Slave Trade - 2. How Britain benefited
Spin-offs: 1. Industrial revolution
Slavery contributed vastly to Britain's rise as an industrial powerhouse. Many slave-traders invested in manufacturing - canals, railways, new ships and new production technology. Inventions like James Watt’s steam engine of the 1760s were hardly thinkable without slave and colonial profits. The Boulton & Watt firm that made steam engines depended for a period on slave profits. Slavers needed ships, crews needed provisions; traders needed goods to barter for slaves -fetters, chains, padlocks, guns, pots, ... Plantations needed machinery; rum making needed bottles. Cotton picked in America was turned into cloth in Lancashire and sold to the colonial market, mostly Africa.
2. Financial services
Investors loaned money to slavers, banking grew to invest the profits and insurance to insure ships and cargoes.
The Barclay brothers - Alexander and David - were among Quakers involved in the slave trade from 1756. they went to found Barclays Bank.
In 1773, the Heywood Brothers founded a bank in Liverpool to fund slave expeditions and deposit their profits. Today that firm is part of the Royal Bank of Scotland.
Lloyds coffee house in London was the centre for slave merchants and financiers. It rose to be a global insurance house.
New lifestyles from products of slave labour
Soon Europeans found themselves enjoying the new products of slave labour like sugar, tobacco, tea, coffee, chocolate. The slave owners and colonial merchants were happy to meet the great demand. Thus the fate of millions of Africans was decided in the tea and coffee houses of Europe.
Edward Long in his History of Jamaica (1774) gives us an idea how people thought of slavery.
“The trade in slaves and goods produced by slaves was immensely profitable, not only to the West Indies, but to Britain...it greatly enriched Englishmen in all walks of life... In every mental and moral way Negroes were absolutely inferior to white men and the best thing that could happen to them was to be forced to work productively.. The slave trade benefited and helped civilise Africa....”
Who even thought that the potato and tobacco had been acquired from the Amerindians - not through fair exchange but by forced dispossession? By 1700, well over 20 million pounds of tobacco was exported to Britain. Tobacco was either smoked in pipes or inhaled in the form of snuff. Pipe-making became a new industry - there were pipes of clay, cane, wood, ivory, tin or silver. Fashionable ladies carried dainty snuff-boxes with them in public places. Glasgow became a major tobacco importer and a thriving city. Its tobacco based prosperity is still evident in some of the buildings and monuments today.
It was the Aztec people of Central America who made drinking chocolate from the cocoa bean. The Spanish invaders of the 16th century slaughtered the Aztecs and took over their lands. They also got to like the chocolate drink and the taste soon spread to Europe in the 17th century. Joseph Fry became the first of the big Quaker chocolate makers in Britain, to be followed by Cadbury and Rowntree.
Cultural Enrichment
The profits from the slave plantations enriched Britain’s art, architecture and literature. Thousands of slave traders sought to raise their social status by investing their money in the arts - buying works of art to adorn their houses or becoming patrons. The Theatre journal referred in 1720 to “rich families of Merchants and Traders who in their furniture, equippage, Manner of Living... are so far from being below the Gentry that many deserve the Imitation of the modern Nobility.”
Many dealers in paintings of the masters also traded in black slaves. In England, both were treated as commodities to be auctioned in coffee houses. Notices of the auction of newly arrived slaves from the West Indies and of Italian paintings were posted side by side. The term ‘patron’ came to mean both slave owner and arts supporter.
Among such prominent arts collectors:
* Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753) was an English physician and collector. In 1687, he went to Jamaica where he spent 15 months as doctor to the governor and collected about 800 new species of plant. He also first encountered drinking chocolate. On his return he published a detailed account of his trip in 1707. This volume also contains the first known transcription of African or African-derived music as heard at 'one of their Festivals...'
Much of Sloane’s money for the purchase of coins and manuscripts came from his dealings in sugar and cocoa. ‘Hans Sloane Milk Chocolate’ became well known. Sloane’s wife was a substantial slave owner in Jamaica. His collection at his death in 1753 established the British Museum. Sloane Square in Chelsea, London is named after him.
* James Brydges, first Duke of Chandos, built a baroque palace in Canons, Middlesex heavily stocked with art objects. There was even a slave ship called Chandos.
* Christopher Codrington left his large library of rare books to Oxford’s All Souls College. His family owned huge plantations in the West Indies. His will of 1710 specifically stipulated that his slaves should not be freed after his death.
The revival of classical taste and architecture in the 18th century all over Europe owed not a little to colonial revenues. Slave owners built beautiful, palatial country houses, decorated them with silver and chandeliers and Old Masters, and had exquisite landscaped gardens to match. Few in England could link the slave mud huts of the Caribbean plantations with the grand mansions of Wiltshire and Middlesex, the high life in England with the misery of the slaves.
In Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, written in 1814, the Bertrams owed their prosperity to Sir Thomas’ sugar plantation in Antigua. Yet the use of slave labour is barely hinted in the novel. An inquiry about the slave trade yielded “ such a dead silence.”
References
1. Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, Verso (1998)
2. David Dabydeen, The Art of Darkness, in ‘Links’ (periodical of Third World First) 1988
3. James Walvin, Fruits of Empire, Macmillan (1997)