Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (16 page)

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Authors: Niall Ferguson

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By May 1751, when Newton set sail for Antigua, his ship had more Africans aboard than Britons: 174 slaves and less than thirty crew, seven having by now succumbed to disease. This was the time of greatest danger for a slaver, not just because of the risk of an outbreak of cholera or dysentery on the overcrowded ship, but because of the danger that the slaves might mutiny. Newton was rewarded for his vigilance on 26 May:
In the evening, by the favour of Providence, discovered a conspiracy among the men slaves to rise upon us, but a few hours before it was to have been executed. A young man ... who has been the whole voyage out of irons, first on account of a large ulcer, and since for his seemingly good behaviour, gave them a large marline spike down the gratings, but was happily seen by one of the people [crew]. They had it in possession about an hour before I mad [
sic
] search for it, in which time they made such good dispatch (being an instrument that made no noise) that this morning I’ve found near 20 of them had broke their irons.
 
He had a similar experience on a voyage the following year, when a group of eight slaves were found in possession of ‘some knives, stones, shot, etc., and a cold chissel’. The offenders were punished with neck yokes and thumbscrews.
Given the conditions aboard slave ships like the
Argyle
– the overcrowding, poor hygiene, lack of exercise and inadequate diet – it is hardly surprising that, on average, one in seven slaves would die during the Atlantic crossing.
14
What is surprising is that a man like Newton, who held religious services for his crew and refused even to talk about business on Sundays, should have been able to do such business with so few qualms. But in a letter to his wife on 26 January 1753 Newton set out a fascinating apologia.
The three greatest blessings of which human nature is capable, are, undoubtedly, religion, liberty, and love. In each of these how highly has God distinguished me! But here are whole nations around me, whose languages are entirely different from each other, yet I believe they all agree in this, that they have no words among them expressive of these engaging ideas: from whence I infer, that the ideas themselves have no place in their minds. And as there is no medium between light and darkness, these poor creatures are not only strangers to the advantages which I enjoy, but are plunged in all the contrary evils. Instead of the present blessings, and bright future prospects of Christianity, they are deceived and harassed by necromancy, magic, and all the train of superstitions that fear, combined with ignorance, can produce in the human mind.
The only liberty of which they have any notion, is an exemption from being sold
[my emphasis]; and even from this very few are perfectly secure that it shall not, some time or other, be their lot: for it often happens, that a man who sells another on board a ship, is himself bought and sold in the same manner, and perhaps in the same vessel, before the week is ended. As for love, there may be some softer souls among them than I have met with; but for the most part, when I have tried to explain this delightful word, I have seldom been in the least understood.
 
How could one regard oneself as depriving Africans of liberty, when they had no conception of it beyond ‘an exemption from being sold’?
Newton’s attitudes were far from exceptional. According to the Jamaican planter Edward Long, Africans were ‘devoid of genius, and seem almost incapable of making any progress in civility or science. They have no plan or system of morality among them ... they have no moral sensations’. They were, he concluded, simply an inferior species. James Boswell, so quick to speak up for liberty in other cases, flatly denied that ‘negroes are oppress’d’ since ‘Africk’s sons were always slaves’.
As Newton’s journal makes clear, slavery had to be imposed by force from the moment the ships set sail. It continued to be imposed by force when the slaves were unloaded and sold. In Jamaica, one of the markets Newton supplied, white men were outnumbered ten to one by those they had enslaved. In British Guiana the ratio was twenty to one. Without the threat of violence, it is hard to believe that the system could long have been sustained. The instruments of torture devised to discipline the slaves of the Caribbean – like the spiked shackles which made running impossible, or the neck irons on which weights could be hung as punishment – are stark reminders that Jamaica was the front line of eighteenth-century British colonialism.
To be sure, James Grainger’s poem ‘The Sugar Cane’, published in 1764, makes the creole planter’s life sound lyrical, if rather trying:
What soil the Cane affects: what care demands;
Beneath what signs to plant; what ills await;
How the hot nectar best to christallize;
And Africa’s sable progeny to treat.
 
But it was ‘Africa’s progeny’ who suffered for the sake of the British sweet tooth. Not only did they have to sow, tend and harvest the sugar cane; they also had to crush the juice from the cane and immediately boil it in huge vats. The original Spanish word for a sugar plantation was
ingenio
– engine – and producing sugar from cane was as much industry as agriculture. But this was an industry in which not just sugar cane but human beings were the raw materials. By 1750 some 800,000 Africans had been shipped to the British Caribbean, but the death rate was so high and the reproduction rate so low that the slave population was still less than 300,000. One contemporary rule of thumb devised by the Barbados planter Edward Littleton was that a planter with a hundred slaves would need to buy eight or ten a year ‘to keep up his stock’.
The Speech of Mr John Talbot Campo-bell
(1736), a pro-slavery pamphlet by a clergyman in Nevis, explicitly acknowledged that ‘by the common Computation, about two Fifths of the newimported Negroes die in the Seasoning’.
Nor should we forget that there was another dimension to the exploitation of Africans in the slave colonies – namely their sexual exploitation. When Edward Long arrived in Jamaica in 1757, he was dismayed to find that his fellow-planters routinely took sexual partners from among their slaves: ‘Many are the men, of every rank, quality and degree here, who would much rather riot in these goatish embraces, than share the pure and lawful bliss derived from matrimonial, mutual love’. This practice was known as ‘nutmegging’, but as Long’s diatribe against it suggests, there was growing disapproval of what later became stigmatized as ‘miscegenation’. Significantly, one of the most frequently told stories of the era is that of Inkle and Yarico, which describes an affair between a shipwrecked sailor and a negro virgin:
Whilst thus in fruitless grief he spent the day,
A Negro Virgin chanc’d to pass that way;
He view’d her naked beauties with surprise,
Her well proportion’d limbs and sprightly eyes!
 
Having had his fill of nutmegging, however, Inkle loses little time in selling the hapless Yarico into slavery.
15
Nevertheless, it would be wrong to portray the Africans sold into slavery exclusively as passive victims. For there were many slaves who fought back against their white oppressors. Rebellions were almost as frequent as hurricanes in Jamaica. By one count, there were as many as twenty-eight between the British acquisition of the island and the abolition of slavery. Morever, there was always a part of the black population that was beyond British control: the Maroons.
When William Penn’s father captured Jamaica from Spain in 1655, there was already a well-established community of rogue slaves who had escaped from their Spanish masters, living in mountain hideouts. They were known as ‘Maroons’, a corruption of the Spanish
cimarron
(wild or untamed). Today you can still savour Maroon culture and its culinary gift to the world, jerk pork, at the annual Maroon festival in Accompong. (The town itself takes its name from one of the brothers of the great Maroon leader Captain Cudjoe.) You only need to hear their singing and watch their dancing to see that the Maroons have managed to preserve a substantial part of their ancestral African culture, despite their enforced exile. In one respect only did they bear the imprint of captivity. Although many were originally Akan-speakers from Ghana, Cudjoe insisted that all his followers spoke in English. The reason for this was eminently practical. The Maroons not only wished to avoid being returned to slavery by Jamaica’s new British rulers; they also wished to swell their own ranks by liberating newly arrived slaves. (As polygamists, the Maroons were especially keen to free female slaves.) Since the slavers shipped people across the Atlantic from myriads of different tribes, their integration into the Maroon community required the retention of English as a common language.
Led by Cudjoe and inspired by the matriarchal and magical figure of Queen Nanny, the Maroons waged a guerrilla war against the plantation economy. Planters came to dread the distant sound of the
abeng
, the conch shell that signalled the coming of the Maroon raiders. In 1728, for example, George Manning purchased twenty-six slaves for his estate. By the end of the year, almost entirely as the result of Maroon raids, only four remained. Colonel Thomas Brooks was forced by the Maroons to quit his estate in St George altogether. Surviving Jamaican place names like ‘the District of Don’t Look Behind’ testify to the paranoia the Maroons engendered. In desperation, the British called in a force of Miskito Indians from the coast of Honduras to try to counter them. Regular troops were summoned from Gibraltar. Finally, in 1732, the British managed to land a punch with the capture of the Maroons’ main settlement, Nanny Town. But the Maroons just melted away into the hills to fight again another day; while the troops from Gibraltar succumbed, predictably, to disease and drink. By the end of 1732, as one Jamaica assemblyman lamented,
The insecurity of our country occasioned by our slaves in Rebellion against us whose insolence is grown so great that we cannot say we are sure of another day and Robbings and Murders so common in our capital Roads, that it is with the utmost hazard we Travel them.
 
In the end, there was no option but to do a deal. In 1739 a treaty was signed which effectively granted the Maroons autonomy in an area of around 1,500 acres; in return, they agreed not only to stop freeing slaves but also to return runaway slaves to their masters – in return for a reward. It was an early example of the way the British Empire often worked: if the British couldn’t beat you, they got you to join them. To be sure, the deal did not put a stop to slave rebellions; on the contrary, it meant that dissatisfied slaves had no option but to rebel, since the escape route to Nanny Town had effectively been closed. There was a spate of slave revolts in the 1760s, at least initially inspired by the Maroons’ example. But from now on the Maroons could more or less be relied upon to side with the British against rebel slaves. Indeed, the Maroons themselves became slave owners. It might not be possible to beat them. It was possible to buy them off.
By 1770, then, Britain’s Atlantic empire seemed to have found a natural equilibrium. The triangular trade between Britain, West Africa and the Caribbean kept the plantations supplied with labour. The mainland American colonies kept them supplied with victuals. Sugar and tobacco streamed back to Britain, a substantial proportion for re-export to the Continent. And the profits from these New World commodities oiled the wheels of the Empire’s Asian commerce. Yet the Maroons were a reminder – troubling to the planters, inspiring to their human chattels – that slaves, upon whose scarred backs the entire imperial edifice seemed to rest, had the capacity to free themselves. Later, in the 1790s, the successful slave revolt on the French colony of St Domingue prompted a crackdown on the Maroons by the then Lieutenant-Governor of Jamaica, Lord Balcarres, which culminated in the expulsion of nearly 600 of the Trelawny town Maroons.
16
But by the time this happened, the Maroons were the least of the Empire’s worries. The slaves of St Domingue had joined forces with disgruntled mulattos and in 1804 established Haiti as an independent republic. But Haiti was not the first New World colony to proclaim its independence. Less than thirty years before, a very different kind of republic had been proclaimed on the American mainland. And here the challenge to imperial rule took the form not of desperate slaves but of prosperous white colonists.
Civil War
 
It was the moment when the British ideal of liberty bit back. It was the moment when the British Empire began to tear itself apart. On the village green of Lexington, Massachusetts, British redcoats exchanged fire for the first time with armed American colonists. It was 19 April 1775.

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