Dan Snow's History Hit - How Slavery Built Modern Britain

Episode Date: December 12, 2020

Padraic Scanlan joined me on the podcast to talk about how Britain rose to global power on the backs of enslaved workers. Modern Britain has inherited the legacies and contradictions of a liberal empire built on slavery. Modern capitalism and liberalism emphasise 'freedom' - for individuals and for markets - but are built on human bondage.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hello everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. What a day. It is the launch day for tickets to the live tour. History Hit is going on the road. Come and listen to a live recording of the podcast. I mean that is the most exciting proposition ever. We're going to be in a room, we're going to be post-vaccine, there's going to be hugging, there's going to be social, what is the opposite of distancing? There's going to be social proximity. There's going to be laughter. We're going to shake hands, if you like. And then we're going to talk about some history. In each great city around the UK, we're going to be hearing from one of the best historians currently working, as we always do, weekly on the podcast. But then we're going to

be hearing about the history of the place we're in. I'm going to go on a little adventure that day. We're going to get out and about. It's going to be great. You can learn about history, you can learn about the place you're in, and then we're all going to get the chance to have a bit of discussion at the end. Please come along. Just go to history.com slash events. Can't wait to see all their folks. It's going to be great. This episode of the podcast is all about, well, the birth of the modern British state and its dark secret, the original sin, slavery, how slavery built Britain. We've got Patrick Scanlon, he's an academic, and he talks about how contrary to the myth that we like to tell ourselves, that Britons never, never,

never will be slaves and how freedom was central to the British conception of empire. In fact, of course, British wealth, British geopolitical power was built on the back of enslaved Africans working to produce commodities in the Caribbean, which were then exported and re-exported to and from Britain. It was a hell of a moneymaker. In this podcast, I want to explore just how important, how big was that slave economy in the development of the modern British state, was that slave economy in the development of the modern British state. Both its economy, industry, venture capital, but also its hard power, its naval reach. If you want to go and check out lots of programs about the 18th century, you can do so at historyhit.tv.

Please go and check it out, the new digital history channel. Use the code POD1, P-O-D-1, you get a month for free, and your second month does one pound, euro or dollar. So, all sorts of good things happening over there. Oh gosh, yeah watch our massive new show which is coming out soon we filmed it it's now in the edit it's looking good very exciting go and check it out history.tv in the meantime here is patrick scandal patrick thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thanks very much for having me. Is the slave trade something that is generating huge amounts of money in the 18th century in particular for Brits and is definitely pumping money into the economy? Or is it something that is systemically absolutely central to that gigantic development of the British economy in that period to become a globally hegemonic force?

development of the British economy in that period to become a globally hegemonic force. To understand exactly what the slave trade did for the British Empire, you have to kind of separate out those two categories. So for individual Britons, the slave trade made an enormous amount of money, both in terms of Britons who were involved in the slave trade itself and plantation owners who owned sugar plantations or coffee plantations in Britain's colonies in the Caribbean and before the American Revolution in the southern part of North America. But slavery built a much bigger economic and political system than just the profits of slave trading or of sugar trading. So in order to have a transatlantic slave trade or a transatlantic trade in the kinds of commodities that enslaved laborers produced in Britain's empire, all kinds of financial apparatus,

economic apparatus, political apparatus were necessary to build those connections. So in order to trade enslaved people or commodities across the Atlantic, you need transatlantic networks of political communication, transatlantic networks of insurance, transatlantic financial networks. And so all of those different networks were crucial to building Britain's empire in the Atlantic. So just to give a quick example, so we don't tend to think about Newfoundland, now one of Canada's provinces, as being particularly important to the British Empire in the 18th century, or indeed to Britain's slave empire in the Caribbean. But Newfoundland provided salt cod, which was one of the main proteins that enslaved people ate in the Caribbean. But Newfoundland provided salt cod, which was one of the main proteins

that enslaved people ate in the Caribbean. So the entire kind of Atlantic world tilted towards slavery and Britain built its empire on the profits of slavery. Let's go back to the beginnings. Talk me through the economics of enslaving African people, transporting them and putting them to work on a different continent. How did that come into being in the first place? Was there a plan? For Britain, not really. So transatlantic slavery began in the big Iberian Empire,

so in Spain and Portugal. So Spain and Portugal were the first European empires to experiment with the mass enslavement of African labourers, first in the Atlantic islands off the coast of Africa in the Canaries, in Madeira, and then later in Brazil and in other parts of South America and the Caribbean. And Britain stumbled into the transatlantic slave trade in the 17th century, beginning with pirate raids on slave ships and on slave trading colonies belonging to Spain and Portugal, and then eventually with the foundation

of sugar plantation colonies, first in Barbados, and then also tobacco planting colonies like in Virginia. And those colonies didn't begin originally as colonies where enslaved laborers were the main labor force. They started off being worked primarily by indentured workers from England and Ireland. So people who had been convicted of crimes or in debt, and it effectively sold their labor to the colony for a fixed period of time. But over time, indentures expired. And when indentured laborers were no longer under the contract that required them to work for a given period of time, these colonies were left without a labor force to do the extremely difficult and arduous work of cultivating sugar and of cultivating tobacco. And so British colonists

began to experiment at first with using enslaved African workers in the colonies. And within 10 or 15 years, a colony like Barbados, which in the 1620s or 1630s would have been worked by a combination of white indentured workers and enslaved African laborers was worked almost entirely by enslaved African labor. So it was a combination of greed and expediency and a desire to avoid conflict with formerly indentured workers that led to the beginnings of the use of enslaved laborers in the British Empire. But then in the course of the 18th century, an entire series of ideological and economic justifications for slavery emerged within the empire. So it started out as expediency. But by 1650, you might ask a slaveholder, why do you employ enslaved laborers? And they would say, because it's easier. But if you'd ask a slaveholder in 1750, they would say something like, because enslaved Africans are particularly suited to this kind of

work, and the empire is kind of offering them something, even though it's actually enslaving them and stealing their labor. Let me ask about the idea that there was kind of uniformity of opinion towards enslavement and slave-grown produce from the 17th century onwards. The fact those justifications needed to be cleaned up, burnished, suggests that it was controversial even back then. That's something that is too easy to forget now. This was something that was contested from the start, was it? I think it was contested in the sense that there were certainly people in England, in Scotland, in Wales, in Ireland, who objected to the idea of enslaving an African worker.

But there certainly wasn't an anti-slavery movement really in the 17th century. So if you look at the early novelist Afra Ben in her novel Orinoco, Orinoco is enslaved, but he's also a kind of, he's this extremely handsome, charismatic member of a royal family in West Africa. And so for him, enslavement is a kind of insult to his heritage, but it's not really, I think, safe to say that Orinoco is an anti-slavery novel. It's a novel that opposes the enslavement of one particular person whose personal qualities show that he ought not to be enslaved. And so the kind of mass anti-slavery movement, at least in Britain,

I mean, I think it's important to remember that enslaved people were anti-slavery from the beginning. And there's a tendency in terms of thinking about people in West Africa who dealt in slaves to treat West Africa as also a homogenous. But there were, you know, not every West African polity dealt in slaves. Many opposed the slave trade, many fought against the slave trade. So West Africa was politically fragmented when it came to slavery as well. And in Britain, at least, there were arguments against enslaving individual people, particularly if those people had the kind of qualities that needed to flourish in free society. But there wasn't really an unorganized anti-slavery movement that early in the 17th century. In Britain, it really began with the Quakers in the

sort of first decades of the 18th century. And what about the money? How quickly does the money make itself felt, you know, in terms of parliamentary interest? We hear a lot in the sort of first decades of the 18th century. And what about the money? How quickly does the money make itself felt, you know, in terms of parliamentary interest? We hear a lot in the UK about so-called nabobs coming over, self-made men who'd made huge amounts of money and made traditional elites very nervous about their new political and economic influence. How quickly does that equivalent for the West Indian planting interest make itself felt?

I mean, quite quickly. There's one feature I think that differentiates the Caribbean empire from the Indian empire, which is that in the Caribbean empire, I don't think perhaps in an even more pronounced way than in India, colonists didn't think of the Caribbean as their home, or at least white colonists didn't. They thought of Britain as home. And the fantasy, the end goal for any sugar planter was to make enough money that you could move back to Britain and establish yourself as a gentleman of leisure and invest in philanthropic causes and end goal for any sugar planter was to make enough money that you could move back to Britain and establish yourself as a gentleman of leisure and invest in philanthropic causes and control your

business from Britain rather than from the Caribbean. So within a few generations of sugar planting, and certainly by the beginning of the sugar boom, when sugar really became a really profitable crop in the British Empire in the early 18th century, many planters were becoming absentees. So leaving their plantations in the Caribbean in the hands of what were called plantation attorneys, who would often manage multiple plantations, either for the same slave holder or for multiple slave holders, and moving back to Britain. And that had a very pronounced cultural impact right away. In addition to all of the sudden infusion of cash into all kinds of British institutions, including Parliament.

This is in the first half of the 18th century is a time when if you have money, you can buy representation very easily, in addition to, you know, investing in art and cultural causes. But Augustine satire, this kind of early era, the first great 18th century movement in British letters, is obsessed with this idea of politeness, right? Addison and Steele in the pages of The Spectator cultivate this ironic detachment that is really a kind of way of smoothing over a society that is being really quickly transformed by the changes of an empire that's becoming very rich very quickly. by the changes of an empire that's becoming very rich very quickly.

So even British culture is formed by the interaction between Britain and its slave empire. This is an economic and political world that's really rough and really raw and really dangerous and really violent. And politeness emerges as a way of kind of smoothing out those rough edges and presenting to the British public a new kind of cultivated imperial way of being in the world. So the impact of slavery on the British Empire is quick, it's immediate, and it's really substantial culturally, politically and economically. This is History Hit. We're talking to Patrick Scanlon about slavery. More coming up after this. Land a Viking longship on island shores.

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There are new episodes every week. Let's talk about the political economy just briefly. Let's talk about the political economy just briefly. To what extent does the British state, the idea of the development of this kind of fiscal military state, a state that modernises itself very effectively in order to fight wars paid for by long-term debt funded by taxation. How important is sugar, is that the money coming from slave-grown products in this story? money coming from slave grown products in this story? It's harder to disaggregate, I think, the products that are made specifically by enslaved workers from all of the other products that come out of Britain's Atlantic colonies. So, you know, for example, like Rhode Island is a place where many slave ships sail from both before and after American independence, but there are no plantations in Rhode Island.

But Rhode Island booms throughout the 18th century because it is part of a network of trade with the Caribbean. So wood from Rhode Island, food from Rhode Island, cattle, grain, all that stuff is going down to the Caribbean to feed enslaved people and to supply plantations. But, you know, it doesn't really come as much in the form of taxation, because one of the things that allows the Britain slave empire to flourish, and that's one of the things I try to show in the book, in the first half of the 18th century, at least, is the kind of lawlessness of trade in the Atlantic world. So technically, all of Britain's colonies are governed by the Navigation Acts, which are mercantilist laws that require that British colonies can only trade with either Britain or with other British colonies. But in practice, Britain's colonies in the Atlantic, and especially Britain's colonies in North America,

the colonies that become the United States, trade freely not only with the British Empire in the Caribbean, but also with the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the Danish, you know, there's a lot of trade going effectively in the first half of the 18th century. There is a kind of free trade in the Atlantic world. And so it's not so much tax revenue that flows back into Britain's colonies so much as the constant expansion of this network of cities and towns and ports and plantations that creates a kind of very durable system for managing trade within the empire. It's only really after American independence that tax revenue from the Caribbean becomes a little bit more significant, but it's not really a kind of a raw dollars and cents kind of amount so much as it is the system that slavery

creates. That's really interesting, but it also implies that in the beginning of the 18th century and the 17th century, the profits from the enslaved African workers are being realized by individuals. But a lot of the payment is coming from the government because sure enough, when they get in fights with colonists of different countries, or there are uprisings, presumably that need putting down, you call the Redcoats, you call the Royal Navy. So the British public are picking up the bills, right? But the profits are being realized by individuals. Yeah, that's absolutely right. So one of the biggest slave revolts of the 18th century was Tacky's Revolt in Jamaica in 1760 and 1761. And that was really, at least for the Jamaican legislature, which throughout the 18th century, and indeed, all the way up until emancipation and beyond, is extremely jealous of its legislative independence.

The Jamaican legislature adopts a pose of resentment towards the imperial government. But when it comes to a rebellion by enslaved people that threatens to overthrow the colonial government, then of course, Jamaican colonists are very eager for not just the arrival of British soldiers, but a permanent military installation within the colony. So there is a really strange relationship, especially between the Caribbean colonies and the mother country in Britain. Because Britain, without the Navigation Acts, the Caribbean colonists, white colonists in the Caribbean, would not have a kind of protected captive market

for their products in Britain. So certainly by the end of the 18th century, there are a lot of other colonies worked by enslaved laborers belonging to other European empires that can produce sugar in greater quantities, higher quality, and much more cheaply than Britain's colonies. But Britain's colonists are protected by the Navigation Act, so they have a kind of exclusive claim on the domestic sugar market. And so the wealth of the slave empire comes from protectionism, from the protection of British slaveholders from competition from other sugar-producing empires.

But at the same time, particularly the colonies that have a long tradition of legislative independence are very resentful of what they see as interference in their affairs. So during the American Revolution, there was a lot of sturm und drang in Britain's Caribbean colonies about joining the American colonists in rebellion. But ultimately, none of the colonies even came close to making that decision, in part because their revenue and their security was guaranteed much more completely by the British government than the 13 colonies on the mainland. The Caribbean relies on the empire, but also produces revenue for it. It's deeply, deeply entwined in the making

of the British Empire in the 18th century. I remember years ago, I was writing a book on the Seven Years' War, the French-Indian War in Canada. And of course, the final chapter is Guadeloupe or Canada, so-called. The controversy there where it seems crazy today, the world's second biggest country, one of the wealthiest countries. And there was a huge debate within the British Atlantic Empire about whether to hand back Canada to the French in order to keep hold of Guadeloupe. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, France's sugar colony, Saint-Domingue, which becomes the Republic of Haiti in 1804, Martinique, Guadeloupe, these are some of the most valuable individual colonies in the entire European colonial world in the 18th century. In 2020, it seems like the value of

Canada would be so much larger than the value of Guadeloupe from the perspective in the 18th century. In 2020, it seems like the value of Canada would be so much larger than the value of Guadeloupe from the perspective of the 18th century empire. But of course it wasn't. And it's also a testament to the power of the planters that Guadeloupe was returned to France because British sugar planters were fearful of competition from French sugar planters who would be kind of folded into the British empire and suddenly become their competitors for the internal British market rather than their kind of competitors in a more abstract sense. Actually, one of the things that made it easier for slaveholders to accept the end of the transatlantic slave trade in the British Empire was the expansion of Britain's colonial holdings in the Caribbean. Internal competition is also a theme that's kind of easy to forget in this story.

Yeah, protectionism doesn't work so well for the protected industries when the imperial power becomes hegemonic and controls the whole area. You mentioned the West Indian, the planting interest there. Talk to me about Parliament. You mentioned initially, so you can buy so-called pocket boroughs, rotten boroughs in Parliament. You can literally buy MPs and the British House of Commons. How powerful do you estimate that the planting interest was? Was it a homogenous interest? And how powerful were they through their peak, if you like, in the mid to late 18th century? The History of Parliament project has tried to count the individual MPs who were invested directly in slavery and the slave trade, and it's probably 40 or 50. So it's certainly not a

majority. When you think about the power of West Indian planters in the 18th century parliament, in particular, it's not so much that there's a kind of leader of a slaveholders caucus or of a Caribbean planters caucus who can summon enough votes to overturn any kind of anti-slavery motion. It's that there's a core of planters who hold property in the West Indies and their clients within parliament and a much wider circle of members of parliament who are very, very receptive to any kind of argument about property. The central value of 18th century British politics within parliament is property ownership. So an anti-slavery argument that begins to list towards dispossessing a parliamentarian of their property suddenly attracts a lot of supporters, right? So there might be a slaveholding MP or a slave trading MP who is relatively well-liked within parliament, but then when a kind of anti-slavery motion is put in place, that person can make

an appeal to the general property and interests of everyone in parliament. I mean, there certainly is a voting bloc, but it's not as though it's a voting bloc that commands a majority and that the anti-slavery struggle is the struggle to elect more MPs who are less pro-slavery. It's that the entire institution is more or less pro-slavery because the entire institution is 100% pro-property. And the possibility of losing that property is enough to alarm a majority throughout the century. How should we think about modern Britain's foundations of that slave economy? The City of London is famous for being a centre of insurance and international finance. So those things, you would argue that slavery is central to that history, that culture?

Yes, absolutely. And that, moreover, is one of the features of Britain's involvement with slavery that survives long after the abolition of slavery in the British Empire. So just to sort of fast forward to the 19th century, in the wake of Britain's abolition of colonial slavery in 1833, and then the end of apprenticeship in Britain's colonies in 1838, the Anti-Slavery Society held the World Anti-Slavery Congress in 1840, which had British delegates, British colonial delegates, American delegates. And one of the real sore points for British delegates at that conference was how to disentangle Britain's financial world from the world of American slavery. So Britain's owned huge numbers of government bonds issued by slaveholding American states.

So they couldn't own enslaved people or plantations under British law, but they could own debt in slaveholding societies. And at the same time, the amount of British capital that flowed into American cotton plantations, into the cotton trade, into insuring the cotton trade was enormous. So Britain's financial investment in slavery remained enormous long after the abolition of slavery in Britain's colonial empire. And the roots of that relationship were made in the 18th century when British firms were able to open offices on both sides of the Atlantic, connecting Britain to its colonies, but also building conduits for money and information and people that survived the abolition of slavery, and indeed continued to thrive after the abolition

of slavery. So you can remove slavery from the empire that slavery built, but that doesn't take apart all of the machinery of that empire. Padraig, thank you so much for coming on this podcast. What's the great new book called? It's called Slave Empire, How Slavery Built Modern Britain. It's out on the 26th of November. Well, good luck. Thanks very much for having me. I hope you enjoyed the podcast. Just before you go, a bit of a favour to ask.

I totally understand if you don't want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash money, makes sense. But if you could just do me a favor, it's for free. Go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcast. If you give it a five-star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review, purge yourself, give it a glowing review. I'd really appreciate that. It's tough weather, the law of the jungle out there

and I need all the fire support I can get. So that will boost it up the charts. It's so tiresome, but if you could do it, I'd be very, very grateful. Thank you.