Vol. 71/No. 17      April 30, 2007

Prime Minister Anthony Blair expressed “deep sorrow and regret for our nation’s role in the slave trade” and joined an anniversary service with the queen and the Archbishop of Canterbury. Churches and schools are organizing similar events this year.

But the truth is that the economic self-interest of industrial capitalism, not taking the moral high ground, was the driving force for abolishing slavery.

In 1833 new laws allowed gradual abolition of slavery in the British Empire, only to be replaced by indentured servitude and wage slavery. British slave owners received £20 million in compensation, and “freed” slaves were held as “apprentices” for up to six years. From 1838 to 1917, British sugar plantation owners in Jamaica brought more than 30,000 indentured laborers from the Indian subcontinent, as well as about 5,000 Chinese, a process repeated in other British colonies.

Slavery and the slave trade were key to the “primitive accumulation of capital” that made Britain the main economic and military power of the 19th century.

From 1520 on, sanctified by the church and legalized by the crown, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and English vessels traded slaves to the West Indies.

At first the colonial planters relied on white bonded labor from England. Merchants bought servants who were kidnapped off the streets or deported from prisons. After William Cromwell’s conquest of Ireland in the mid-1600s, British troops seized 100,000 Irish, selling them as slaves to English tobacco planters. However, white bonded labor was insufficient. Many were released after fixed terms, or escaped with ease, merging with the white population.

By the early 1700s African slaves, branded by their black skin, displaced white servants in the British colonies. Between 1713 and 1780 an estimated 20,000 African slaves were carried each year to America. Following the 1713 war with Spain, England had a monopoly on the slave trade.

The triangular trade in slaves from English ports created massive fortunes for the British ruling class. But the American Revolution reduced their fortunes to the British-owned plantations in the Caribbean. The French Revolution in 1792 inspired slave revolts, the largest being in French San Domingo (Haiti). The British colonialists, at war with the French, invaded, hoping to seize it and prevent slave uprisings in their nearby colony of Jamaica. The British defeat shook the establishment, with growing concern that the slave trade was a liability.

The 19th century industrial revolution transformed British manufacture into large-scale industry, with a factory system and wage labor. Economists like Adam Smith condemned the slave system as expensive and restrictive.

An offshoot of the industrial revolution was a transformation of cotton production in the U.S. South. Wage slavery in the mills plus chattel slavery on U.S. plantations put fabulous profits into the pockets of English textile magnates. British manufacturers who prided themselves for abolishing slavery benefited from slavery in the United States.

From 1850 on, the restrictive character of plantation slavery signaled a crisis for the U.S. southern states. The need to sink enormous sums of money annually into slaves and land devoured the planter’s surplus capital. English capital found more attractive investments elsewhere.

The 1865 victory of the northern states in the U.S. Civil War sealed the fate of the slave-based economy. During this revolutionary war the English landed aristocrats pressed the British ruling class to back the southern states. When the Union navy of the North blockaded cotton shipments to British mills, laid-off cotton workers refused to endorse the breaking of the blockade in an act of solidarity.

Protests organized here around the 200th anniversary of the end of the British slave trade include demands for an official apology for slavery.

Today the hangovers of slavery, anti-Black and other racist discrimination, can be abolished only through working-class struggles that help lead the toilers toward taking power from the hands of the capitalist class and joining the worldwide fight to build a society based on human solidarity—socialism.  
 
 
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