Nevertheless, and despite all the clerical humbug that surrounded the subject, the admission that slaves could be converted opened a debate, which intensified as the eighteenth century progressed, as to how, if at all, a religion that claimed the equality of souls before God could reconcile itself to a system founded upon the hereditary inferiority of one part of mankind. Moreover, as the planters predicted, a knowledge of Christian doctrines led many slaves to interpret their own circumstances unfavourably. One who did told a missionary in the 1820s, ‘Buckra [the white man] left him God in England, and devil in Jamaica stir him to do all dis wickedness.’9
The brandmark that identified the Society for the Propagation of the Christian Gospel’s slave was an unmistakable reminder that he or she was, in the eyes of the law, the property of a master. According to the constitution of Carolina that was framed by the philosopher John Locke in 1669 ‘every free man’ was ‘to have absolute authority over his negro slaves’, a principle which, in different forms, obtained throughout much of North America and the West Indies. Its everyday application gave plantation life a peculiar and often grotesque brutality. Much has been written about this, so one incident set down in the diary of the manager of a Jamaican estate may stand for many others: ‘(25 May 1756) Derby caught by Port Royal [both slaves] eating canes. Had him well flogged and pickled, then made Henry [another slave] shit in his mouth.’10
Eating the young cane shoots was the inevitable outcome of having to undertake heavy physical labour on a sparse diet. A recent forensic examination of 101 skeletons of slaves exhumed from a Barbadian graveyard, in use between 1660 and 1820, revealed an average life expectancy of twenty-nine and a high death rate for children under ten. Evidence of nutrition indicated a diet that was inadequate for the tasks demanded of the slaves, who commonly assuaged their hunger by smoking tobacco in pipes.11 This high wastage rate was not offset by the slaves’ ability to reproduce themselves, despite the active encouragement of concubinage. This phenomenon was explained with some percipience by one planter who noted in his journal that, ‘Negresses can produce children at pleasure, and when they are barren, it is just as hens will frequently not lay eggs on shipboard, because they do not like their situation. Low birth rates and high death rates meant that planters had continually to replenish their stock of slaves and so the slave trade was perpetuated.
The mechanics of the transatlantic slave trade were simple. Negroes were obtained by barter with the tribal rulers of the West African seaboard states, confined in compounds attached to trading posts and then shipped for sale in the West Indies. During the second half of the seventeenth century the commonest items of exchange were cowrie shells, bolts of Indian-manufactured cloth (both local units of currency), copper, iron, tobacco and alcohol. After 1700 some British dealers offered muskets which were greatly prized and a form of indirect investment since tribal armies equipped with firearms enjoyed a considerable advantage on the battlefield and could, therefore, capture more prisoners to sell on the coast.
During its early stages, returns from the slave trade were very high. A slave could be exchanged for goods worth between £4 and £5 and the cost of passage was a further £5, including his food and the attendance of a doctor. On a West Indian quayside the slave would be sold for between £15 and £17 or 2,400 pounds of sugar depending on his or her age and health. The high profit margin was in great part a reflection of the losses of slaves during the voyage for as many as one in four perished from sickness or despair, or a mixture of the two.
During the 1650s the trade was already flourishing, with an average of 3,000 slaves being sold annually in Barbados, some for re-export to other islands or Virginia and Maryland. The scope of the trade, with markets in Dutch as well as British colonies, attracted the intervention of the government which hoped to secure a share of the profits. In 1660 a monopoly was granted to the Company of Royal Adventurers (in which Charles II invested £5,000) which gave it the right to sell licences to British slave traders who did business on the West African coast. Reorganised as the Royal African Company in 1672, the corporation controlled a string of fortified and garrisoned trading stations on the shores of what today are Gambia, Senegal, Ghana and Nigeria. The company never enjoyed a total monopoly – enterprising slavers operating out of Boston and New York ignored it and traded with Madagascar. In 1698 it was abolished, allowing hundreds of independent traders to stake a claim in the commerce. Most were based in London, Liverpool and Bristol, but there were many, often small-scale businesses, with vessels of less than a hundred tons, based in Lancaster, Whitehaven and Dumfries.
* * *
Among the commodities bartered for slaves were cheap textiles imported from India by the East India Company. Indian and Far Eastern markets had first been penetrated by the Portuguese at the beginning of the sixteenth century. The arrival of their heavily-gunned caravels was unwelcomed, but proved unstoppable. In 1501 Vasco da Gama’s men-o’-war bombarded Calicut to show its inhabitants the power of European cannon, and a year later his outnumbered flotilla decisively defeated an Arab fleet off the Malabar coast. These victories gave the Portuguese a local supremacy that lasted for nearly a hundred years.
The challenge to Portugal’s domination of the trade in spices and Far Eastern textiles came from English and Dutch merchants and shipowners. After a number of preliminary reconnaissances, the London-based East India Company was formed in 1600, the brainchild of Levant Company merchants who were keen to by-pass middlemen in the eastern Mediterranean and deal direct with spice suppliers in the East Indies (modern Indonesia). The company was small, with a capital of £68,000, and at first confined itself to annual expeditions by small fleets. The risks, not least of the journey around the Cape of Good Hope, were great. When the Globe and the Peppercorn returned in 1617 with full holds and the prospect of a good return, the company’s governor called the stockholders to prayer for ‘all ought to lift up their hearts unto God to be thankful … and to be more thankful for the same; not doubting that the more thankful we be, the more His blessings will increase.’
The blessings and the profits did increase, satisfying the business acumen and piety of investors in an age which believed that God never failed to reward His elect. Those who put their money on the early voyages received, on average, a return of twenty per cent. Moreover, in 1614 two company ships had engaged and driven off four Portuguese vessels by the mouth of the River Tapti, a demonstration of British fighting skill which was watched by the Mughal army on shore. In India at least the company had secured a toehold and, within twenty years, the Portuguese had conceded the East India Company the right to set up factories, as trading posts were known, wherever it chose on the Indian coast.
And yet as the company’s name indicated, its founders had pinned their hopes on gaining a share in the spice trade at its source: Malaya, Java and the Molucca Islands. Here the rival Dutch Compagnie van Verre (Company of Far Distant Lands) was already strongly entrenched and ready to resist interlopers. Founded in 1602 with capital of £500,000, the Dutch company quickly established fortified trading posts at Batavia (Jakarta), Amboina Island and Malacca on the Malay coast which they took from the Portuguese in 1641. Tolerance of British intruders was thin and, in 1623, eighteen British merchants were tortured to death on Amboina in an exercise of brutality designed to frighten off others. It did not wholly succeed but it helped turn the minds of British traders towards India where their presence was not opposed.
The Mughal emperors, India’s overlords, and their provincial nawabs (governors) were willing to come to terms with the East India Company and allow them to secure a string of trading posts along the western and eastern shores of the subcontinent. A continual flow of ships replaced the earlier annual sailings and by the mid-century a profitable trade was developing. In 1674–5 the Company exported £155,000 worth of British manufactured goods and £410,000 in silver bullion, and imported £860,000 worth of Indian goods, largely textiles. At the same time, and in imitation of the P
ortuguese and Dutch, the Company was entering the shipping business, carrying goods between India and ports in southern Arabia and the Far East. In 1664 a minute amount of tea, still an exotic luxury, was obtained from China solely for the use of the directors.
As the Company’s interests expanded and diversified, its establishments became larger, although the directors insisted that it had no political or territorial ambitions in a country that was enjoying a period of stability under Mughal government. And yet in a land where the outward signs of prestige and power were important, the Company had to maintain an impressive public face. In the 1670s, Thomas Bowrey, a visitor to the Company’s factory at Fort St George near Madras, found it ‘surrounded by very potent and strong bulwarks, points, and batteries’ like any fort in Europe. The governor and his council behaved like local potentates ‘for the Honour of an English Nation keeping and maintaining the place in great splendour, civil and good government, entertaining nobly all foreign ambassadors’. The grandees were also merchants and Bowrey saw ‘great quantities of muslins, calicoes etc.’ stored for export to Britain and ships bound for Arabia, Persia and China with cargoes of British broadcloths, knives and scissors.12 The Indians were a ‘harmless idolatrous people’ among whom there were well-established business communities of Parsis, Gujaratis and Moplahs willing to trade with the Company. By this time textiles, produced by weavers who earned an anna (½p) a day, had become the staple of the company’s exports. Between 1699 and 1701 imports of these products totalled £522,000 and two thirds were re-exported to Europe and West Africa where they were exchanged for slaves.
3
The Necessary Union of Plantations: Crown and Colonies
In 1645 the trading vessel Dolphin left London with a cargo of manufactured goods that included glass, castors, shoes, hats, bales of canvas, and pewter, iron and brass utensils, all for sale to the New England colonists. These wares were unloaded at Boston where the hold was filled with local products: wheat and rye, barrels of preserved beef, pork, herrings and mackerel, and 7,000 pounds of tobacco, presumably shipped from Virginia and Maryland. The Dolphin then sailed southwards to Barbados where some of its cargo was discharged and replaced with sugar. It then began the haul across the Atlantic, pausing at the Canaries where the pickled fish was removed for sale to those pious Catholics who obeyed the church’s rules concerning meatless Fridays.1
This round voyage and hundreds like it marked a significant change in the pattern of British trade. Fine woollen cloth, so long Britain’s main export, was steadily losing ground to tobacco, sugar, fish and, during the last quarter of the century, Canadian beaver pelts for hat-making. By 1700 the re-export of these commodities made up 30 per cent of Britain’s foreign trade. Cloth’s share of the export market had fallen dramatically from 90 per cent in 1640 to 47 per cent at the end of the century and continued to decline. At the same time new markets were emerging. Between 1630 and 1700 half a million men and women had emigrated to the colonies, two thirds of them to North America, and all were dependent on home-manufactured goods; during the 1650s 20,000 pairs of boots and shoes and 1,500 horses were imported into Barbados.
The early stages of this economic revolution coincided with a period of domestic political instability which culminated in the outbreak of the Civil War between Charles I and parliament in 1642. The principle source of contention was control over the making of policy, particularly in matters concerning religion and taxation. The waves stirred by the war in Britain sent ripples across the Atlantic. From 1640 onwards, many New England Puritans returned home to fight for parliament and in Virginia, its governor Sir William Berkeley, a former courtier and playwright, welcomed royalist refugees after the collapse of their cause in 1649. The new, republican Commonwealth disapproved and removed him from his post, allowing him to retire to his plantations, from where he emerged to recover his position on Charles II’s restoration in 1660.
The establishment of Commonwealth in 1649 may be reckoned as marking a major turning point in the history of the empire. The next eleven years witnessed continuous and dynamic government activity to preserve and enlarge Britain’s overseas possessions and their trade. There was legislation to assert the total dominance of Britain over all aspects of colonial commerce; an ambitious programme of naval rearmament; a challenge to Dutch seapower; and a partially successful offensive against Spain in the Caribbean.
One thing was clear to the ministers and civil servants who framed these policies: Britain’s colonies and the new transatlantic commerce they were generating were a vital national asset to be coveted, protected and extended, if necessary by aggression. At every turn, the government was influenced by the prevailing economic dogma, mercantilism. This assumed that a limit existed to global trade and measured a nation’s wealth in terms of its self-sufficiency. Autarky, especially in raw materials, was also an indicator of a country’s international status since it released it from dependence on other powers and allowed it to accumulate a surplus of treasure. For this among other reasons James I and Charles I had been willing to charter colonies which, their promoters hoped, would provide alternative sources for commodities previously imported from Europe. They were largely mistaken, but, unexpectedly the American and Caribbean settlements offered products for which there appeared a growing but finite continental market. If trends already detectable during the 1640s continued, Britain would soon become the focus of a transatlantic commerce based upon tobacco, sugar, fish and the new traffic in slaves.
The future of this commerce was by no means assured. Britain’s position in North America was vulnerable: the French had already begun to penetrate the St Lawrence basin, and further south the Dutch had a toehold in what is now New York. The Dutch also posed another threat for, temporarily disengaged from European conflicts after 1648, they were free to increase their already vast merchant fleet and become the world’s main sea carriers.
In broad terms the government aimed to tighten commercial links with the colonies, which were compelled to conduct all their seaborne trade through Britain and in British-owned ships. This was the objective of the Navigation Acts of 1649 and 1660, the Staple Act of 1663 and the Plantation Act of 1673. Non-British carriers were banned from conveying goods of any kind between Britain and its colonies or between individual colonies. At first, ‘British’ meant English, Welsh, Irish and Scottish but in 1660, when Scotland and England again became separate kingdoms under one king, Scottish shippers were included in the interdict. As well as being given a monopoly of colonial freightage, British shipowners were given the right to Royal Navy protection by an act of 1649 which was confirmed at the Restoration.
Although keeping the title Royal Navy, the British fleet was now a national force at the disposal of those subjects with foreign and colonial business interests. The act had originally been introduced to suppress royalist privateers, but by 1680 warships were regularly escorting British merchantmen in the Mediterranean as a deterrent against Algerine pirates; policing the Yarmouth, Iceland and Newfoundland fisheries; and patrolling in Atlantic and Caribbean waters.2 Henceforward, the navy would be an instrument of commercial and colonial policy.
Extensive protection to merchant shipping required additional warships. From 1650 onwards, the government embarked on a ship-building programme which continued after the Restoration; in 1679 the navy possessed 86 ships and double that number by 1688. Much of the credit for this must go to Samuel Pepys, the diarist and Secretary to the Board of Admiralty, who strove to eliminate corruption within the navy’s bureaucracy and create a formidable fleet that could be swiftly mobilised and manned in the event of war against France, Spain or the Netherlands.
It was the Dutch with their huge merchant marine who were seen as the greatest danger to British commerce, at least before 1680. They were most vulnerable in the English Channel and North Sea through which their vessels had to pass on their way to Amsterdam and it was here that they were challenged by the Royal Navy. The three Anglo-Dutch wars of 1652-4, 1665-7
and 1672-4 were inconclusive. The successes of the first, achieved by Admiral Blake, were offset by the attack on the Medway ports in 1666 when British shipping was seized and burned. This humiliation was outweighed by the occupation and subsequent annexation of New York.
While British broadsides may not have substantially harmed the Dutch, the latter’s position of economic strength was deceptive. Unlike their rival, they had few colonies and no single staple such as sugar or tobacco upon which to rely and, as the wars demonstrated, their carrying trade could be disrupted at will by Britain. Moreover, from the mid-1660s the Dutch were driven to divert more and more of their surplus wealth into the fortification of their southern, landward frontier against France.
God, not Admiral Blake’s battleships, was given credit for the navy’s victories in 1652–4, or so ran the official proclamation which marked the signing of the peace treaty with the Netherlands. It concluded that ‘the dispensations of the Lord have been as if he had said, England thou art my first-born, my delight among nations.’ It is easy to see the hand of the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell, behind such sentiments which reflected a new, triumphalist and expansionist mood in the country. Late-Elizabethan ideas of national and Protestant destiny were in the process of resuscitation and translation into action at the hands of Cromwell, who throughout his life had a profound sense of serving a Divine Providence. He also had a vision of a godly, industrious nation whose Protestant faith and commerce qualified it for a pre-eminent position throughout the world.
The Rise and Fall of the British Empire Page 4
