HIST 150 / AFRI 150: Slavery, Resistance, and the Archive (Becker, Spring 2024)

- If, therefore, a Weft-India planter, by being difpoffeffed of his interelt in his slaves, is obliged to have the work of his estate done by freedmen, at an expence so great as not to allow him an interest on his capital equal to what he made before, or to what he might get in any other way; it will be incumbent on the legifla- ture to indemnify him;-and that can only be done by taking his lands and all their appendages at their present just value. Now the value of the lands, with their eretions and appendages, and live flock, cannot be less, at a medium, than twice as much as the gross amount of the saves which were employed to cultivate it. If, therefore, the fum, required to indemnify the planters for the emancipation of their slaves, be at least twenty millions sterling, the fum, that will be required to indemnify them for their lands, &c. will be forty millions; which, ad- ded to the twenty millions for the negroes, will form the enormous mass of sixty millions flerling. 1 imagine it will not be necessary to do more than briefly to hint at this consequence of emancipating the negroes, to convince the warmest advocate for the measure of the absurdity of indulging any fur- ther speculations on a point, which is so unlikely to be accomplilhed.

This article interrogates the notion of the fall of a single “planter class” in the British colonies and argues that in the new slave territories of British Guiana and Trinidad, the slave economy flourished between the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and emancipation in the 1830s. The wealth extracted in these colonies from the labor of enslaved people, especially in British Guiana, largely flowed to a group of absentee slave owners in Britain and created a new fraction of the planter class in the metropole, outside the conventional sphere of the established Jamaican planters. Using the records of the Commissioners of Slave Compensation, appointed to oversee the distribution of £20 million in compensation to the slave owners under the Abolition Act of 1833, the article traces the dimensions of this grouping of new men, many of them concentrated in the mercantile elites of Glasgow and Liverpool. Such men had demonstrable political weight in Britain, and the article argues that only by acknowledging their role and influence can we make sense either of the structure of the emancipation settlement, which favored slave owners in the new territories over the old plantocracy, or, more profoundly, of the continued vigor of the West Indians in negotiating that settlement, a vigor which troubled Eric Williams, given his view that, by the 1830s, the West Indian planters were “[a]n outworn interest whose bankruptcy smells to heaven in historical perspective.”

The debate about the abolition of the British transatlantic slave trade escalated in the 1780's-90's. Abolitionists had to fight for another 18 years before seeing significant results. As for emancipation, it came 27 years after the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. Pro- and antislavery campaigners fiercely defended their views regarding overseas trade, enslaved Africans, and the British identity during these periods. The author analyzes how, in a context marked by the French Revolution and Franco-British rivalry, a racially biased view of enslaved Africans was accompanied by a discourse centered on principles of humanity in Britain and in the West Indies. The competing discourses of planters and abolitionists paradoxically revealed similar paternalist and imperialist views. Planters were just as British as their English counterparts, or so they argued. Their aim was to make the plantocracy a viable institution for Britain's sake. They contended that they had the right, as free British subjects and owners, to protect their property. The Abolition Act of 1807 came as a severe blow. They, nonetheless, decided to fight against Emancipation. In order to achieve their goal, they adopted delaying tactics such as legal measures that appeared to improve plantation life. They enforced pro-natalist measures and promoted villeinage. On the other hand, planters were pressuring Parliament to secure their future if emancipation was to happen. The Emancipation Act was passed in 1833, but this new step toward freedom proved to be a bittersweet victory for slaves, as planters were granted a twenty-million-pound compensation for their lost property, while they received nothing. They were forced to work as apprentices for their masters for six years before full emancipation.