You would have had to be wilfully deaf and blind to remain ignorant of the profound change the slave trade was working in England during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was, in the words of one apostle, ‘the mainspring of the machine which sets every wheel in motion’, making possible the network of enterprises which brought tea and coffee to the sideboard, oils and wines to the lunch table, Chinese pottery and Persian silks to the drawing room. It created a wealthy commercial class with the means to shoulder aside the traditional landed aristocracy. Wealthy West Indian traders became a familiar sight about town and the subject of popular drama, their riches contaminating almost every area of national life, buying seats in parliament, building churches, funding schools and hospitals, educating orphans. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel was the proud proprietor of its own plantation in Barbados, where for a time a red-hot iron was used to brand the word ‘Society’ on the chests of slaves. The Society tended not to preach sermons in the colonies based on the Exodus text about the promised land.* Slave traders effectively owned much of the British political class, who secured their interests in parliament. By the middle of the eighteenth century, families which would soon claim to be the very flower of the aristocracy were showing off the enormous wealth from their plantations by throwing up or elaborating vast country houses, like the Pennant family’s mock-Norman castle at Penrhyn in North Wales, the Fitzherberts’ Tissington Hall in Derbyshire or the Lascelles’ great pile, Harewood House – ‘St Petersburg Palace on a Yorkshire hill’ – with magnificent gardens designed by Capability Brown and furniture specially made by Chippendale. The beautiful Codrington Library at that most unworldly of Oxford colleges, All Souls, was built with slaving money. The core of the British Museum’s original collection of artefacts was amassed by Sir Hans Sloane, much of it with money from his marriage to the widow of a Jamaican planter. The National Gallery was established with the collection of Old Masters built up by John Julius Angerstein, much of whose money had been made by underwriting slave-ship insurance and ownership of plantations. All these exquisite sensibilities were nourished by barbarism. The British have never really had to confront the consequences of this trade because for them slavery happened thousands of miles away. The contrast is with the United States – where slaves lived, sweated and died within the national borders, where a civil war was fought over their freedom, and where discrimination against the descendants of slaves was a mainstream issue within living memory. Roughly 40 per cent of African Americans alive today have their ancestral roots in West Africa and remind contemporary Americans of the country’s slaving past every day. But Britons with an Afro-Caribbean family background, who are also descendants of slaves, pass as a mere ‘ethnic minority’, while their white fellow citizens troop off to gawp at the splendour of Harewood House, and turn it into ‘England’s Large Visitor Attraction of the Year, 2009’.*
We are left with the unpleasant conclusion that, when the slave trade was at its height, mainstream British opinion simply did not consider that any wrong was being done. In 1672, King Charles II had granted the British Royal African Company the right to create a fleet for the ‘selling, bartering and exchanging of, for or with any gold, silver, Negroes, slaves, goods, wares and manufactures’ – a bill of fare which made the hierarchy quite explicit. A century later the belief that slaves were merely a commodity was still alive. In November 1781 sickness broke out on the overcrowded decks of the Liverpool-registered slave ship the Zong during the Middle Passage. ‘Normal’ conditions on these ships were disgusting enough, the stench overwhelming. But when, predictably, dysentery or some other sickness broke out, conditions were horrific. On the Zong an epidemic began to spread among the Africans, and with each slave who died, the value of the cargo in the markets of Jamaica dropped. After seventy had perished, and with many more very sick, the captain – who had a financial stake in the voyage – came up with a way to protect his investment. In the sort of actuarial calculation possible only if all considerations of humanity were discounted, he realized that while deaths on board would become a charge on the shipowners, if the seriously ill were to drown at sea, jettisoned to ‘save the ship’, the problem was one for the insurance underwriters. He told the crew that water supplies were gravely low and that therefore the sick Africans, who would die anyway, should be thrown in the sea. The day after he reached this decision, fifty people were put over the side. The next day, another forty were forced overboard, followed on the third day by another twenty. All told, over 130 sick Africans were thrown into the sea. The story for the insurers was that they had had to be ‘sacrificed’ to preserve water supplies, which were dangerously low. Yet when the Zong reached Jamaica just before Christmas it had over 400 gallons of fresh water on board, more than enough to supply everyone – the result, the owners later claimed, of a sudden, unexpected downpour.
The lawsuit which followed was not a criminal prosecution for murder but a civil case in which the underwriters and shipowners argued about property. The Solicitor General, who represented the shipowners in court, asked, ‘what is all this vast declaration that human people have been thrown overboard? … This is a case of chattels or goods. It is really so: it is the case of throwing over goods, for to this purpose, and the purpose of insurance, they are goods and property, whether right or wrong we have nothing to do with it.’ The case eventually fizzled out in a familiar pattern of legal verbiage and lawyers’ bills. But the attendant publicity sufficiently outraged a young man named Granville Sharp that he attempted – unsuccessfully as it turned out – to bring a private prosecution for murder against the slavers. Sharp, the godfather of the movement to remove the stain on Britain made by the slave trade, had in a previous case persuaded the Lord Chief Justice that a runaway slave who made it to Britain could not be forcibly returned to the colonies. ‘Let Justice be done, though the Heavens may fall,’ said the judge, in a ruling which went to the heart of the contradiction between ‘freeborn Englishmen’ and enslaved Africans. Sharp belonged to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (whose ownership of the Barbados plantation he was unaware of). And it is notable how much of the anti-slavery cause was made by religious believers, especially Nonconformists: nine of the twelve founding members of the London committee of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade were Quakers. When, finally, the campaign achieved its goal it gave the British Empire a vital moral purpose.
Almost the only remark anyone now remembers of the great Victorian historian Sir John Seeley is his claim that ‘We seem … to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind.’ Seeley delivered the lectures of which this half-truth was part at a time when the empire was in its late nineteenth-century pomp. That line about ‘absence of mind’ comforts the post-imperial generation almost as much as it comforted the Victorians, for it suggests that the British had never really wanted an empire at all, had had it somehow forced upon them. But while piracy may have been part of no great design, the ‘absence of mind’ line simply will not do. If there was nothing quite so precise as a single plan in the early stages, there was certainly an ambition, which showed itself in a series of schemes, haphazard, opportunistic and changeable as they may have been. By Seeley’s time there had come talk of national destiny and a ‘civilizing mission’ to the world, but the empire grew at the hands of men who had multiple motives. Some would plant the flag because they had won battles, others in the name of science and discovery, still others because they were merely obeying orders. Often British power spread because it offered profit, sometimes it did so in the name of freedom, sometimes by mistake and at other times simply to stop someone else seizing land. The makers of empire were aristocrats, merchants, sailors, soldiers, missionaries, speculators, hard-cases, criminals. Some went to start a new life, others to escape an old one. The description ‘Jack the Lad’ would fit many of them.
One of the first people to use the term ‘British Empire’ seems to have been Queen Elizabeth I’s astro
loger, a clever and rather deluded Welshman called John Dee, in 1577. Dee advised the queen that she was entitled to claim large tracts of North America, because the place had been ‘discovered’ by a Prince Madog ab Owain of Gwynedd in 1170, some 300 years before Christopher Columbus clapped eyes on the place. Documentary proof to support this claim is no more readily available than is evidence to validate Dee’s other convictions, such as his belief in the existence of a Philosopher’s Stone which could turn base metals into gold, or his assertion that he could hold conversations with angels.
But it was a Devon man, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, who persuaded Elizabeth to let him cross the Atlantic to found the first English colony in North America. The characteristics of this founder of empire – visionary enthusiasm and slippery opportunism – occur time and again in the people who brought so much of the world under British rule. Gilbert’s proposal was that he set out to find a route to China through a north-west passage, above the North American landmass. The motive was commercial – ‘to possesse ye welth of all the East partes of the worlde’, and ‘through the shortnesse of the voyage, we should be able to sell all maner of Merchandize, brought from thence, far better cheape, then either the Portingal, or Spaniarde doth, or may doe’. Gilbert laid out the goods with which he might return – gold, silver, silks, spices and precious stones. And it would not be a one-way traffic. God, he said, had reserved all the territory north of Florida for the English to ‘plant a Christian habitation’. In a scheme which would later become a staple feature of British penal policy, he proposed to use the lands he discovered as a dumping ground for ‘such needie people of our Countrie which now trouble the common welth, and through want here at home are inforced to commit outrageous offences, whereby they are dayly consumed with the Gallowes’. As well as the opportunity to offload individuals who would otherwise be a burden on the state, there was the additional pleasure of biffing the Spanish. In 1577 he proposed to the queen his scheme ‘to annoy the King of Spayne’ by attacking his fishing fleets off the coast of Newfoundland. The following year, Elizabeth gave him authority to seek out ‘remote heathen and barbarous lands’.
There is about Humphrey Gilbert’s proposal – as about many later pitches to potential sponsors of imperial expansion – a real whiff of excitement, the sort of drive which would before long lead men and women to attempt to cross Africa, climb mountains or push towards the Poles. Part of the impulse to explore was simply that it was there. In an age when the world has been mapped and plundered it requires something of an imaginative leap to appreciate the thrill suggested in this sort of project. Perhaps the closest modern equivalents are the exploration narratives of science fiction. Gilbert was certainly a hard enough nut for this voyage into the unknown, having shown utter ruthlessness during the campaign to put down a rising in England’s first (and perhaps its last) major colony, Ireland. As a military governor he gave no quarter and accounts of the war there talk of supplicants being made to approach him through an avenue of severed heads. It was in the Irish colony, too, that Gilbert had learned the practice of ‘planting’ settler communities (the origins of the so-called loyalist community which still exists in that country, nearly a century after most of the island achieved independence).
In August 1583, Sir Humphrey Gilbert landed at St John’s, Newfoundland and claimed for the Crown the harbour and all the land within a radius of 200 leagues. He immediately proclaimed three laws: that the religion was to be that of the Church of England; that those who menaced the Crown would be executed for treason; and that if anyone bad-mouthed the monarch they would lose their ears. The English coat of arms was cast in lead and attached to a wooden pillar, after which Gilbert set off again. Around midnight on 9 September, his ship ran into enormous seas. The last sighting of the man later to be called ‘the father of English colonization’ was of him standing on deck with a book in his hand. According to the sixteenth-century geographer Richard Hakluyt his final words, shouted across the tempest, were ‘We are as near to heaven, by sea as by land.’
At this stage, if an empire was indeed being formed, it was a distinctively English one: the only function of the Scots and Irish was to provide some settlers. It took the arrival of a Scottish king to get the British Empire going. The invitation to the Stuart James VI to take the English throne had talked of ‘one Imperial Crown’. (A Welsh member of parliament even proposed that James should take the title of emperor and his dominions be renamed ‘Great Britain’, thereby anticipating the Act of Union of 1707 by more than a hundred years.) The suggestion was not adopted, but by the time of the Act of Union the empire had become a fact: in 1600 there were no permanent English settlements in America; by 1700 there were seventeen different jurisdictions and the clear – and clearly understood – framework of an empire. If we had to find a one-word motive for these settlements, and for most of their successors across the world, it would have to be money. In 1610, for example, a group of thirty-nine men had sailed from Bristol to found a colony at Conception Bay, Newfoundland, under the sponsorship of some London and Bristol merchants who thought there were profits to be made from the spectacular yields of cod to be found in the local waters.* Another Newfoundland scheme, near by at Ferryland, was sponsored by James’s Secretary of State, Sir George Calvert (later Lord Baltimore). Both failed to make a good enough return on investment, but left behind settlers. Newfoundland soon became England’s first permanent colony in the New World, complete with a properly organized economy, a recognizable class structure and the beginnings of its own strange politics.†
There was a precedent for these settlements, for they followed a pattern set in what George Bernard Shaw called John Bull’s Other Island. Ireland had been an anxiety to the English Crown for generations, and for a long time authority ran no further than ‘the pale’, or fence and ditch, surrounding Dublin (and even then there were times when it was little more than a convenient fiction). The new Tudor state which emerged at the end of the Wars of the Roses was determined to assert its authority, and in 1541 Henry VIII had himself proclaimed king in Dublin, with the country formally annexed to England. The ‘planting’ of settlers had a political purpose: the Tudors put down resistance mercilessly (Humphrey Gilbert’s processional avenue of severed heads being an example of their style), confiscating the land of those involved and giving it to settlers from England or Scotland. When, in September 1607, the Earls of Tyrconnell and Tyrone scrambled aboard a ship in Lough Swilly on the north coast of Ireland and fled the country (‘the flight of the earls’), the English grabbed their chance, seized lands in the particularly troublesome northern province of Ulster and ‘planted’ them with English and Scottish settlers. Because England and Scotland had embraced the Reformation – unlike Ireland – these loyalists were marked out from their Catholic neighbours by their Protestant religion. The resulting sectarian tensions lasted into the twenty-first century.
The English continued creating plantations in Ireland for much of the sixteenth century; as would happen elsewhere in the empire, they offered those with high hopes and empty pockets the chance to acquire land, even if it came with the ever present possibility of rebellion or war. Although the scheme was less costly than maintaining heavily armed garrisons or fighting campaigns in Ireland, it was not cheap, and since James’s government could not afford to fund the scheme itself, it forced the City of London to do so. Slightly against their better judgement, a dozen livery companies extracted what concessions could be had and began to ship in settlers. As with later imperial projects, funding for the scheme was raised by issuing a prospectus outlining delectable rewards. This approach seems to have been developed by the Tudor scholar Sir Thomas Smith, whose son was to lead an expedition to settle the Ards Peninsula in Ulster. Their manifesto invited adventurers – specifically the younger sons of the nobility or gentry – to join the project to acquire land and escape the overcrowding that beset them at home. (‘England was never that can be heard of, fuller of people than it is today.’) Did they re
ally, the advertisement asked, fancy the alternative of trying to make do as clergymen in the current economic circumstances of ‘excessive expence; both in diet and apparel’? By contrast, those who joined the project would be offered at least 300 acres of land, which would be more than enough to ensure a good living. ‘I cannot see’, said the proposal, ‘how Fathers that haue many sonnes, or landed men that haue many younger brothers, can do better … than to prefer them, and set them forthe in this jorney with me.’ Eight hundred young men answered the call.
The plantation of Ireland had an unmistakably strategic purpose. When Thomas Hacket dedicated a book to Elizabeth’s man in Ireland, Sir Henry Sidney (who said he ‘cursed, hated, and detested’ the country), he made explicit comparison with the odious way the Spanish behaved in their colonies in the New World. But the real reference point – and it is one that is used again and again in the lifetime of the British Empire – was another empire altogether. Quite apart from the military benefits and the possible financial dividends for those involved, the English considered their settlements to be part of a civilizing mission to a culturally inferior people. The English purpose in Ireland, argued Sir Thomas Smith, was no different to that of the Romans when they first encountered the primitive ancient Britons. The Irish were culturally inferior to the English, and, he advised his son as he left for Ulster, the English should follow the models of Rome, Carthage and Venice.
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