Consuming Anxieties: Consumer Protest, Gender, and British Slavery, 1713-1833 (review)
- Consuming Anxieties: Consumer Protest, Gender, and British Slavery, 1713-1833
Above the desk as I write is a collection of shopkeepers' handbills from Dock Square, the Cornhill, and the South Market in Boston from the 1790s, advertising West India goods; English textiles; and French, Dutch, German, and Indian manufactures. The European and Asian goods, with trivial exceptions, were financed by earnings on slave-produced commodities from the West Indies. The direct link between the American consumer of the late eighteenth century and the African slave is staring me in the face. For the English consumer the connection is more transparent: one of England's most important imports, sugar, was produced by slaves.
Sussman's book discusses the role that the rise of consumer society played in the abolition of British slavery in the Western hemisphere through an organized campaign against the purchase of sugar. In her words, "In the last two decades of the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth, abolitionists asked the British consumer to abstain from consuming sugar grown in the West Indies as a method of undermining [End Page 462]the slave economies that produced that sugar. . . . The campaign had only a minor impact on the political process of emancipating the slaves" (37). Her book deals with the rise of consumerism and issues of gender in this campaign.
As every schoolboy knows, behind the increase in the range and quality of consumer goods in late eighteenth-century England lay developments in agricultural productivity, the transport network, the financial network, foreign trade, and technological change. It is no secret that all this activity began in the second half of the century and came to fruition before the middle of the nineteenth century. The eighteenth-century polity of Crown, church, and land now faced new social, economic, and religious groups whose numbers were disproportionate to their political power. Their challenge-organized by petitions, meetings, and print media-had to be mounted outside of Parliament. The campaign for the abstention from sugar consumption fits into this context. Sussman's point is that the abolitionist movement devised a new form of social protest by transforming consumers into activists, exercising their moral choice over expenditure decisions-especially women, in view of their primacy in the domestic sphere.
Following the introduction, Sussman presents two chapters on an analysis of works by Jonathan Swift and Tobias Smollett, two on the role of women in the politics of sugar, one on violence, and a concluding one on contemporary issues like globalization, which does not meet the scholarly standards of the rest of the book. Throughout, close analysis of books and poems provides the evidence for her argument.
Sussman's insistence on linking the abolition of slavery with anti-colonialism is hard to maintain. Initially the abolitionists were not so much opposed to slavery as to the slave trade, and they were not against colonialism at all. They advocated the consumption of colonial sugar grown by free labor, and Britain was content to keep its West Indian colonies until after World War II. To find anticolonialism in eighteenth-century Britain is a trick anyhow: Until mid-century Britain hardly had an empire, with economically valuable possessions only in Ireland, Virginia, and Barbados.
Swift's opposition to importing British goods into Ireland was in support of autarky, an infant-industry argument to protect the Ascendancy class. It had nothing to do with the native Irish, who might have considered it pro-colonialist, rather as if the abolitionists had supported the plantation owners, not the slaves. It is hard to see the campaign as a "consumerist critique of colonialism" in any contemporary sense.
Sussman, however, makes a strong case that
