The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation (review)

Drescher's latest contribution to the history of British abolitionism "traces the intrusion of social science into the politics of slavery" in the British empire from the late eighteenth century through the middle of the nineteenth century (6). Demography, political economy, and anthropology—the three social sciences that Drescher identifies as most important to the debate about slavery—intruded in the guise of academics, journalists, bureaucrats, and politicians who used the language and authority of science to shape public policy. This intellectual elite considered emancipation to be an "experiment" in the organization of human affairs, and as the experiment ran its course, a new intellectual elite ultimately concluded that it had failed to demonstrate the economic superiority of free over unfree labor in the colonial milieu.

Drescher first traces the intellectual origins of social-science inquiry into slavery. Most important were Smith, whose writings on political economy championed free over slave labor, and Malthus, who attacked the slave trade in an appendix to the 1806 version of his Essay on Population.¹ Abolitionists used demography to especially good effect in the campaigns for slave-trade abolition and emancipation. The effects of the slave trade on mortality, and the decline of the West Indian slave population after slave-trade abolition, constituted powerful arguments against slavery. Smith's contribution to the antislavery movement, on the other hand, was generally undermined by subsequent political economists who acknowledged that slave labor might be economically superior to free labor under certain circumstances. The fate of commercial agriculture in Sierra Leone and Haiti provided ample evidence.

Drescher argues that British policymakers viewed West Indian emancipation as a quasiscientific experiment that, if successful, might be replicated all over the world. The fundamental question to be answered was whether, and under what conditions, freedpeople would work for wages. From the perspective of policymaking elites, the terms of emancipation—compensation to slaveowners, the apprenticeship system, and protectionist duties on sugar—were protocols that guaranteed the success of the test. The collection of massive amounts of statistics and expert testimony respecting the consequences of emancipation further bolstered the ethos of experimentation and the patina of social science, while the labor question brought political economists to the forefront of the debate.

Buoyed by emancipation in the West Indies, British abolitionists tried to extend their experiment in freedom to the rest of the world, but their optimism began to ebb in the 1840s. The costs of West Indian emancipation came under attack. Free traders argued that ending protectionist sugar duties would really put free labor to the test in a world competition against slave labor; the slave economies of the United States, Brazil, and Cuba outperformed the British West Indies. Increasingly, it appeared to policymaking elites that the mighty experiment in the British West Indies could not be replicated elsewhere in the Americas, in Africa, or in Asia. One nasty effect of the abolitionists' loss of confidence was the increasing respectability of racism by mid-century, expressed most clearly in Carlyle's essays but also visible in the patterns of colonial policy.² I wish that Drescher had discussed John Elliott Cairnes, Slave Power (London, 1862), a landmark in the intrusion of social science into the politics of slavery, suggesting that the political economists' faith in free labor had not been entirely extinguished.

The Mighty Experiment explores a discrete set of ideas about freedom and slavery, articulated by a limited number of influential men. Those ideas imposed a heavy burden on the freedpeople of the British West Indies, whose own ideas about the meaning of freedom eluded the imperious gaze of nineteenth-century social science.