46 Michèle DucketBuxton, who drew up a proposal to 'civilize' Africa, urging Great Britain to
use the influence and power 'which God had thought fit to bestow on her to
raise Africa up out of the dust and enable it to draw upon its own resources
to wipe out slavery and the slave trade'.^66 As for the official missionary effort,
it was restricted to the spread of the faith and the education of the people,
leaving the settlement—or the neglect—of these difficult problems to the dis-
cretion of the administrative authorities.
Taking the declarations of the Rights of Man, and the Law of Nations
as the basis for its ideas, the liberal, philanthropic and humanitarian trend
developed, led by such prominent figures as Lamartine, Benjamin Constant
and Tocqueville. Victor Schoelcher, who had been one of the chief architects
of the Act for the abolition of slavery in 1848, denounced the persistence of
the slave trade in Natal in 1877.^66 In many countries, from France and Great
Britain to Brazil and the Cameroons, anti-slavery societies were founded to
defend the rights of the human being against all forms of slavery, in the widest
possible sense that the historical context dictated. But this liberal tradition,
inspired by faith in the progress of the human mind and in a certain sense of
the white race's 'civilizing' mission, was superseded by socialist thinking which
cherished no illusions about 'man's inhumanity to man', and set about demon-
strating that the evils of the colonial system were to be found in the logic of
its own existence, and that the only way to put an end to slavery 'in all its
forms' was to put an end to European hegemony in Africa:The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entomb-
ment in mines of the aboriginal population ... the turning of Africa into a warren for
the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist
production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation
... slavery ... is the sole natural basis of colonial wealth.^67Within a comprehensive theory of capitalism, Karl Marx defines the slave
trade as one form of primitive accumulation, as a traffic in human beings which
has specific characteristics and which, at a particular point in history, yields
a maximum rate of return.Liverpool waxed fat on the slave-trade. This was its method of primitive accumulation.
And, even to the present day, Liverpool 'respectability' is the Pindar of the slave-trade
which... has coincided with that spirit of bold advent which has characterized the
trade of Liverpool and rapidly carried it to its present state of prosperity; has occa-
sioned vast employment for shipping and sailors, and greatly augmented the demand
for the manufactures of the country.^68The profit derived from the slave trade itself is compounded by the profit
made out of menial labour: merchants, slave-traders and planters share the
gains of a system which pushes human exploitation to limits hitherto unknown.