Emancipation and the remaking of the British Imperial world

By Manchester University Press

Slavery and the slavery business have cast a long shadow over British history. In 1833, abolition was heralded as evidence of Britain’s claim to be the modern global power. Yet much is still unknown about the significance of the slavery business and emancipation in the formation of modern imperial Britain. This book engages with current work exploring the importance of slavery and slave-ownership in the re-making of the British imperial world after abolition in 1833.

The contributors to this collection, drawn from Britain, the Caribbean and Mauritius, include some of the most distinguished writers in the field: Clare Anderson, Robin Blackburn, Heather Cateau, Mary Chamberlain, Chris Evans, Pat Hudson, Richard Huzzey, Zoë Laidlaw, Alison Light, Anita Rupprecht, Verene A. Shepherd, Andrea Stuart and Vijaya Teelock.

The impact of slavery and slave-ownership is once again becoming a major area of historical and contemporary concern: this book makes a vital contribution to the subject.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Nov 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781526103024

Book preview

Preface

The essays in this volume were first delivered as papers at a conference at University College London (UCL) on ‘Emancipation, Slave-ownership and the Re-making of the British Imperial World’ in March 2012, organised by the team working on the ESRC-funded project ‘Legacies of British Slave-ownership’. Both the conference and this volume benefited greatly from the co-operative spirit and collective work of many people. Julian Hoppit, Miles Taylor and Françoise Vergès were among those who delivered thoughtful and stimulating commentaries. The large and diverse audience raised many important issues. And, not least, there were those whose work made the conference possible. Ben Mechen was an enormous help and we thank too Rachel Lang and Kate Donington.

We are also very grateful to those whose financial support for the conference was indispensable: the Amiel Melburn Trust, the Economic History Society, the Tristram family and the History Department at UCL.

Introduction

Catherine Hall, Nicholas Draper and Keith McClelland

The postcolonial moment, as Salman Rushdie argued in 1982, was a moment of crisis in British culture. ‘Racism’, he argued, was ‘not a side-issue in contemporary Britain, not a peripheral minority affair’. Britain was undergoing a critical phase of its postcolonial moment and this was not simply an economic or political crisis. ‘It’s a crisis of the whole culture’, he wrote, ‘of the society’s whole sense of itself’.¹ ‘New Imperial History’, a naming that no one was ever very happy with but that nevertheless captured something, emerged in that moment. It was shaped in part by both the consciousness of the full implications of Britain’s increasingly diverse population, many of whom were drawn from the erstwhile empire, and the recognition that decolonisation had been a very partial process: formal empire might have ended but the culture of the coloniser/colonised relationship had not. This was the time, as Simon Gikandi suggested, that the foundational histories of both metropolitan and decolonised nations began to unravel, when imperial legacies came ‘to haunt English and postcolonial identities’.² While anti-colonialism had focused on the expulsion of the colonial powers and the creation of new political nations, the postcolonial project was to decolonise the mind, to dismantle the racial hierarchies which were one of the most pernicious legacies of colonialism and, as Bob Marley put it, to ‘free ourselves from mental slavery’.³ The damage that had been done by colonialism was not only political and economic, it was also cultural, shaping minds and subjectivities. Marley’s powerful and evocative lyrics were intended for his own people, the oppressed and the exploited, whose sense of self had been damaged and deformed by colonial power. ‘Those English were the biggest obeah men out when you considered what they did to our minds’, as one of the characters in Paule Marshall’s magnificent novel, The Chosen Place, The Timeless People, puts it.⁴ But it was not only the colonised who needed to dismantle their minds, it was also the colonisers, those who had assumed power and superiority over subordinated subjects, whose culture was built on the disavowal of violence and conquest, whose ‘imperial dispositions’ were embedded in everyday practices.⁵

New-style imperial history, critical colonial studies as it has come to be called, started from these premises. The histories of colonisers and colonised were inextricably linked: a proper understanding of both domestic and colonial histories depended on grasping the connections between the two. In the much-quoted terminology, metropole and colony must be analysed in the same frame.⁶ The feminist historians who had already challenged the gender blindness of history writing and were insisting on placing gender as central to historical analysis were the first to take up these questions in relation to British history. They were inspired to rethink British domestic history through the lens of empire, exploring the ways in which the British were ‘at home’ with that empire, how it had shaped both culture and politics. What were the grammars of difference and hierarchies of inequality? How were these inflected by gender and class as well as race? How was ‘home’ constituted as separate and different from ‘away’? Part of the imperative of this work was the focus on culture as a process and set of practices, culture as the production and exchange of meanings, culture as how people make sense of the world, not just in terms of idea but in the organisation and regulation of everyday lives. This turn to the cultural, a major shift across the humanities and social sciences, was associated with the recognition of the limitations of existing approaches, particularly those associated with economic determinism. A pivotal category for this form of analysis was class, the privileged domain of this reductionism. E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963) was a landmark text, an explicit critique of economic reductionism and, with its emphasis on consciousness, experience and the collective practices of working people, an opening for what would become cultural history. Such a text became in its turn a point of critique for feminist and postcolonial scholars concerned with the social divisions of race and gender. By the 1970s theorists of culture were turning to Gramsci’s exploration of hegemony and the struggle over the winning of consent to disrupt traditional notions of base and superstructure. Foucault’s notion of discourse was critical in focusing not only on how language and representation produce meaning but on how the knowledge which specific discourses produce connects with power, creating identities, defining the ways certain things are and are not represented, insisting on the historical specificity not of language in general but of particular languages in their specific historical moments. Historians concerned with understanding colonialism as a culture have made discursive analysis a central tool, and questions of culture and representation, family and household, identity and belonging, memory and forgetting, intimacy, emotional and psychic life have all figured in work over the last decades.

In this preoccupation with culture, identity and representation larger social and political questions were never abandoned but now ideology was given determining weight alongside the economic. Empire linked the lives of people in the Empire to global circuits of production, distribution and exchange, to the exploitation and oppression of millions of other imperial subjects. National and local histories were imbricated in a world system fashioned by the racial hierarchies of colonialism and imperialism. We need, as Mrinalini Sinha argued, an understanding of the ‘imperial social formation’, a ‘mode of analysis that is simultaneously global in its reach and conjunctural in its focus’. Here she was drawing on Gramsci’s notion of conjuncture, mediated by Althusser’s notion of ‘overdetermination’. Economic, social, cultural and political dimensions of a social formation are always articulated with one another. Each has relative autonomy and each has determining weight within the complex whole. Few historians, however, in a time when the discipline has increasingly subdivided into specialisms, were able to respond effectively to the call for a mode of analysis that was both global and conjunctural.⁷

If ‘new imperial history’ was set in motion by the postcolonial moment, the moment we are now living in is very different. Economic questions dominate the news and dominate our collective lives – the banking crisis, the effects of globalisation, Britain’s dependence on financial services, the decline of manufacturing, the industrial wastelands, weak growth, the deficit, austerity, the cuts in welfare services and benefits, unemployment, especially severe amongst young people, food banks and increased poverty, these are some of the myriad ways in which economic issues have taken centre stage since 2007 and have direct effects on all our lives. Yet economic history has declined significantly as a subject in the last twenty years. The compartmentalisation of history into its sub-disciplines and areas of expertise has had the effect of rendering those of us primarily concerned with social and cultural questions ill-equipped to grasp the significance of the economic, and many economic historians marginalise cultural questions. By the economic we do not mean economic relations as they would have been conceptualised before gender history or the discursive turn – for we now have an expanded conception of the significance of social relations of production and of the ways in which the reproduction of the relations of production and of the symbolic forms of life are critical to the circuit of capital. A society based on choice and the market needs analysing in terms of consumption – an area in which cultural historians have made decisive interventions – but not because of their training in classical economics. Production, reproduction, material life, wealth and labour all need greater salience in our explanatory vocabularies, alongside – not portioned off from – questions of culture. It is perhaps only now, Partha Chatterjee argues, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, that ‘all three entities – capitalism, the nation-state, and empire – can be subjected to systematic historical critique’.⁸ And, one might add to this trinity, the family, that key institution of modern life.

The essays in this volume reflect some of these issues. They were first delivered as papers at the conference at University College London on ‘Emancipation, Slave-ownership and the Re-making of the British Imperial World’ in March 2012. The conference was organised by the team working on the ESRC-funded project ‘Legacies of British Slave-ownership’ (LBS) and was an attempt to begin to look at British emancipation in the context of the wider imperial world. We wanted to think particularly about whether the abolition of slavery in 1833 marked a historic break in the Empire. The team brought together economic, political, social and cultural historians in a deliberate effort to think more holistically and to put the development of industrial capitalism, analysed in its metropolitan and colonial dimensions, back into centre stage.⁹ The LBS project was concerned with the slave-owners who received compensation when slavery was abolished in the British West Indies, Mauritius and the Cape in 1833. The West India interest still had a powerful voice in Parliament and the City and was able to negotiate a sum of £20 million (over £16 billion in today’s money) in compensation for the loss of ‘their property’ – enslaved men and women. The £20 million represented just over 40% of the valuation attributed to the 800,000 enslaved people in the colonies affected by the Abolition Act. In addition, the slave-owners received interest on the compensation for the period between 1 August 1834 and the payment date, which varied between 1835 and 1845, with the vast bulk of payments made by 1838. Furthermore, they received the value of the further period of forced labour known as ‘Apprenticeship’, originally intended to be between four and six years but truncated in 1838, which Fogel and Engerman calculated as a further 47% and Draper estimated as a further 33% of the value of the enslaved.¹⁰ The enslaved people themselves received nothing. The agreement over compensation reflected a common sense among the state, the abolitionists, the slave-owners and the unaligned political nation that when property was confiscated by the government there should be recompense, for the basis of the contract between the individual and the state was protection of person and property. This defence of property rights was maintained, even though the moral case against slavery was that no one should be the property of another. A few radical voices challenged the agreement on compensation – but very few. The money was divided amongst slave-owners across metropole and colonies, and in the web-based encyclopaedia (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs) created by the LBS team all the individual claims have been documented. In addition, research has been done to track the legacies of the absentees, those living in Britain but owning property in people. Nearly half the £20 million can be traced directly to individuals in Britain, though the absentees represented a small minority of claimants, around 6%: such absentees in Britain owned a disproportionate share of the Caribbean estates, with large numbers of enslaved people attached to a single production unit; whereas in the colonies thousands of resident slave-owners held smaller groups of enslaved people (often only one or two) employed as domestic servants, and lived alongside those members of the plantocracy still resident in the slave colonies. We have been concerned to trace the legacies of the British absentee slave-owners at a number of different levels: from the financial and commercial, to the political, cultural, historical, imperial and physical.

It was clear to us that the scale of the legacies we were uncovering was very significant and challenged the assumption, initially made by Ragatz, associated most closely with Eric Williams, but taken up for the period after 1807 even by the critics of the ‘decline’ thesis of Ragatz and Williams, that the West India interest was only an archaic fragment by the time of abolition.¹¹ Nearly £9 million was a huge sum to be distributed in liquid form into the hands of the slave-owners, and the men and women who received this money were as a group neither economically nor politically bankrupt, despite their own cries of distress and some spectacular failures. The crisis of the West India economy came not with emancipation, but with the equalisation of the sugar duties after 1846. We have tracked the compensation money going into a range of financial sectors from marine insurance and merchant banking to railways, investigated the continued political influence of a group of West Indian merchants and planters, especially in relation to the sugar duties and indenture, and analysed the volume of writings from a range of former slave-owners and their descendants concerned with reconfiguring race after slavery. We have also explored the philanthropic, physical and imperial legacies of these men and women that can be traced in key national and local institutions, country and town houses and colonial government. Slave-owners, we have concluded, far from disappearing at the time of emancipation, remained influential at a variety of different levels.¹² ‘Decline’, therefore, must at most be a relative term (the sense in which we believe Williams himself thought), relative not only to the growth of British industrial capability but relative also to the economic culture that both reflected and anticipated Britain’s development as the world’s leading manufacturing nation. At the same time, our work confirms the continued movement of wealth from slavery into the reshaping of the economy which would ultimately leave slavery behind. As Julian Hoppit stressed in his intervention in the second session of the conference, devoted specifically to the economy, however, each such claim for the role of slave-wealth, both in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, has to be analysed scrupulously: coincidence does not equal causation, and the contribution of slavery needs to be placed consistently in the framework of domestic and European sources of growth and change.

We knew that the abolition of slavery was part of a wider programme of reform both of nation and empire and it was these connections that we wanted to explore. What wider reorganisations of industrial, mercantile and financial capital, of labour and of the imperial state were taking place? These were very big questions but it might be possible to begin to sketch out some initial answers by bringing together a range of scholars. What was this wider programme of reform? In the period between 1829 and 1836 a number of key pieces of legislation were passed which reconfigured both nation and empire. The repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, which removed some aspects of the discrimination against dissenters, closely followed by Catholic Emancipation in 1829, which opened Parliament and official positions to Catholics, were critical steps in recognising that non-Anglicans could nevertheless be loyal to the British state. Catholics could be Englishmen, as Thomas Babington Macaulay put it; religious affiliation was superseded by national belonging.¹³ This was only the beginning of the assault upon the ‘Protestant Constitution’, as Miles Taylor pointed out in our discussions. The abolition of Irish church tithes and the later payment of compensation to tithe holders, together with the lack of any attempt to impose the established church in the new colonies of white settlement, marked the beginning of the end of the colonial church establishment. This disempowerment of the Church meant an increased differentiation between political and civil society: religion was a private matter.¹⁴ At the same time there was a redefinition of the political nation. The reform of the House of Commons in 1832, after an extended period of sustained political agitation, increased the electorate by approximately 45%, to men of moderate property, and gave representation to the new industrial towns and cities. It was widely understood as a triumph for middle-class men and a defeat for working-class reformers, opening the way for Chartism. Three years later the new legislation on municipal government ushered in a significant increase in middle-class dominance in urban areas. The new, somewhat more inclusive idea of the nation was at odds with the institution of slavery, increasingly defined as a stain upon the nation. A significant number of the MPs elected to the reformed House of Commons had been under great pressure from their anti-slavery constituents to support immediate abolition and, despite the Whig government’s lack of enthusiasm for the measure, the sustained campaigning from ‘outside’ and a determined body of abolitionists within Parliament secured a majority. But abolition went alongside not just compensation (marking not only the sanctity of property rights but also the effective growth of the bureaucratic state) but also ‘apprenticeship’, the system designed to teach the newly freed to labour, and to keep them unfree for a period. This underlined the differentiated ways of viewing black and white labour: Africans were seen to require a particular kind of labour discipline, designed to fit them for freedom.

If colonised subjects were conceptualised differently from British subjects, the Irish occupied an ambivalent position in the racial hierarchy. The Coercion Bill for Ireland was passed in 1833, suspending habeas corpus and substituting courtsmartial for ordinary courts in disturbed districts. This was designed to end serious agrarian unrest but made it clear that Ireland was not governed in the same way as England. In the same months the new Charter Act for India articulated, as Jon Wilson argues, ‘a strong sense of the difference between British and colonial political culture’.¹⁵ Representative government was for Britain, autocratic government for India – a benighted land that needed to be wrenched out of its darkness and stagnation. The appointment of Macaulay as the Law Member of the Governor General’s new Council was one of the signs of the unleashing of a programme of Anglicisation. The Act also removed the East India Company’s monopoly on the China trade – one of the significant moves towards free trade that were to multiply in the years to come. That same year a factory act put the first limitations on the hours of women and children, another kind of state intervention in the regulation of labour, while the following year the Poor Law Amendment Act drew a line between England’s ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor. Soon after, indenture was to be legitimated as a way to resolve the needs of the plantocracy by voluntary or forced migration across the Empire. Three years later the Report from the Select Committee on Aborigines in British settlements could be seen as marking the end of a period of humanitarian influence associated with anti-slavery.¹⁶ ‘Others’, whether African, Indian or Aboriginal, were not the same as ‘us’. Taken together these measures were manifestations of new thinking in relation to the governance of both nation and empire. But, as Joanna Innes reminded us in our discussions, we need to exercise great care in thinking about the specificity of the interconnections. Attention to the local and perhaps to the disconnections is as vital as attention to the connections. How, then, might slave-ownership and emancipation fit into this picture?

Our intention was to draw on scholars to present their work, and to ensure that we would have ample time for discussion – the talk was vital to our common project. We were fortunate in having a remarkable group of paper-givers and commentators, together with an engaged audience of academics, teachers, curators, writers, family and local historians. The first three sets of discussions were on formations of capital, the imperial state and the reorganisation of labour. But we also wanted to recognise the centrality of the family to the social formations of both nation and empire, and think about the ways in which that has been taken up in fictional and other forms of writing which tend to occupy a different space from academic writing. Constructing family histories, as we know, has become a major occupation, and for many in the UK what appears to start out as an English or Scottish or Welsh or Irish story turns out to have ramifications stretching far beyond. The local often becomes the global, migration both in and out a key, and under-recognised, aspect of Britain’s history. The LBS investigation of the legacies of slave-ownership has brought us back time and again to the centrality of the family as an imperial institution, operating across different sites, both metropolitan and colonial, with different generations and extended kin acting as networks, one form of cement of empire. Similarly those working on the legacies of slavery itself, and indeed the slavery business more widely, have recognised the centrality of family, and the different definitions of family, which need to be thought about. It seemed important to bring these issues into our discussion, to challenge the bifurcations between the academic and the popular, fiction and history, to be open to different voices. Andrea Levy’s reading from her novel of Jamaican slavery and rebellion, The Long Song (2010), was a highpoint of the two days, a moving and evocative experience, bringing the voices of the enslaved right into our midst.

The final set of issues that we were determined to address was the vexed question of reparations. How can the destruction of the slave trade and slavery ever be repaired? What responsibility does Britain have and what are the implications of this? From the beginning of our work on the compensation records it was clear that the research had implications for these debates. Critics challenged our focus on the individuals who were compensated, arguing that this took attention away from the state. In providing a solid empirical account of who got the money, we argue that we are contributing to a better-informed discussion of the issues. In an attempt to encourage this kind of engagement our final session focused on the public understandings of the legacies of slavery and the case for reparations and restitution in Mauritius and Jamaica. In her comment Françoise Vergés reminded us, in the words of Edouard Glissant, that the slave of slavery is the one who does not want to know.¹⁷

The essays

We were fortunate in having Robin Blackburn open the conference and give the Neale lecture. His essay, ‘The scope of accumulation and the reach of moral perception: slavery, market revolution and Atlantic capitalism’, opens the first part of the book, which re-examines the arguments about the relationship between slavery and industrial capitalism. Widening the focus of Eric Williams’ classic text, Capitalism and Slavery, Blackburn considers the relationship between the rise of industrial capitalism in Britain and the United States and the emergence of a very intense regime of plantation slavery in the Americas. Drawing on his wide-ranging knowledge and a discussion of Williams, Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, and the more recent work of Pomeranz and historians of the USA, he argues that the continuing importance of the slave economy was a significant factor in the development of a range of financial and industrial sectors. Illegal slave trading continued apace in the mid-nineteenth century and plantations boomed both in the Southern states, Brazil and Cuba. This ‘second slavery’, in Tomich’s term, or slaveholder capitalism, was doomed in the US, he suggests, not because of its economic failure or the moral outcry against it, but because of its successes which resulted in the building of a broad alliance against it. While analysing these developments he also points to the alternative and more humane routes that could have been taken. Blackburn’s emphasis on the continuing objective importance of slavery but its relative repositioning within a new, dominant political and economic culture hostile to the institution represents an important modification of the economic determinism often detected in the classic Williams ‘decline’ thesis.

Blackburn’s essay provides the framework for considering two further important contributions which represent different approaches but which together consolidate the acceptance of Williams’ argument that slavery was central to the take-off of Britain’s industrialisation. Pat Hudson was among the few economic historians to give Joseph Inikori’s Africans and the Industrial Revolution serious attention on its publication a decade ago, and her chapter here marks the incorporation of the Williams/Inikori thesis into the mainstream of histories of the Industrial Revolution. It is driven in part by her reading of what Williams wrote about slavery and the Industrial Revolution, rather than the received caricature that is too often the version refuted by Williams’ critics. Not only does Hudson support the concept of slavery as a necessary but not sufficient condition of the Industrial Revolution, she also embraces Williams’ dialectical argument that, as she puts it, the very ‘structure and institutions that the slave/plantation nexus had created made it relatively easy for [British merchants and financiers] to adapt’ to the end of slavery. In her endorsement of Williams, and of Inikori’s emphasis on the regional nature of the Industrial Revolution, Hudson argues for the ‘unique’ role of the slave trade in promoting (through its deployment of bills of exchange) the integration of the London and provincial money markets, which she sees as a central precondition of the development of the major manufacturing regions of south Lancashire and Yorkshire: ‘the industrial revolution was entirely dependent’ on the bill of exchange as a means of payment, rather than on the underdeveloped banking system. In a narrative arc reminiscent of Capitalism and Slavery but consciously extending the scope (geographic and chronological) even of that wide-ranging work, Hudson extends her analysis to the continued involvement of British capital in the Atlantic slave economy after the end of Britain’s own colonial slave system and the birth of the system of indentured labour from south Asia to replace or compete with the labour of the formerly enslaved people in parts of the British Caribbean.

Chris Evans’s chapter provides further support for the Williams/Inikori position in the form of an exemplary regional study that both recognises the very modest scale of slave-ownership in Wales and demonstrates the profound intertwining of colonial slavery more broadly with critical sectors of the industrial transformation of south Wales. The example of the slave-owning Pennants of Penrhyn in north Wales, and their major investment in slate quarrying, has stood as an archetypal case-study for the centrality of slave-derived capital in the extractive sector (and by sleight of hand, often in the manufacturing sector as a whole) since Capitalism and Slavery’s publication in 1944, but Evans shows that the family was completely unrepresentative of any wider pattern and that the expansion of the south Wales coal industry in the 1840s, for example, was unrelated to slave-ownership or slave compensation. Instead, Evans highlights the importance of Welsh copper and Welsh woollens in the slave economy, and the importance in turn of the slave economy in the development of these sectors, one strategic and the other more transitory in the context of the economic history of Wales. African demand, mediated through Bristol, drove the growth of Welsh copper smelting in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries until, as Evans demonstrates, other markets outgrew Africa in importance in the second half of the eighteenth century. Again, demand from the slave colonies of the Caribbean was material as a market not only for fabricated copper equipment, but also for the ‘Negro cloth’ that drove the commercialisation of the woollen industry. Families connected with slave compensation were prominent in the Welsh copper industry in the nineteenth century and moved into slave-produced copper elsewhere in the Americas after emancipation, but Evans is scrupulous in the claims he makes for the significance or otherwise of such linkages. His careful analysis is a model for future sector and regional studies that have already, in the case of Ireland and Scotland, begun to accumulate evidence for the extent and limits of the importance of slavery to the Industrial Revolution.¹⁸

The three essays in the second part of the book challenge the widespread belief that the abolition of chattel slavery in the Caribbean, Mauritius and the Cape of Good Hope in 1833 and the ending of the apprenticeship system by 1838 led to a regime of ‘free labour’. Such a view of slavery is also typically bound in to a perspective which essentially derives from Enlightenment stadial theory, namely that humanity progresses through a series of stages, each of which is superior to the last. Thus, social formations which depend on forms of unfree labour, such as feudalism or slavery, will be surpassed by ‘commercial society’ or modern capitalism, in which free wage labour becomes the overwhelmingly dominant form. Clare Anderson’s chapter was originally written as a commentary on the papers by Heather Cateau and Anita Rupprecht and is both a dialogue with their work and a powerful argument against seeing slavery separately from other forms of coerced and unfree labour. It is in no way to under-estimate the brutality and violence of the system, nor the experiences of the enslaved, to argue, as Anderson does, that slavery belonged to what she calls the ‘continuum’ of unfree forms of labour which underpinned the various formations, in different places at different times, of the British Empire, or indeed, a wider global economy and society. Reflecting on diverse forms of labour extraction, including indenture and the use of convict labour as well as enslavement, she shows that these forms, which existed alongside each other, were of critical importance to the structures of economy, society and politics throughout the Empire.

As Anderson suggests, an understanding of the ‘continuum of labour forms’ has important implications for an understanding of the forms and practices of the states – both metropolitan and colonial – in the British Empire. The search for and mobilisation of different kinds of labour forces were not, and could not be, a simple market response to shortages of labour and other ‘problems of labour supply’, ones which were ‘solved’ by the operation of market mechanisms. They required the active construction of new forms of public labour management, the engagement of states in, for instance, the development of schemes of indentured labour, and the reforming of hierarchies built on race as much as, and perhaps more than, categories of labour. Although Anderson’s discussion of these issues is brief, the implications of her arguments are considerable. Her approach requires thinking across not only different sites of empire and the distinguishing characteristics of labour regimes in any one place but also that we need to think across different sub-disciplines of history, since the processes are social, cultural and political as well as economic. Moreover, they were globalising processes: just as capital moved between different zones across the Empire so too did labour, whether forced or voluntary.

Anita Rupprecht’s essay also unpicks any notion of a simple transition from slavery to free labour. She takes off from a critique of Seymour Drescher’s influential views on the nature of thinking within classical political economy about the relative profitability of slavery and free labour systems. Drescher argues that the central reason for the demise of slavery lay in moral humanitarianism and politics rather than in any economic logic. But, as Rupprecht demonstrates, a narrow focus on the relative costs and profitability of slavery does not do justice to the range of classical political economy and, especially, the thinking of its most important advocate, Adam Smith. Reflecting the re-evaluations of Smith which have occurred in recent decades, Rupprecht argues that his views on whether or not free labour was cheaper need to be situated within the whole framework of his moral and social philosophy as well as the particular propositions of The Wealth of Nations. While the operations and ‘logic’ of the market economy might overcome the moral problem of slavery they could do so only in conjunction with political interventions to either outlaw or dismantle slavery. Furthermore, contemporary views of both enslaved labour and associated forms of coerced labour, and the acculturation of black labour to changing disciplinary regimes, presupposed a hierarchy of race in which the African and the enslaved must be treated as capable only of being firmly directed. Drawing on a relatively neglected archive, that of the Royal Commission of Inquiry established from 1821 which investigated ‘captured negroes’ seized in the wake of the abolition of the slave trade, she demonstrates that forms of indentured labour both coexisted and meshed in with systems of enslavement.

What forms of labour were deployed within the plantation system is central to Heather Cateau’s account of the ‘labour matrix’ in the Caribbean. She too argues against the notion that there was a simple transition from slavery to indenture or wage labour, demonstrating how the hiring of the enslaved in exchange for wages was an increasingly important dimension of the economy of slavery in the Caribbean. Moreover, the conditions of labour under the hiring system prefigured some of the features of the use of Indian indentured labour after 1845. As she writes, it was the hiring system which was ‘the real training ground for indentureship’. Her account chimes with other work¹⁹ in showing that that there were respects in which the conditions of indentured labour after the 1830s were less ‘free’ than could be the case under enslavement. Like Anderson and Rupprecht, Cateau is also in no doubt of the imperatives lying behind the use of different forms of labour. The owners or employers utilised diverse forms according to the dictates of their own labour needs and they sought to organise, acculturate and discipline labour in ways shaped by not only ‘economic’ requirements but also cultural assumptions about the capacities – ‘raced’, ‘classed’ and gendered – of labourers to undertake the work. And necessarily, that entailed the articulation of political and legal regimes – of forms of ‘governmentality’ – which supported them.

The third part of the book considers the role of the imperial state in the period after emancipation. Victorian Britain was awash with beliefs that one of the distinguishing characteristics of the era and the country was the necessary and desirable unfolding of liberty or freedom – for freed slaves, of trade and markets, of the relations between individuals and the state. In his essay Richard Huzzey examines political arguments over how the ‘anti-slavery state’ could or should best protect ‘the true enjoyment of liberties’. He focuses first on the connection between policies on free trade in sugar and emigration in relation to the encouragement of African migration and Indian indentured labour to the Caribbean. The notion of ‘freedom’, he suggests, cannot be disassociated from the subjugation of and indifference to the needs of black and subaltern peoples. Second, he addresses the question of the use, by the state, of violence and the military to suppress the international slave trade in the name of