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3 The Anti-Slavery State ANTI-SLAVERY’S TRANSITION from reformist crusade to national policy was a curious and complicated process. After centuries of supporting the slave trade, the British state was transformed, in stages, from the patron of slavery to its determined enemy. How and why did international suppression of the slave trade become an objective for successive Victorian governments? Various strands of government policy responded to the challenge and the relationship between anti-slavery and the state was transformed as anti-slavery evolved from a question of imperial morality to a cause for moral imperialism.1 Anti-slavery action by the British state dated back to Sir William Dolben ’s act regulating the traffic in slaves in 1788. The abolition of the nation ’s slave trade in 1807 was accompanied by naval patrols to enforce the ban on British slave trading and, as gradually permitted by treaty and law, to stop foreign participation in the traffic too. Registration of slave ownership and ameliorative mandates preceded the Emancipation Act of 1833, controlling and then alienating private property. In order to compensate owners, the British government raised its duties on foreign sugar and spent£20 million on a compensation scheme that represented the largest financial transaction ever undertaken by the state.2 The system of apprenticeship was supervised by London and looked set to be abolished by Parliament in 1838, although this was preempted by voluntary abolition by the colonial legislatures. In short, Britain had been developing anti-slavery state action for fifty years before Victoria’s accession but her reign would see a further institutionalization. When the question of British emancipation was settled in 1838, the “anti-slavery state” had passed through adolescence into its prime. As T THE ANTI-SLAVERY STATE 41 Howard Temperley has suggested, the epithet “abolitionist” could apply to officials, sailors, and politicians as much as to members of the BFASS.3 This does not mean that the British state adopted the form and practices that many anti-slavery activists would have wished. Among abolitionist campaigners , within the British public, and throughout government and the state, there remained great divisions over the best tactics—and sometimes over the right strategy too.4 What united differing Victorian views was the presumption that the British state should give powerful consideration to the nation’s impact on slavery and the slave trade abroad. However, British anti-slavery politics had never existed independently of imperial and foreign policy anxieties or of the perceived and suspected actions of other countries. After the Emancipation Act, Britons would discover that their interactions with other nations uncovered more and more anti-slavery problems; foreign and imperial policy hence became enveloped by these dilemmas. For early Victorians, “the Empire” meant Britain’s overseas territories and conquests: the sugar colonies of the Caribbean; the white settler colonies of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa; the vast subempire of India; and various scattered territories. British power also “expanded overseas by means of ‘informal empire’ as much as by acquiring dominion in the strict constitutional sense,” and focusing on occupied territories alone is “like judging the size and character of icebergs solely from the parts above the water-line.”5 Historians have recognized that Britain exerted a cultural and economic dominance over a vaster “informal empire ” stretching from Brazil and Argentina, which were soaked in London finance, to Chinese, African, and Middle Eastern ports, which were opened to British merchants through violence and menace.6 This unwieldy, chaotic assortment of economic and military opportunities formed something greater than the sum of its parts, as they enriched and reinforced each other to create what John Darwin calls a “British system of world power.” Thanks to “the chaotic pluralism of British interests at home and of their agents and allies abroad,” this power sometimes led to full colonies carved from tiny “bridgeheads,” sometimes to the preservation of these vulnerable outposts, and sometimes to compromise or retreat in the face of opposition.7 As we shall see, foreign and colonial anti-slavery policies were part of a global assertion of imperial power, with British policies flexible, responsive, and opportunistic with different peoples in different circumstances. This book makes an arbitrary but necessary division, as many Victorians did, between relations with sovereign, or nominally sovereign , independent states (considered in this chapter) and countries over which Britain claimed ownership for at least part of our period (discussed in chapter 6). This practical distinction does not change the fact that British politicians...

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