Sugar & Slaves - The British West Indies

Britain was anxious not to lose its Caribbean possessions and prized such territory so highly that its government had almost swapped the whole of Canada for Guadeloupe in 1763! The reason for was for the muscovado crop - the raw brown sugar that was used to produce the sweet sugar that the British now craved for their puddings and which rotted their teeth.

Slaves were used to produce the sugar and it was Britain who dominated the slave trade, shipping their 'black ivory' across the Atlantic Ocean. By 1807, half of Britain's long distance shipping was engaged in the trade and it is estimated that around 12 million Africans were transported between the 16th and 18th Centuries, with one fifth of these people dying en route. An infamous incident saw the Captain of the Zong running short of water and throwing 132 slaves overboard so that insurance value could be claimed. In the subsequent court case the ship's owners lost, but only on the subject of property as Chief Justice Mansfield likened the crime to that of killing horses.

Viewed as inferior beings, the captured Africans were inspected like cattle and then bought, branded and manacled for their two month journey across the Atlantic. One of the few slaves to record his experiences, Olaudah Equiano felt imprisoned in a 'world of bad spirits'. The slaves were crammed into a space smaller than a coffin and had to wallow in their own excrement whilst suffering from disease and malnutrition as the irons ate into their flesh. Skeletal and ill, the survivors were then sold on to plantation owners where a new form of hell began. The exhausting process of producing sugar meant an existence of toil and punishment.

Samuel Johnson described the main West Indian colony of Jamaica as 'a place of great wealth and dreadful wickedness, a den of tyrants and a dungeon of slaves'. He also stated that he drank to 'the next insurrection of Negroes in the West Indies'.

The white plantation owners grew extravagantly rich amongst this suffering. Many planters indulged in the sexual exploitation of their female slaves and, whilst flogging was widespread throughout British society, it was taken to torturous extremes when punishing the slaves. Even worse than the specific instances of cruelty was the mental horror that each slave faced. In comparison with the slaves of the Roman Empire, these people had no chance of obtaining freedom and were denied the most important life-sustaining quality of all:hope.

The campaign for the abolition of the Slave trade went from being a popular moral issue to a sustained political movement in late 18th and early 19th Century Britain. Delayed by the repressive reaction to the American and French Revolutions, the eventual victory of this campaign was in itself a triumph for humanitarianism. However, swelled by victory against the French and by new territorial gains across the globe, this empire would use such a triumph to engender a moral righteousness that insisted that the British were now intent on civilising the entire world.

Source:

Piers Brendon, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781 - 1997.