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

In Chocolate on Trial, Lowell Satre has written a detailed narrative history of the controversy about slave-grown cocoa that broke out in England in the first decade of the twentieth century. Following up on concerns in the 1890s about slavery in African cocoa, he seeks to understand why Cadbury Brothers—the English and Quaker chocolate maker—kept on purchasing cacao from São Tomé growers after they were told that workers on the cacao plantations of the Portuguese colony of São Tomé lived in conditions tantamount to slavery.

Ten chapters, based on exhaustive research primarily in English languages sources, describe the events in question. Chapter One follows the trail of newly enslaved laborers from their homes in the interior of West Central Africa to the ships waiting at the coast to take them to "virtual slavery." Chapter Two takes us to England and a discussion of Cadbury Brothers initial response to the news that slaves were growing the cocoa used to make English cocoa. The next chapter then looks at Portuguese imperialism in Africa and the "labor contracts" under which Africans labored for Portuguese planters on São Tomé. Subsequent chapters describe Cadbury's efforts to investigate labor conditions on the plantations from which it purchased cocoa; the reluctance on the part of Great Britain's foreign office to allow British anti-slavery activitists and chocolate manufactures to make an international incident out of the labor conditions in Africa; and Portugal's ineffectual efforts to resolve the problems of labor exploitation in her colonies. Yet even after damning evidence of labor abuse—outlined in Chapter 5—the government and the company were reluctant to act. Cadbury's was concerned to be careful not to unfairly criticize the Portuguese to the point that they failed to take significant steps to change the situation for eight years after they learned about labor conditions in São Tomé. While the anti-slavery societies were pushing the chocolate companies to act, the companies were concerned about loosing their largest supplier of cocoa. Indeed, the companies were reluctant to act until mainland African cocoa cultivation began to take off, while the British Foreign Office feared that official British government criticism of Portugal's behavior would raise questions about British imperialism in Asia and elsewhere.

Although principally a study of British business history, Satre raises several issues of interest to Brazilianists. For those of us for whom the slave trade and slavery ended in 1857 and 1888 respectively, he makes clear that both continued in West Central Africa well after the Atlantic phase of the trade and chattel slavery in the Americas were over. He also shows significant continuity between the positions of British anti-slavery activities in the early nineteenth century and the early twentieth centuries. He makes equally clear, however, that by 1900, however, the British government was not nearly as willing to make anti-slavery a cornerstone of foreign policy, as it had been a century earlier. The reluctance grew out of several factors: first, all of the labor exploitation of which the anti-slavery societies complained in the early 1900s took place within the contours of Portugal's African empire at a time when Great Britain would not have appreciated interference in the administration of its own colonies. Second, serviçais—as the enslaved laborers of São Tomé were known—had contracts and were not purchased and sold in the way of chattel slavery earlier.

Coerced labor most definitely existed on São Tomé, but government officials and chocolate company executives alike asked—was it slavery? It certainly was not the slavery that to which those of us accustomed to studying "chattel slavery" of the Americas are accustomed. Rather, it bore more resemblance to what is often called debt peonage—a system in which workers were contracted for a salary which never seemed to be sufficient to cover the expenses that the worker incurred in traveling to the...