Abstract
In 1807, during the final days of debate over the bill for abolition, West Indian MPs argued their case and defended the colonies much as they had done for the prior two decades. During the discussions on 23 February following a request to read the bill for abolition in the Commons for the second time (a request that had already been postponed once), for example, George Hibbert alluded to the West Indian interest’s historic successes as he attempted to explain his opposition to the bill:
if I had been told … of any measure that, although it was indisputably enjoined by every principle of justice and humanity, yet that in the course of almost 20 years discussion, it had not been able to make its effective progress through the British parliament (recommended, at the same time, by the cry of the people out of doors, and by an union of the greatest talents within), until it received the protecting hand of his majesty’s principle minister in either house, I should say, “it is impossible; there must be some mistake in the application of these great principles to the measure.”1
Members of the West Indian interest and their supporters were able to delay and defeat motion and motion for abolition and amelioration in the 1790s and early 1800s despite the often-overwhelming popular support for the measure. But just how was this accomplished? Calls for abolition were repeatedly defeated through the use of convincing, clear, supposedly logical, and often pro-colonial arguments. The West Indians’ successes cast doubt upon the propriety of the bill for abolition. In truth, the proslavery position significantly impacted upon the nature and timing of British abolition. This chapter will explore the ways in which this took place.
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Notes
The Society of West India Planters and Merchants had been formed as a pressure group to lobby the government on behalf of the West Indian colonists and absentees in London. Jamaican planters and merchants dominated the society. See David Beck Ryden, West Indian Slavery and British Abolition, 1783–1807 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 194.
Christer Petley, “Rethinking the Fall of the Planter Class,” Atlantic Studies, 9 (2012), 9.
David Lambert, White Creole Culture, Politics and Identity During the Age of Abolition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 61.
For example, uprisings occurred in Barbados in 1816, in Demerara in 1823, and in Jamaica in 1831–2. The year 1830 witnessed a wave of revolutions sweeping across Europe, affecting France, Poland, Switzerland, Belgium and the Netherlands, and the surrounding territories. There was also a great deal of instability within Britain as the country experienced rapid population growth, agricultural depression, economic depression, and a cholera epidemic. Finally, the rejection of the second bill for parliamentary reform in October 1831 led to pillaging, riots, mob violence, deaths, an attack on a jail, and threats by the political unions to begin military-style drills. See Malcolm I. Thomis and Peter Holt, Threats of Revolution in Britain 1784–1848 (London: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1977), 87.
Brycchan Carey, British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment and Slavery, 1760–1807 (Basingstoke: Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 2005), 144.
Seymour Drescher, “People and Parliament: The Rhetoric of the British Slave Trade,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 20 (1990), 579.
Several historical studies of British slavery and abolition include rhetorical analysis of the parliamentary debates on slavery that relied on published speeches from the period. For example, see Seymour Drescher, “People and Parliament: The Rhetoric of the British Slave Trade,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 20 (1990), 561–80. See also Carey, British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment and Slavery, 1760–1807, Ch. 5.
Joseph E. Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England: A Study in International Trade and Economic Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 479.
Srividhya Swaminathan, “Developing the West Indian Proslavery Position after the Somerset Decision,” Slavery & Abolition, 24 (2003), 41.
Seymour Drescher, “Abolitionist Expectations,” Slavery & Abolition, 21 (2000), 42.
Linda Colley, Britons: Forgingthe Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 358.
Kenneth Morgan, “Slave Women and Reproduction in Jamaica, ca. 1776–1834,” in Women and Slavery: The Modern Atlantic, ed. Gwyn Cambell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008), 27.
Ibid., 45.
Ibid., 33.
While statistics underwent significant development in the nineteenth century, their use in the social sciences was far less developed than in other scientific disciplines. However, statistical theory and analysis dramatically increased in Britain beginning in 1830. See Stephen M. Stigler, The History of Statistics: The Measurement of Uncertainty before 1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 4–5 and Part Two. See also Theodore M. Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820–1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), Ch. 1.
David Beck Ryden, “Sugar, Spirits, and Fodder: The London West India Interest and the Glut of 1807–15,” Atlantic Studies, 9 (2012), 46.
Seymour Drescher, “Public Opinion and Parliament in the Abolition of the British Slave Trade,” Parliamentary History, 26 Supplement (2007), 63.
Seymour Drescher, “The Decline Thesis of British Slavery since Econocide (1986),” in Seymour Drescher, From Slavery to Freedom: Comparitive Studies in the Rise and Fall of Atlantic Slavery (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 103.
Andrew J. O’shaughnessy, An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 34.
Andrew J. O’shaughnessy, “The Formation of a Commercial Lobby: The West Indian Interest, British Colonial Policy and the American Revolution,” The Historical Journal, 40 (1997), 77.
Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005), 275.
Ibid.
Roger N. Buckley, Slaves in Red Coats: The British West India Regiments, 1795–1815 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979), 78.
R. G. Thorne, ed., The House of Commons, 1790–1820, vol. 5 (London: Secker and Warburg, 1986), 332–6.
Estimates Database, Voyages: The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database (Emory University, 2009) [www.slavevoyages.org/tast/assessment/estimates.faces, accessed December 14, 2012].
David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 249.
Richard B. Sheridan, “Slave Demography in the British West Indies and the Abolition of the Slave Trade,” in The Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade, ed. David Eltis and James Walvin (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981), 269.
Ibid.
Ibid., 271.
Margarette Lincoln, Representingthe Royal Navy: British Sea Power, 1750–1815 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 90.
Stephen Farrell, “‘Contrary to the Principles of Justice, Humanity and Sound Policy’: The Slave Trade, Parliamentary Politics and the Abolition Act, 1807,” in The British Slave Trade: Abolition, Parliament and People, ed. Stephen Farrell, Melanie Unwin, and James Walvin (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2007), 161.
John W. Cairns, “The Definition of Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Thinking: Not the True Roman Slavery,” in The Legal Understanding of Slavery: From the Historical to the Contemporary, ed. Jean Allain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 71.
Ibid., 83.
B. W. Higman, “The West India ‘Interest’ in Parliament, 1807–1833,” Historical Studies, 13 (1967), 1.
Christer Petley, Slaveholders in Jamaica: Colonial Society and Culture During the Era of Abolition (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009), 87.
Ibid., 67.
Ibid., 67
David Turley, The Culture of English Antislavery, 1780–1860 (London: Routledge, 1991), 53–5.
William A. Green, British Slave Emancipation: The Sugar Colonies and the Great Experiment (1976. Reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 105.
David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution 1770–1823 (London: Cornell University Press, 1975), 365–6.
Marcus Wood, Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 151–3.
For example, see the anonymous pamphlet, The Condition of the West Indian Slave Contrasted with That of the Infant Slave in Our English Factories (London: W. Kidd, 1833). See also Gordon K. Lewis, “Proslavery Ideology,” in Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World, ed. Verene Shepherd and Hilary Beckles (Oxford: Ian Randal, 2000), 558.
Larry E. Tise, Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701–1840 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), 95.
Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought 1785–1865 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 215–7.
Burge, a plantation owner, served as a colonial agent for Jamaica from 1830 and as Jamaica’s attorney general. He was a member of London’s West India Planters and Merchants Committee. See D. R. Fisher, ed., The House of Commons, 1820–1832, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) vol. 1, 274, and vol. 4, 450–5.
Colin Kidd, The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 116.
Ibid.
H. F. Augstein, “Introduction,” in Race: The Origins of An Idea, 1760–1850, ed. H. F. Augstein (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1996), ix–x.
Mervyn C. Alleyne, The Construction and Representation of Race and Ethnicity in the Caribbean and the World (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2002), 82.
Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad, Dangerous People? England 1783–1846 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 477.
For information on contemporary racial thought as utilized in the slavery debates, see Peter J. Kitson, Romantic Literature, Race, and Colonial Encounter (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), Ch. 3.
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© 2016 Paula E. Dumas
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Dumas, P.E. (2016). The Proslavery Position. In: Proslavery Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137558589_2
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