Britain’s long campaign against slavery | Dominic Lawson
“The inglorious crusade of England against slavery may probably be regarded as among the three or four perfectly virtuous pages in the history of nations,”
National Masochism
The British tendency towards national guilt flares up at regular interludes but recent events have thrown it into overdrive. The murder of a man five thousand miles away has prompted anger. But elements within our own population have seized upon it for political purposes. This is intended to demoralise the British people into being ashamed of their history.
One key aspect of this has been the role of the British empire in the African slave trade. Weaved into a grand narrative which, alongside empire, posits that the British people are uniquely contaminated with a form of secular original sin. It is a narrative intended to demoralise the British population.
It is also wrong. It neglects the equally significant role that Britain has played in fighting slavery. Indeed, if the British are burdened by the sins of their ancestors, then they are also the inheritors of one of the proudest traditions of anti-slavery of the entire world.
Tradition
British anti-slavery emerges from the conquest of the British Isles by the Normans in the 11th century. William the Conqueror outlawed the practice of slavery within the lands he controlled by official edict. His motivation for doing this is hotly debated among historians but various reasons, such as the spread of Christianity, a desire to weaken his opponents who depended on the slave trade, and even economic self interest have been suggested.
Whatever the motivation, his rule was defined by the removal of slavery from England; the Council of London officially banned the act of selling another human being in 1102.
While the practice still lingered in the Celtic Fringe, it was all but completely gone from the British Isles by the 13th century. Serfdom became the primary societal organising principle for the next centuries and while in practice it was oppressive, it was certainly better than chattel slavery.
It is hard to impress quite how radical this was for the time that it was done. There are very few examples of any state or kingdom at that time abolishing the practice of slavery. And it is possible that England may have been the only place on the planet to have abolished it.
It was within the Cartwright case, under the reign of Queen Elizabeth, in which a man was observed savagely beating a slave he had purchased in Russia that the concept of England’s ‘air being too pure for slavery’ became an aspect of common law. The presiding court came to believe that, because slavery was not recognised as an official condition of English society, it could not exist therein.
This legal decision became the precedent that was drawn upon with the famous case of Somerset vs. Stewart, when an African slave appealed to English lawyers to aid him in his fight to remain in the home islands and avoid being forcibly removed to Jamaica. Somerset was backed by the influential abolitionist Granville Sharpe, with the presiding judge William Murray deciding that slavery had no justification in English law. While not an official abolition of the practice, it was another significant step towards recognising the illegality of it.
Globalisation of Misery
Africa has been the source of much of the world’s forced labour for millennia. The region of West Africa has always been a diverse mixture of kingdoms, tribes and nomadic peoples whose territories were in a constant state of flux. War and skirmishes were a common fact of regional politics.
The wealthy elites in cities like Timbuktu and Djenne in the Niger Delta lead raiding parties against those beyond their territorial limits to claim slaves from opposing factions. A famous African monarch King Tegbesu of modern day Benin is estimated to have made a fortune of £250,000 annually (3 million in modern money) in the selling of slaves.
On the east of the continent, the great trading cities of the Swahili Coast became key nodes within the burgeoning network of proto-globalisation of which slavery was a key feature.
From the 7th century to the emergence of industrial capitalism in the late 16th, the Arab world had possessed an insatiable appetite for slaves. They captured people as slaves from the Balkans, Southern Europe and Caucasus, or those parts of Africa where Islam had not reached.
But, when European states began to solidify and increase their military power, the Arab world was “forced” to expand their operations within Africa, which was a continent still politically divided. This would lead to the increase in traffic throughout the Indian Ocean and various trans-Saharan routes. Records are unreliable but some historians estimate the number of Africans and Europeans forced into slavery by the Arab world to total 17 million.
When the Portuguese arrived on the West African coast, they found already thriving business and infrastructure in the region. The vast majority of slaves were captured by African elites in exchange for weapons and goods provided by the Europeans to enable them to fight wars against their regional rivals.
It would be from linking this regional market with the plantations of South America and southern part of North America that the bloody transatlantic route was birthed. The United Kingdom, being the primary naval power of the time, did play a key role in providing the infrastructure to transport an estimated three million people across the Atlantic Ocean.
The role that the British played in this trade is undeniably one of the worst parts of our history. The transatlantic passage must have been close to hell on earth - thousands of innocent people crammed into animal-like conditions with many dying on the way.
The British of the time maintained a hypocritical attitude towards the practice of slavery. While recognising that it should not exist within the bounds of the home islands, many recognised the economic benefits to lining their personal wealth and the coffers of the Exchequer.
Abolition and Moral Crusade
The force of abolitionism had been slowly growing within the British Isles but the final effort at ending the trade came within the context of the year 1807. This was at the height of the Napoleonic Wars where the United Kingdom led resistance to France in her efforts to gain hegemony over the European continent.
The war is important because British propaganda argued strongly that the United Kingdom fought for freedom from a tyrant. Abolitionists at the time were successful in their attempt to psychologically link the institution of slavery to the tyranny of Napoleon - something that was made easier for them by the French dictator’s attempt to re-conquer the newly free black republic of Haiti.
So British propaganda was successful in linking slavery to the French in that it was something foreign and unbecoming of a civilised people like the British. Alongside that, slaves formed a key part of the French trade and it was reasoned that to ban slavery would be a form of economic warfare against Paris.
Countries rarely do things for moral reasons and the geopolitical argument against slavery ultimately became the defining argument to push the United kingdom to become an opponent of the trade.
London would form the famed ‘West Africa Squadron,’ a fleet which would grow to some 30 ships and patrolled an estimated 3,000 miles of coastline. It began raiding slave ships and freeing those imprisoned within.
The West Africa Squadron
When European conflict finished in 1815 and the British home islands were secure from invasion, the British navy extended its sweeping raiding of slave vessels throughout the Atlantic Ocean.
The British of the time were the world’s undisputed global power with an extensive network of naval infrastructure and advanced military technology. If one was a slaver and observed on the horizon the Union Jack atop an incoming vessel, you would feel the intense panic of knowing that you were about to be raided by the world’s most effective fighting force.
Historians estimate that some 1,600 slaving vessels would be captured by the West Africa Squadron with an estimated 150,000 people liberated. Many of these people would go on to serve in the British navy or resettle in the city of Freetown in modern day Sierra Leone.
Britain also forced its African allies and vassals to end their participation in the slave trade. This was resisted heavily by African elites who profited hugely from it and who used the slave trade as a means of ethnically cleansing tribal minorities. One African ruler, an ally of the British, is quoted as saying he would do anything the British wanted him to do apart from giving up slavery.
Ultimately, the British strong-armed their local allies into giving up the practice. More than fifty treaties were signed with African rulers which forced them into ending participation in the capture and selling of people. Likewise, bribery was also used where the UK gave preferential trading rights to those local elites who had banned the practice.
As said, this campaign was based largely on a desire to retain British economic advantage over European rivals such as Spain and France. But, there is also another aspect to this which was that a zeitgeist had taken hold within Victorian Britain which defined ridding the world of slavery as a holy mission and a key tenet of the glory of the empire.
After news of Arab atrocities against their African slaves generated intense public anger in England throughout the 1860’s, the operations of the Royal Navy expanded into the Indian Ocean where British ships sought to disrupt the trade from Zanzibar.
Historians talk about how the exploits of the anti-slavery vessels became romanticised and much talked about among the British public. The actions of the men who manned these vessels was nothing less than heroic, as they suffered a death rate far above the standard rate.
Without the actions of the Royal Navy strangulating the slave trade at the source and the resolve of the British government in bribing and threatening nations whose economies relied upon the slave trade, it is likely that the trade would have continued for far longer than it did.
The modern slave state
This fact is demonstrated by the number of countries in which British imperial influence was minor, such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Mauritania, which still practiced slavery long into the 20th century.
There are more people in bondage today than at any other point in human history. Estimates place the number as being as high as 40 million, mostly concentrated in Africa and Asia. Modern slavery is a lucrative business for those partaking in it, with an estimated 150 billion dollars generated annually.
This practice has been slowly growing in the shadows but the Western world recently became more aware of it when footage of pens holding people like chattel emerged from Libya. This was only the most obvious example of something which had been developing in Libya since the removal of the Qaddafite state.
The deteriorating security situation in the West African Sahel, where desertification, extremist Islam and ethnic conflict mingle into a deadly cocktail, has created a situation where people are fleeing en masse from their homes. The shortsighted decision to topple the Libyan regime has made that country a key route via which human traffickers smuggle people into Europe.
The loss of a stable state structure, the ongoing civil and proxy conflict within Libya, and the continuous migration into Europe has created a precarious environment which has allowed practices of modern slavery to flourish. Armed militias lure migrants into captivity with promises of taking them to Europe, then force them into work or sexual slavery.
Solutions
Libya has always acted as a gateway to Europe, and the instability that has developed there has generated what has been referred to as ‘Somalia on the Medditerrean,’ - a scene of continuous carnage and an exporter of crime and terrorism. It is a central connecting point in the newly developed ‘Trans-Meditterean’ human trafficking route.
Notwithstanding a desire to limit foreign adventurism, the presence of a modern slave state and transit hub for drugs and human trafficking is a clear threat to European, and British national security.
The United Kingdom could seize an opportunity to take a leadership role and open a political cleavage between the southern Europeans and the Northern states by using the Royal Navy to assist Italy in their efforts to curb movement into the continent.
British naval infrastructure on either end of the Medditerrean Sea means we have the capability to keep a continued presence of ships devoted to halting illegal movement.
This military solution could come in tandem with a diplomatic effort to set up safe zones in isolated regions of Libya into which migrants and refugees could be delivered. These zones could be policed by UN blue helmets and operated by Western development agencies. The Spanish controlled North African enclaves of Ceuta and Melila could act as a proof of concept for these zones.
Finally, we in the global north must project an image of being inaccessible to illegal immigration. Our current soft policies merely encourage people to risk their lives in the Mediterrean because they know that there is a high chance they will get into a wealthy country. By closing our borders and deporting those who have entered illegally, we remove the main pull factor and this will ultimately save lives and deprive human traffickers and slavers of people to prey on.
Conclusion
Throughout the history of nations, there are few whose role in the social development of morality has been as crucial as that of the British. While the United Kingdom has not been innocent in its trade of human beings, it has been one of the primary forces on the planet who have seen that trade pushed from being a fact of human existence to one which is rightly regarded as morally repugnant, and that is something that the British can take some pride in.
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