In Our Time - Slavery and Empire

Episode Date: October 17, 2002

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss slavery and empire; two themes that run right through this country’s history. Britain’s imperial project dominated at least the last three centuries of our national life. Its advocates claim it was a civilising mission by which Britain spread enlightenment and improvement across the globe. Opponents have long seen it as a brutal business, with Britons cast as cruel oppressors out to exploit a conquered world. Is our imperial history so clear cut? What if Britons were themselves captives, either as prisoners of an imperial enterprise that sucked them in, generation after generation or, in some startling cases, as slaves to foreign peoples? Is slavery an inevitable part of empire: does it come with the territory? And how did Britain finally shake it off? With Linda Colley, School Professor of History, LSE; Catherine Hall, Professor of Modern British Social and Cultural History, University College London; Felipe Fernandez Armesto, Professorial Research Fellow, Queen Mary College London.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, this week on In Our Time, we're discussing captivity and empire, which brings in slavery in empire, two of the themes that run through this country's imperial history.

Britain's Imperial Project played a major part in the last 250 years of our national life and we've had a hangover ever since. Its advocates claim it was a civilising mission by which Britain spread enlightenment and improvement across the globe. Opponents have long seen it as a brutal business with Britain's cast as cruel oppressors who set out to exploit a conquered world.

But our imperial history isn't so simple. What happened, for instance, when Britons themselves were captives of empire, either as prisoners of an imperial enterprise that sucked them in, generation after generation, or in some cases as slaves themselves to foreign people? And is slavery an inevitable part of empire, does it come with a territory? And how did Britain finally shake it off and encourage the rest to follow?

With me to discuss and rummage round the subject from an original starting point is Linda Colley, school professor of history at the LSE, and author of a new book Captives, Britain, Empire and the World, 1600 to 1850. Catherine Hall, Professor in Modern British Social History and Cultural History at University College London, and author of Civilising Subjects 1830 to 1867, and Felipe Fernandez Armesto, Professor Oriel Research Fellow at Queen Mary Corrid's London, an author of civilisations from the Ice Age to the 20th century. Linda, who are the captives in your title? They were hundreds and thousands of people.

I think partly because our view of the British Empire is overdetermined by the Victorian period when we really wear the dominant power, the great confidence splashes of red on the world. We tend to see the British experience of empire as one of power, exploitation, the white man on horseback, the ladies in their hats in colonial tea parties. But the earlier period of empire, which is what I'm looking at from 1600 to 1850, that the closer image very often was that of Gulliver. You remember in the novel that Gulliver sets out from Bristol to various colonial outposts, is constantly getting caught on the way and tells his story.

Well, what I tried to do was look at hundreds of thousands of English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish men and women and children who get taken captive. I could have looked at any continent. I focused on the three main ones where the British government was most interested in, the Mediterranean, North America and India. And we're talking big numbers here in India in the early 1780s. More than one in five Britons in arms are taken captive merely by the state of Mysore in the south. So you have people who are taken captive and you're telling their stories from their standpoint. And you have people whose position in the empire could be called, or you're called akin to captivity, people trapped inside the empire by serving it, as it were.

Well, again, I think we've had a very elitist view of empire. We've looked at the pro-consuls, the generals, the great intellectuals, the great explorers and missionaries. The vast majority of English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish people who went out into the empire were insignificant people. They were soldiers, they were minor traders, they were sailors, they were camp followers, they were assorted women, folk and children. These are the bulk of people who are taken captive in non-European areas. But they also experience in many ways a kind of double captivity, that they are captives of their own state. I mean, I think of a woman, Sarah Shade, who's born in the 1740s,

goes to India with her stepfather, who may have been her lover in the 1760s, and spends 30 years in India during which she is a captive in Mysore. But she's also a camp follower living a very tough life. I mean, it's very interesting in the account that she dictates in 1801. She doesn't mention the word empire at all. For her being in India is a continuation of a hard life. And I think that perspective on empire has been neglected in favour of the view from above. But I don't think captives just tell us about the British.

Many of the captives who survive write or tell accounts of their experiences. And many of these become bestsellers when Peter Williamson, who's a poor Scott, who's captured by Delaware Indians in 1754, when he releases his account of his experiences in the late 1750s, it becomes a best sell. It remains so into the 19th century. It's the source that gives most ordinary people, their knowledge about Native Americans.

And I think the powerless white man's view of different non-European people, is subtly different, obviously, from the powerful white man's view. It gives us a much more multifaceted, richer view of relations between whites and non-whites, Christians, non-Christians, non-Europeans. Catherine Hall, what's your view about captives as a way into rediscussion, reassessment of empire? Well, I think it's a fascinating way in. I think every different story that we can tell about Empire is worth telling.

We need to know of as many different perspectives as we can, and we're very lucky that we have these captivity narratives, which Linda has been able to put to such terrific use in this book. But I think they only tell us one kind of story, and there are many other kinds of stories to tell. So one of the things I'd want to do is to put that picture of white vulnerability and white insecurity, which we're getting from the stories of those captured in India or, you know, Britain's in North America or in North Africa, put that against other kinds of other people's

insecurities and vulnerabilities in the empire over this period. So, okay, hundreds of thousands of Britons were captured in war, but their status as captives of war was different from the status, for example, of those who were enslaved. It's a very different situation to be a slave from being a captive. But on the Barbary Coast, for instance, they were treated as slaves, a lot of the captives, weren't they? Yes, of course, that was the exceptional situation in North Africa. and they were enslaved, but even those who were enslaved could hope for ransom, they could hope for freedom. They were not stateless persons in the ways that Africans who were taken to the Caribbean or North America were.

It's a different kind of slavery that we're dealing with when we're dealing with captives of war. So you don't see much, do you see what connections you see between, let us take three sorts then. People who are imprisoned by virtue of being boy soldiers in India and they couldn't get out of serving in India for most of the rest of their useful lives. People who are captured on the Barbary Coast by the American Indian tribes and slaves. Do you see useful connections between those three categories?

We're obviously dealing with forms of unfreedom in every situation, certainly in the 19th century, to talk about people in terms of, of to use the metaphor of slavery was the most common metaphor, the most common way of talking about states of unfreedom. So the soldiers in India,

white soldiers in India, compare themselves with those who are enslaved because they're flogged in the same way as black people are. Factory workers compare themselves with slaves. In the north of England, yeah. In the north of England. Women compare themselves with those who are enslaved

because they see that the absence I mean, British women, they see the absence of freedom, of citizenship, of rights over their children. This is talked about in the language of slavery. Well, this is a language. This is a way of talking about the absence of certain kinds of freedom. But, I mean, the question is what kinds of freedom and how comparable are these experiences? Philippa, do you think that slavery is endemic to empire? I'm talking about the British Empire.

You are an overseeing historian some of the time. Do you see it as all empires have tended? to have slaves or do all empires need to have slaves? No, no. Is the British Empire distinctive in its, A, from Linder's point of view, the reports from the captives and B from the attitude to slavery? Well, no, because empire is a political term and slavery is really an economic, essentially an economic status. And of course, you can have empire without slavery and you have slavery without empire and there are innumerable examples of both of those throughout history.

But obviously, if you're using the word slavery in a metaphorical sense, then, you know, you can talk about empire and slavery as being more or less conterminous, and that's really what American revolutionaries did when they denounced themselves as slaves of their imperial masters in England. But they were clearly, they clearly meant something different by slavery when they used it in that metaphorical sense from the sort of slavery in which they held their own black slaves, which their resentment of their own enslavement by the empire didn't make them any more willing to release their own blacks from captivity. But I mean, I don't, I'm afraid, I'm rather unsympathetic to this question of Catherine's.

I don't see it as being a question that is particularly raised by Linda's book, because although Linda does use the phrase white slaves, and she's talking about these Britons who are trapped in their own empire and unable to escape its trammels, condemned to serve it sometimes for a lifetime in distant and hostile environments. But she uses it in inverted commas. using it as a metaphor. And she's not claiming, as I understand her, at all,

that the status of people who are captors of their own empire is the same as that, of people who are slaves of other people's empires. The idea that this was an evil which should be eradicated and a certain number of people in the West Indies and here moved towards liberalising that, as it were, do you find that surprising, Philippe? Did it surprise you, though, was such a strong and successful movement to do it, which was then backed by the, eventually by the British government to enforce it? Well, it surprises me in a sense because actually, you know,

you've got to remember that slavery is the normal, so it's part of the normal condition of humankind. And as far as we know, there's never been a human society that hasn't practiced slavery until extraordinarily recent times. And the notion that it's immoral, and that it has to be abolished is a radical challenge you know,

everything that had happened before in human history. So to that extent it's very surprising and needs to be explained. And, you know, there has been a tendency among some historians to say that it can't possibly be explained

merely by a kind of moral revolution and by people's feelings and opinions and that there has to be some economic interest amongst the abolitionists in challenging slavery. Moral case is very strong. These were very moral people. Wesley's involved, Bulbawson. Well, that's what I think.

And I think that actually is a good example. The missionaries were Catherine was talking about in the West Indies sent back these reports which fed the thing and it became embroiled with workers' movements in particular parts of England. I know about the north of England where the fleeing of slaves was to do with the emancipation of people in heavy manufacturing industries.

It all came together in a remarkable way because we might come to this later that two things we labour under is that we were so responsible for the slave to it were as it was already active in Africa and we were one of the Western seaboard countries but more importantly it seems like as importantly we were very responsible for bringing it to an end and I think it was a moral force well yes and I agree with you but I'm you know had you allowed me to do so nothing I would have gone on to say that I personally reject this nation anybody tries to stop you talking as my sympathy Well, you know how I always defer to you.

And I think it's one of the great examples of the power of an idea, which actually triumphs over the economic interest. But I think on the whole that Britain, it's surprising. I think that you can, you know, shake the evidence by the throat and make it kaleidoscopically fall into a different pattern if you want to. But I think on the whole, it's surprising that Britain committed so many resources and so much effort to the abolition of this nature. and I think that's one of the glories of the British Empire.

You know me, I think that all empires are evil and that the British Empire was the worst of all except for all the others. And that, you know, it had these, it was an empire which was excellent in parts, and one of the excellent parts was the abolition of the slave trade. I wonder what today's great superpower of the United States is going to do for the world, which is, you know, comparably moral to what Britain did for the world in committing much treasure and blood to the abolition of slavery. There are two persons waving their hands beside me.

I know Catherine is going to plunge into this one with arms flailing, but before she does, I think it's important to say that there is a revolution in sentiment, though it's never total, and it doesn't remain total. But there's also a change of economic ideas. You've got people like Adam Smith saying in the great wealth of nations, well, look, slavery is actually not an economic form of labour. Free labour is better in money terms as well as morality. terms. But I think I would absolutely agree that there is a sentimental and moral revolution. And I wonder, though, this has never been looked at, whether in fact there isn't a connection with Britain's own earlier captivity traumas about white slavery in North Africa. Because when so many captives from these islands were taken to North Africa,

Or snatched from Cornwall, raised on Cornwall. I mean, we know that there were church services across the land. A lot of money was raised for their ransoms from ordinary people. And you're getting the same kind of popular activism, money being raised from ordinary people, as people, historians like Seymour Dreschko has shown, from the 1770s, 1780s. Anti-slavery never grabs everybody in these islands.

of course, and there's fluctuations over time, as Catherine has shown. But there is, I think, a deep popular revulsion against slavery by the end of the 18th century, which however gross Britain's record on slavery earlier has been, is, I think, deserving of comment. It is a tremendous revolution. It was very, very important. Catherine. Well, of course, that's true. but before we get too enthusiastic about the great thing which Britain did, we've also got to remember that the abolition of slavery did not mean the abolition of racial thinking,

far from it. And as many people commented in the mid-19th century, the British hate slavery, but they don't like slaves. This was a common sentiment. And the end of slavery, as many scholars, have demonstrated, brought with it new kinds of racial thinking. Once Africans were no longer completely identified with those who were enslaved, they became made inferior in other ways.

So there is no clear moral, you know, there is a complex set of moral processes going on here. And we've got to take that into account. It was in the aftermath of abolition, when enthusiasm for abolition was in decline in the 1840s, that we get the beginnings of new kinds of mapping of racial difference across the empire, the hierarchising of different kinds of peoples with the white Anglo-Saxon, of course, inevitably at the top.

And the stereotyping of Africans, of Indians, whether they're Hindu or Muslim, of different peoples across the empires of African Americans, of Aboriginal peoples in Australia and so on, extensive sets of ideas about all these different people and the part they can play and the ways in which they must be civilised by those who know better than they do. And that, of course, is the basis of colonial rule

that people who are ruled in colonial systems are not capable of ruling themselves. They must be ruled and they must be politically represented, by others. That is at the heart of imperial thinking. Well, in that case, imperial thinking started in this country way before it got across the borders, because that's what happened to most people in this country for most of the time. Filippa. Well, that's certainly true, and

the United Kingdom is a... It was the first imperial kingdom, right? And indeed, you know, you had a Scottish empire because the highlands and islands were conquered by the lowlands. It was a very similar way to that in which Ireland was conquered by England. But, I mean, I fundamentally disagree, I think, with Catherine's understanding of what colonialism is. Again, I think one of the beauties of Linda's book is that it reminds us that indigenous power, the power of indigenous states and indeed indigenous empires often survived alongside coexisted with the outreach of the British Empire.

And the art of empire is actually the art of collaboration. It's the art of establishing links with quizzlings and collaborators in indigenous societies and with local elites and regional powers. Because an empire like Britons, which was fundamentally feeble. I mean, I think that Linda's drawn our attention to the fact that the great problem of the British Empire, isn't how powerful it was. It's how feeble it was, how few its personnel were in the United States. numbering. That's what makes it a really interesting historical problem. How did this relatively

small metropolitan society paint so much of the map read? And of course they didn't do it by direct rule, by depriving locals of authority. They did it by setting up a network of collaboration. And the more we study empire across the world, the more we see that that is true. It also seems to me that by shifting, you know, the focus of the discussion, or attempting to shift the focus of discussion to racism, Catherine's conceded the point about slavery. Because, of course, she's right about racism, but racism and slavery are very different. And just as she was anxious early in the discussion to preserve the sense of distinction between black and white slavery. I think we should preserve the distinction between slavery and racism.

The British Empire remained racist for the 19th and much of the 20th century, but that doesn't to detract from the great achievement of the British Empire and enforcing globally the abolition of the slave trade. Then, Catherine. I call my book captives in a deliberately ambivalent way that I'm obviously talking about individual men and women and children who are taken captive, but I'm also talking about Britain itself,

not just as a greedy, ruthless conqueror as it often was, but also as a captive in itself. I mean that being an empire put Britain under all kinds of constraints because in some ways it was so small and so weak. That doesn't mean it wasn't violent in places it often was. But I think that it's not just that it's dependent on the collaboration very often of other peoples in order to rule them. I mean, classically, India, which it cannot rule without an Indian army and an Indian police.

But also because of that dependence very often on indigenous people, you then get all kinds of racial complications and upsets. I mean, one of the things that astonished me was, you know, in 1835, Parliament decides that Indian sepoys working for the British will no longer be flogged. The Indian Army, the shipwashed, the Indian Army. Yes, but white soldiers serving in India, they can be flogged. Why do they decide that? Because you cannot afford to offend all those Indian troops,

but you can, or at least they think they can, afford to offend their own white working class soldiery. Now, that's a rather extreme example, but it is a very powerful example, I think, of the way that empire and the exigencies of empire can shake up racial and power relations in extraordinary ways. Catherine. Well, I think part of what we're talking about here, which perhaps we should clarify, is the different periodizations of the British Empire, and I do think there are real differences. And your books actually almost follow one from the other.

Yes. I mean, I've written mainly. on the 19th century and Linda, obviously, on the 17th and 18th century, and Philippe on a much longer period altogether. But the British Empire clearly was much weaker in the 17th and 18th centuries than it was in the 19th century. And it's all very well talking about taking the Indian example, as if that's paradigmatic of the empire. But of course it's not.

There are many other sites of empire where those forms of collaboration are completely irrelevant, because if you think about Canada or New Zealand or Australia or South Africa, there is no Indigenous white population to collaborate with. And we're talking, of course, about genocide and about the forms of, you know, the destruction of Aboriginal populations which took place in those areas. So, again, attention to the different sites of empire

and to the different periodisations of empire is, I think, terribly important. I think that's... I should have brought that in earlier. Absolutely right, because that's caused some confusion. But we're having to sort of pull out now, unfortunately. But just one question. Do you think that the received perception of slavery

and its association increasingly as the sole association with the British, although we all know all the Western Seaboard nations engaged slavery, we all know slavery was deeply in African Africa before we came and after we went. Do you think that that has coloured our view of empire so much that it made it extremely difficult to talk about the British Empire

over the last 30 or 40 years, particularly because of the slavery issue? I'm afraid I'm to ask you to be brief, but I do think that's quite important. People, the empire, touch it and you get scolded because there's this terrible thing that we don't really like to talk about because it was so terrible and we can't assess it. It's too massive, too awful. Do you think it's actually distorted your historians a view of

historians that they might how they tackle empire, imperial studies. My history is always distorted by ignorance and if people think that Britain's particularly culpable in the context of the history of slavery then they're just wrong but the way to correct that impression isn't

by talking only about the British Empire, it's by doing what I think is essential for the study of imperial history and that is approaching it comparatively and comparing it with other empires. I think empire is like war. It is a recurrent human practice.

Indeed, it's still with us in various forms. And while we hate war, we should hate war, we still want to study it. We need to study it. And the same applies to empire. It's difficult. It's often horrible. It's deeply contentious, as this programme has shown. But that is precisely why we need to look at it more.

Catherine, because your studies have been most focused on the slave. issue. Well, yes, I mean, I agree with what Linda's saying about, of course, about the importance of more understanding and clearly that's absolutely central. More knowledge, less ignorance. I do think that slavery, obviously,

the existence of slavery and Britain's particular relation to it, not because it was the only country, the only empire that practiced it, because of course it wasn't, but because of the moral advantage that was claimed by Britain in abolishing it. I think that's been a very, that was very important in the 19th century. I think it's something that all historians of empire have to deal with.

And I think that it has played an important part in our thinking in the late 20th and 21st century, partly because of the ways in which the question of reparations has been taken up. And it's just unavoidable. We have to think about those things. The effects of slavery on Africa were absolutely devastating. devastating and that has to be part of what we think about when we think about the legacy of empire. Do you think there's a guilt around finally and briefly, Linda,

do you think it's a guilt about the British Empire among people? Would your students say, no, I'd only do that. It's too. I'd rather do something which isn't so guilt-filled. I think there can be guilt, and I'm not sure that that beyond a point is particularly helpful because I think guilt encourages amnesia, and that's the very worst thing. Empire was a versatile and complex beast.

I think it's a good thing because it encourages you to do better in future. Well, morally stimulating from Felipe, to the last. Thank you very much, all three of you. We'll be back next week talking about the scientist. And thanks very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.uk forward slash radio 4.