Does Decline Make Sense? The West Indian Economy and the Abolition of the Slave Trade

One of the most lively and long-lived historical controversies centers on the causes of British anti-slavery policies during the first years of the nineteenth century. Participants in this debate dispute whether the health of the West Indian sugar industry had any impact on the decision to abolish the slave trade in 1807. Advocates of what is commonly referred to as the "Decline Thesis" believe that slavery's faltering profitability mandated abolition, whereas the opposition tends to reject the very notion of economic hardship in the West Indies. Recent historians tend to fall into this latter camp, their research focusing on how social and cultural changes within England provided a fertile environment for reform movements to flourish. This line of thought argues that the industrialization of Britain introduced new systems of production, trade, and politics that fostered the emergence of the anti-slavery movement as the major philanthropic agenda of the day. Despite these two differing opinions regarding the fundamental cause of Britain's first major assault on slavery, both positions have relied upon economic theory and application to bolster their points of view.

New evidence presented in this article resurrects the argument that planters were facing rapid decline at the turn of the nineteenth century. Both sugar prices and estimated slave prices culled from the Jamaica Archives confirm the contemporary commentary that outlines the problem of "overproduction," which led to a financial crisis among British planters on the eve of the slave trade's abolition. Previous studies have ignored both variations in transport costs and the runaway inflation of the late- eighteenth century, creating an overoptimistic portrait of planters' prospects and erroneously eliminating the role of West Indies from the abolition equation.

the rise and fall of the decline thesisIn the mid-twentieth century, the most popular explanation of the slave trade's demise came from the Manichean model of world history purveyed by Clarkson--the first chronicler of British abolition and an active participant in the fight to destroy the trade. The "Clarksonian" point of view pictured abolition as the consequence of a divinely guided confluence of Christian thinkers toward social change within the empire, as his diagram, reproduced in Figure 1, illustrates. ¹

Clarkson's story of Christian progress remained the conventional interpretation of abolition a century after the publication of his history. Coupland, the pre-eminent early-twentieth-century scholar of British anti-slavery, echoed much of Clarkson's sentiment in his account of the movement, though he saw the struggle not between good and evil but between morality and national self-interest. According to Coupland, the slave system was a "necessity" for Britain after the loss of the North American colonies. Upon surveying "what was left of the old Empire," Parliament chose to follow a policy that protected the status quo of all economic arrangements, including that of West Indian black-white relations and the slave trade. Subsequently, the early anti-slave-trade campaigners became persona non grata in the eyes of the establishment. Coupland interpreted the eventual success of the movement as a tribute to the single-mindedness of the abolitionist "Saints" to raise public consciousness above the nation's economic-self interest. ²

Williams' seminal book, Capitalism and Slavery, viciously attacked Coupland and other followers of the Clarksonian tradition, claiming that they "sacrificed scholarship to sentimentality and . . . placed faith before reason and evidence." In Williams' view, Anglo researchers had neglected to investigate the possibility of more worldly and structural causes of slavery's destruction. Williams explained that previous studies had artificially inflated the importance of the sugar industry in order to glorify the achievement of the abolitionists, thereby failing to recognize the underlying materialist causes behind the prohibition of slave trading. Earlier historians missed the fact that the new capitalistic economy had no need for the...