22 The New York ReviewSlavery, Empire, Memory
Howard W. French
Slave Empire :
How Slavery Built Modern Britain
by Padraic X. Scanlan.
London: Robinson,
448 pp., £25.00; £12.99 (paper)Empireland : How Imperialism
Has Shaped Modern Britain
by Sathnam Sanghera.
London: Viking,
306 pp., £18.99; £9.99 (paper)In 1833 Britain allocated the extraor-
dinary sum of £20 million—40 percent
of the British treasury’s annual expen-
ditures at the time, and the equivalent
today of some $3.35 billion—in com-
pensation payments to make a clean
and final break with slavery. This was
the year that it freed enslaved people
throughout its empire and a quarter
of a century after it outlawed partici-
pation in the transatlantic commerce
in Africans, which it had dominated
for 150 years. During that time it had
shipped three million slaves to the
Americas.
Since then the country has attempted
to recast the historical understanding
of how it profited from the forced labor
of millions of Africans. Britons were
taught—and many still believe—that
slavery had never been a foundation
of their country’s commercial prosper-
ity but was a millstone that needed to
be removed so capitalism could truly
flourish. Echoes of such thinking can
be heard in the claims of Prime Minis-
ter Boris Johnson and his predecessor,
Theresa May, that exiting the Euro-
pean Union was a way for Britain to
reconnect with its proud traditions as a
global trading power.
In the place of remorse or even
meaningful dialogue about their
slave-trading and plantation- operating
past, Britons have been encouraged
to embrace feel-good messages aboutfreedom. Such efforts began in the
early nineteenth century with the pro-
motion of their country as the very av-
atar of the liberation of human chattel.
A central prop in this national image
management was Britain’s West Af-
rica Squadron, the ships that period-
ically swept the African coast in the
nineteenth century, interdicting re-
calcitrant traders in human beings,
whether from Europe or the Americas,
and freeing the Africans they seized.
Britons were also regaled with tales of
the gratitude of former slaves who had
been freed from bondage on West In-
dian plantations and allowed to work
for themselves in the New World for
the first time.
What was wrong with such a flatter-
ing picture? To begin with, the gener-
ous compensation paid in 1833 went
not into the pockets of the enslaved,
or even toward their care or rehabili-
tation, but to the former slave owners.
Many of them increased their fortunes
by investing in the emerging industries
of the day, including banks, railroad
stocks, mines, factories, and, for some,
American cotton, then a booming new
slave industry. Seventy-five baron-
ets are listed in the compensation re-
cords, along with dozens of members of
Parliament.
The legend of the West Africa Squad-
ron, though not trivial, was blown out
of all proportion to its actual impact on
the shadowy last years of the illicit in-
ternational trade in slaves. As Padraic
X. Scanlan writes in Slave Empire:
How Slavery Built Modern Britain, his
bracingly revisionist work on the era of
Black bondage and its aftermath, pop-
ular histories about this interdiction
force bore subtitles like “The Ships
That Stopped the Slave Trade.” But in
reality it did nothing of the sort. More
than 2.6 million enslaved Africans
were shipped across the Atlantic after1810, when the British patrols, always
sparse in number, began: “The Squad-
ron was more useful as a fighting force
for intimidating and destroying West
African coastal kingdoms and chief-
taincies that happened to defy British
demands.”
And what became of the enslaved
people who were freed from their
chains when total abolition finally
came? Scanlan says they were paid
wages far too low to allow them to pur-
chase land of their own, so they had
to continue producing sugar and cof-
fee, cotton and indigo for others under
harsh conditions in the Caribbean. In
fact, he argues, that was the goal all
along. Even among the most progres-
sive of English abolitionists, many be-
lieved that the best outcome of this new
era of nominal freedom for formerly
enslaved Black people would be for
them to toil indefinitely under the tu-
telage of wealthy white plantation own-
ers whose commodities British comfort
and prosperity required.The intellectual background of Scan-
lan’s book, which he acknowledges
early on, is the argument—first made
by the former Trinidadian prime min-
ister and scholar Eric Williams and
recently elaborated and refined by nu-
merous other historians—that an em-
pire in the Caribbean based on slavery
was foundational to British capitalism
and prosperity. To say that Western
historians have not always embraced
this interpretation would be an un-
derstatement. For decades after the
publication of Williams’s landmark
work, Capitalism and Slavery (1944),
the scholarly pendulum mostly swung
in the opposite direction. Mainstream
British and American historians at-
tacked his writings as overwrought
and unsupported, and made light of hisoverall argument by seizing on two of
his claims: that profits from the slave
trade had been an essential part of the
financing of British industrialization,
and that Britain only renounced slav-
ery once it was no longer profitable.
This second idea is clearly indefensi-
ble, but today many historians believe
that the first can only be considered
wrong if it is viewed in the most lim-
ited way.
Scanlan, like other recent scholars,
argues quite sensibly that profit from
the slave trade derived from other ac-
tivities besides the outright buying and
selling of human beings. He makes
clear, though, that this brutal com-
merce was immensely lucrative. Slave
traders of the late eighteenth century
averaged a handsome 9.5 percent an-
nual rate of profit, more than double
the appreciation in value of British real
estate. Another way of understand-
ing the profitability of this business
comes from examining its effects else-
where. In a 2014 paper, the economists
Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman
argued that the value derived from the
trade and ownership of slaves in Amer-
ica was greater than that from all of the
country’s factories, railroads, and ca-
nals combined.* And imports of slaves
to the United States represented less
than 5 percent of the total transatlantic
trade, with much larger numbers going
to Brazil and the Caribbean.
Many of Williams’s critics narrowly
considered the market prices of slaves
to attack the idea that profit from the
trade could have been a decisive fac-
tor in British industrialization. Yet it
is only when one considers the overall
wealth creation made possible by slave
labor, which is implicit in Piketty and
Zucman’s calculation, that one can
begin to take the true measure of the
trade’s impact on British (as well as
European and American) prosperity.
Chattel slavery was the foundation of
a great many economic activities, in-
cluding what was arguably the most
transformative one of its era: the sugar
plantation.
As businesses, Scanlan reckons,
plantations were roughly as profitable
as the trade in human beings, but even
this falls far short of providing the
full picture of how decisively slavery
boosted Britain’s (and America’s) for-
tunes. Limiting the estimate to sugar,
or even adding in the profits from the
ceaseless buying and selling of mil-
lions of human beings, would be akin
to measuring global carbon emissions
from the internal combustion engine
alone. By the mid-1660s, sugar pro-
duced in the tiny British colony of
Barbados was worth more than all the
silver and gold shipped to Spain from
its American colonies.
With the sharp growth of sugar plan-
tations, in Barbados and then Jamaica,
the contribution of trade to Britain’s
gross domestic product rocketed from
4 percent in 1700 to 40 percent in 1770.
But as this happened, the boom inEnslaved people working in the boiling house of a sugar plantation in British Antigua; etching by William Clark, 1823British Library/Granger*“Capital Is Back: Wealth- Income Ra-
tios in Rich Countries, 1700–2010,”
The Quarterly Journal of Economics,
Vol. 129, No. 3 (August 2014).French 22 24 .indd 22 3 / 9 / 22 5 : 00 PM