Slavery and the Transatlantic Trading of Enslaved Africans: How the UK Deals with its Past.
First part of a paper presented at the Moravian Church Conference in the Netherlands, October 31 – Nov 2, 2019 by Br Livingstone Thompson, PhD.
Introduction
In August 2018, the University Road Moravian Church in Belfast held a service to commemorate Emancipation. As far as can be verified, this was the first time that a service of the kind was being held in the UK. A similar service was held again this year. Currently, I am supporting the efforts of the Africa and Caribbean Support Organisation of Northern Ireland in marking the 400th year from the commencement of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. This was a Dutch Innovation, in which Britain came to be leader. Our aim is to raise awareness of the connections and legacies of Transatlantic Slave Trade to Northern Ireland.
I am not aware of any other initiative within the Moravian Church that seeks reckon with or address slavery and the slave trade, nor to come to terms with the church’s own involvement in slavery. We still live in the nostalgia of having brought the gospel to the people of African descent in the Caribbean. On the question of the keeping people as slaves there is silence but on the question of working with the enslaved there is frequent talk. The myth that the missionaries sold themselves into slavery is a nice story by the evidence for this is very slim. The re-telling of the unbalanced good story only results a loss of opportunity to have a serious reflection and to learn from the errors of that injustice. This is like what we see at the state level.
In 2015 the United Nations passed a resolution proclaiming, ‘the International Decade for People of African Descent, commencing on 1 January 2015 and ending on 31 December 2024’, with the theme ‘People of African descent: recognition, justice and development’. Later that same year in the UK parliament, Baroness Young of Hornsey asked about the plans the UK government had to observe the decade. The response by Baroness Anelay of St Johns was that, ‘The British Government has no specific plans to mark the UN International Decade for People of African Descent.’ The response then went on to list things, to which the government was committed, that made it unnecessary to make any specific plans to observe the decade. This response of the British government is a missed opportunity to address a perceived bias against African people and is probably typical of the ways in which the UK has over the years dealt with people of African descent: unjust, patronising and disrespectful. The ease with which concerns and cares of the people of African descent in the UK have been brushed aside, minimised or overlook is mind-boggling. This paper will look at instances to justify this assertion. The paper will focus on issues related to abolition and compensation as the corner stones on which the UK attitude of ‘useful only in servitude’ has been constructed.
Abolition and the Job Done – Let’s Move on?
The act to make trading of enslaved Africans illegal was passed in 1807. It should of course be remembered that this was not by consensus and there was significant opposition to it. It might have taken 20 years from the time it was first raised. The tide of public opinion against slavery itself took much longer and abolition efforts and strategies lasted nearly a century.
There were two important court cases that significantly advance the movement for abolition. The first was 22 June 1772 when the Court of Appeal judge, Lord Mansfield ruled that English law forbade the forced relocation of Africans from England to the colonies. Force relocation, often for resale, was the practice used by English planters when relationship with the people they held as slaves broke down. The case on which Mansfield ruled was one in which an enslaved man, James Somerset, objected to being forcibly returned to Jamaica. The Judge ruled that under English Law it could not be allowed, whatever the inconveniences might be. The decision had far reaching consequences and implications, not least in England where enslaved people took it upon themselves to walk away from enslavement. This added traction to the abolitionists’ argument that if it were not allowed in Britain then it, slavery, should be outlawed throughout the whole British realm.
The second significant moment was the case related to the Zong Slave ship. The owners of the Bristol registered Zong, were seeking compensation for Africans they claimed that they lost at sea, in an effort to preserve the fate of the whole ship. In fact, the ship captain and crew had callously thrown 133 enslaved Africans overboard, to mitigate the pressure on their water supply, which they felt would have run out and risked the lives of everyone. Their idea was that if the enslaved, which was for them property, died on board then the shipowners would have to bear the loss. However, if they died by drowning, then the loss would be covered by the insurers. The Chief Justice, the same Mansfield who made the landmark ruling a decade before, heard the case and in 1783 ruled against the shipowners. The heartless, depravity of the ship owners was exposed in the court as they tried to make the case for compensation. They hung their case on the assertion that the Africans they murdered constituted loss property. The moral outrage arising from the case helped to solidify the cause for abolition, which was at first only concerned with the dangers of the trade, not the fact of enslavement. This attitude led one prominent Belfast businessman, Waddell Cunningham, in 1786 to propose developing a slave shipping business out of Belfast, believing that he could offer a more humane trade. This proposition was made to sympathetic ears who with whom Cunningham sat, with others of abolitionist bent, in the board room of the Belfast Charitable Society. Happily, for Belfast, his proposal didn’t gain sufficient support and was eventually dropped. The abolitionist movement gathered momentum and the 1807 Act to make the shipping of enslaved Africans illegal was passed. Twenty-six years later the Act to outlaw the enslavement of African was passed.
The achievement of the abolitionists is the story that people in the UK know and, by and large, love to tell. However, consistently presenting only the morally high ground of the abolitionists, served to conceal the other issues associated with abolition, namely the revolt of the enslaved and the inefficiency and failures of forced labour, which caused the sugar economy to succumb to the pressures of the industrial revolution. Already in 1807 the economic argument was made that favoured ending the system of forced labour. The PM at the time, William Wyndham Grenville, denounced economic objections to the proposal to end slave trading by declaring that the West Indies planters already produced more than they could sell, and continuation would result in their ruin.
The story, which the British do not seem to know or chose not to tell, is that in addition to the immorality of forced labour, by the second half of the 18th century downturn in the West Indies sugar industry was already evident. According to Eric Williams, former PM of Trinidad and Tobago, colonial forced labour and the sugar economy was a vicious, inefficient and unprofitable economic system that was being supported by business interests that could not see that the tide was turning. The attack on the vicious West Indian economic system by astute capitalist happened in three phases:
(a) first was the attack on the trade in enslaved Africans, which was outlawed in 1807.
(b) second was the attack on the inefficient and inhumane system of forced labour. In this the Africans themselves played a critical role and abolition came in 1833.
(c) third was the abolishment of sugar preferences in 1846.
1846 was the same year the Corn Laws that levied high taxes on locally grown corn were abolished. The Anti-Corn Law League was predicated on the same principle to the anti-slavery movement. The abolitionist gave the language in the form of a moral argument that the masses could understand. They were heard more so because the capitalist interests had shifted from the colonial side to the emerging industrial side. The capitalist argument that West Indian sugar industry monopoly was inefficient and unprofitable was not easily heard. On the opposing side of that argument were oligarch imperial interest unable to see the inevitable. However, as we shall see in the next part, those who opposed abolition were handsomely compensated, despite their stubbornness and blindness.
As far as Britain was concerned, then, once slavery itself was abolished, the job was done. There was no need to tell another story and the only thing to be concerned with was the economic loss of the plantation owners and it is to this we must now turn our attention in considering British response.
