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5 Power, Prosperity, and Liberty IT WAS a painful truth for Victorian Britons, as the Earl of Clarendon observed in 1846, that “for our necessaries and luxuries of life, for the employment of our people, for our revenue, for our very position in the world as a nation, we are indebted to the production of slave labour.”1 As an anti-slavery pioneer, it was not clear how much Britain could or should isolate itself from other countries’ surviving (and often thriving) slave systems . Debates over economic sanctions for the importation of slave-grown products and the use of violence to suppress the international slave trade burned brightly in the years before the American Civil War. The British puzzled how morality (in the form of anti-slavery) was best married with prosperity (in the form of trade). It was not clear how they could be advanced together. Both sides of the sugar contest claimed to be the authentic standard-bearers of anti-slavery and prosperity; they assumed different moral economies of how the two would interact. For protectionists, free trade might lower prices in the short-term, but at the long-term cost of destroying the wealth of Britain’s West Indian colonies and encouraging slavery. By contrast, the free traders thought protection was a delusion or trick that would hurt the poor at home and halt the spread of anti-slavery around the globe: “Commerce was the great emancipator.”2 This chapter examines the particular debates over sugar and violence and then analyzes how Britain’s economic interests related to her policies toward slave labor and free labor. The fundamental question linking these themes is how Britons imagined anti-slavery to interact with national interest , world power, and economic growth. Was anti-slavery good for British prosperity and, if so, how? Revisiting the issue of sugar protection will T POWER, PROSPERIT Y, AND LIBERT Y 99 demonstrate differing expectations for whether free production could compete with slavery in the world marketplace. It also reveals whether free trade required Britons to choose between morality and prosperity. Before British emancipation, slaveholders and monopolists were one and the same; protective tariffs for the West Indies subsidized the evil of slave cultivation and made Britons pay more for their sugar. However, the adoption of free labor in the sugar colonies created questions about whether enemies of slavery should embrace or continue to oppose duties that taxed foreign sugar (much of it produced by slaves) at a higher rate than that produced by Britain’s newly freed peoples. The needs of working people, as we have seen, formed a key part of the resulting debate, but that is only part of the story. There were broader ideological questions at stake too. CHEAP SUGAR MEANS CHEAP SLAVES? Victorians had to decide whether an anti-slavery nation could or should wean itself off such an addiction to the fruits of slavery. Sugar created a particular dilemma because “all considerations mingle in it; not merely commercial, but imperial, philanthropic, religious; confounding and crossing each other, and confusing the legislature and the nation lost in a maze of conflicting interests and contending emotions.”3 So declared Benjamin Disraeli, future prime minister and long-standing opponent of free trade, in 1852, after he had spent more than a decade fighting unsuccessfully to keep the tariff. The politics of sugar, as he suggested, rested on so complex a cocktail of ideological judgments that partisans on a particular side of the debate could have quite different reasons for choosing it. As an old observation goes, political disputes over economics quickly become passionate rather than rational.4 But, more profoundly, the debate was one about how economic ideas could be applied to a political question: a passionate contest to define rationality. This is why sugar divided loyalties, defeated governments , and soured party ties. The Emancipation Act of 1833 had increased the sugar duties in order to pay compensation to West Indian slaveholders. Radical abolitionists had at the time opposed compensation on principle, but found the tax on buyers of sugar a particularly odious way to fund it. The attack on sugar protection after 1838 came as part of the broader movement for free trade, which believed that the country’s taxation system was rigged to reward a parasitic aristocracy and dull the energies of entrepreneurial industrialists and their armies of workers. The Anti–Corn Law League, as its name announced , focused its wrath on the taxes that, they argued, kept the price...

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