The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (5 page)

Although burdened by moral and intellectual disabilities, the negro was part of a divinely ordered world in which the prime justification for a man’s existence was his productive usefulness. This principle of the utility of all humankind impelled British governments to deport idlers, vagrants and criminals to the colonies where they would redeem themselves through work, and the French to condemn miscreants to perpetual labour rowing war galleys. Plantation slavery was the means by which negroes could fulfil the role for which God had intended them and add to the general well-being of the world. ‘I was shock’d at the first appearance of human flesh exposed for sale,’ wrote John Pinney, an absentee Nevis planter in 1764. ‘But surely God ordain’d ’em for the use and benefit of us: other his Divine Will would have been manifest by some sign or token.’

Enslavement was not without its advantages. With breathtaking smugness Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury, argued in the early 1700s that since the slaves had given so much to Britain it was only proper that they should receive Christianity in return. This exchange was unwelcome to planters who imagined, with good reason as it turned out, that conversion would make their slaves ‘more perverse and intractable’. Addressing the Barbadian plantocracy, assembled in the island’s parliament in 1681, the governor Sir Richard Dutton remarked that slaves deserved the ‘good usage of Christian servants, but as to make negroes Christians, their savage brutishness renders them wholly incapable’.
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Slave-owning was compatible with the Christian life, at least in the form it was taught by Catholic and Church of England divines. One of the latter, Bishop Fleetwood, preached in 1711 that, ‘The laws of God did not forbid the keeping of Christian slaves, nor do the laws of the land. The following year his church’s missionary organisation, the Society for the Propagation of the Christian Gospel, was bequeathed a plantation in Barbados. Each of its slaves was branded on the chest with the word ‘Society’ to denote his new owner; not surprisingly the rate of conversion was disappointing.

Nevertheless, and despite all the clerical humbug that surrounded the subject, the admission that slaves could be converted opened a debate, which intensified as the eighteenth century progressed, as to how, if at all, a religion that claimed the equality of souls before God could reconcile itself to a system founded upon the hereditary inferiority of one part of mankind. Moreover, as the planters predicted, a knowledge of Christian doctrines led many slaves to interpret their own circumstances unfavourably. One who did told a missionary in the 1820s, ‘Buckra [the white man] left him God in England, and devil in Jamaica stir him to do all dis wickedness.’
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The brandmark that identified the Society for the Propagation of the Christian Gospel’s slave was an unmistakable reminder that he or she was, in the eyes of the law, the property of a master. According to the constitution of Carolina that was framed by the philosopher John Locke in 1669 ‘every free man’ was ‘to have absolute authority over his negro slaves’, a principle which, in different forms, obtained throughout much of North America and the West Indies. Its everyday application gave plantation life a peculiar and often grotesque brutality. Much has been written about this, so one incident set down in the diary of the manager of a Jamaican estate may stand for many others: ‘(25 May 1756) Derby caught by Port Royal [both slaves] eating canes. Had him well flogged and pickled, then made Henry [another slave] shit in his mouth.’
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Eating the young cane shoots was the inevitable outcome of having to undertake heavy physical labour on a sparse diet. A recent forensic examination of 101 skeletons of slaves exhumed from a Barbadian graveyard, in use between 1660 and 1820, revealed an average life expectancy of twenty-nine and a high death rate for children under ten. Evidence of nutrition indicated a diet that was inadequate for the tasks demanded of the slaves, who commonly assuaged their hunger by smoking tobacco in pipes.
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This high wastage rate was not offset by the slaves’ ability to reproduce themselves, despite the active encouragement of concubinage. This phenomenon was explained with some percipience by one planter who noted in his journal that, ‘Negresses can produce children at pleasure, and when they are barren, it is just as hens will frequently not lay eggs on shipboard, because they do not like their situation. Low birth rates and high death rates meant that planters had continually to replenish their stock of slaves and so the slave trade was perpetuated.

The mechanics of the transatlantic slave trade were simple. Negroes were obtained by barter with the tribal rulers of the West African seaboard states, confined in compounds attached to trading posts and then shipped for sale in the West Indies. During the second half of the seventeenth century the commonest items of exchange were cowrie shells, bolts of Indian-manufactured cloth (both local units of currency), copper, iron, tobacco and alcohol. After 1700 some British dealers offered muskets which were greatly prized and a form of indirect investment since tribal armies equipped with firearms enjoyed a considerable advantage on the battlefield and could, therefore, capture more prisoners to sell on the coast.

During its early stages, returns from the slave trade were very high. A slave could be exchanged for goods worth between £4 and £5 and the cost of passage was a further £5, including his food and the attendance of a doctor. On a West Indian quayside the slave would be sold for between £15 and £17 or 2,400 pounds of sugar depending on his or her age and health. The high profit margin was in great part a reflection of the losses of slaves during the voyage for as many as one in four perished from sickness or despair, or a mixture of the two.

During the 1650s the trade was already flourishing, with an average of 3,000 slaves being sold annually in Barbados, some for re-export to other islands or Virginia and Maryland. The scope of the trade, with markets in Dutch as well as British colonies, attracted the intervention of the government which hoped to secure a share of the profits. In 1660 a monopoly was granted to the Company of Royal Adventurers (in which Charles II invested £5,000) which gave it the right to sell licences to British slave traders who did business on the West African coast. Reorganised as the Royal African Company in 1672, the corporation controlled a string of fortified and garrisoned trading stations on the shores of what today are Gambia, Senegal, Ghana and Nigeria. The company never enjoyed a total monopoly – enterprising slavers operating out of Boston and New York ignored it and traded with Madagascar. In 1698 it was abolished, allowing hundreds of independent traders to stake a claim in the commerce. Most were based in London, Liverpool and Bristol, but there were many, often small-scale businesses, with vessels of less than a hundred tons, based in Lancaster, Whitehaven and Dumfries.

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Among the commodities bartered for slaves were cheap textiles imported from India by the East India Company. Indian and Far Eastern markets had first been penetrated by the Portuguese at the beginning of the sixteenth century. The arrival of their heavily-gunned caravels was unwelcomed, but proved unstoppable. In 1501 Vasco da Gama’s men-o’-war bombarded Calicut to show its inhabitants the power of European cannon, and a year later his outnumbered flotilla decisively defeated an Arab fleet off the Malabar coast. These victories gave the Portuguese a local supremacy that lasted for nearly a hundred years.

The challenge to Portugal’s domination of the trade in spices and Far Eastern textiles came from English and Dutch merchants and shipowners. After a number of preliminary reconnaissances, the London-based East India Company was formed in 1600, the brainchild of Levant Company merchants who were keen to by-pass middlemen in the eastern Mediterranean and deal direct with spice suppliers in the East Indies (modern Indonesia). The company was small, with a capital of £68,000, and at first confined itself to annual expeditions by small fleets. The risks, not least of the journey around the Cape of Good Hope, were great. When the
Globe
and the
Peppercorn
returned in 1617 with full holds and the prospect of a good return, the company’s governor called the stockholders to prayer for ‘all ought to lift up their hearts unto God to be thankful … and to be more thankful for the same; not doubting that the more thankful we be, the more His blessings will increase.’

The blessings and the profits did increase, satisfying the business acumen and piety of investors in an age which believed that God never failed to reward His elect. Those who put their money on the early voyages received, on average, a return of twenty per cent. Moreover, in 1614 two company ships had engaged and driven off four Portuguese vessels by the mouth of the River Tapti, a demonstration of British fighting skill which was watched by the Mughal army on shore. In India at least the company had secured a toehold and, within twenty years, the Portuguese had conceded the East India Company the right to set up factories, as trading posts were known, wherever it chose on the Indian coast.

And yet as the company’s name indicated, its founders had pinned their hopes on gaining a share in the spice trade at its source: Malaya, Java and the Molucca Islands. Here the rival Dutch Compagnie van Verre (Company of Far Distant Lands) was already strongly entrenched and ready to resist interlopers. Founded in 1602 with capital of £500,000, the Dutch company quickly established fortified trading posts at Batavia (Jakarta), Amboina Island and Malacca on the Malay coast which they took from the Portuguese in 1641. Tolerance of British intruders was thin and, in 1623, eighteen British merchants were tortured to death on Amboina in an exercise of brutality designed to frighten off others. It did not wholly succeed but it helped turn the minds of British traders towards India where their presence was not opposed.

The Mughal emperors, India’s overlords, and their provincial nawabs (governors) were willing to come to terms with the East India Company and allow them to secure a string of trading posts along the western and eastern shores of the subcontinent. A continual flow of ships replaced the earlier annual sailings and by the mid-century a profitable trade was developing. In 1674–5 the Company exported £155,000 worth of British manufactured goods and £410,000 in silver bullion, and imported £860,000 worth of Indian goods, largely textiles. At the same time, and in imitation of the Portuguese and Dutch, the Company was entering the shipping business, carrying goods between India and ports in southern Arabia and the Far East. In 1664 a minute amount of tea, still an exotic luxury, was obtained from China solely for the use of the directors.

As the Company’s interests expanded and diversified, its establishments became larger, although the directors insisted that it had no political or territorial ambitions in a country that was enjoying a period of stability under Mughal government. And yet in a land where the outward signs of prestige and power were important, the Company had to maintain an impressive public face. In the 1670s, Thomas Bowrey, a visitor to the Company’s factory at Fort St George near Madras, found it ‘surrounded by very potent and strong bulwarks, points, and batteries’ like any fort in Europe. The governor and his council behaved like local potentates ‘for the Honour of an English Nation keeping and maintaining the place in great splendour, civil and good government, entertaining nobly all foreign ambassadors’. The grandees were also merchants and Bowrey saw ‘great quantities of muslins, calicoes etc.’ stored for export to Britain and ships bound for Arabia, Persia and China with cargoes of British broadcloths, knives and scissors.
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The Indians were a ‘harmless idolatrous people’ among whom there were well-established business communities of Parsis, Gujaratis and Moplahs willing to trade with the Company. By this time textiles, produced by weavers who earned an anna (½p) a day, had become the staple of the company’s exports. Between 1699 and 1701 imports of these products totalled £522,000 and two thirds were re-exported to Europe and West Africa where they were exchanged for slaves.

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The Necessary Union of Plantations: Crown and Colonies

In 1645 the trading vessel
Dolphin
left London with a cargo of manufactured goods that included glass, castors, shoes, hats, bales of canvas, and pewter, iron and brass utensils, all for sale to the New England colonists. These wares were unloaded at Boston where the hold was filled with local products: wheat and rye, barrels of preserved beef, pork, herrings and mackerel, and 7,000 pounds of tobacco, presumably shipped from Virginia and Maryland. The
Dolphin
then sailed southwards to Barbados where some of its cargo was discharged and replaced with sugar. It then began the haul across the Atlantic, pausing at the Canaries where the pickled fish was removed for sale to those pious Catholics who obeyed the church’s rules concerning meatless Fridays.
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This round voyage and hundreds like it marked a significant change in the pattern of British trade. Fine woollen cloth, so long Britain’s main export, was steadily losing ground to tobacco, sugar, fish and, during the last quarter of the century, Canadian beaver pelts for hat-making. By 1700 the re-export of these commodities made up 30 per cent of Britain’s foreign trade. Cloth’s share of the export market had fallen dramatically from 90 per cent in 1640 to 47 per cent at the end of the century and continued to decline. At the same time new markets were emerging. Between 1630 and 1700 half a million men and women had emigrated to the colonies, two thirds of them to North America, and all were dependent on home-manufactured goods; during the 1650s 20,000 pairs of boots and shoes and 1,500 horses were imported into Barbados.

The early stages of this economic revolution coincided with a period of domestic political instability which culminated in the outbreak of the Civil War between Charles I and parliament in 1642. The principle source of contention was control over the making of policy, particularly in matters concerning religion and taxation. The waves stirred by the war in Britain sent ripples across the Atlantic. From 1640 onwards, many New England Puritans returned home to fight for parliament and in Virginia, its governor Sir William Berkeley, a former courtier and playwright, welcomed royalist refugees after the collapse of their cause in 1649. The new, republican Commonwealth disapproved and removed him from his post, allowing him to retire to his plantations, from where he emerged to recover his position on Charles II’s restoration in 1660.