Between the lines – The Interest by Michael Taylor
The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement didn’t start in 2020. Nor did it begin in Britain. But last year it resonated as never before in this country. Suddenly, in mainstream news and on social media, Britain’s past and present came uneasily together in new and unsettling ways. This crossover crystallised on Bristol’s dockside on 7 June when the bronze statue commemorating the early 18th century philanthropist, Edward Colston, who had made much of his money from the slave trade, was pulled down by a large crowd and thrown into the adjacent waters.
Meanwhile, in another part of Britain a talented young historian was putting the finishing touches to his book, The Interest: How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery. Michael Taylor’s richly textured and vivid new history of the lead-up to Britain’s abolition of slavery in 1833, challenges assumptions underlying a national myth which has hitherto portrayed Britain as international leaders in the ending of slavery. Taylor’s telling of the story reveals complexities that are often overlooked and makes for uncomfortable reading.
It is uncomfortable because our national memory of slavery is culpably incomplete. We recall from our schooldays the successful campaign led by William Wilberforce to end the slave trade in 1807; but we don’t recall that the abolition of slavery itself had to wait till 1833. Why did it take so long to achieve? After all, if the trade in slaves was wrong and banned accordingly, surely slavery itself was wrong? What stopped one from following swiftly the other? This is the core question at the heart of Taylor’s book and the answer he provides is a story of resistance by the slaveholders themselves and by their political supporters and apologists in early nineteenth century Britain. It is a story driven by individuals and by contingency. There was nothing inevitable about the Act of Abolition in 1833.
Slaveholders and their local agents in the Caribbean colonies continued to use the cultivation of sugar by slave labour to generate great wealth for themselves after 1807. In turn, they used their economic power to leverage political support in Britain against an early end to slavery in the Empire. They were helped by the fact that slavery was something that happened far away and of which most people in Britain had no first-hand experience. At their most cynical, the slaveholders and their propagandists argued that conditions of poverty and deprivation in Britain should have been of greater objective concern than “false” stories about the conditions suffered by slaves in the colonies.
It took a while for the anti-slavery trade lobby to reconfigure itself for the new fight against slavery. Once Wilberforce and his main collaborators – increasingly his successors – roused themselves they proved eventually to be advocates capable of generating massive levels of public support. But it took time and they had setbacks, not least when the supremely clever George Canning led a government intent in 1823 on equivocation. By imposing measures to “ameliorate” the conditions of slaves he, in practice, provided a screen for continued inaction by the slaveholders.
Taylor shows persuasively that the factors which led to eventual abolition involved far more than the advocacy and pressure brought to bear by abolitionists, crucial as they were. Pressure for political reform was a necessary ingredient in the mix, as was the impact of ‘rebellion’ by slaves in Jamaica in 1831-32 and the decline in the economic viability of Caribbean sugar. It was only by 1832-33 that all these elements (along with a strong religious impulse) came together in a decisive way. Even then, though slavery had been a key issue in the first post-Reform Act election, support in the new House of Commons was not assured and certainly not in the House of Lords, where the Duke of Wellington continued to hold conservative sway. In the end, pragmatism won Wellington over as he recognised that continued resistance might provoke widespread public discontent and disorder. Abolition came late (and at a heavy price in terms of compensation payments to slaveholders) but, thereafter, like the true convert, Britain became an international rallying point against continued slavery elsewhere.
I spoke to the author about his book recently. Given that Taylor divides his book into eighteen chapters of straight narrative history, followed by a more polemical ‘epilogue’ drawing out what he sees as legacy issues, and contemporary responsibilities towards the Caribbean countries, I sought his views on those aspects as well.
When asked what attracted him to the book’s subject, Taylor says he wanted “to complicate a previously simplistic story about Britain’s relationship with colonial slavery” and a self-serving national myth. “If abolishing slavery was such a magnificent achievement (which of course it was) what had been the obstacles in its way for the twenty-six years after the ending of the slave trade?”, he asks. The Interest sets out “to interrogate the idea that Britain had led the abolition of slavery,” he adds, when, in fact, much of the anti-slavery sentiment expressed in public was no more than “rhetoric”. And only after 1834 did Britain truly become an anti-slavery advocate.
We discussed early 19th century attitudes to slaves and Africans more generally. Taylor thinks there was a crucial attitude which was shared very widely, namely, “that Africans were incapable of working efficiently as free men”. If slave holders had thought they could be just as profitable without slavery, why have slavery? There would have been no economic rationale for it. And why would Parliament in 1833 have agreed to pay compensation if it hadn’t thought there would be a severe economic loss for the slaveowners once slavery was abolished?”
“I was struck by the moral ambivalence of most people’s attitudes to slavery,” Taylor says, “apart from a few hard-core pro-slavery individuals who believed in the righteousness of slavery itself, everybody knew it was evil and everybody prefaced their public statements, speeches and pamphlets with references to its eventual end.” To that extent, the author believes thinks abolition was probably just a matter of time. When asked about the use of the words “racism” or “racist” to describe attitudes at the time, Taylor said they are hardly found in the primary documents he consulted. “Racialised hierarchy was the best way they could think of for ordering humanity,” he says, “whilst of course placing themselves at the top.” As for religion and slavery, he thinks, at least among Protestants, they “took from Christianity exactly what they wanted and applied it to the degree they wanted.”
In his epilogue Taylor addresses questions of legacies and national responsibilities today. He says he is in support of the application of what he sees as the most justifiable and practicable of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Reparations Commission’s recommendations on health issues, illiteracy and debt forgiveness. In terms of the question he poses in his book as to “what should happen next”, Taylor is unambiguously clear: “I think … the best possible thing for the British government to do is finally and sincerely to recognise and apologise for colonial slavery.”