Competing Visions of Empire: Labor, Slavery, and the Origins of the British Atlantic Empire by Abigail L. Swingen (review)

Abigail L. Swingen’s new book begins with a simple question: “Why did England establish and maintain an empire in the Americas during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries?” (1). This deceptively simple query is posed in full knowledge of the fact that scholars have variously concluded that the colonies either grew up willy-nilly as the product of the initiative of disparate groups often left to their own devices or were the product of a coherent and uniform mercantilist vision of empire emanating from London. What these two opposing views ignore, Swingen asserts, is that there was a great deal more debate—both in England and between the metropole and colonies—about the nature and purpose of colonies and that labor, especially slavery, was central to these ongoing conversations. Thus, and in direct contrast to those who might lay the blame for the expansion of slavery and its prominent place within the empire at the door of colonial miscreants, Swingen argues that not only was the English state deeply involved in the development of slavery in the Americas, but slavery “became a justification for the empire itself” (9).

While the title of the book would suggest a comprehensive approach to the subject of empire, Swingen is primarily concerned with the island colonies of Barbados and Jamaica. At the outset, however, she addresses the problematic history of the servant trade, convict labor, and kidnapping in a fashion that also gives some attention to the labor issues that plagued Virginia and the broader English Caribbean. More important, however, she also establishes that the answer to many of the questions she will explore throughout the volume can best be answered by looking not to the periphery but to the middle—England itself. Swingen is less interested in the familiar problem of the labor demands of the burgeoning colonies and rather more concerned with the political, cultural, and economic problems of supply in England. To Swingen, it is important to understand that the first imperial problems of the seventeenth century were the failure of alternate forms of unfree labor to suit the needs of the would-be empire and the serious concerns that were raised in Restoration England about the deleterious effects of excessive out-migration. Significantly, we learn, labor was an English problem, not just a colonial one.

Insisting that the English dog wagged the colonial tail on the question of labor generally works well in Swingen’s telling. The more complicated and debatable assertion is the one that follows, that “empire building through territorial acquisition and strict commercial regulation was necessary to expand servant and slave markets and increase England’s national wealth” (33). In other words, Swingen argues that labor was not simply a problem that grew out of the predictable complications of building an empire based largely on the production and transportation of cash crops. Rather, the ability to profit from supplying labor to distant outposts not only drove imperial regulation within the empire, but it also created the rationale for international conflict (and sometimes cooperation) with Spain, France, and the Netherlands. Swingen’s empire is neither an empire of goods nor simply an accumulation of terrestrial space; it is an empire of forced labor.

On several matters, Swingen is quite compelling. During the last half of the seventeenth century, competing interests in England and in the separate colonies espoused different positions on how the colonies should be managed and the role that colonists should play within the empire. Oliver Cromwell’s “Western Design,” for example, epitomized state-sponsored empire building, but the acquisition of Jamaica in 1655 created a number of problems and highlighted a number of areas of disagreement among metropolitan officials (especially after the Restoration in 1660) and among colonial merchants and planters. The three versions of the outfit that would come to be known as the Royal African Company (RAC) were...