[Marxism] British emancipation

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times Book Review, January 9, 2005
'Though the Heavens May Fall' and 'Bury the Chains': Freed
By MARILYNNE ROBINSON

THOUGH THE HEAVENS MAY FALL
The Landmark Trial That Led to the End of Human Slavery.
By Steven M. Wise.
Illustrated. 282 pp. Da Capo Press. $25.

BURY THE CHAINS
Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves.
By Adam Hochschild.
Illustrated. 468 pp. Houghton Mifflin Company. $26.95.

"The air of England is too pure for a slave to breathe in.'' This phrase, 
with slight variations, recurs through long years in the rhetoric of 
movements to abolish first African slavery within England, then the 
Atlantic traffic in African people that England dominated for more than a 
century and then the institution of slavery in the British Empire, whose 
populations included hundreds of thousands of slaves. It is an axiom 
traditionally believed to have been invoked in 1772, in principle if not 
verbatim, by Lord Mansfield, the judge in Somerset v. Steuart, which Steven 
M. Wise in ''Though the Heavens May Fall'' calls the ''trial that led to 
the end of human slavery.'' Somerset was an African who accompanied 
Steuart, his owner, to England. He escaped, was recaptured and sued 
successfully for his freedom.

Both Wise and Adam Hochschild celebrate this trial and the events and 
personalities that brought it about. No doubt they should. It is a 
melancholy fact, however, that the phenomenon of African slavery loomed as 
it did over the Atlantic world because, from the reign of Elizabeth I to 
the reign of George III, England assumed that the air of its colonies, or 
of any other colony ready to buy, was impure enough to accommodate slavery 
very nicely.

Wise, the president of the Center for the Expansion of Fundamental Rights, 
traces with reverent care how the question of the legality of slavery 
developed within England, culminating in this famous trial. The hero of his 
narrative is Granville Sharp, a minor government clerk who educated himself 
in the law in the course of defending the rights of Africans brought into 
England as slaves. He devoted himself and his slender resources to this 
work over decades with the object of finally putting an end to slavery 
itself. The trial, which is said to have abolished slavery within England 
by legal precedent, was centered on the question of Steuart's right to sell 
Somerset into the West Indies. Lord Mansfield ruled in favor of Somerset on 
the grounds that slavery ''is so odious that nothing can be suffered to 
support it but positive law.'' There being no such law in England, ''the 
black must be discharged.'' This decision freed an estimated 15,000 
Africans then held as slaves in England.

full: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/09/books/review/09COVERRO.html

===

Jack Gratus, "The Great White Lie: Slavery, Emancipation, and Changing 
Racial Attitudes" (MR, 1973):

In the end, for all its back-patting and self-applause, the British 
parliament did not actually give the slaves full and unconditional freedom. 
It had given them­as it had always done­the name without the substance. It 
had talked for fifty years about humanity and justice for the blacks. It 
had prided itself on ending the slave trade and colonial slavery, ending 
them, it must be added, with considerable reluctance and ill-will. But to 
what extent did its legislation affect the real situation? During those 
fifty years the importation to the colonies of blacks from Africa 
continued. During those fifty years the treatment of the slaves in the West 
Indies remained as brutal and unjust as it had always been. At the end of 
those fifty years the emancipation of the slaves from all forms of coercive 
labour had come as a result, finally and again with great reluctance, of 
the legislative acts of their former masters, the assemblies of the 
colonies concerned.

Because resounding speeches with noble sentiments had been made from time 
to time about the conditions of the slaves by men like Wilberforce, Pitt 
and Brougham, and because these individuals had from time to time nobly 
demanded an improvement in the slaves' condition and finally their 
emancipation, it came to be assumed, once it was all over, that parliament 
itself had been the powerful, forceful instrument of change. In fact, as we 
have seen, little had really changed, but successive members of parlia­ment 
during these fifty long years­and how long they must have seemed to the 
slaves themselves­had taken the word for the deed. They had blinded 
themselves to the realities which existed outside the doors of parliament 
by their reverence for the spoken word and for the supposed glory of 
parliament to which they were forever paying exaggerated homage.

Following their politicians' lead, the British public indulged itself for 
nearly one hundred years in paeans of self-praise, with the result that, 
instead of Britain coming out of this shameful period with some humility 
which, if it had might have saved Africa much sorrow, it emerged with even 
greater arrogance. 'A great cause in which a whole people can feel 
themselves honoured is the prime secret of national unity and vigour', 
Joyce Gary wrote. Forgetting the massive opposition to emancipation within 
Britain and by successive British Governments, he considered that it had 
given to national action 'a moral dignity, very rare in history, but 
enormously valuable to any people and any Government'.16

This may be good politics or morale-boosting mythology, but surely not 
history. Britain's pockets had been filled by the West Indian slave system 
it had created. Its pride was puffed up by the erroneous belief that it had 
destroyed the system; but it was slavery that destroyed slavery. The 
economics of the system forced it in the end to collapse, as Adam Smith had 
predicted sixty years before it did. The emotional attitudes against it, 
which certainly existed in Britain­very strongly at times­and which the 
emancipa­tionists channelled, helped to bring it down. But parliament and, 
even more so, the Governments of the time limped behind both the economic 
and the emotional forces at work, never really catching up with either.

The end of slavery did not mean the end of the plantation system. In the 
West Indies the 'grateful peasantry' of the ex-slaves which the 
abolitionists had predicted did not come to pass; instead the workpeople 
left the plantations to set up wherever they could on their own. The white 
plantation owners, unable to obtain white workers, looked to India for 
labour. Between 1833 and 1917 Trinidad imported 145,000 East Indians and 
British Guiana nearly a quarter of a million. Indians were also brought to 
other West Indian islands.

The exploitation of the blacks by the whites continued in different forms 
in different countries. The need of the whites to justify their acts by 
persuading themselves of the supposed inherent inferiority of the blacks 
continued through­out the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. The 
question whether 'they' were 'fit for freedom' became 'fit for equality', 
and the same circular arguments heard in the emancipation debate were, and 
still are, applied to this new problem the whites created for themselves. 
The blacks, it was argued, are not yet ready for equality and have to be 
prepared for it by the whites; but since, so long as there is inequality 
they will never be ready for it, the blacks must remain forever unequal. 
The white man still clings in places to this antiquated logical 
merry-go-round; most blacks got off in disgust some time ago.


Louis Proyect
Marxism list: www.marxmail.org 


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