States was now a foreign country.

It left the British West Indies stranded, thousands of miles from supplies of food and manufactures, having to trade in expensively-built British ships from the other side of the Atlantic – or even built in India.

And because of the way the winds blew, Jamaica, the biggest and most vociferous of all the British West Indian islands, was now very much the most stranded of all.

#wilberforce #enslavement #margaretmiddleton #Zong #granvillesharp #trafficking #slaveship #thomasclarkson #abolition #emancipation

Segar Smoking Society in Jamaica by James Abraham © The Trustees of the British Museum

Britain was getting tired of the privileged West Indies planters and their demands

What the vociferous Jamaican planters wanted was to scrap the Navigation Laws so that they could trade with the new United States BUT maintain the laws back home so that British consumers had to buy British sugar.

You see the French Caribbean island of St Domingue – which is now Dominica and Haiti – was producing more sugar than all of the British West Indies put together. And (without much of the brutality the British employed) producing it more cheaply.

So, if you scrapped the British Navigation Laws back home, then British sugar would be priced straight out of the market. Everybody in Britain would immediately buy cheaper French sugar. Bad idea.

However the West Indies’ planters’ demands were no longer important to the government. It was India that was financially keeping Britain afloat now, not sugar from the Caribbean.

Imports from India included a very superior grade of saltpetre that gave English gunpowder – and therefore cannon – a significant edge in warfare.

Better still, Indian trade didn’t need government protection. The East India Company had their very own navy to protect their trade, and from 1793 were paying the British government an annual subsidy of £400k to be allowed to keep its monopoly.

The West Indies, by contrast, were costing the British government over a million pounds a year – over 10% of government revenues. While the planters made private fortunes, British consumers, and more important, the British government was, for much of the time, heavily out of pocket.

The British government under William Pitt actually bought 13,400 enslaved men to make into soldiers to fight the French - they never received their freedom

Holy Trinity Clapham is most famously associated with William Wilberforce and the group of friends known as “The Clapham Sect”

Powerful evangelicals, including Wilberforce, took a dim view of West Indies planter hostility to Christianity

The days when the West Indians could get away with whatever they wanted were over. Their Whig friends in Britain had been thrown out of government. And questions were being raised about exactly why the West Indies planters – pretty much uniquely in British imperial society in the 1780s – were so opposed to Christianity.

Evangelical Anglicans were now spreading their influence into every corner of government and Empire. They were especially close with the Prime Minister William Pitt and in the East India Company.

In fact, by 1800s, the West Indies was getting to be just about the only part of the Empire where the evangelicals were kept out. (The Evangelicals weren’t that keen to end enslavement however, merely to ensure that the enslaved were given time off to go to Church.)

In what was rapidly becoming a competition for economic and political influence between the West Indies and the East Indies – it was completely obvious which side these very powerful evangelicals would be on.

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Benedict Cumberbatch as William Pitt the Younger with his friend William Wilberforce (Ioan Gruffydd) in the film Amazing Grace

The British government was now quietly buying slaves for itself to fight against the French in the Caribbean.

The anti-slavery movement juddered to a halt in the 1790s.

A year after the French Revolution, there was a spectacular revolt among the enslaved of French St Domingue. Both the French and the British tried to recapture the island, but the rebels pushed them both off the island. The revolt ended with the establishment of the first ex-enslaved black Caribbean republic, when Haiti was finally recognised on 1 January 1804.

The British government, now on the back foot militarily, was in no mood to stir up trouble in the Caribbean by tackling the issue of enslavement, nor was it in any hurry to end it. You see, the government of Wilberforce’s friend William Pitt was actually busy buying slaves for itself and turning them into soldiers to fight against the French in the Caribbean.

The British government bought 13,400 enslaved to make into soldiers who, it was hoped, might survive the climate better than British-born soldiers. They were promised their freedom when the war was over.

In practice, however, when the war ended they were transformed from slaves into regular soldiers who, the government claimed, had technically ‘volunteered.’ And soldiers who’d ‘volunteered’ could be retained indefinitely. It was a disgrace.

As a result enslaved British soldiers who didn’t die or run away were still being forced to serve in the British army in the 1820s.

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