Slavery and the British Economy

(whooshing music)- Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. My name's Martin Elliot, I'm currently the provost of Gresham College, and I'm really pleased to welcome you to a full hall tonight at the college, and those of you who are watching online as well. This is, I think, a very important lecture that we are going to hear. The relationships between governments, commerce, and the people who do the work, who labor to create the wealth, often of the few, are contentious and discussed more and more as the gap between rich and poor widens again. The public discourse towards exposure of those who were involved in earning money from slavery has emerged more and more in recent months and recent years towards their disgrace and demands for restitution. But the details of those relationships are often more complex, and somehow, they kind of escaped the history that many of us were taught at school, and later, and even that we can read about. Tonight, we are privileged to welcome back Professor Martin Daunton to put that right, and to recalibrate the historical context of this difficult part of our history. But it's not entirely our history, I think, because as we were discussing just beforehand, slavery still exists. So please join me in welcoming Martin Daunton to give his lecture this evening.(audience applauds)- At Dorchester, on the 4th of October, 1774, John Gordon, the owner of a slave plantation in Jamaica, died on his way back to the Caribbean. St. Peter's Church, where this memorial is currently located, recently applied to remove it, a request that collides with a policy of Historic England to retain and explain. If that memorial were to be retained, explaining it would open up the entire complicated and emotive subject of slavery in the British Empire. How can we provide an explanation? The dangerous rebellion, which is referred to there, of 1760, in Jamaica, was Tacky's Revolt. It occurred during the global battle with France in the Seven Years' War of 1756 to 1763, which took place across Europe, the Caribbean, North America, and India. The revolt in Jamaica should be seen as part of that wider global conflict. The abolitionists, who argued for the end of the slave trade, and then slavery, portrayed the enslaved people as pleading for freedom, as in the medallion produced by Josiah Wedgwood in 1787 or the tomb of Charles James Fox of 1822 in Westminster Abbey. In reality, as the revolt of 1760 showed, slaves resisted and were active agents in Tacky's Revolt, in the revolt in Demerara in 1823, and again in Jamaica in 1831. Many slaves had been warriors in Africa and were skilled in bush or guerrilla warfare. This was politically uncomfortable for the abolitionists, who portrayed supplicant slaves to be rescued by paternalistic reformers. Well, slavery in the Caribbean was brutal, the disease environment was challenging, and labor in sugar cultivation, as shown here, was harsh, especially in preparing the ground for planting. The overseers on slave plantations maximized production by driving the slaves. One observer remarks, and I quote, he heard many of the overseers say,"I have made my employer"20, 30, 40 more hogsheads of sugar per year"than any of my predecessors ever did."Though I have killed 30 or 40 Negros per year more,"the produce has been more than adequate." Well, the disease environment and that behavior meant that the death rate was higher than the births, that's the death rate there, there's the births. And if we take one plantation, the Mesopotamia Estate in Jamaica, between 1762 and 1789, its total enslaved population grew by 31, it was only by buying, from Africa, 160 slaves. Unlike in North America, the slave population did not reproduce itself in the Caribbean, so you needed to have continued slave trade from across the Atlantic, as shown here in the Slave Voyages Database. And the peak of the British slave trade was in the third quarter of the 18th century, about 832,000 enslaved people carried. After the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, it was the Portuguese and the Brazilians who were taking over the bulk of the trade, so it continued right through into the mid 19th century. Of the slaves leaving in British ships, about 272,000 went to Jamaica, the area I've just been concentrating upon. So, during that peak period of 1751 to '75, the British ships carried about 43% of all slaves crossing the Atlantic. So, where did the slaves come from? How were they taken into captivity? And there, we need to look at what was happening in West Africa. In the 16th, 17th century, there were great empires in the northern part of Africa, in the Sahel area, like the Mali, we know the great forts of Timbuktu. They broke down in the 17th century and were replaced by smaller kingdoms, centralized kingdoms, centralized states, and they were linked to the Atlantic trade. They were monetized and militarized. They received currency from overseas in a form of cowrie shells, of copper ingots, or iron ingots, and cloth, these were all use as forms of currency, but they were soft currency, unlike the hard gold currency, which they were exporting overseas. These soft currencies within West Africa depreciated against what was going out, their hard gold, And that creates strains, and it also leads then to both the development of commerce and enslaved people being sent overseas to compensate for that depreciation. So we need to understand the ways in which these centralized states were then building up powerful armies, they were themselves building up revenues from this trade, they become more militarized, and the warfare produces more captives, which go into the Atlantic slave trade. They secure arms, these militarized states, from the Europeans. It was estimated that by 1730, about 180,000 guns a year went into what were called the gold and the slave coasts. The import of British goods, the import of the guns, the growth of the slave trade becomes a circle, if you will, contributing to the continued militarization of Africa. More slaves meant more guns, meant more war, meant more captives. It also meant, as I said earlier on, that many enslaved people had experience in warfare, and this is a very important point for the sense insecurity of the white population in places such as Jamaica, where the white population was outnumbered about nine to one. How, against a military-experienced slave workforce, which is about 90% of the population, did the white population maintain authority? And they did that in three ways. The first is that Jamaica was a garrison state, a garrison colony, with fortifications and a major naval station. This provided both external security against France and internal security against enslaved people. That military and naval presence had to be paid for by the British fiscal-military state, that is, an efficient tax system that serviced government debt, and that government debt paid for the navy and successful warfare. The second source of authority, that's one of the the warriors I was talking about, were the Maroons. The Maroons were escaped slaves who had gone into the interior of Jamaica, into the mountains, and initially, they posed a major threat to the white settlers, white planters. There was a war, which ended in 1739 with a treaty that legitimized the rights, or recognized the rights of the free Blacks. In return, and I quote from the treaty,"They would use their best endeavors"to take, kill, suppress, or destroy rebel slaves"and capture and return runaway slaves." That treaty opened up the interior of Jamaica to settlement, and this is the period, after 1739, when the island, the white planters, had the maximum influence on imperial policy in London, and the planters had the greatest autonomy to do what they wished within Jamaica, and this period runs up, really, to the end of the Seven Years' War. But the third way in which the white planters kept authority was by brutality, by a regime of terror. I apologize now for some of the quotes which are going to follow. The enslaved people, they said, should be treated,"As a sort of beast, and without souls." They had, it was said,"As great a propensity to subjection"as we have to command."They love slavery as naturally as we do liberty." These assumptions went with a lack of legal constraint. The diaries of one planter, Thomas Thistlewood, provide a detailed record of his sexual exploitation and brutal treatment of enslaved people, which makes for very difficult reading. He whipped enslaved people brutally, but not only that, I quote from the Diary, he, "Rubbed in salt pickle, lime juice, and pepper," he marked the bodies of enslaved people by slitting noses, cutting off ears. He put one man in an iron cage, I quote,"Gagged him, rubbed him with molasses,"and exposed him naked to the flies all day"and the mosquitoes all night." He demeaned and dehumanized the enslaved people. Thistlewood recorded of one slave, I quote,"I gave him a moderate whipping, pickled him well,"made Hector shit in his mouth,"immediately put in a gag whilst his mouth was full,"and made him wear it four or five hours." It was a regime of dehumanization and trauma, which had consequences for British views of the planters in the Caribbean. As well as depending on a continued inflow of enslaved people and a regime of brutality, the island also suffered from food insecurity and the risk of famine. Slaves produced high value export crops, and planters grew little food. The West Indies, therefore, relied on imports from North America. Bryan Edwards, a leading commentator on Jamaica in the 1790s, remarked, "It is true economy in the planter"to buy provisions from others."The product of a single acre of his cane fields"will purchase more maize"than can be raised in five times that extent of land,"and besides pay the freight." This trade was important to the Middle Colonies and to New England. Their export to the West Indies allowed a trade deficit between them and Britain. John Adams, the future United States president, saw, and I quote,"The commerce of the West Indies"is a part of the American system of commerce."They can neither do without us, nor we without them."The Creator has placed us upon the globe"in such a situation"that we have occasion for each other." That mutual alliance could also, of course, lead to precarity in the food supply to the West Indies, and to famine. Well, this is the context for Tacky's Revolt of April, 1760. Tacky had probably been a royal official or chief in West Africa. Although men of high status who were captured in warfare could sometimes be ransomed by their their fellows, the price could be too high or the occasion was just not suitable, so these high officials, experienced warriors, could be enslaved alongside ordinary soldiers. Well, after his revolt, Tacky was shot and killed, and the remaining holdouts negotiated with John Gordon, as on that memorial in Dorchester Parish Church. They surrendered to Gordon, the memorial referred to his humanity, on condition that they would be sent out of Jamaica rather than put to death. Well, others were less lucky, they were put to death, they were made a public example, for example by being suspended in iron cages and left to dehydrate and starve. One man survived for nine days, which is viewed not as a sign of the brutality of those who did it to him, but rather of the unfeeling nature of Black bodies, of what was called their brutal insensibility. The defeat of Tacky was not the end of the matter, a larger rising followed in May, the Coromantee War, which was led by an enslaved man known as Wager. As far as we can tell, this man had been a leading official or warrior, possibly Asante, in West Africa. At some point in the 1740s, Apongo, to give him his African name, was captured and sold to Arthur Forrest, a naval officer who was also a planter, owning around 3,000 acres in Jamaica. Apongo served on Forrest's ship, HMS Wager, for a year, hence his name. Before the ship returned to England, Wager, or Apongo, was discharged, and became, like Tacky, a driver in charge of discipline on Forrest's plantation. Forrest returned to Jamaica on naval duties, and fought a French squadron in this battle in 1757. He secured a fortune and a landed estate in Berkshire from his naval victories, from seizure of French cargoes, and of course from the slave plantations. The lives of Apongo and Forrest were connected through the global conflicts of the Seven Years' War. The rising of the Coromantee War started on Forrest's plantation in Westmoreland Parish, a densely settled area of major plantations, including those of William Beckford, Lord Mayor of London, who defended the rights of the City of London and of English liberties against the Crown. And here he is, his statue, in the Guildhall making his speech against George III to protect the freedoms of the City of London. The irony, of course, of being a slave owner was probably lost on him, though not on on us. In all, there were around 15,000 slaves in Westmoreland Parish, on 60 plantations, it was one of the most profitable areas of the British Empire. The rising there was very difficult to suppress. It was put down by the local militia, by sailors from the fleet, soldiers from the British Army, the Maroons, who I talked about earlier on, who pursued the rebels using scorched earth tactics and public terror. Apongo was captured, sentenced to be hung in chains for three days, taken down and burned alive. The success of the slave owners in putting down such uprisings showed that they could survive, it showed them that they did not need to fear the slaves, they could terrorize them. Rather than suffering, paralyzed from fear of their precarious position, the defeat of these uprisings in 1760 emboldened them to use immediate and unrelenting application of terror, combined with coercive, intrusive, and expensive imperial and colonial interventions by the navy and the army, this resting upon high taxation, which was above the level that provoked rebellion in the War of Independence in North America. In North America, the imperial state was raising taxes to stop the settlers going across the Appalachians and leading to warfare with Native Americans. In the West Indies, the imperial state and high taxation helped the planters achieve their security, above all in the victory of Admiral Rodney over the French and Spanish fleets in the Battle of the Saintes in April, 1782. It was such successes which allowed the sugar colonies to prosper, reaching their peak from the Seven Year's War to the American Revolution. Although they were hit by the disruption of the War of Independence, high profits soon returned from the 1780s through to the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. But whilst they flourished economically, they were also starting to lose political and cultural standing, which declined from the peak in the Seven Years' War. Opponents in the metropole, in London, in the United Kingdom, saw the planters' way of life as degraded and debauched, they were acting as cruel tyrants who had become un-British. Samuel Johnson, on hearing of the death of one planter, raised a glass in a toast. He said,"He will will not, whither he is now gone," that is, Hell,"find much difference, I believe,"either in the climate or the company." This feeling the planters had turned Jamaica into a hell on earth was reflected in two important court cases. The first was the Somerset case of 1772. The case here was whether a slave could be returned to Jamaica from England. Lord Mansfield, the Chief Justice of King's Bench, argued, I quote his judgment, that slavery, "is so odious"that nothing can be suffered to support it"but positive law," and since slavery had not been positively sanctioned in England by statute or common law, the slave could not be returned to Jamaica. This decision marked a distancing from the West Indies' interest: slavery was an un-English, tyrannical innovation that had been invented in the West Indies. And that case was supported in the case of the Zong, the ship the Zong, where, in 1781, the crew threw the cargo of Africans overboard to claim insurance money. Mass murder was treated as an insurance case. The action of the crew, and the reasoning about whether or not it was justified to throw enslaved people overboard as if they were cargo, exposed the immorality of the whole sordid enterprise, which continued to be used in abolitionist debate, as in this later painting by John Mallord Turner of 1840. So, sentiments in the metropole were changing, and the imperial state also wanted more control over what was going on in the colonies. Although they were economically prosperous, they were losing their influence in London, they were losing unreserved support. The costs of defending the colonies were rising with the war against revolutionary France and the Napoleonic Empire, and with the Second Maroon War of 1795, when the colonial authorities were breaching the treaty with the Maroons, they rose up, were defeated, were sent to Nova Scotia, from where they moved on to Sierra Leone. So a change taking place here, the West Indies losing culturally and politically. Remaining profitable, especially with the removal of competition from the prosperous French colony of Saint Dominique, with the war there in 1794. Pressure from legislation in the British Parliament and self-interest did lead the slave planters to adopt a more prudent policy of what they called amelioration, trying to treat the slaves a bit better, knowing that when the slave trade ended, they could not rely upon bringing new men and women over the Atlantic. The idea there was that amelioration, though, could also delay the abolition of slavery itself, because if you ameliorate their conditions, perhaps there was less need to free them. So the argument continued to rumble on, not rumble on, it carried on in a very, very bitter way until slavery was eventually abolished in act of Parliament in 1833. So what have we learned from trying to explain the memorial to John Gordon? I think we've learned a number of things. One is, the colonies, the West Indies depended upon a constant stream of enslaved people, that's linked with what was happening in West Africa with centralized, militarized states which were dependent upon trade and money. They relied on a trade in food, linking it into the 13 colonies of North America, which allowed them to import goods from Britain. The produce of the coerced labor, sugar, tobacco, and so on, was exported a Britain for consumption and re-export to Europe, which increased the trade with Britain. There was a major role of the Royal Navy, which was supported by a successful tax regime. That men like Forrest and Beckford accumulated major fortunes, which they spent on landed estates and conspicuous consumption. Now, what I want to turn to now is whether or not what I've just outlined explains the British Industrial Revolution, because this is what is often argued, that it was this world, this brutal world of slavery in the Atlantic economy, which led Britain to become the world's first industrial nation. Now, the argument here, that it was important, is actually the argument made by the supporters of slavery. The West Indian interests, the slave owners argued against the abolitionists that their enterprise, their plantations were vital to British prosperity. As one supporter of slavery asked in 1833,"What is your Bristol, your Liverpool,"your Manchester, your Glasgow"if you take from them the West Indian colonies?" The answer, he said, was, "Nothing, worse than nothing,"one universal scene of beggary and starvation." It was the abolitionists who argued that slavery was not essential for economic prosperity. In fact, it was a drain, it was less efficient than free labor, the consumers at home were paying more for slave-produced West Indian sugar, protected by import duties against non-empire sugar, that the metropole was being taxed to pay for defense, as I was showing you with Admiral Rodney. Britain would therefore, they argued, be better off without slavery. So that was the argument at the time, but now, politics have shifted, and it's the critics of British imperialism who stress that slavery was central to British economic development, a claim that is uncomfortably close to that made by the defenders of slavery, and it's those debates which I now want to try and probe a little bit. Of course, we should consider slavery and the Atlantic economy, of which it was an integral part, in any history of Britain's economic development. Some commentators say that even talking about it is to traduce British history and shared identity. That, of course, is untrue. It was contested at the time, it remains contested, it is important, but was it really the major cause of industrialization? The argument that is often put forward is that of Eric Williams, who wrote a book called"Capitalism and Slavery" in 1944, and here are some key quotes. He was careful, he said,"It was one of the main streams"of the accumulation capital."The profits provide part of the huge outlay."It must not be inferred"that the triangular trade," between Britain, Africa, and the Caribbean, and back,"was solely responsible." But then he also says,"It was only the capital accumulation of Liverpool"which called the population of Lancaster into existence." So which did he mean?(Martin coughs) Apologies, I have something in my throat today.

how large a part was it? If it was only one stream, how large a stream? The book provides a lot of evidence of people making money from slavery, engaged in different trade. Thomas Heywood, a merchant in Liverpool, became a banker who worked in the Lancashire textile district, Anthony Bacon was engaged in the trade to the West Indies with iron and set up ironworks in South Wales, Lord Penrhyn developed the slate industry of North Wales, owned a slave plantation in Jamaica, you can see these links, so it was certainly part, but how important a part? When I was a student, back in the late 1960s, this was not seen as a major part at all, but now it's returned as being perhaps the major part of British industrialization, above all in the book by Joseph Inikori,"Africans and the Industrial Revolution," in which he tries to provide quantitative measures of how important the West Indies, but also North American colonies and Brazil, enslaved Africans were to the development of the British economy. So he presents a powerful case, let me just outline it very quickly. Successful industrialization required exports, Britain, he said, went for import substitution industrialization, it replaced imports of Asian textiles, which I talked about in my last lecture, it then exports overseas with aggressive export promotion, that's within the Atlantic economy. The growth of international trade rests upon the Atlantic World, there was like a common market providing specialization of enslaved people producing these goods. He argues that it was Africans in the New World who provided most of the commodities being sent overseas to Europe, they produced 82.5% of all the exports from the Americas, he says, in the 1760s and '70s. He said it was Africa, African people, fueled this whole trade, that these commodities went to the metropole for re-export, they led the development of European trade, the merchants, the farmers of North America prospered on this basis. It leads to the growth of shipbuilding and shipping, it leads to the growth of the financial service sector, it leads to the development of the West Indian Docks in London, for example, and to the Lloyd's marine insurance industry, where he claims that about 60% of all of the premiums issued there, insurance certificates issued there came from this trade. Imported raw materials supplied the goods for British industrialization, he says that British industrial regions were integrated with their export markets and their source of raw materials externally, they were not integrated internally within Britain. Slave-produced commodities produced new tastes, led to development of consumer culture within Britain. It then links up into Asia because bullion being earned within this trade then bought the goods from Asia, the textiles, the tea, and so on. So the whole thing, the whole development of the British economy revolves around this slave-based Atlantic economy. Now, it's right to put that back at the center of the picture, but there's also a danger of going too far, of exaggerating, and that has actually entered into public discourse. What I want to do now is try and probe a bit at just how important this was. It was important, it was wrong when I was a student back in the 1960s not to talk about it, but equally, one can exaggerate. So the first question is, what did slave traders and the owners of slave plantations do with their profits? It's not necessarily the case that profits from slavery and the wider Atlantic economy were invested in industry. We need to know how did these people consume and invest compared with individuals in other trades. Many of them spent their money upon waste, building Fonthill Abbey, the heir of William Beckford. It fell down, it bankrupted him. So it's not necessarily the case the money goes into industry, it could in fact go into landed estates more than anything. And the major survey of who was compensated at the time of the abolition of slavery finds, and I quote,"It was predominantly Tory Anglicans"who received the money."Large scale slave ownership"permeated sections of the Anglican rural gentry class." That is true of two major slave planters, I'll just mention them briefly, one is Simon Taylor, who was the richest slave owner in Jamaica, he had several children by slave mistresses, to use a euphemism. His heir was his brother John, who was a member of the Society of Dilettanti, was notorious for being a spendthrift, to the horror of his brother Simon. He died, the money all went to Simon's nephew, who also died, it went then to the niece, who married a spendthrift called George, who spent his time hanging around with William IV, spending it on fine art, and building a landed estate in Wiltshire. That family disappeared. That was not true of the Lascelles family of Harewood House, who built up a major aristocratic fortune. They were not initially slave owners or planters, they were merchants and financiers, but in the 1770s, when the War of Independence in America led to bankruptcy by estates, they acquired the estates, so they became slave owners almost by happenstance, they owned about 3,000 slaves. The fortune went to two brothers, one ran the business, one built the estate, neither of them had children, it then went to a relative, who became the earl of Harewood in 1812. The fortune led to an aristocratic estate rather than industry. We then need to ask which way did money flow? Money didn't only flow from the Caribbean to London, or Glasgow, or wherever, it could flow the other way. Merchants who prospered from that trade could in fact put their money into plantations, the money could be taken out rather than going into Lancashire. That was true, for example, of John Gladstone, a Liverpool merchant and property owner who didn't initially put his money into Lancashire industry, he put into sugar estates in Demerara. In 1833, he had about 300,000 pounds invested there, but only 1,200 pounds in shares in docks, canals, and railways in Lancashire. So Stanley Engerman and David Eltis, two leading historians of the Atlantic economy of slavery, says that it's not clear which way the money was flowing. The Caribbean might have been generating much of the capital it needed itself, but it might also have been bringing money in from Britain, so which way round it goes needs to be carefully considered. The next point to make is, was the Atlantic economy large enough to be the prime mover? And this is the calculation of Engerman and Eltis, where they work out the value added in different sectors of the economy, and they suggest that West Indian sugar had a value added of 5.4 million pounds in 1845, but look at how big some of the other sectors were, that's only some of the other sectors. So their point here is that, put it in perspective, and they said that, if we think about it, it's true the Caribbean plantation production was growing at about 1% a year in the 18th century compared with about 0.7% of the British economy, so it was growing compared with Britain, but, they said, it only meant it was growing from being the size of Rutland, the smallest English county, to Lancashire, so it's important, but not so important. And if we put it into perspective, the French Caribbean and the Spanish Caribbean was growing even more rapidly and becoming a larger share of their economies than was the case of Britain, so why didn't they have an industrial revolution if it all rested upon the Atlantic economy, is their point. So we're not denying that the Atlantic economy had a role, but we need to be careful. I think Eltis and Engerman actually go too far in minimizing the role, I think that it was actually more important than they suggest. If you look at cotton textiles, well, that's a very important sector to the British Industrial Revolution. They say, well actually, raw cotton was not very valuable compared with the productivity of the workers at home in the factories. But of course, you wouldn't have had those workers at home in the factories if they didn't have a supply of unlimited raw material coming in, so just be careful. My next point is, where did industry get its capital from to industrialize in Britain? Well, a point here is that even large cotton factories did not need much fixed capital, most of what they needed was in the credit for securing raw materials and giving credit to consumers, so they didn't need much capital, and the capital that they needed could come from plowing back their own profits, as in fact Eric Williams himself admitted. The initial capital to go into those mills could come from the so-called putting-out merchants, the people who put out raw materials to the people working at home in small workshops at home in the villages and the hills of the Pennines, so it could be plowed back from that previous domestic system of production. Large sums of capital were needed to sink deep coal mines, but where did that money come from? Landed aristocrats, like the marquesses of Bute in South Wales or the Londonderry Estate in the North East of England, so again, let's be careful about where this money came from. Credit was important, but where does credit come from to buy your materials, to supply credit to consumers? A lot of it comes from the agricultural districts, so East Anglia, after the harvest, has spare money, they send it down to London, London bankers sent it up to the bankers in Lancashire, so it could be this recycling of credit within Britain, as well as coming across the Caribbean. And my next point is to ask whether or not the industrial regions were, as Inikori suggested, more integrated with colonial markets than they were internally. Well I think, in fact, that is already indicated by what I've just said, markets were integrated internally within Britain, as in that cycle of credit from Lancashire. In fact, what is striking about Britain, compared with many European countries, is how integrated it did become from the late 17th century, with a single market where you could trace how it is integrated by the movement of prices, say for grain and wheat. And my next, and, you'll be delighted to hear, final point, about arguing how important this Atlantic economy was is to look at the fiscal-military state. In Spain and Portugal, the state revenues from Latin America paid for European warfare, which diminished economic potential, so don't necessarily think that it leads to economic growth. The British state did not rely largely upon revenues coming from overseas, it relied upon a powerful internal domestic tax state, and that internal domestic tax state was just very successful. Britain did not default on any loan in the whole of the 18th century, the French defaulted nearly every year in the 18th century. So it was how you structured these things internally in creating a legitimate tax regime is very important. Now, I want to link that point to why slavery was then abolished. In 1833, Parliament voted to abolish slavery in the British Empire, but not in India, and as yet not banning British involvement in slavery elsewhere in the world. The point I would make here is that it's not slavery which was the issue here, which is what's causing the downfall, it's the monopoly of West Indian sugar. Should you be protecting one interest against another which is putting costs upon British consumers? That links in with an attack upon the fiscal state having suddenly lost its legitimacy. After the Napoleonic Wars, landowners are escaping taxation, but they're being given subsidies for their corn production, that's falling upon the workers, is falling upon industry. Part of that internal debate is then leading to a threat to the West Indian interest. To Williams, the slave trade ended because it was incompatible with industrial capitalism. No, I don't think it was, he himself admits that. Slavery continues to be used by British industrialists, so I think what's going on here is partly humanitarianism, there's a big uprising in 1831 led by the Baptists. Who looks as if they are attacking Christianity? The slave owners, so there's a change in perception here. So humanitarianism, but also I'm suggesting, above all, the politics of the West Indian interest. So you want to try and create a stable system, now you've got urbanized, industrial workers, you need to show that those workers can share in the benefits of trade, and you do that by the removing the monopoly power of the West Indian interest. Industrialists themselves continue to rely on, or use slavery. They owned this copper mine in Cuba. The production of copper was very important, this is currency being sent to West Africa, being used in the sugar industry there in the West Indies, and the copper smelters of Swansea own this slave-run copper mine in Cuba, even after the abolition of slavery in Britain. Even when the British were not allowed to own slaves, they get around it by hiring slaves. In return for abolition, slave owners were compensated by up to 20 million pounds, equivalent to about 5% of the British GDP. The slaves were not compensated. Now, the question then is, what happens to that money? Well, a lot of that money went into landed estates, as I've just been suggesting. It's often said it went into industrialization, well to some extent it did. Here's John Gladstone, and he put, in 1843, a lot of money into shares, quite a bit of which went into railways. But it wasn't only that, you could also go into land ownership. In fact, some bankers in Birmingham, to take one example, feared that by raising a loan to provide compensation, it was taking money away from industrialization, and in fact, a lot of that money went overseas. A lot of it went overseas, of course, into slave-produced cotton, railways in the American South, or into Brazil. And then finally, I would like to ask what happens to West Africa in all of this? What was the impact of abolition in Africa? I think, there, there's already tensions occurring before the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. These centralized states I talked about were building up warrior aristocracies. They capture people in the warfare and they sell them overseas, partly to compensate for the depreciation of their soft currency. They're losing contact with the people within their own societies, within their own states, they're seen as being parasitical, they're seen as a threat to people who would be enslaved, so these tyrannical warrior elites are already being challenged by local revolts, which actually link back to what is happening in things like Tacky's Revolt, there are movements across the Atlantic, and notice, the Maroons end up in Sierra Leone. They're also then being threatened, these warrior elites, by the rise of Islam, because Islam did not approve of the Transatlantic slave trade. Some states actually petitioned to keep slavery as the basis of their wealth, Dahomey, Asante, but they're being challenged now internally. There's also a change going on economically. West Africa had to produce food for slave voyages, so there's the basis already there for a different economic basis of producing crops. And with the rise of Islam, which didn't approve of Transatlantic chattel slavery, you have the growth of coerced internal slavery, coerced labor, growing things like palm oil and groundnuts, peanuts. The abolitionists hope that by ending slavery, they would create so-called legitimate trade based upon free peasant labor. In fact, what happened was the growth of plantation agriculture on the basis of coerced labor internally. That change could then also provide an opening for imperialism. By the middle of the 19th century, the major West African export was palm oil. So to take Liverpool, you move from people like John Gladstone profiting from slavery to William Lever and Port Sunlight, where his so-called legitimate commerce was based upon forced labor in the Congo. So to conclude, we do need to insert the slave economy into the history of Britain as part of a wider Atlantic economy which includes other European empires and considers the impact on the economies of West Africa and the internal dynamics within West Africa, but in doing this, we should not overcompensate for past neglect, we need to look carefully at the details of the relative importance of the slave-based economy compared with other markets in Europe, in Asia, the source of raw materials, the sources of capital, the direction of investment of profits. To criticize anybody who tries to work through these arguments as somehow engaging in some sort of woke enterprise is to misunderstand British history. These issues were debated by contemporaries and deeply divided opinion then, as they do now. To say that analysis undermines our common heritage ignores the reality that our history has always been contested. And by the way, what happened to that memorial of John Gordon with which I started? Well, because it's in a church, it's not under civil law, it's under ecclesiastical law. It's going to be taken down and moved to a museum, unlike William Beckford, where the common councilors decided he will stay there with a plaque to provide an explanation. Well, as I suggested, there's a lot of explaining to do. Thank you.(audience applauds)- Thank you very much indeed, that was a wonderful lecture. As ever, we have some questions coming in from abroad. The first one, though, is a statement with which I think we can, probably,

"Why isn't this lecture, and more like it,"a compulsory part of state education in England?" And I can only agree with that myself, I will say.- Hear, hear.- There's a specific question from Adrian Leonard, who I suspect you might know the name of.- Oh gosh, one of my PhD students, an expert on the marine insurance industry.- "Is Thistlewood's example"representative of the treatment of enslaved peoples"in Jamaican and British Caribbean plantations,"or an outlier?"- Sorry, I couldn't quite hear?- Sorry, my voice is going.- No, no, my hearing.- "Is Thistlewood's example"representative of the treatment of enslaved peoples"in Jamaica and the British Caribbean,"or an outlier?"- Well, that's difficult to know because, of course, it's a diary which he kept, and it's been published, the Royal Historical Society has an edition. I anticipated that question, and I already worked out my answer, which is that partly he's recording his own behavior, which might make one think of the case which we've all been horrified by, about the police officer, he was obviously a serial sex offender, he recorded all of his offenses, but he's also recording other people, so some of the quotes I had were not of what he did, it's what other people did. And from Trevor Burnard, who has edited this work, he says the whole society was based upon a regime of terror, of intimidation, of dehumanization, so Thistlewood is probably an extreme case of what was a normalized form of behavior there. And I think that it was that sort of comment of people like Samuel Johnson which entered into the perception of the British to think that these people, these white people in the Caribbean have become depraved, they're not like us.- Let's open it to the floor, any questions from the floor? Let's start here first of all.- [Questioner] I have two little points to ask you. First of all, in India, we didn't hear of slaves, but we heard of indentured labor, do you classify that as slavery, or is it something different?- You have indentured labor coming in with the end of slavery, so you're bringing in Indian labor, but of course, you would have indentured labor before this people who are people who are from Britain going to serve as indentured servants in North America. But of course, at the end of the indenture, you have your freedom.- [Questioner] The other thing you mentioned, about Islam, however, even after 1833, the slaves, which were originally coming across the Sahara, were now going in the opposite direction, they were going to the Middle East.- Yes, the table, the slave voyages figure I had up there earlier on showed some of that. In fact, this happens earlier as well as later. And the calculation by a recent scholar is that, here you see, different scale, the calculation by one recent scholar is that coerced labor, as I called it, within Africa in the early 19th century, well, in 1850, there were as many slaves within Africa in those plantations as there were in the Southern United States. Yeah, so you've got different things happening, you've got this movement here, but you've also got the enslaved people within Africa.- Martin, what do you think the sum total of the stories that you've elucidated, this tale that you've elucidated, tells us about the morality of capitalism and commerce in the modern era?- Well, there's an interesting question here about whether we should be thinking about what we're doing. I don't know if any of you saw Mary Beard on television about contested statues, where she pointed out that she watched Colston being taken down from his plinth in Bristol on her iPhone, which made her reflect, where were the parts of my iPhone produced, by forced labor perhaps, in China? So we should all be aware of the morality of what we are doing. And a good example of this contested heritage point I was talking about is the memorial of Rustat in Jesus College Chapel in Cambridge, a slave trader. There, the Church court decided to retain the statue, it's by Grinling Gibbons, it's a very major work of art, but the reason, the judge said, for retaining it was that it should be used to make students reflect upon the morality of their own behavior, rather than taking down something, to use this display in the chapel to say, where did your trainers come from, where did your iPhone come from? So I think what we should be asking is what people at this time were asking, what is the nature of legitimate trade, what is the nature of forced labor? Abolitionists wanted people to buy goods which were produced in fair ways. Of course, the problem there, as I pointed out, is what they consider to be legitimate trade, to use their phrase, could also be goods produced by coerced labor in William Lever's plantations in West Africa. So we should always be thinking about this, not just attacking the past for what they did, we should contemplate, reflect upon, but also what we do.- One more question here, we've just got time, I think, for your question, and then we must stop.- [Questioner] Thank you. I had a question, so I found it really interesting how a lot of those people who owned slaves then put it into estates and land, and essentially power. How much do you think slavery has influenced the wealth and power of people that we have today, especially the Tories that you?- I wouldn't possibly make a party political comment, now would I. It is a very interesting area. You may notice that, I think it was in "The Observer" on Sunday, the Trevelyan family has apologized for slavery, they were horrified to discover that they owned slaves. You only have to look it up in this slave database that I referred to. They were leading Liberals at the time. John Gladstone's son was William Gladstone great hero of Liberals, should his statue be taken down because he was a slave owner? Well, I think what one might say there is that he himself realized later in life that he was wrong, actually, in 1833 to stand up and attack the bill to abolish slavery. So I think that there's interesting questions here about where fortunes come from. The Lascelleses have apologized also for slavery. Is apologizing enough? The Church of England has just had a report on its involvement in slavery. They've tried to calculate how much that was worth, and they're giving back 10 million pounds. But you think, 10 million pounds, is that enough? To whom does one give it? So you have Hilary Beckles, the great historian and vice-chancellor of the University of the West Indies, I think he's arguing more, you can't find out the individuals who should be compensated by these people you talk about, but you should perhaps think why are certain societies in the Caribbean now poor? It might be because of the way that this brutality was carried on, and it goes on after the abolition of slavery, which I'll be talking about in my next lecture, plug. Perhaps the money should go into healthcare and into primary education to provide some sort of compensation in that. So I think that if our politicians, some of whom might have derived their money from these enterprises, and the Church of England, and Cambridge University and Oxford University, should reflect upon this and think it through.- Well, I think what we've heard tonight, as usual, is a triumphant presentation, thank you very much, Martin, but also a real stimulus to the importance of education in general for all of us to behave better in our lives. Thank you very much indeed, Martin.(audience applauds)