History's engines: British mobilization in the age of revolution

William and Mary Quarterly

Volumn 66, Issue 4, 2009, Pages 737-756

  Drescher, Seymour ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 77949841446     PISSN: 00435597     EISSN: 1933-769     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (90)

1. See for example David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1975)
2. Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848 (London, 1988)
3. Blackburn, "Haiti, Slavery, and the Age of the Democratic Revolution," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 63, no. 4 (October 2006): 643-74
4. Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York, 2006), chaps. 7-8
5. The tradition runs back at least three generations, to C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint Louverture and the San Domingo Revolution (London, 1938)
6. Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1944), chap. 6
7. The title of this article blends two concepts, Karl Marx's designation of revolutions as history's locomotives and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's designation of Thomas Clarkson as the "moral steam engine." See Coleridge to Daniel Stuart, Feb. 13, 1809, in Ellen Gibson Wilson, Thomas Clarkson: A Biography (Basingstoke, Eng., 1989), 1
8. For the original context of the quotation, see Earl Leslie Griggs, ed., The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (New York, 2002), 3: 746
9. Davis, Problem of Slavery, 233 ("industrial revolution"), 366 ("awareness")
10. In conformity with this scenario, "Britain's oligarchy had a world to win if they could pull through [abolition in 1807] - and a kingdom to lose if they did not . . . The political conjuncture to be negotiated by the oligarchy was one of growing danger and isolation" (Blackburn, Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, ibid., 312-13)
11. See Joanna Innes, "Legislation and Public Participation, 1760-1830," in The British and Their Laws in the Eighteenth Century, ed. David Lemmings (Woodbridge, Eng., 2005), chap. 5
12. For an analysis of Britain's path to new forms of mass politics and relationships to the state, see Charles Tilly, Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758-1834 (Cambridge, Mass., 1995)
13. Seymour Drescher, "Public Opinion and Parliament in the Abolition of the British Slave Trade," in The British Slave Trade: Abolition, Parliament, and People, ed. Stephen Farrell, Melanie Unwin, and James Walvin (Edinburgh, 2007), 42-65
14. For the public debate over the significance of the Manchester petition and its economic interests, see Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective (New York, 1987), 68-72, 210-13
15. To a Liverpool letter writer who complained that the Manchester petitioners attacked their own cotton interest, a Manchester correspondent replied, "Why be alarmed for manufacturers and mechanics when they have no fears?" (Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective ibid., 212 n. 25)
16. See also Thomas Clarkson's special use of the Manchester and Birmingham petitions in Clarkson, An Essay on the Impolicy of the African Slave Trade (London, 1788), 118-19
17. For Manchester's role, see Drescher, "Public Opinion and Parliament," 49
18. J. R. Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery: The Mobilisation of Public Opinion against the Slave Trade, 1787-1807 (Manchester, Eng., 1995), esp. chaps. 2, 4
19. On Olaudah Equiano, see Vincent Carretta, Equiano the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (Athens, Ga., 2005)
20. Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, chap. 4
21. Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery, chaps. 2, 4-5
22. Clare Midgley, Women against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780-1870 (New York, 1995), 65 (quotations)
23. See also Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven, Conn., 1992), 279-80
24. Thomas Clarkson, The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the Slave-Trade by the British Parliament (London, 1808), 2: 352-55 ("Of the enthusiasm")
25. Paul Michael Kielstra, The Politics of Slave Trade Suppression in Britain and France, 1814-1848: Diplomacy, Morality and Economics (New York, 2000), 30-31 ("All England is moving," 31)
26. On the asymmetrical distribution of economic and moral motives, see Seymour Drescher, "People and Parliament: The Rhetoric of the British Slave Trade," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 20, no. 4 (Spring 1990): 561-80
27. See also Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York, 2007), 325-26
28. A long and distinguished historiographical tradition views Britain's trauma of defeat and despair in the American War of Independence as the catalytic event in the emergence of British abolitionism. See among other works R. Coupland, The American Revolution and the British Empire: The Sir George Watson Lectures for 1928 (1930; repr., New York, 1965), 1-45, 82-83, 196-99
29. Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2006), esp. 182-206, 451-62
30. On this particular issue, David Brion Davis offers a different view. See Davis, "American Slavery and the American Revolution," in Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution, ed. Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman (Charlottesville, Va., 1983), 262-80
31. "Trade with America," London Morning Chronicle, Mar. 15, 1787, [3] (quotation)
32. Quantitative indicators reinforce the qualitative observations in newspapers. During the 1780s net migration rates from England fell to their lowest level in the more than three centuries from 1541 to 1871. See E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541-1871: A Reconstruction (Cambridge, 1989), 531-35 (table A3.3)
33. National income was rising at a record rate in the decade after 1782. See Patrick K. O'Brien and Philip A. Hunt, "The Rise of a Fiscal State in England, 1485-1815," Historical Research 66, no. 160 (June 1993): 129-76, esp. 175-76 (table 5)
34. Further indicators of economic growth and prosperity in the mid- to late 1780s may be found in the increased output and export of coal, metals, paper, and ships built. Customs reported record imports of raw wool, raw silk, cotton, tea, sugar, and wine. Newspapers reported bumper farm crops and consumption of wheat. In the area of public finances, national expenditures dropped dramatically in the mid-1780s, whereas net public income reached record heights. For statistics on all these items, see B. R. Mitchell, British Historical Statistics (Cambridge, 1988)
35. As Christopher Leslie Brown observes, British "essayists were still condemning American slavery and celebrating British free soil" in 1785. See Brown, Moral Capital, 201
36. Drescher, "Public Opinion and Parliament," 47 (quotation), 55-56
37. Robert Isaac Wilberforce and Samuel Wilberforce, The Life of William Wilberforce (London, 1838), 2: 19 (quotation)
38. On the initial significance in England of Saint Domingue's uprising, see David Geggus, "British Opinion and the Emergence of Haiti, 1791-1805," in Slavery and British Society, 1776-1846, ed. James Walvin (London, 1982), 123-49
39. See Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces
40. On the French revolutionary government's colonial policy, see Miranda Spieler, "The Legal Structure of Colonial Rule during the French Revolution," WMQ 66, no. 2 (April 2009): 365-408
41. For the Franco-Haitian influence on British abolition in the 1790s, see David Patrick Geggus, Slavery, War, and Revolution: The British Occupation of Saint Domingue, 1793-1798 (New York, 1982)
42. Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington, Ind., 2002)
43. On the effect of the Saint Domingue revolution in the Caribbean, see David Barry Gaspar and Geggus, eds., A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean (Bloomington, Ind., 1997)
44. Geggus, ed., The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (Columbia, S.C., 2001)
45. The Saint Domingue rebellion apparently had little effect on the Danish slave trade commission's deliberations leading up to gradual abolition of the slave trade early in 1792. Indeed the commission welcomed a rumored British governmental hesitation. Its members took it as an opportunity to preempt British priority and gain glory for the Danish king. See Erik Gøbel, "The Danish Edict of 16th March 1792 to Abolish the Slave Trade," in Orbis in Orbem: Liber Amicorum John Everaert, ed. Jan Parmentier and Sander Spanoghe (Ghent, Belgium, 2001), 251-63
46. T. C. Hansard, ed., The Parliamentary Debates from the Year 1803 to the Present Time (London, 1812), 8: 952 (quotation)
47. For the revolutionary decade, see David Geggus, "The Enigma of Jamaica in the 1790s: New Light on the Causes of Slave Rebellions," WMQ 44, no. 2 (April 1987): 274-99
48. For the chronology of British colonial slave revolts, see Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca, N.Y., 1982), 335-39
49. Craton concludes that "nowhere in the British West Indies did slaves rise up unaided on French Revolutionary principles, and in the campaigns in which they participated they were doing no more than following a traditional pragmatic course . . . Far more British West Indian slaves rallied to the aid of the imperial regime" (Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies ibid., 165)
50. See Emilia Viotti da Costa, Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood: The Demerara Slave Rebellion of 1823 (New York, 1994)
51. Gelien Matthews, Caribbean Slave Revolts and the British Abolitionist Movement (Baton Rouge, La., 2006)
52. See for example Craton, Testing the Chains, chap. 22
53. Davis, Inhuman Bondage, 217-21
54. Kielstra, Politics of Slave Trade Suppression, 31 ("All England is moving")
55. Seymour Drescher, "Whose Abolition? Popular Pressure and the Ending of the British Slave Trade," Past and Present, no. 143 (May 1994): 136-66 ("You must really press," 164)
56. David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York, 1987), 85, 93
57. Following the Napoleonic Wars, the British government began to negotiate a long series of bilateral treaties providing for a mutual right to conduct searches aboard suspected slavers flying the flag of the signatories, with joint courts adjudicating the resulting cases (David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade ibid, 84-94)
58. As Eltis observes, "Great Britain was a signatory to all the myriad treaties affecting the slave trade from 1810 to 1900." See Eltis, "Was Abolition of the U.S. and British Slave Trade Significant in the Broader Atlantic Context?" in "Abolishing the Slave Trades: Ironies and Reverberations, ed. Scott E. Casper, Christopher Grasso, and Joseph C. Miller, special issue, WMQ 66, no. 4 (October 2009): 717-36 (quotation, 731)
59. The strongest states with slaves refused to sign up, which left enough holes in the network to sail hundreds of thousands of Africans to the Americas. See Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government's Relations to Slavery, comp. and ed. Ward M. McAfee (New York, 2001), 160
60. See Richard B. Allen, "Licentious and Unbridled Proceedings: The Illegal Slave Trade to Mauritius and the Seychelles during the Early Nineteenth Century," Journal of African History 42, no. 1 (2001): 91-116, esp. 100 (table 2)
61. On Sierra Leone, see Cassandra Pybus, "'A Less Favourable Specimen': The Abolitionist Response to Self-Emancipated Slaves in Sierra Leone, 1793-1808," in Farrell, Unwin, and Walvin, British Slave Trade, 97-112
62. Eltis, Economic Growth, 139 (quotation)
63. For an estimate of the cost of abolition to Britain, see Chaim D. Kaufmann and Robert A. Pape, "Explaining Costly International Moral Action: Britain's Sixty-Year Campaign against the Atlantic Slave Trade," International Organization 53, no. 4 (Autumn 1999): 631-68, esp. 637
64. Seymour Drescher, The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation (New York, 2002), 232-33
65. George Reid Andrews, Afro-Latin America, 1800-2000 (New York, 2004), chap. 2
66. For the transatlantic figures, see Voyages, http://www.slavevoyages.org/ tast/index.faces
67. On the British intracolonial trade, see Eltis, "The Traffic in Slaves between the British West Indian Colonies, 1807-1833," Economic History Review 25, no. 1 (February 1972): 55-64
68. Hilary McD. Beckles, "'An Unfeeling Traffick': The Intercolonial Movement of Slaves in the British Caribbean, 1807-1833," in The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave Trades in the Americas, ed. Walter Johnson (New Haven, Conn., 2004), 256-74
69. Seymour Drescher, "The Fragmentation of Atlantic Slavery and the British Intercolonial Slave Trade," The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave Trades in the Americas, ibid., 234-55
70. Michael Tadman, "The Interregional Slave Trade in the History and Myth-Making of the U.S. South," in Johnson, Chattel Principle, 117-42, esp. 120 (table 6.1)
71. Jeremy Adelman, Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic (Princeton, N.J., 2006), 98-99 (quotation, 98)
72. Eltis, WMQ 66: 717-36
73. See Fehrenbacher, Slaveholding Republic, chap. 2
74. On the abolition process in the major Atlantic American seaboard regions, see Richard S. Dunn, "Black Society in the Chesapeake, 1776-1810," in Berlin and Hoffman, Slavery and Freedom, 49-82
75. Gary B. Nash and Jean R. Soderlund, Freedom By Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its Aftermath (New York, 1991)
76. Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and "Race" in New England, 1780-1860 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1998)
77. David N. Gellman, Emancipating New York: The Politics of Slavery and Freedom, 1777-1827 (Baton Rouge, La., 2006)
78. Reginald Coupland, Wilberforce (London, 1945), 327 (quotation), 396-97
79. For military pressure on Portugal, see João Pedro Marques, The Sounds of Silence: Nineteenth-Century Portugal and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, trans. Richard Wall (New York, 2006)
80. On Brazil, see Leslie Bethell, The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade: Britain, Brazil, and the Slave Trade Question, 1807-1869 (Cambridge, 1970)
81. For the African coast, see Robin Law, "Abolition and Imperialism: International Law and the British Suppression of the Atlantic Slave Trade" (paper delivered at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture's conference "'The bloody Writing is for ever torn': Domestic and International Consequences of the First Governmental Efforts to Abolish the Atlantic Slave Trade," Aug. 8-12, 2007, Accra and Elmina, Ghana)
82. Alexis de Tocqueville, "On the Emancipation of Slaves," 1843, in Seymour Drescher, trans. and ed., Tocqueville and Beaumont on Social Reform (New York, 1968), 137-73 (quotations, 138, 154)
83. Tocqueville and Beaumont on Social Reform Ibid., 151-54 (quotation, 150-51)
84. A more recent translation appears in Alexis de Tocqueville, Writings on Empire and Slavery, ed. and trans. Jennifer Pitts (Baltimore, 2001), 199-226
85. Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York, 1998), 151-52 ("epochal victory," 151)
86. "First of August," [Boston] Liberator, Aug. 20, 1841, 134
87. J. R. Oldfield, "Chords of Freedom": Commemoration, Ritual and British Transatlantic Slavery (Manchester, Eng., 2007), 148 ("greatest moral miracle")
88. John W. Blassingame et al., eds., The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews (New Haven, Conn., 1979), 2: 142 ("passage to freedom")
89. Douglass delivered his speech in Rochester, N.Y. For a general comparison of British and Continental patterns of reform, see Jonathan Sperber, "Reforms, Movements for Reform, and Possibilities of Reform: Comparing Britain and Continental Europe," in Rethinking the Age of Reform: Britain, 1780-1850, ed. Arthur Burns and Joanna Innes (Cambridge, 2003), 312-30
90. For detailed analyses of the relationship between abolitionism and democratization on the Continent, see Olivier Pétré Grenouilleau, ed., Abolir l'esclavage: Un réformisme à l'épreuve (France, Portugal, Suisse, xviiie-xixe siècles) (Rennes, France, 2008)