Abolitionism and the Sierra Leone Colony, like the India Act, helped Britain reimagine its empire on a new moral basis and recover its imperial pride and imperial unity after the disorienting loss of America. In the years after the American War, familiar criticisms of an immoral empire were replaced by a more supportive public sentiment as the empire was portrayed as a force for good around the world. Thus it was a high-minded imperialism that the Sierra Leone Company sought to enact, constructed on an admirable platform of sympathy and moralism. Company and colonists alike sought not to rule the world, but remake it in their own image, fully believing that the benefits of European civilization were real and that extending them to all and sundry was a genuine kindness. That empire should be brought back to Africa by its former sons and daughters should not surprise, for though their time among the “civilized” Europeans had been an almost unending string of suffering, the refugees who settled Sierra Leone had, in their own way, embraced the “civilization” of their erstwhile oppressors. Stripped of their African identity by enslavement, most had cobbled together new identities, not quite African, not sufficiently British, a people of two worlds and none. As men and women of such hybridity their sense of kinship with Africans merged with a firm belief in the benefits of a British civilization, that had at last, belatedly, self-interestedly set them free. Such men, men like Boston King, were the perfect agents of the new British imperialism.
And so it was in 1802 that Boston King, a slave from South Carolina who had never set foot on African soil, came to die a British Christian missionary among the Sherbo people. The Sierra Leone Colony might have failed to meet the expectations of its settlers, and even of its supporters in Britain, but in other ways it was remarkably influential. It served as a bridgehead for Britain’s empire in Africa, with merchants, missionaries, and explorers fanning out across the region, the tentacles of imperialism worming their way into the interior of the “Dark Continent” as never before. With this came a sea-change in attitudes and conceptions. The colony helped to transform views of Africa from an opaque mystery into a place where British people lived and labored, a place where merchants and missionaries plied their trades, a place where British interests lay. To smooth the way for British civilization, African children, especially the children of the elite, were educated in British schools within the colony, inculcating British culture and values in the next generation. Some African children, like King Tom’s son, were even brought to Britain for education and indoctrination. As part of this effort, Zachary Macaulay brought dozens of African children with him when he returned to England in 1799. Sierra Leone thus began to make Africa visible to the British public and legible to British government in new ways. It was no coincidence that the same abolitionist impulses that created Sierra Leone also fueled the African Association, which combined its efforts to provide a positive view of the continent with information gathering that would further British interests in Africa. In many ways, the abolitionist movement and the settling of Sierra Leone touched off the first era of African exploration that would pave the way for British imperialism. Going forward, merchants, missionaries, and explorers would be the point of the imperial spear, paving the way for eventual British encroachment.
Even in its express purpose to undermine the slave trade, the Sierra Leone Colony proved remarkably effective, if not in the way its creators expected. If it failed to mount an argument in favor of emancipation and resettlement, it also furnished the campaign to abolish the slave trade with mountains of evidence about the nature of the trade, and Britons’ role in it, direct from the source of the problem. Most previous accounts of slavery had focused on America, the West Indies, or the Middle Passage, but now there came accounts from Africa itself: first-hand accounts of African suffering, of British and American brutality, of the corrupted and corrupting nature of the slave trade itself. When Wilberforce and his allies at last achieved the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, Sierra Leone became a center for British efforts to end the trade. The colony became a base for the West African Squadron—the British naval force charged with capturing and arresting slave traders—and the site of a British Admiralty court charged with prosecuting captured slavers, at once both a site for freedom and of imperialism. As a focal point for the fight against the slave trade, Sierra Leone became a clearing-house and processing point for the 81,745 slaves seized from slave ships, more than anywhere else in the British Empire. When Samuel Samo, the first slave trader to be charged under the Slave Trade Felony Act of 1811, was tried at Sierra Leone in 1811, John Macaulay Wilson, one of the African children Zachary Macaulay had brought to England in 1799, was among the jurors to decide his fate.
12
OPIUM AND EMPIRE
On November 6, 1792, eleven years after François Henri de la Motte’s naval espionage resulted in the Battle of Porto Praya, mere months after Boston King passed by the Cape Verde islands on his way to a new life in the fledgling colony of Sierra Leone, a similarly unusual collection of ships rode at anchor among the gentle swells of Praya Bay. One was an American whaling vessel from Nantucket, pausing at Cape Verde on its way south to the whaling grounds of the South Pacific. On four ships the new Tricolor, emblem of the revolutionary French Republic, snapped in the breeze. Outfitted in Dunkirk, and manned by a combination of French and British sailors, the French ships posed as whaling vessels as well, but their cargo of clothes and other such articles belied their outward posturing: in reality, they were smugglers engaged in the contraband trade with the Spanish colonies of South America. On the three remaining ships in the harbor of Praya Bay, the men who had gathered on deck to gaze at the rugged mountains of Saint Iago, the largest of the Cape Verde Islands, bristled with indignation. These were British vessels, and though the imperial civil war with their American cousins was not yet a decade in the past, and though they were at times alarmed by the growing frequency of their encounters with American ships as the United States began to stretch out into the wider world of international trade, their ire was directed elsewhere. France and Britain were once more rushing headlong into war, but in November 1792 open hostilities were still months away. So while many among the British contingent looked with a mixture of horror and disdain on the Tricolors, symbols of chaos, disorder, and violence, it was only one of the French ships, the ship christened with the suitably revolutionary name of La Liberté, that raised the hackles of the British.
Many among the British ships recognized La Liberté, or at least the ship she had once been. Under the French flag and the new name lay the Resolution, the immortal ship of Britain’s greatest naval hero, Captain Cook. The transformation of the Resolution from a symbol of British imperial ambition to a smuggling ship of the detested French Republic was enough to drive some to despair. “I am not ashamed to confess,” John Barrow wrote from his vantage point aboard the Hindostan Indiaman:
that my feelings were considerably hurt in witnessing this degradation of an object so intimately connected with that great man . . . Few, I believe, will envy that man’s feelings, who can see without emotion the house in which he was born, and in which he spent his happiest years, either wholly demolished or degraded to some unworthy purpose. The Resolution was the house of the immortal Cook and, out of respect to his memory, I would have laid her up in a dock, till she had wasted away plank by plank.1
John Barrow could perhaps be forgiven his rather melodramatic response to his encounter with the Republicanized Resolution. For unbeknownst to the French and American ships sharing the harbor of Porto Praya, Barrow and his companions were, like Cook before them, bound for the Pacific on a mission of grave imperial importance. The Hindostan, HMS Lion, and the brig Jackal had been tasked with a momentous charge, carrying the first official embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China. In the world created by the American Revolution, Britain was forced to look east for the imperial prosperity so disrupted by her colonies’ rebellion. India was to become the jewel in the British imperial crown, but,
as seemed increasingly clear, the viability of British India would depend on Britain’s ability to maintain and expand its burgeoning trade with China. It was in service of this increasingly vital trade that John Barrow and his companions found themselves in the islands of Cape Verde contemplating the glorious history and still tenuous future of Britain’s empire.
Britain had been trading with China since 1635. The Portuguese had arrived on the shores of the Middle Kingdom even earlier in 1513, so early that they had been awarded their own island, known as Macao, at the mouth of the Pearl River from which to conduct their trade. As its Middle Kingdom moniker implied, China considered itself to be the middle or center of the world, and with such a worldview came a superior and disdainful attitude toward other nations and their trade. Diplomatic relations were always conducted with the clear understanding that all other nations were supplicants, that they had little to offer the Celestial Kingdom, and that any goods China deigned to sell to them were favors and blessings rather than the byproducts of equal exchanges of mutual benefit. This was not mere jingoism. Much had changed since the days when the treasure ships of Zheng He sailed the seas in search of exotic goods and imperial tribute. Under the Qing dynasty (1644–1912), China had little interest in affairs beyond its own expanding borders, and both Chinese migrants in Southeast Asia and European traders in Macao were viewed with indifference at best and suspicion at worst. Merchants, of whatever nation, were not to be trusted. By their very nature they were transgressors of borders, transforming secure frontiers into security risks. As such, coastal populations were closely monitored and European trade with China was rigorously controlled.
Despite official Qing distrust, Britain’s trade with China grew and flourished to become the centerpiece of the East India Company’s trading empire by the middle of the eighteenth century. In Britain and America, China, and its exotic products, became the darling of the beau monde. The pinnacle of fashion, chinoiserie, real and counterfeit, proliferated in the drawing rooms of the elite, while everyone, from artisans to the aristocracy, sipped and guzzled gallons of tea, the Chinese brew that was fast elbowing coffee aside as Briton’s beverage of choice. And it was not only China’s trade goods that were admired. There was a veritable craze for all things Chinese, and the nation itself, cast in an admiring light by missionaries and French philosophes, became a byword for stability, rational government, and moral rectitude. China was all the rage, and there was every reason to believe that Britain’s trade with the Middle Kingdom would continue to grow and flourish.2
Beginning in the 1760s, however, everything seemed to change. Whereas once Britain had been allowed to trade at multiple ports, now the Qianlong Emperor decreed that all European trade would be restricted to the port of Canton on China’s south-eastern coast. But the restrictions did not stop there. Henceforth, European merchants would not be allowed to reside on Chinese soil. They were to have no contact with the Chinese population, were forbidden to learn the Chinese language, and were only allowed to enter Canton itself to conduct business during the brief trading season between October and March. Further, British merchants were required to wait at Macao until the season’s ships arrived, and only then were they allowed to move to their factories in Canton and commence business. Once in Canton, all trade was to be conducted with a small, closed cartel of Chinese merchants known as the Hong. The Hong, nominally ten in number and supervised by an official called the Hoppo, were a monopoly guild licensed by the state and granted sole right to trade with Europeans. The only legal point of contact for Western merchants, and the sole conduit for European complaints and grievances, the Hong were able to dictate prices, levy tariffs, and control the flow of trade.3
With higher prices and new tariffs passed on to British and American consumers, the incentive to smuggle tea grew exponentially across the eighteenth century, as we have seen. Indeed, some nations’ entire China trade was geared around smuggling tea into British territories. To undercut the price of smuggled tea and prop up a flailing East India Company, Britain passed the Tea Act of 1773, which for the first time allowed the Company to ship tea directly to North America rather than being required to auction off its imported tea in London first. The Tea Act also refunded part or all of British import duties on EIC tea, passing on the burden of tariffs established with the Townshend Acts to American consumers and threatening to ruin American tea merchants who had bought wholesale tea at the London auctions.
When, in response, rebellious colonials cast the products of China into the harbors of Boston, New York, and Annapolis, the war that followed turned a building crisis into a full-blown disaster. With many of its most lucrative trade routes cut off and its coffers drained to pay for war around the world, the East India Company teetered on the brink of financial collapse. By the time peace came in 1783, the EIC and the China trade had been crippled by a ruinous shortage of credit and specie. The most pressing concern, the anxiety that kept government officials and company directors awake at night with nightmares of financial ruin, was Britain’s enormous and growing trade deficit with China. The source of the problem was a fundamental imbalance between the desires of European and Chinese markets. Europeans wanted almost everything China had to offer; China wanted almost nothing Europeans brought to trade for its tea, silk, and porcelain. To meet the demand of their countrymen, British merchants were thus forced to buy tea with silver, quickly draining Britain of its specie. In the 1760s Britain exchanged about 3 million Taels of silver for Chinese goods (1 Tael equaling 40 grams). By the 1780s, however, this trade imbalance had ballooned to an unsustainable 16 million Taels, or roughly 1.4 million pounds of silver.4
British hopes for righting this damaging trade imbalance and saving the East India Company from ruin lay with the one product that was in high demand in China; a product that could be grown in Britain’s expanded territories in India; a product that might refill Company coffers and pay for the administration of the territorial empire it was constructing in the subcontinent: opium. Opium, which had been consumed by Asian elites for centuries, was produced by making incisions in the poppy plants that grew naturally in India. From these incisions, a sticky sap emerged, which was scraped off, boiled into a thick paste, and rolled into balls for transport. The East India Company had a monopoly on the growth and sale of Indian opium, which it used to sell licenses to private merchants known as “Company Traders,” who bought opium from India and transported it to China where it was sold for silver. This silver was then deposited with East Indian Company officials in Canton in exchange for letters of credit. The Company officials then used the silver to purchase the tea, silk, porcelain, and other goods it sold back in Britain. In the years after the American Revolution began, this new “triangle trade” helped to replace the war-disrupted Atlantic triangle trade. Between 1773 and 1790, annual exports of opium from British India to China quadrupled to 600,000 pounds or more, with grave consequences for both British pushers and Chinese consumers.5
Still, Britain could not hope to make up the ground lost during the war, or to reinvigorate the flagging East India Company given the strict Chinese controls put into place in the 1760s. If the Commutation Act was to succeed in undermining smuggling and raising revenue, stable prices for tea sold in Britain were a necessity. To ensure prices remained stable in Britain, the prices and tariffs for tea purchased in Canton also needed to remain stable. This could only be ensured with formalized relations with China. Likewise, if a growing triangular trade between India, China, and Britain was to revive British and East India Company fortunes, it was vital that the Canton trade be normalized. With this firmly in mind, what Britain desired, what the flotilla that limped into Cape Verde in November 1792 was tasked with securing, was a permanent diplomatic presence at the Chinese capital of Beijing, the end of the hated Canton system, the opening of other Chinese ports to British trade, and the reduction of tariffs on British trade. If these could be achieved, and opium substituted for British silver, Britain might yet conquer the
world on the back of her trade.
The Hindostan, Lion, and Jackal had left Spithead six weeks before, on September 26, 1792. The ships had been specially chosen and were among the best the British navy had to offer. The Hindostan was reputed to be the largest and fastest East Indiaman the East India Company had to offer, while the Lion represented the cutting-edge of late eighteenth-century naval warfare. The men who boarded these emblems of British power and technological ingenuity were no less carefully chosen, likewise selected to provide a combination of outward prestige and practical competence. The squadron would be led by Sir Erasmus Gower, a naval officer who had served with distinction in the Indian Ocean theater of the American War. The diplomatic mission was placed in the similarly capable and experienced hands of Lord George Macartney. Both men had long imperial experience to recommend them, and both had been fundamentally shaped by their roles in the wars of the American Revolution.
George Macartney was born in County Antrim in northern Ireland in 1737 and educated at Trinity College in Dublin before moving to London to fulfill his deep ambition for a conspicuous life of public service. In London he became friends with Edmund Burke, Samuel Johnson (becoming a member of his Club), Lord Holland (elder brother of the influential Whig politician Charles James Fox), and Lord Sandwich. With such august connections, Macartney was well placed to succeed in public life, and in 1764, at the age of 27, he was appointed to his first diplomatic post as envoy to the court of Catherine the Great of Russia. In the direct aftermath of the Seven Years’ War, young Macartney was tasked with securing an alliance with Russia against France. A natural diplomat with a cool charm and instinctual ability to ingratiate himself with those in power, he succeeded in securing the commercial treaty which gave British merchants an elevated place in the Russia trade and made the US envoy Francis Dana’s attempts to secure a similar treaty with Russia increasingly difficult. However, Macartney failed to achieve the hoped-for military alliance with Catherine, who insisted as a condition of any such treaty that Britain agree to aid Russia against the Ottoman Empire, setting the stage for later Russian aggression against the Turks.
To Begin the World Over Again Page 55
