29862: Arthur (opinion) Britain's vote to end its slave trade was a precursor to ... (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Charles Arthur <charlesarthur@hotmail.com>

Note: article mentions the slave revolutionaries in Saint-Domingue, today's 
Haiti,

Britain's vote to end its slave trade was a precursor to today's liberal 
imperialism


The sanctimonious interventionism that still motivates British governments was 
first conceived in 1807

Richard Gott
Wednesday January 17, 2007
The Guardian


In March, the British state will rightly celebrate the bicentenary of the end 
of Britain's part in the slave trade. Yet ordinary citizens, as well as 
schoolteachers and makers of television programmes who may find themselves 
caught up in the prolonged bout of self-congratulation imposed by government 
fiat (with the help of £16m from the Heritage Lottery Fund), will do well to 
reflect on aspects of this anniversary that are not so praiseworthy.

In the first place, when remembering the parliamentary vote in 1807, we should 
also recall that the slave trade was, for more than two centuries, the central 
feature of Britain's foreign commerce - endorsed, supported and profitably 
enjoyed by the royal family, and by the families of sundry courtiers, 
financiers, landowners and merchants.

The personal and public wealth of Britain created by slave labour was a crucial 
element in the accumulation of capital that made the industrial revolution 
possible, and the surviving profits have remained a solid element within 
specific families and within British society generally, cascading down from 
generation to generation, in John Major's felicitous phrase. In this context, 
the demand for reparations is a serious proposition, similar to the claim put 
forward by the families of Holocaust survivors for the return of property 
stolen by the Nazis. Black people whose forebears were slaves, victims of that 
other Holocaust, are simply asking for the stolen fruits of their ancestors' 
labour power to be given back to their rightful heirs.

Second, we should remember that the end to the trade came not simply from the 
useful agitation of Quakers, other Christian dissidents and parliamentary 
radicals, but also from the work of slaves who engaged in the propaganda of the 
deed, people who today would be described as "terrorists". Driving the 
anti-slave trade agitation was the ever accelerating rate of slave rebellion 
experienced in the Americas and the Caribbean in the late 18th century, 
reaching a peak in the years of the French revolution.

It is customary to pay homage to the slave revolutionaries in Saint-Domingue, 
today's Haiti, who rebelled in August 1791. They seized power, abolished 
slavery, and established the first black republic in the Americas. Yet other 
islands also saw serious uprisings by slaves and Maroons, who - at the time of 
the French-British wars - seized control with French help of large parts of 
Dominica, Guadeloupe, Grenada, St Vincent, Jamaica, St Lucia and Trinidad. Even 
where their actions were not eventually successful, the rebellions defeated two 
British armadas sent to destroy them, killing thousands of seamen and soldiers 
(with assistance from the French and from the twin weapon of malaria and yellow 
fever). They also deprived the British of income from their sugar plantations 
for years. Since those in the forefront of these rebellions were slaves 
recently arrived from Africa, the stark danger of the continuing slave trade to 
British commercial interests could not have been more graphically revealed.

Third, in considering the British achievement of 1807, we should remember that 
other countries got there first. Again, it is customary to record the decision 
of the French convention to abolish slavery itself, on February 4 1794. Yet in 
the US, in spite of the wording of the constitution adopted in 1787 that 
endorsed the slave trade (at least for the subsequent 20 years), several states 
abandoned slavery. While the southern states grew rich on slave labour for 
another 70 years (until 1863), slavery was abolished in the 1780s in New Jersey 
and Delaware, and the trade was outlawed in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New 
York and Rhode Island.

The Danes were also among the first in the field, decreeing an end to the trade 
to their Caribbean colonies in March 1792 (though it continued until 1803). The 
British voted much the same way as the Danes at the end of a Commons debate a 
month later, declaring that "the slave trade ought to be gradually abolished". 
The weasel word "gradually" was introduced by an influential imperial 
politician from Scotland, Henry Dundas, who thereby postponed the trade's end 
for 15 years.

This long postponement is a further reason for this year's anniversary to be 
celebrated in a minor key, for the continuing trade allowed the evil practices 
of the Atlantic passage to continue, as well as permitting the British to 
purchase black people in the slave market to serve in their imperial wars. 
Black people were imported from the slave market in Goa and from Mozambique to 
fight a war of conquest in Ceylon, while 13,000 slaves were bought in the 
Caribbean to help in the suppression of slave rebellions. Black battalions were 
formed in several islands after 1795, and the soldiers were promised freedom 
when hostilities ended. Since the promise was often forgotten, the rebellions 
on one side were followed by mutinies on the other, both leading to a 
horrendous litany of floggings and executions.

A fourth aspect of the slave trade ban should not be forgotten: the vote of 
1807 was not always respected. The British in Asia continued to take advantage 
of the continuing trade. The governor in Mauritius, conquered in 1810 from the 
French, sought to befriend the existing French settlers by allowing them to 
continue importing slaves, some 30,000 between 1811 and 1821.

The vote did not put an end to the international trade by other nations, nor 
did it terminate slavery. Several countries continued the trade, with half a 
million slaves arriving in the Americas in the 1820s, more than 60,000 a year. 
About 3,000 slaves were still being landed annually in Brazil in the 1850s. 
Slavery itself was not abolished in the British empire until 1838, in the 
French empire in 1848, and in the US in 1863. Spanish Cuba continued with 
slavery until 1886, and Brazil until 1888.

One lasting and dubious legacy of 1807 has been the sanctimonious 
interventionism that has survived in Britain for two centuries, and still 
motivates contemporary governments. The British navy was given the task of 
patrolling the Atlantic, to police the continuing international trade from 
Africa to Brazil, Cuba, and the US. The West Africa Squadron began surveying 
the coast of Africa, and securing the naval bases that would make easier the 
task of imperial expansion later in the century, when east Africa was brought 
into the frame. Parliamentary radicals, however, were always opposed to the 
policy, arguing cogently in the 1840s that "our unavailing attempts to suppress 
the traffic worsened the lot of the slaves by making the misery of the Middle 
Passage worse than ever". Yet their opposition was ineffective. The naval 
squadron was not phased out until the 1870s, but by then Britain's taste for 
empire had become well established.

The navy's activities gave the British a taste for international action that 
has survived long into the post-colonial era. Tony Blair's speech in Plymouth 
last week, on Britain as a "war-fighting" nation whose frontiers reach out to 
Indonesia, last included in the empire between 1811 and 1816, was emblematic of 
the new enthusiasm for imperial revival, echoed by Gordon Brown's repeated 
remarks that the empire gives us nothing to apologise for.

The final tragic aspect of the decision to end the slave trade was its arousal 
of the false expectation among slaves that their servitude might soon be 
abolished. It was to be more than 30 years after 1807 before the British 
finally abandoned slavery in their empire, years that saw major slave 
rebellions in Jamaica, Dominica, Barbados, Honduras and Guyana. All were 
savagely repressed. Some participants claimed that the trumpeted news of an end 
to the trade had led them to believe that slavery itself was over, a mistake 
that some people still make today.

· Richard Gott, author of Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution, is writing 
a book about imperial rebellions.

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