#13 Understanding Colonialism: Slaves and Settler Societies

In this blog, I focus on slavery and the legacy of colonisation. Slavery is so widely discredited today that it is difficult to grasp the key historical elements that made chattel slavery so widely acceptable over such a long period. This blog aims to give readers a better idea of the role slavery had in the growth of wealth within Western and American societies. I will also be outlining the different forms of slavery that have been practiced across the world in recent centuries, such as indentured labour.

Slaves and Settler Societies

Maps showing slave trading routes.

Colonisation and slavery were the cornerstones of the Industrial Revolution. European industrialisation and Atlantic-American slavery as two structural global transformations must be understood as an integral whole. Industrialisation in the 19th century was enough to bring Europe out of a backwater in terms of global wealth and power. The processes of industrialisation have been written about in detail by scholars, and students of economic history will be deeply aware of industrialisation. When I learnt the subject at university years ago, the slave trade and colonisation were scarcely mentioned to undergraduates. The Industrial Revolution, new inventions of the internal combustion engine, the urbanisation of spinning and weaving cotton, were all portrayed as the genius of British or European inventors.

C L R James writing in The Black Jacobins provides us with an idea of the scale of the trade in slaves and the produce that was exported as a result of the new plantations in Haiti:

Never for centuries had the western world known such economic progress. By 1734... there were 599 plantations of sugar, 3379 of indigo. During the Seven Years War the French marine, swept off the sea by the British navy, could not bring supplies on which the colony depended; the smuggling trade could not supply the deficiency, thousands of slaves died from starvation... But after the treaty in Paris the colony made great strides forward. In 1767 it exported 72 million tons of raw sugar and fifty on of indigo, and two million pounds of cotton.

The trade in goods that came out of slave production was huge for France and created the conditions for the Industrial Revolution in the second half of the 18th century.

The anti-slave movement began in Britain through the Quakers at the end of the 18th century and continued into the beginning of the 19th century. Britain and the Congress in America passed legislation to abolish the Slave trade in 1807. For Britain, this included slavery in her West Indian colonies in 1834. English history books tend to make much of these facts, but sadly this is a partial and biased picture. The trade in slaves grew rapidly in the first half of the 19th century after ‘abolition’ to provide for North American labour demand.

The large colonial West Indian and southern USA landed estates needed a large amount of labour, and over the centuries had become used to slave labour. At first, they tried to use the indigenous peoples, who either died from European diseases or refused to work. Massive commerce in slaves developed, and over two million slaves were sold in the decades before the civil war. Many came from Virginia to the cotton kingdom in the south. Every major town had slave dealers and all southern newspapers carried an advertisement for slaves. In Charleston and New Orleans, there were large public slave markets. In 1859, the largest slave auction was held where more than 400 men women and children were sold in Savannah Georgia.

The Industrial Revolution after 1815 was partially founded on the cotton industry. The demand for raw cotton expanded exponentially during the first 50 years of the 19th century which increased the demand for slaves. By the 1860s, 75% of the world’s cotton came from the slave plantations and comprised 57% of all US exports. One of Karl Marx's most famous sayings at around this same time in the 19th century was: "without slavery you have no cotton, without cotton you have no modern industry".

The slave trade also continued in Brazil and Cuba, as well as in the southern states. It was not until the 1860s, after the American civil war, that the Atlantic system in the wholesale trade in slaves finally ended. Yet the demand for free or very cheap labour remained, and bonded labour supported by dictatorial colonial governments replaced slave labour. Chinese and Indians were shipped to the Americas in large numbers.

Slavery continued in diverse forms even after the end of the American civil war. The Belgians under King Leopold continued slavery in the Congo from the time they took control in the 1890s, and likewise the Americans in tropical regions of Peru, Brazil and Columbia. Hundreds of thousands of people perished as a result and its impact is seldom recognised today.

The British and then the French used Indian, Chinese and African bonded labour during the First World War, in very large numbers. Irish labourers, colloquially termed ‘navvies’, provided a form of bonded labour to build British infrastructure: canals, railways, ports and roads. ‘Navvy’ Irish labourers were the cheapest available, they were often desperate for money to afford the pay rent that was paid to the English upper-class landlords In Britain. The demand for very cheap labour to create their infrastructure had grown rapidly from the 1760s and continued throughout most of the 19th century.

Ireland after 1801, when it became part of the United Kingdom, was all but in name a colony, as I outlined in the previous blog post. Irish land was owned by British aristocrats, and the land was divided up into small plots for rent. As the population grew, rents increased throughout the century. An Irish farmer may have used his land to feed his family, yet he needed cash to pay his rent. It became customary in the 19th century that after he had planted his crops in the spring, he would travel to England to earn enough cash to pay his rent. The Irish ‘navvies’ undercut English workers and lived on-site for six months every year.

Bonded or indentured labour was used after the 1820s as a substitute for slavery. It was used across the world by the European colonial powers throughout the 19th century, and even in the First World War. The conditions for the labourers were not so different from slave labour.

A Very Brief History of Slavery

The first cargo of slaves was brought to Lisbon in 1441, and by the 1450s ships from Lisbon were trading gold and slaves. During the 1500s, slaves were being sent to the Americas in even larger numbers. It was said that 10,000 slaves a year were moved across the Atlantic by 1540, with the Portuguese dominating trade. By the 1550s, the French, Dutch and British were all competitors for the slave trade. But by 1588, when the Spanish Armada was defeated by the British, the commercial slaving empires of Spain and Portugal collapsed. From this time onwards, the number of ships being built specifically for the slave trade increased year on year, servicing the ports of Bristol, Liverpool and London. From 1680 to1786, it has been estimated that over two million slaves were exported from West Africa.

The most ostentatious sects of the new Protestant religion were struggling for the West African slave trade: the Protestants of England, the Huguenots of France and the Calvinists of Holland. The profits were enormous and vast fortunes were made, heralding the beginning of global capitalism.

After Clive destroyed the Mughal Empire in India in the 1760s, the new money flowing into London from the slave trade was reinvested in the African slave trade, establishing the London Stock Exchange. Slavery was justified as rescuing the ‘heathen’ from perdition and saving his soul.

The new exportable crops - sugar, cotton and tobacco - were intentionally organised in large plantations needing intensive labour, and the demand for slaves became insatiable. From the beginning, there were slave revolts and ‘maroons’ (people who had escaped slavery) who lived in the hills of Cuba, Jamaica and Haiti. By 1750, the British had defeated the French in the Seven Years War and were beginning to control the trade.

Then came the first full-blown slave revolution on the island of Hispaniola, now Haiti and the Dominican Republic, in 1795. Many at the time thought this would herald the end of African slavery. However, the slave trade rapidly increased in the early 19th century as industrialisation in the USA got underway. Not until the US Civil War in the 1860s did slavery come to an end.

But cheap or free labour did not suddenly vanish for the plantation owners in the colonised West Indian islands or the southern states of the USA once slavery was outlawed in the 1860s. Bonded labour had been experimented with, and all colonial powers used bonded labour right up to 1920. Wherever a colonial power needed large labour resources, whether it was the sugar plantations in Cuba, the building of the railway in East Africa or the needs for labour-power in the First World War, huge numbers of bonded labourers from Indian, Africa and China were recruited and sent across the seas. The so-called ‘coolie’ of Indian or Chinese origin or the ‘navvy’ of Ireland was recruited by the colonial authorities. The story of bonded labour is as important as the story of slave labour for an understanding of the colonial period of world history.

Sidney Mintz, one of the foremost anthropologists of the Caribbean, expresses this succinctly:

...only a couple of centuries ago the Caribbean Island became the testing ground for European imperialism, modern slave labour, and the first production site for the "proletarian drug food" such as sugar, coffee and rum. Never before had Europe succeeded in establishing overseas production for such profitable imports in tropical lands they owned by conquest." He describes these activities as 'innovative capitalist experiments... which rested on genocide, slavery, large scale agriculture and forced industrialisation...

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Further reading

Slavery and the Slave Trade:

Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery; Verso, 1997.

Sidney Mintz, Structure and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History; Penguin, 1985.

David Greggus, The Caribbean in the Age of Revolution; 2017.

Stephen Yaffe,

Ward Churchill and Winona LaDuke, Struggle for the Land: native North American Resistance to Genocide; Ecocide and Colonization; City Lights Publishers, 2002.

Walter Rodney, The History of the Upper Guinea Coast; 1545 to 1800; ​ Monthly Review Press, 1970.​

Eric Williams, ​Capitalism and Slavery; the University of the North Carolina Press, 1940​.

W E B Du Bois, The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the part which Africa has played in world history; International Publishers, chapter 3: The Rape of Africa, 1946.

Sven Beckert​, Empire of Cotton: A New History of Global Capitalism; Penguin, 2015.​

Theodore W Allen​, The Invention of the White Race: Volume Two: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo America; Verso, 1997.​

Caryl Phillips​, Cambridge A Novel on slavery in Barbados around 1830s or 40s;​ Vintage Books, 1991​.

C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Overture and the San Domingo Revolution​; Penguin, 1938.​

Charles Forsdick and Christian Hogsberg Toussaint Louvedrture, A Black Jacobin in the Age of Revolutions; ​Pluto Press, 2017​.

Mario Vargas Llosa, The Dream of the Celt: The Story of Roger Casemont in the Congo and Amazonia; Faber and Faber, 2012.

Marika Sherwood, Manchester, Liverpool and Slavery; North West Labour History Journal, #32, September 2007.

Bonded Labour:

Ulrike Lindner, Indentured Labour in Sub-Saharan Africa (1880-1918): Circulation of Concepts between Imperial Powers, in Bonded Labour pages 59-82; Transcript 2019.

Sabine Damir-Gielsdorf et al. (eds.), Bonded Labour: Global and Comparative Perspectives (18th–21st Century); Transcript Verlag, Bielefeld, 2016.

The Ameena Gafoor Institute – a new Institute on this subject has a large data base of published scholarly work on bonded labour.

Impoverishment:

Walter Rodney, How Europe Undeveloped Africa; Verso, 2018.

For India and China see:

Amiya Kumar Bagchi, Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital; Ropman and Littlefield, 2005

For an Indian Professor who hotly disputed the impoverishment thesis see: Trithanker Roy, India in the World Economy: From Antiquity to the Present; CUP, 2012

For other authors on Indian colonial history:

Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World; Verso, 2000.

William Dalrymple: superb Indian writing, well worth reading, see White Mughals; Harper Collins, 2002., and The Last Mughal, the Fall of Delhi 1857; Bloomsbury, 2006.

Amitav Ghosh novels: Sea of Poppies (John Murray, 2009), River of Smoke (John Murray, 2011), and In an Antique Land (Granta Books, 2012), all on the 1840s in India and China, are based on powerful evidence.

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