The Ending of the British Slave Trade in 1807: The Economic Context

Look around upon the miserable fate of almost all our unfortunate colour - superadded to ignorance, - see slavery, and the contempt of those very wretches who roll in affluence from our labours superadded to this woeful catalogue: Ignatius Sancho, 1772.¹

"It's always best to do the humane thing, sir; that's been my experience". And the [slave] trader leaned back in his chair, and folded his arm, with an air of virtuous decision, apparently considering himself a second Wilberforce: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin, 1852.²

Two hundred years on from Britain's abolition of its slave trade in 1807 debate over the causes of that remarkable event continues. Fundamental to the debate is the issue of the relative importance of economic factors in precipitating abolition. For over a century after 1807, abolition was principally seen as a victory for evangelically inspired humanitarianism, but the consensus built around this interpretation was broken when from the 1920s onward some historians claimed that economic factors were pivotal to explaining British abolitionism. Central to such claims were arguments that the British West Indian planter class was in decline from the 1760s onwards and fell victim to an emergent British industrial capitalism wedded to principles of free labour and free trade. Such arguments have been subjected to severe criticism. They still, however, attract support from some historians. Moreover, even among historians critical of the so-called decline thesis, there is an acceptance that explanations of British abolitionism need to take account of ideological and economic changes associated with the age of revolutions, including the British Industrial Revolution. The purpose of this paper is to explore how economic factors interacted with other factors in swaying parliament to outlaw the British slave trade in 1807.

1

There is an oft-told story that when George III and his prime minister, William Pitt the Younger, were driving out near Weymouth and encountered a pretentious equipage and outriders owned by a Jamaican planter, the king allegedly remarked 'Sugar, sugar, hey? All that sugar! How are the duties, hey Pitt, how are the duties?'³ Though apocryphal, the story is commonly seen as emblematic of the wealth of absentee West Indian planters. As such, it is clearly consistent with Ignatius Sancho's comments, noted in the epigraph to this paper, on the 'affluence' of the 'wretches' who profited from slavery. It is equally consistent with claims that slave-based Caribbean sugar production nurtured British industrialization as well as with recent estimates of the wealth of Jamaica.⁴ The timing, however, of the alleged remark of King George - probably around 1790 - and of that of Ignatius Sancho two decades earlier is intriguing, for, if some historians are to be believed, they occurred at a time when the standing of the West Indian planter class was in long-term terminal decline. According to the historian Lowell Ragatz, that decline began in the 1760s and, in tandem with economic changes in Britain, prompted a redefining of Anglo-Caribbean relations as a prelude to the abolition of British transatlantic slavery and West Indian sugar preference in the British market. Ragatz's interpretation informed the work of the West Indian scholar, Eric Williams, who, in his own seminal study, Capitalism and Slavery, attributed not only British industrialization to profits from slavery but also the success of British anti-slavery to shifts in the balance of power between a declining planter class and its allies and Britain's emergent industrial capitalists.⁵ The 'decline thesis' thereafter became entrenched in West Indian historiography and while not without its critics remains for some an indispensable component of explanations of the ending of the British slave trade.⁶ For scholars of this persuasion, it was economic change, not British humanitarianism, that determined the course of British anti-slavery.

At the heart of the decline thesis lie two key arguments. The first relates to the American Revolution, the second to the nature of slavery itself. According to Williams, the outbreak of the American Revolution was 'the first stage in the decline of the sugar colonies'; it provoked that...