The acknowledgement of the influence of the
slave trade on contemporary Britain is, of course, contentious. For some, that is.
When I was growing up, the rich used to
show their supremacy, culturally and economically, by paying in ‘guineas’
rather than pounds. I had to become an adult before I found out the precise
provenance of that word. Similarly, I had to wait for maturity and beyond,
before anyone wondered if Mr. Darcy and Mr. Bingley might have made their money
from slavery. And don’t get me started on Colston Hall …
Part of the reason for this lies within
mainstream school and university twentieth century textbooks - the ‘Whig view
of History’ has prevailed in this country, pretty much, throughout my lifetime:
incremental, empirical, pragmatic, non-ideological, practical progress.
Omniscient and generous rulers, who knew when it was exactly the right moment
to bring in exactly the right amount of reform, and so avoid those beastly
continental revolutions.
It is this historiographical trope that
trots out a so-called line running from Magna Carta, through the ‘Glorious (‘peaceful’,
and exaggerated) Revolution’ of 1688, and on through the Reform Acts of the 19th
and early 20th centuries. This trope misses out the Commonwealth
(‘Interregnum’), of course, but includes the 1807 Act ending the slave trade in
the British Empire, and the 1833-4 Abolition of Slavery Act.
Oh, beneficent all-seeing rulers: born to
rule, and always knowing best: lucky Britons and lucky Britain.
This is, needless to say, an illusion at
best, false consciousness at worst – and dangerously deceptive with regards to
slavery. The foregrounding of the 1807 and 1833 Acts has too often got our past
off the hook – two centuries worth of slave trafficking sent backstage. And the
history books that have contrasted the domestic programme of the ‘Modernizing
Whigs’ of the 1830s with the ‘Reactionary Tories’ pre - 1832, have often
glossed over some of the detail of the 1833 Abolition of Slavery Act. The textbooks have focused upon
Whig/Benthamite reforms for factories, towns, workhouses and so on, rather than
the abolition of slavery.
The 1833-4 Act freed slaves within the
British Empire (but let the East India Company off), but provided £20 million
in compensation for the slave owners. That was not far off half of all
governmental expenditure for that year, and is the equivalent of some £17
billion in today’s values. The UCL research project indicates that about half
of those slave owners resided in this country and half in the West Indies (https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/commercial/).
The mapping of these beneficiaries shows
how slave owners pop up in the most unlikely of places in the United Kingdom in
1834.
The project also shows what was done with
much of this compensation and, unsurprisingly, a huge amount went into
investment in the railways.
In a sense, the ‘Railway Mania’ of the
1840s, and the subsequent speculative investment cycles in the British domestic
economy, were fuelled by those handouts to slave owners – and when you take
into account the Keynsian multiplier effect, it’s hard to imagine almost anyone
whose lives weren’t touched by that dirty money.
I researched two areas on the database for
slave owners: Stroud and Portland Place in London. Portland Place was
absolutely rife with slave owners; Stroud had but one in 1834: Samuel Baker of
Lypiatt Park. Think of that, the next time you gaze out on that grand house;
think about Baker’s 410 slaves on his two estates in Jamaica and how all his
compensation helped fund many of our local railway lines: ‘A Day in the Life of
a Penny’.
Appetite whetted, I typed in Painswick and
discovered: Rev. Joseph Duncan Ostrehan, Sheepscombe Parsonage, He received
compensation of £85 8s 11d for 3 slaves in Barbados, God bless him.
I then typed in Gloucestershire – why was I
so astonished to find so much compensation being paid to Bristol in general, and
Clifton, in particular? But a few more
local parishes popped up. (Stop Press! I have now decided, whilst writing this,
to collate all of these so as to put together a walk around the county and
around the city – so no more of these entries for now. I’ll post all of that in
a couple of weeks’ time.)
As regards the consequences of compensation
for culture, the sullied cultural legacy resulting from this dirty money is shown
at https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/cultural/
, and https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/physical/
also shows how compensation paid to the
46,000 owners of about 800,000 slaves helped pay for new grand houses. It also
funded many charities; indeed, the Royal Lifeboat Association was floated with
slavery compensation. (To name but one.) Your own delving will reveal this
hidden history of widely tainted philanthropy.
Another cultural legacy – albeit delayed –
was racialist ideology. The campaign led
by free traders against mercantilism, monopoly and slavery meant that
imperialism and empire were regarded with thrifty suspicion by the Manchester mid
19th century zeitgeist – but the ‘Age of Empire’ would see the
resurrection of racialist ideas in the late nineteenth century.
And how.
And, of course, it’s still with us today.
And how.
More of this on a future post – and working
backwards, more on the economics, ideology and cultural consequences of slavery
in the 18th century on a future post too.
To conclude for now, the link below takes
you to the two excellent documentaries on BBC 2 in July 2015. David Olusoga was
quite brilliant in these programmes about the UCL project. His presentation was
especially poignant when reminding us that the abolitionists were, in the end,
only allowed to free fellow human beings, by denying those slaves their
humanity. This was, in a sense, a denial of the abolitionists’ fundamental beliefs.
The slave owners were triumphant in defeat:
compensation for property, not humanity. That is why there is no equality of
payment; instead there is a calibrated proportionality; Jamaican soil was
becoming sugar-exhausted, whereas British Guiana was sugar-fertile, and so,
Jamaican slaves were worth less … indeed, some were ready reckoned down to the
most exact halfpenny.
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