The United States went through a devastating civil war to end slavery—the deadliest war in American history. Have you ever thought about how the British ended slavery in their Caribbean possessions such as Barbados and Jamaica?
The answer is, in a word, “peacefully.” It happened fifteen years before our 1863 Emancipation Proclamation and 17 years before the end of our Civil War.
I don’t mean to gloss over the turmoil—there were major slave revolts in British territories before the Emancipation Act was adopted in 1833, and full emancipation did not arrive until 1838. From 1787, when the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was created (mostly by Quakers), protests against the slave trade in Britain were fierce, long-lasting, and initially futile.
But by 1838 all former slaves in the British possessions were free—without a widespread war.
In this post I will give a brief summary of how British Caribbean slaves were freed. (The French experience was different; I may say more about that another time).
By the late 1600s, the Caribbean islands had become extremely successful in producing sugar, which had skyrocketed in popularity in Britain and Europe as tea and coffee edged out gin and port. Although initially some indentured workers were employed in the sugar plantations, gradually only African slaves worked there. The work was hot, dirty, miserable, the environment more like a factory than a plantation, and slaveowners were allowed to take liberties they could not take with indentured servants. Slave mortality was high.
It can rightly be argued that the full exploitation of sugar cane would have been impossible without slaves.
Here are some key differences between enslavement in the U. S. South and the Caribbean:
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- The number of slaves in the British West Indies was comparatively small—about 665,000 people were freed in 1838, compared with 4 million people freed in the United States in 1865. [1, 2]
- On the other hand, slaves vastly outnumbered planters—90 percent of the Caribbean population was enslaved. [3] Fears of slave revolts were quite realistic and, in fact, there were three substantial nineteenth-century revolts—in Barbados in 1816, Demarara in 1823, and Jamaica in 1831–32.
- Most of the abolitionist movement took place in Britain—much farther from the actual plantations than abolitionists were in the United States. And, unlike the federalism of the U.S., Britain’s parliamentary system meant that once a decision was made, it was usually carried out.
Political Change and Moral Fervor in Britain
So what brought about peaceful emancipation? Historians have differed over the causes but political change and spiritual ferment were intimately connected, and slaveowner compensation fueled the process.
The arguments in favor of abolition had been honed since 1787 when abolitionism began in Britain. The famed William Wilberforce led a group of dedicated advocates for ending the slave trade, many of them Quakers or evangelical Christians who considered the slave trade a moral horror.
The anti-slave trade campaign succeeded in part because Britain was at war with Napoleon in 1807, and British ships were supplying the French with slaves for their islands. First, Parliament ended the sale of slaves to foreigners, then stopped it altogether.
After its 1807 success, the British antislavery movement seems to have faded, but it was rekindled again in 1821 with the formation of the Anti-Slavery Society, which pushed for emancipation.
Assessing the abolitionists, historian James Walvin wrote, “There had never been such broadly-based public backing for a reforming movement, from poorer plebeian communities through to the intellectual elite which had, throughout, formed the nucleus of the movement.”[4]
Parliamentary elections in 1830 and the Parliament Reform Act of 1832 changed the political dynamics. Whigs replaced Tories in the majority, and “rotten boroughs” that had previously been represented by landowner-appointed MPs and represented hardly anyone, were ended. [Thanks to Robert Natelson for correcting my previous statement about rotten boroughs.]
Slavery Ended in 1838 in the British Caribbean
While the 1833 law freed children, it authorized six years of “apprenticeship” for adults. Slaves would still work without pay up to a certain number of hours and then be paid. That didn’t work out—neither slaves nor plantation owners fully accepted it—and in 1838 Parliament freed all slaves.[5]
The emancipation plan compensated slaveowners by a total of £20 million. In purchasing power, the equivalent figure would have been about £1.5 billion in 2007, when historian Nick Draper calculated it. However, as a percentage of the British economy it would represent more like £65 billion (in 2007 figures), he said. [6].
A larger role for economics has been debated at least since 1944, when Eric Williams argued that the sugar industry had been waning and the benefits to slavery had diminished. [7] This has been challenged on the grounds that sugar production was strong before emancipation. However, there was clearly a change in economic theory from mercantilism to laissez-faire, and Adam Smith and other political economists opposed the slave trade. Whether that affected Parliament’s views is not clear.
Most likely, the key forces were: 1) The compensation to owners was considered satisfactory; 2) Moral pressure against slavery was fervent; and 3) Parliament changed sufficiently to welcome emancipation.
Thus, a terrible era ended peacefully—but not in the United States.
Notes (Comments follow the notes)
[1] B. W. Higman ” Population and Labor in the British Caribbean in the Early Nineteenth Century,” in Long-Term Factors in American Economic Growth, eds. Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 605-640, at 605.
[2] “The Civil War and Emancipation,” PBS Resource Bank, Teachers’ Guide, Africans in America.
[3] Stanley L. Engerman, Comment on B. W. Higman, “Population and Labor in the British Caribbean in the Early Nineteenth Century,” 626.
[4 James Walvin, Slaves and Slavery: The British Colonial Experience (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 97.
[5] Some of these details come from Kenneth Morgan, Slavery and the British Empire: From Africa to America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). The rejuvenated Parliament also passed the Factory Act of 1834, which limited the hiring of young children in factories.
[6] Nick Draper, “‘Possessing Slaves’: Ownership, Compensation and Metropolitan Society in Britain at the Time of Emancipation 1834-40.” History Workshop Journal, no. 64 (2007): 74–102. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25472936.
[7] Eric Williams, Capitalism & Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944).
Caribbean map, originally published by John Hinton in 1755, is from the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center, published under a Creative Commons license.
Jon Murphy: Others can explain this better than I. Congressional supremacy is pretty modern. Initially, Congress was in charge of interstate trade and defense, but the constitutional clauses have been stretched, and the Constitution amended, to give Congress enormous powers. The Civil War was part of that process—but even today we have “states’ rights.” Britain didn’t have such a system.
Fascinating look at slavery in Britain. I was wondering if you would expand on this sentence a little bit:
“And, unlike the federalism of the U.S., Britain’s parliamentary system meant that once a decision was made, it was usually carried out.”
I’m not quite sure I understand what you mean here. I thought Congress still had supremacy over the states.