Chocolate on Trial: Slavery, Politics, and the Ethics of Business (review)

Solid scholarly historical studies of overseas businesses in Africa are rare. Rarer still are studies of this area that deal with ethics and corporate responsibility without cant or overheated rhetoric. Lowell J. Satre's Chocolate on Trial stands out as a nuanced history of the dilemmas of doing business responsibly in a colonial setting. The paradoxes it describes are similar to what many corporations face today. The book demonstrates that the controversy over how raw materials are amassed in the non-Western world for manufacturing in the Western world is not new. Doing the right thing, as this study shows, is not always easy. Businesses have to find their way through a labyrinth of geopolitics, cultural difference, and conflicting corporate aims. The price of success under these circumstances can be almost as high as the costs of failure.

Satre's history details how the British chocolate manufacturing company Cadbury dealt with the disclosure in 1900–1901 that most of the chocolate they were purchasing from the Portuguese African colonies of Príncipe and São Tomé was being grown with slave labor. Cadbury was no ordinary company. It was owned by an idealistic Quaker family renowned for its progressive policy of labor relations and unwavering support of British humanitarian organizations, particularly the Anti-Slavery Society. It took nearly eight years for the company to take decisive action on this damaging revelation. Satre's book meticulously examines the many reasons for this delay. In the process, the reader learns a great deal about the relationship between business and the British state during this period and about how public opinion could have an impact on corporate policy. Ultimately, in an effort to minimize further injury to their reputations, the company and the Cadbury family became involved in one of the most famous libel trials of the Edwardian period. The company won its case against The Standard newspaper but was awarded only one farthing of damages.

Satre tells this absorbing story in the manner of an imperial historian of the old school. This approach in the hands of a skillful practitioner like Satre has its advantages, but the drawbacks also are many. His narrative is brisk and lucid. He has a gift for making convoluted situations intelligible and for focusing on essential details. His research using British sources is impeccable, and he marshals his evidence with precision and elegance. However, at times his book seems trapped in a time warp. He seems unaware of several recent historiographical trends in African history that are germane to his subject. African labor history, for example, could have enriched his work. Frederick Cooper's research on East Africa is one body of work among many that could have provided a valuable comparative perspective.

A more serious deficiency is the lack of African and Portuguese sources. Satre did not undertake extensive archival research of Portuguese sources (indeed, it appears he does not read Portuguese), and he did not reconstruct African responses to the odious Portuguese colonial labor policies. As a result, Africans in his work are people to whom things are done, not people who make their own history. He portrays the Portuguese as corrupt and enervated. The British are reduced to intriguing in London drawing rooms or adventuring in the tropics. All these portrayals are limited and veer on the stereotypical. Satre may have tried to remedy these deficiencies by traveling to São Tomé with his wife. The trip, though, merely resulted in some rather uninteresting photos of old colonial buildings and added little depth or complexity to the text.

Still, Chocolate on Trial is a valuable contribution. Highly readable, topical, and discerning, it will be useful for undergraduate history research papers, business ethics courses, and African economic history surveys. It covers a fascinating subject about which too little has been known. The Cadbury family, by the way, had a very modern...