According to Adam Smith, the discovery of America and the Cape route to India are “the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind.” The importance of the discovery of America lay not in the precious metals it provided but in the new and inexhaustible market it afforded for European commodities. One of its principal effects was to “raise the mercantile system to a degree of splendour and glory which it could never otherwise have attained to.”1 It gave rise to an enormous increase in world trade. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were the centuries of trade, as the nineteenth century was the century of production. For Britain that trade was primarily the triangular trade. In 1718 William Wood said that the slave trade was “the spring and parent whence the others flow.”2 A few years later Postlethwayt described the slave trade as “the first principle and foundation of all the rest, the mainspring of the machine which sets every wheel in motion.”3
In this triangular trade England—France and Colonial America equally—supplied the exports and the ships; Africa the human merchandise; the plantations the colonial raw materials. The slave ship sailed from the home country with a cargo of manufactured goods. These were exchanged at a profit on the coast of Africa for Negroes, who were traded on the plantations, at another profit, in exchange for a cargo of colonial produce to be taken back to the home country. As the volume of trade increased, the triangular trade was supplemented, but never supplanted, by a direct trade between home country and the West Indies, exchanging home manufactures directly for colonial produce.
The triangular trade thereby gave a triple stimulus to British industry. The Negroes were purchased with British manufactures; transported to the plantations, they produced sugar, cotton, indigo, molasses and other tropical products, the processing of which created new industries in England; while the maintenance of the Negroes and their owners on the plantations provided another market for British industry, New England agriculture and the Newfoundland fisheries. By 1750 there was hardly a trading or a manufacturing town in England which was not in some way connected with the triangular or direct colonial trade.4 The profits obtained provided one of the main streams of that accumulation of capital in England which financed the Industrial Revolution.
The West Indian islands became the hub of the British Empire, of immense importance to the grandeur and prosperity of England. It was the Negro slaves who made these sugar colonies the most precious colonies ever recorded in the whole annals of imperialism. To Postlethwayt they were “the fundamental prop and support” of the colonies, “valuable people” whose labor supplied Britain with all plantation produce. The British Empire was “a magnificent superstructure of American commerce and naval power on an African foundation.”5
Sir Josiah Child estimated that every Englishman in the West Indies, “with the ten blacks that work with him, accounting what they eat, use and wear, would make employment for four men in England.”6 By Davenant’s computation one person in the islands, white or Negro, was as profitable as seven in England.7 Another writer considered that every family in the West Indies gave employment to five seamen and many more artificers, manufacturers and tradesmen, and that every white person in the islands brought in ten pounds annually clear profit to England, twenty times as much as a similar person in the home country.8 William Wood reckoned that a profit of seven shillings per head per annum was sufficient to enrich a country; each white man in the colonies brought a profit of over seven pounds.9 Sir Dalby Thomas went further—every person employed on the sugar plantations was 130 times more valuable to England than one at home.10 Professor Pitman has estimated that in 1775 British West Indian plantations represented a valuation of fifty millions sterling,11 and the sugar planters themselves put the figure at seventy millions in 1788.12 In 1798 Pitt assessed the annual income from West Indian plantations at four million pounds as compared with one million from the rest of the world.13 As Adam Smith wrote: “The profits of a sugar plantation in any of our West Indian colonies are generally much greater than those of any other cultivation that is known either in Europe or America.”14
According to Davenant, Britain’s total trade at the end of the seventeenth century brought in a profit of £2,000,000. The plantation trade accounted for £600,000; re-export of plantation goods £120,000; European, African and Levant trade £600,000; East India trade £500,000; re-export of East India goods £180,000.15
Sir Charles Whitworth, in 1776, made a complete compilation, from official records, of the import and export trade of Great Britain for the years 1697–1773. His book is invaluable for an appreciation of the relative importance of the Caribbean and mainland colonies in the British Empire of the eighteenth century. For the year 1697 the West Indian colonies supplied nine per cent of British imports, the mainland colonies eight per cent; four per cent of British exports went to the West Indies, slightly under four per cent to the mainland; the West Indies accounted for seven per cent of Britain’s total trade, the mainland for six per cent. In 1773 the West Indies still maintained their lead, though as an export market they had become inferior to the mainland colonies with their larger white population. In that year nearly one-quarter of British imports came from all Caribbean areas, one-eighth from the entire mainland; the Caribbean consumed somewhat over eight per cent of British exports, the mainland sixteen per cent; fifteen per cent of Britain’s total trade was with the West Indies, fourteen per cent with the mainland. Taking the totals for the years 1714–1773, and including in those totals trade with new acquisitions, foreign colonies temporarily occupied by British forces during the war, or foreign colonies in general, we get the following picture: One-fifth of British imports came from the Caribbean, one-ninth from the mainland; six per cent of British exports went to the Caribbean, nine per cent to the mainland; twelve per cent of Britain’s total foreign commerce was accounted for by the Caribbean, ten per cent by the mainland. During these same years one-half per cent of British imports came from Africa, two per cent of British exports went to Africa, while African trade represented nearly one and a half per cent of total British trade. Leaving out of account, therefore, the plantation colonies on the mainland, Virginia, Maryland, Carolina, Georgia, the triangular and West Indian trades represented nearly one-seventh of total British trade during the years 1714–1773.
The amazing value of these West Indian colonies can more graphically be presented by comparing individual West Indian islands with individual mainland colonies. In 1697 British imports from Barbados were five times the combined imports from the bread colonies; the exports to Barbados were slightly larger. Little Barbados, with its 166 square miles, was worth more to British capitalism than New England, New York and Pennsylvania combined. In 1773 British imports from Jamaica were more than five times the combined imports from the bread colonies; British exports to Jamaica were nearly one-third larger than those to New England and only slightly less than those to New York and Pennsylvania combined. For the years 1714–177 3 British imports from Montserrat were three times the imports from Pennsylvania, imports from Nevis were almost double those from New York, imports from Antigua were over three times those from New England. Imports from Barbados were more than twice as large as those from the bread colonies, imports from Jamaica nearly six times as large. For the same years Jamaica as an export market was as valuable as New England; Barbados and Antigua combined meant as much to British exporters as New York; Montserrat and Nevis combined were a better market than Pennsylvania. British exports to Africa during these years were only one-tenth less than those to New England, British imports from Africa one-quarter more than those from New York and more than double those from Pennsylvania.16
Mercantilists were enthusiastic. The triangular trade, and the associated trade with the sugar islands, because of the navigation they encouraged, were more valuable to England than her mines of tin or coal.17 These were ideal colonies. But for them Britain would have no gold or silver, except what she received from illicit commerce with the Spanish colonies, and an unfavorable balance of trade.18 Their tropical products, unlike those of the northern part of the mainland, did not compete with those of the home country. They showed little sign of that industrial development which was the constant fear where the mainland was concerned. Their large black population was an effective guarantee against aspirations to independence.19 It all combined to spell one word, sugar. “The pleasure, glory and grandeur of England,” wrote Sir Dalby Thomas, “has been advanced more by sugar than by any other commodity, wool not excepted.”20
There was one qualification—monopoly. The economic philosophy of the age had no room for the open door, and colonial trade was a rigid monopoly of the home country. The mercantilists were adamant on this point. “Colonies,” wrote Davenant, “are a strength to their mother kingdom, while they are under good discipline, while they are strictly made to observe the fundamental laws of their original country, and while they are kept dependent on it. But otherwise, they are worse than members lopped from the body politic, being indeed like offensive arms wrested from a nation to be turned against it as occasion shall serve.”21 The colonies, in return for their prosperity, owed the mother country, in Postlethwayt’s view, gratitude and an indispensable duty—“to be immediately dependent on their original parent and to make their interest subservient thereunto.”22
It was on these ideas that the mercantile system was erected. The colonies were obliged to send their valuable products to England only and use English ships. They could buy nothing but British unless the foreign commodities were first taken to England. And since, as dutiful children, they were to work for the greater glory of their parent, they were reduced to a state of permanent vassalage and confined solely to the exploitation of their agricultural resources. Not a nail, not a horseshoe, said Chatham, could be manufactured, nor hats, nor iron, nor refined sugar. In return for this, England made one concession— the colonial products were given a monopoly of the home market.
The keystone of this mercantilist arch was the Navigation Laws, “English measures designed for English ends.”23 The Navigation Laws were aimed at the Dutch, “the foster fathers,” as Andrews calls them, of the early British colonies,24 who supplied credit, delivered goods, purchased colonial produce and transported it to Europe, all at more attractive rates than the British could offer in open market. But the laws were aimed also at the Scotch and Irish25 and Scotland’s attempt to set up an independent African Company26 aroused great fears in England and was largely responsible for the Act of Union in 1707. The sugar islands protested against this monopoly of their trade. Those who, in 1840, were loudest in their opposition to free trade, were, in 1660, the most fervent advocates of free trade. In 1666 the governor of Barbados begged “leave to be plain with His Majesty, for he is come to where it pinches. . . . Free trade is the life of all colonies . . . whoever he be that advised His Majesty to restrain and tie up his colonies is more a merchant than a good subject.”27 His successor repeated the warning: “Ye must make their port a free port for all people to trade with them that will come. The ordinary way thats taken for new plantations I humbly conceive is a little erroneous. My Lords the Act for Trade and Navigation in England will certainly in tyme bee the ruine of all his Maties forreigne plantations.”28 The Lords of Trade decided to “give him a cheque for upholding this maxim of free trade,” and censured him severely for “these dangerous principles which he entertains contrary to the settled laws of the kingdom and the apparent advantage of it.”29
Such subversive ideas could not possibly be tolerated in an age which heard demands that the Navigation Laws be stretched to confine the provision for “English built” ships to ships built of English timber and using British made canvas, and which passed legislation that the dead be buried in English wool and all servants and slaves on the plantations be made to wear English wool, to encourage England’s foremost industry. Negroes, the most important export of Africa, and sugar, the most important export of the West Indies, were the principal commodities enumerated by the Navigation Laws. But the West Indian sugar planters never accepted this limitation on their trade. Ultimately in 1739 they were granted a modification of the Navigation Laws, but in so limited a form and only to such poor foreign markets in Europe—south of Cape Finisterre— that its advantages were nugatory. But even this concession, badly shorn though it was, aroused the wrath of English merchants. It would, said a Liverpool petition before the measure became a law, “be highly prejudicial in many instances to the interest and manufactures, to the trade and navigation of Great Britain in general and of this port in particular.”30 One hundred years later the same conflict was to be fought out, more bitterly, between monopoly and free trade, mercantilism and laissez faire. The antagonists were the same, British traders and industrialists on the one hand and West Indian sugar planters on the other. But British capitalism, now all for monopoly, was then all for free trade; the West Indian planters, on the other hand, forgot all their noble free trade sentiments and clung tenaciously to the principle of monopoly which they had formerly condemned, as making them “the merchants’ slaves.”31
This external trade naturally drew in its wake a tremendous development of shipping and shipbuilding. Not the least of the advantages of the triangular trade was its contribution to the wooden walls of England. There was less distinction between a merchant ship and a man-of-war in those days than there is today. The “long voyage” was an admirable nursery for the seamen, the merchantmen invaluable aides to the navy in time of war; and advocates of the slave trade argued that its abolition would annihilate the marine by cutting off a great source of seamen.32 As one Liverpool slave trader wrote: “It is a matter of two much importance to this kingdom—when ever it is abolish’d the naval importance of this kingdom is abolish’d with it, that moment our flagg will gradually cease to ride triumphant on the seas.”33
In 1678 the Commissioners of Customs reported that the plantation trade was one of the great nurseries of the shipping and seamen of England and one of the greatest branches of its trade.34 Here again the sugar colonies outdistanced the bread colonies. More English ships sailed to the sugar colonies than to all the mainland colonies combined. In 1690 the sugar colonies employed 114 ships, of 13,600 tons and 1,203 seamen; the mainland colonies m ships, of 14,320 tons and 1,271 seamen.35 Between 1710 and 1714, 122,000 tons of British shipping sailed to the West Indies, 112,000 tons to the mainland.36 The West Indian trade in 1709 employed one-tenth of British shipping engaged in foreign trade.37 Between 1709 and 1787 British shipping engaged in foreign trade quadrupled;38 ships clearing for Africa multiplied twelve times and the tonnage eleven times.39
Shipbuilding in England received a direct stimulus from the triangular trade. Vessels of a particular type were constructed for the slave trade, combining capacity with speed in an effort to reduce mortality. Many shipwrights in Liverpool were themselves slave traders. The outstanding firm was Baker and Dawson, one of the largest exporters of slaves to the West Indies, and engaged, after 1783, in the supplying of slaves to the Spanish colonies. John Gorell was one of the Liverpool members of the Company of Merchants trading to Africa. So was John Okill, one of Liverpool’s most successful shipbuilders, but apparently he eschewed the slave trade. In a port whose prosperity was intimately connected with the slave trade, William Rathbone was a curiosity in his refusal to supply timber for the construction of vessels to be employed in the slave trade,40 in which half of Liverpool’s sailors were engaged.41
The shipping industry was divided, as industry in general, on the question of the organization of the slave trade. Some sections favored the Royal African Company, others the free traders.42 But on the question of abolition the industry presented a united front, arguing that abolition would strike at the very roots of Britain’s naval and imperial supremacy. The first reaction of Liverpool to the act of 1788 regulating the capacity of slavers was that it left 22 masters of slave ships, 47 mates and 350 seamen unemployed, with their families and the tradesmen dependent more indirectly on the trade with Africa.43
In addition to the seamen, there were the ancillary trades. Carpenters, painters and boat-builders; tradesmen and artisans connected with repairs, equipment and lading; commissions, wages, dock duties, insurances—all depended partly on the ships trading to Africa. To supply the ships, there were in 1774 fifteen roperies in Liverpool.44 There were few people in the town, it was claimed, who would not be affected, directly or indirectly, by abolition.45
The sugar islands made yet another contribution to the growth of shipping. The peculiar economy developed in the West Indies concentrated on export crops while food was imported. Most important of all the food supplies was fish, an article dear to the heart of every mercantilist, because it provided employment for ships and training for seamen. Laws were passed in England to encourage the consumption of fish. Friday and Saturday were set apart as fish days. Fish was an important item of the diet of the slaves on the plantations, and the English herring trade found its chief market in the sugar plantations.46 The Newfoundland fishery depended to a considerable extent on the annual export of dried fish to the West Indies, the refuse or “poor John” fish, “fit for no other consumption.”47 A West Indian tradition was thereby fostered. Imported salted cod is still today a normal and favorite dish in all but the well-to-do West Indian families; whether it is still “fit for no other consumption” is not known.
The increase in shipping subjected the eighteenth century docks of England to intolerable strain. The number of ships entering the port of London trebled between 1705 and 1795, the tonnage quadrupled, exclusive of the smaller vessels engaged in the coasting trade. The warehouses on the quays were inadequate for the imports. The colliers could not be discharged and the price of coals rose enormously. Sugar was piled six or eight hogsheads high on the quay, increasing the danger of fire and encouraging thefts. A great machine of organized crime was developed, involving some ten thousand people. The total annual depredations at the docks were estimated at half a million pounds, half this sum from vessels from the Caribbean.
The West Indian merchants set themselves to grapple with the problem. They organized a special force of constables to cope with the thefts, and set up a general register of laborers discharging West Indian ships. They lobbied in Parliament and eventually secured an act authorizing the construction of the West India Docks. For twenty-one years they were given a monopoly of loading and unloading vessels engaged in the West Indian trade. The first stone was laid in 1800, and the ceremony was followed by an elegant entertainment for the notables present, at which one toast was appropriately drunk to the prosperity of the West Indian colonies. The docks were publicly opened in 1802, the first ship being named after the Prime Minister, and the second laden with six hundred tons of sugar.48
The development of the triangular trade and of shipping and shipbuilding led to the growth of the great seaport towns. Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow occupied, as seaports and trading centers, the position in the age of trade that Manchester, Birmingham and Sheffield occupied later in the age of industry.
It was said in 1685 that there was scarcely a shopkeeper in Bristol who had not a venture on board some ship bound for Virginia or the Antilles. Even the parsons talked of nothing but trade, and it was satirically alleged that Bristol freights were owned not by merchants but by mechanics.49 Customs duties rose from £10,000 in 1634 to £334,000 in 1785. Wharfage dues, payable on every vessel above sixty tons, doubled between 1745 and 1775.50
It was the slave and sugar trades which made Bristol the second city of England for the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century. “There is not,” wrote a local annalist, “a brick in the city but what is cemented with the blood of a slave. Sumptuous mansions, luxurious living, liveried menials, were the produce of the wealth made from the sufferings and groans of the slaves bought and sold by the Bristol merchants. . . . In their childlike simplicity they could not feel the iniquity of the merchandise, but they could feel it lucrative.”51 An analysis of a committee set up in 1789 to oppose the movement for abolition of the slave trade shows that among the members elected were nine merchants at some time mayors of Bristol, five who were sheriffs, seven had been or were to be Masters of the Society of Merchant Venturers.52
When Bristol was outstripped in the slave trade by Liverpool, it turned its attention from the triangular trade to the direct sugar trade. Fewer Bristol ships sailed to Africa, more went direct to the Caribbean. In 1700 the port had forty-six ships in the West Indian trade.53 In 1787 there were thirty Bristol vessels engaged in the slave trade, seventy-two in the West Indian trade; the former averaged 140 tons each, the latter 240.54 In 1788 Bristol had as many ships in the trade to the Leeward Islands, and almost as many in the trade to Jamaica, as in the trade to Africa.55 Nearly one-third of the tonnage which entered, more than one-third of that which sailed from, the port was engaged in the trade with the sugar colonies;56 and it was the amiable custom in Bristol to celebrate the arrival of the first sugar ship each year by a gift of wine at the expense of the fortunate owner.57 The West Indian trade was worth to Bristol twice as much as all her other overseas commerce combined. As late as 1830 five-eighths of its trade was with the West Indies, and it was said in 1833 that without the West Indian trade Bristol would be a fishing port.58
Bristol had a West Indian Society of its own. The Town Council distributed municipal funds for the relief of distress caused by fire in the sugar islands. It was customary for younger sons and junior members of West Indian firms to spend some years on the plantations before entering business at home. Bristol members of Parliament in the eighteenth century were frequently associated, in one way or another, with the sugar plantations, and so important did the islands become to Bristol that for the first half of the nineteenth century Bristol was always represented in Parliament by a West Indian—a Baillie, a Protheroe, or a Miles. James Evan Baillie exhorted his fellow citizens not to lay the axe at the root of their own prosperity by supporting the abolition of slavery in the islands.59 His own prosperity was also at stake. The compensation paid to the family for their ownership of numerous slaves in Trinidad and British Guiana exceeded £62,000.60 Bristol presented a determined opposition to the equalization of the sugar duties which gave the coup de grace to the West Indian monopoly. Thereafter Bristol’s trade with the West Indies declined rapidly. In 1847 forty per cent of the port’s tonnage was bound for the West Indies, and ships returning from the islands represented a mere eleven per cent. In 1871 no ship left Bristol for Jamaica, and the inward tonnage from the islands constituted less than two per cent of the arrivals. Bristol’s trade with the islands did not revive until the end of the nineteenth century with the advent of the banana in the world market.61
What the West Indian trade did for Bristol the slave trade did for Liverpool. In 1565 Liverpool had 138 householders, seven streets only were inhabited, the port’s merchant marine amounted to twelve ships of 223 tons. Until the end of the seventeenth century the only local event of importance was the siege of the town during the English Civil War.62 In collecting ship money Strafford assessed Liverpool at fifteen pounds; Bristol paid two thousand.63 The shipping entering Liverpool increased four and a half times between 1709 and 1771; the outward tonnage six and a half times. The number of ships owned by the port multiplied four times during the same period, the tonnage and sailors over six times.64 Customs receipts soared from an average of £51,000 for the years 1750 to 1757 to £648,000 in 1785.65 Dock duties increased two and a half times between 1752 and 1771.66 The population rose from 5,000 in 1700 to 34,000 in 1773. By 1770 Liverpool had become too famous a town in the trading world for Arthur Young to pass it by on his travels over England.67
The abolitionist Clarkson argued that the rise of Liverpool was due to a variety of causes, among which were the salt trade, the prodigious increase of the population of Lancashire, and the rapid and great extension of the manufactures of Manchester.68 This is a particularly flagrant case of putting the cart before the horse. It was only the capital accumulation of Liverpool which called the population of Lancashire into existence and stimulated the manufactures of Manchester. That capital accumulation came from the slave trade, whose importance was appreciated more by contemporaries than by later historians.
It was a common saying that several of the principal streets of Liverpool had been marked out by the chains, and the walls of the houses cemented by the blood, of the African slaves,69 and one street was nicknamed “Negro Row.”70 The red brick Customs House was blazoned with Negro heads.71 The story is told of an actor in the town, who, hissed by the audience for appearing before them, not for the first time, in a drunken condition, steadied himself and declared with offended majesty: “I have not come here to be insulted by a set of wretches, every brick in whose infernal town is cemented with an African’s blood.”72
It was estimated in 1790 that the 138 ships which sailed from Liverpool for Africa represented a capital of over a million pounds. Liverpool’s own probable loss from the abolition of the slave trade was then computed at over seven and a half million pounds.73 Abolition, it was said, would ruin the town. It would destroy the foundation of its commerce and the first cause of the national industry and wealth. “What vain pretence of liberty,” it was asked in Liverpool, “can infatuate people to run into so much licentiousness as to assert a trade is unlawful which custom immemorial, and various Acts of Parliament, have ratified and given a sanction to?”74
This dependence on the slave trade has proved very awkward to sensitive and patriotic historians. A generation, argued a Bristol historian in 1939, which has seen the spoliation of Ethiopia, the brutal dismemberment of China and the rape of Czechoslovakia, cannot afford to condemn the slave trade.75 In the opinion of a Liverpool town clerk, Liverpool has borne more than its share of the stigma attaching to the slave trade. The indomitable perseverance and energy of its people would have ensured an equal prosperity in other directions, as effectively if not as quickly, had the slave trade not existed, and the ultimate success of the port would perhaps have been retarded, though not prejudiced or impaired, without the slave trade.76 According to yet another Liverpool writer, there was nothing derogatory in the fact that their ancestors had dealt in “niggers,” and the horrors of the slave trade were exceeded by the horrors of the Liverpool drink traffic. But, after all, “it was the capital made in the African slave trade that built some of our docks. It was the price of human flesh and blood that gave us a start.” Some of those who made their fortunes out of the slave trade had soft hearts under their waistcoats for the poor of Liverpool, while the profits from slave trading represented “an influx of wealth which, perhaps, no consideration would induce a commercial community to relinquish.”77
Not until the Act of Union of 1707 was Scotland allowed to participate in colonial trade. That permission put Glasgow on the map. Sugar and tobacco underlay the prosperity of the town in the eighteenth century. Colonial commerce stimulated the growth of new industries. As Bishop Pococke wrote in 1760, after a visit to Glasgow: “the city has above all others felt the advantages of the Union, by the West India trade which they enjoy, which is very great, especially in tobacco, indigoes and sugar.”78 Sugar refining continued as an important industry in the Clyde Valley until the eclipse of the West Indian islands in the middle of the nineteenth century.
It is necessary now to trace the industrial development in England which was stimulated directly or indirectly by the goods for the triangular trade and the processing of colonial produce.
The widespread ramifications of the slave trade in English industry are illustrated by this cargo to Africa for the year 1787: cotton and linen goods, silk handkerchiefs, coarse blue and red woolen cloths, scarlet cloth in grain, coarse and fine hats, worsted caps, guns, powder, shot, sabers, lead bars, iron bars, pewter basons, copper kettles and pans, iron pots, hardware of various kinds, earthen and glass ware, hair and gilt leather trunks, beads of various kinds, silver and gold rings and ornaments, paper, coarse and fine checks, linen ruffled shirts and caps, British and foreign spirits and tobacco.79
This sundry assortment was typical of the slave trader’s cargo. Finery for Africans, household utensils, cloths of all kinds, iron and other metals, together with guns, handcuffs and fetters: the production of these stimulated capitalism, provided employment for British labor, and brought great profits to England.
Until the tremendous development of the cotton industry in the Industrial Revolution, wool was the spoiled child of English manufactures. It figured largely in all considerations affecting the slave trade in the century after 1680. The cargo of a slave ship was incomplete without some woolen manufactures —serges, says, perpetuanos, arrangoes and bays. Sometimes the cloth was called after the locality where it was first manufactured. Bridwaters represented Bridgewater’s interest in the colonial market; Welsh Plaines, a woolen cloth of the simplest weave, was manufactured in western England and Wales.
A parliamentary committee of 1695 voiced the public sentiment that the trade to Africa was an encouragement to the woolen manufacture.80 Among the arguments put forward to prove the importance of the slave trade, the exports of wool which that trade encouraged were always given first place. A pamphlet of 1680, illustrating the public utility and advantages of the African trade, begins with “the exportation of our native woollen and other manufactures in great abundance, most of which were imported formerly out of Holland . . . whereby the wooll of this nation is much more consumed and spent then formerly; and many thousand of the poor people imployed.”81 Similarly, the Royal African Company stated in a petition in 1696 that the slave trade should be supported by England, because of the exports it encouraged of woolen and other English manufactures.82
The woolen manufacturers of the kingdom took a prominent part in the long and bitter controversy waged between the Royal African Company and the separate traders. Those from whom the company made its purchases argued that the interlopers caused disturbances and dislocation of the trade, and that the trade declined when the company’s monopoly was modified. In 1694 the clothiers of Witney petitioned Parliament in favor of the company’s monopoly. The cloth workers of Shrewsbury followed suit in 1696, and the weavers of Kidderminster twice in the same year. In 1709 the weavers of Exeter and the woolen tradesmen of London, and in 1713 several tradesmen interested in the woolen manufacture, also took the company’s side.83
But the weight of the woolen interests was on the whole thrown on the side of the free traders. The company’s monopoly enabled it to “screw up the tradesmen to a limited quantity and price, length, breadth and weight.”84 Monopoly meant one buyer and one seller only. A searcher in the custom house testified that when the trade was open there was a greater exportation of wool. According to the testimony of two London merchants in 1693, the monopoly had reduced the exports of wool by nearly one-third. Suffolk exported 25,000 woolen cloths a year; two years after the incorporation of the company, the number declined to 500.85 In 1690 the clothiers of Suffolk and Essex and the manufacturers of Exeter petitioned against the company’s monopoly. Exeter petitioned again in 1694, 1696, 1709, 1710 and 1711 in favor of free trade. The woolen merchants of the kingdom complained in 1694 that restrictions had greatly lessened their sales. Similar petitions were presented against the monopoly by the woolen traders of London and the woolen merchants of Plymouth in 1710, the woolen dealers of Totnes and Ashburton, the woolen manufacturers of Kidderminster, the Merchant Adventurers of Mine-head engaged in the woolen manufacture in 1711.86
Other petitions to Parliament emphasized the importance of the colonial market for the woolen industry. In 1690 the planters of Jamaica protested against the company’s monopoly as a discouragement to trade, especially the woolen trade. A petition from Manchester in 1704 revealed that English wool was traded to Holland, Hamburg and the East for linen yarn and flax, which, when manufactured, were sent to the plantations. The merchants and traders of Liverpool in 1709, the merchants and inhabitants of Liverpool in 1715, contended that the company’s monopoly was detrimental to the woolen industry. Petitions from the industrial North in 1735 disclosed that Wake-field, Halifax, Burnley, Colne and Kendal were all interested in the manufacture of woolen goods for Africa and the West Indies.87
That woolen goods should figure so prominently in tropical markets is to be attributed to the deliberate policy of mercantilist England. It was argued in 1732, on behalf of the mainland colonies, that Pennsylvania alone consumed more woolen exports from England than all the sugar islands combined, and New York more than any sugar island except Jamaica.88 Woolen goods were more suited for these colder climates, and the Barbadian planters preferred light calicoes which could be easily washed.89 But wool was England’s staple, and climatic considerations were too great a refinement for the mercantilist mind. Any one familiar with British West Indian society today will appreciate the strength of the tradition thereby fostered. Woolen undergarments are still common in the islands today, though more among the older generation, and suits of blue serge are still a sign of the well-dressed man. Like the Englishman and unlike the North American in the colonies, the Caribbean colored middle class today still apes the fashions of the home country in its preference for the heavier materials which are so ridiculous and uncomfortable in a tropical environment.
But cotton later superseded wool in colonial markets as it did in domestic. Of a total export of four million pounds of woolen manufactures in 1772, less than three per cent went to the West Indies and less than four per cent to Africa.90 The best customers were Europe and America. In 1783 the woolen industry was slowly beginning its belated imitation of the technological changes which had revolutionized the cotton industry. In its progress after 1783 the triangular trade and West Indian market played no appreciable part.
What the building of ships for the transport of slaves did for eighteenth century Liverpool, the manufacture of cotton goods for the purchase of slaves did for eighteenth century Manchester. The first stimulus to the growth of Cottonopolis came from the African and West Indian markets.
The growth of Manchester was intimately associated with the growth of Liverpool, its outlet to the sea and the world market. The capital accumulated by Liverpool from the slave trade poured into the hinterland to fertilize the energies of Manchester; Manchester goods for Africa were taken to the coast in the Liverpool slave vessels. Lancashire’s foreign market meant chiefly the West Indian plantations and Africa. The export trade was £14,000 in 1739; in 1759 it had increased nearly eight times; in 1779 it was £303,000. Up to 1770 one-third of this export went to the slave coast, one-half to the American and West Indian colonies.91 It was this tremendous dependence on the triangular trade that made Manchester.
Light woolen goods were popular on the slave coast: so were silks, provided they were gaudy and had large flowers. But the most popular of all materials was cotton goods, as the African was already accustomed to coarse blue and white cotton cloths of his own manufacture, and from the beginning the striped loincloths called “annabasses” were a regular feature of every slave trader’s cargo. Indian textiles, banned in England, soon established a monopoly of the African market. Brawls, tapsells, niccanees, cuttanees, buckshaws, nillias, salempores— these Indian cloths were highly prized, and yet another powerful vested interest was drawn into the orbit of the slave trade. Manchester tried to compete with the East India Company; bafts, for example, were cheap cotton fabrics from the East later copied in England for the African market. But the backwardness of the English dyeing process made it impossible for Manchester to get the fast red, green and yellow colors popular on the coast. Manchester proved unable to imitate the colors of these Indian cottons, and there is evidence to show that the French cotton manufacturers of Normandy were equally un-successful in learning the secrets of the East.
Manchester was more fortunate in its trade in cotton and linen checks, though figures for the first half of the eighteenth century are unreliable. The European and colonial wars of 1739–1748 and the reorganization which the African Company was undergoing up to 1750 caused a slump in the cotton trade to Africa, and when it revived after 1750 Indian exports were inadequate to satisfy the demand. English manufacturers made full use of this opportunity to push their own goods. In 1752 the export of cotton-linen checks alone from England was £57,000; in 1763, at the end of the Seven Years’ War, it stood at the exceptionally high figure of £302,000, but after 1767 remained between £100,000 and £200,000, when Indian competition again proved formidable.
Available statistics make comparison between the value of English cotton checks and Indian cotton pieces exported to Africa impossible, as the former are given by value and the latter by quantity. But the growth of Indian and English cotton exports to Africa will give some indication of the importance of the African market. Total cotton exports stood at £214,600 in 1751; in 1763 they were more than double; in 1772 they were more than four times as great, but as a result of the American Revolution they declined to £195,900 in 1780. The effect of the war on the slave and plantation markets is at once apparent. By 1780 checks had ceased to be an important part of the cotton industry. But it was not the war alone that was to be blamed. Manchester could satisfy the African market only when Indian cottons were scarce or dear. For the plantation market cheapness was essential, and by 1780 raw cotton was becoming increasingly expensive as the supply lagged behind the demand of the new inventions.92
But according to estimates given to the Privy Council in 1788, Manchester exported annually to Africa goods worth £200,000, £180,000 of this for Negroes only; the manufacture of these goods represented an investment of £300,000 and gave employment to 180,000 men, women and children.93 The French manufacturers, impressed with the quality and cheapness of those special goods called Guinea cloths produced in Manchester, were sending agents over to get particulars, and extending open offers to Manchester manufacturers, should Britain abolish the slave trade, to set up in Rouen where they would be given every encouragement.94 In addition, Manchester in 1788 furnished for the West Indian trade more than £300,000 annually in manufactures, which gave employment to many thousands.95
Between the cotton manufacturers of Manchester and the slave traders there were not the close connections that have already been noticed in the case of the shipbuilders of Liverpool. But two exceptional instances of such connections exist. Two well-known cotton manufacturers of Lancashire, Sir William Fazackerly and Samuel Touchet, were both members of the Company of Merchants trading to Africa. Fazackerly, a London dealer in fustians, presented the case of the separate traders of Bristol and Liverpool against the African Company in 1726.96 Touchet, member of a great Manchester check-making house, represented Liverpool on the governing body of the company during the period 1753–1756. He was concerned in the equipping of the expedition which captured Senegal in 1758 and tried hard to get the contract for victualling the troops. A patron of Paul’s unsuccessful spinning machine intended to revolutionize the cotton industry, accused openly of attempting to monopolize the import of raw cotton, Touchet added to his many interests a partnership, with his brothers, in about twenty ships in the West Indian trade. Touchet died, leaving a large fortune, and was described in his obituary notice as “the most considerable merchant and manufacturer in Manchester, remarkable for great abilities and strict integrity, and for universal benevolence and usefulness to mankind.” Two modern writers have left us this description of the man: “Icarus-like soaring too high,” he emerges as “the first considerable financier that the Manchester trade produced, and certainly as one of the earliest cases of a Manchester man who was concerned at once in manufacturing and in large scale financial and commercial ventures in the City and abroad.”97
Other cases emphasize the significance of Touchet’s career. Robert Diggles, African slave trader of Liverpool, was the son of a Manchester linen draper and brother of another. In 1747 a Manchester man was in partnership with two Liverpool men in a voyage to Jamaica. A leading Manchester firm, the Hibberts, owned sugar plantations in Jamaica, and at one time supplied checks and imitations of Indian goods to the African Company for the slave trade.98
Manchester received a double stimulus from the colonial trade. If it supplied the goods needed on the slave coast and on the plantations, its manufacturers depended in turn on the supply of the raw material. Manchester’s interest in the islands was twofold.
The raw material came to England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries chiefly from two sources, the Levant and the West Indies. In the eighteenth century that Indian competition which proved too formidable for Manchester on the slave coast and which was threatening to swamp even the home market with Indian goods was effectively smashed, as far as England was concerned, by the prohibitive duties on Indian imports into England. The first step was thereby taken by which the motherland of cotton became in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the chief market of Lancashire. In the eighteenth century the measure gave Manchester a monopoly of the home market, and private Indian traders began to import the raw cotton for the Lancashire factories. A competitor to the West Indian islands had arisen, to be followed later by Brazil, whose product by 1783 was recognized as clearly superior to all the other varieties.
But in the early eighteenth century England depended on the West Indian islands for between two-thirds and three-quarters of its raw cotton. Cotton, nevertheless, was essentially a secondary consideration in the West Indian planter’s outlook, and however much the planters as a body looked with jealousy on its cultivation in India or Africa or Brazil, it remained a secondary consideration. In opposing the retention of Guadeloupe in 1763, the West India interest measured their arguments in terms of sugar, while, significantly, a contemporary pamphleteer pointed to its cotton exports to England as a reason for keeping the island.99 But British consumption was small and the West Indian contribution welcome. In 1764 British imports of raw cotton amounted to nearly four million pounds; the West Indies supplied one-half. In 1780 Britain imported more than six and a half million pounds; the West Indies supplied two-thirds.100
In 1783, the West Indies, therefore, still dominated the cotton trade. But a new day was dawning. In the phenomenal expansion of an industry which was to clothe the world, a few tiny islands in the Caribbean could hardly hope to supply the necessary raw material. Their cotton was the long-staple, sea-island variety, easily cleaned by hand, limited to certain areas, and therefore expensive. When the cotton gin permitted the cultivation of the short-staple cotton by facilitating the task of cleaning, the center of gravity shifted from the islands to the mainland to meet the enormous demands of the new machinery in England. In 1784 a shipment of American cotton was seized by the Liverpool customs authorities on the ground that cotton, not being a bona fide product of the United States, could not legally be transported to England in an American vessel.
It was an evil omen for the West Indians, coinciding, as it did, with another significant development. During the American Revolution Manchester’s cotton exports to Europe almost trebled.101 The Revolution itself created another important market for Manchester, the independent United States, at a time when the cotton gin was just around the corner. For both its import and export markets, therefore, cotton was beginning to reach out to the world market. The sunny Caribbean sky was marred by a barely perceptible but portentous cloud, and the gentle West Indian breeze was rising ominously. It heralded the approaching political hurricane which, to alter Edmund Burke’s description of those visitations of nature common in the West Indies, humbled the sugar planter’s pride if it did not correct his vices.
The processing of colonial raw materials gave rise to new industries in England, provided further employment for shipping, and contributed to a greater extension of the world market and international trade. Of these raw materials sugar was preeminent, and its manufacture gave birth to the sugar refining industry. The refining process transformed the crude brown sugar manufactured on the plantations into white sugar, which was durable and capable of preservation, and could be easily handled and distributed all over the world.
The earliest reference to sugar refining in England is an order of the Privy Council in 1615 prohibiting aliens from erecting sugar houses or practising the art of refining sugar.102 The importance of the industry increased in proportion to its production on the plantations, and as sugar became, with the spread of tea and coffee, one of the necessities of life instead of the luxury of kings.
About the middle of the eighteenth century there were 120 refineries in England. Each refinery was estimated to provide employment for about nine men. In addition the distribution of the refined product called into existence a number of subsidiary trades and required ships and wagons for the coastal and inland trade.103
The sugar refining industry of Bristol was one of the most important of the kingdom. It was in Bristol in 1654 that the diarist, Evelyn, saw for the first time the method of manufacturing loaf sugar,104 and in the annals of Bristol’s history sugar figures frequently as a gift to distinguished visitors to the town —Richard, son of Oliver Cromwell, and King Charles II, in return for which the king knighted four of the town’s merchants.105
In 1799, there were twenty refineries in Bristol, and the town did more refining than London in proportion to size and population. Bristol’s sugar was considered superior in quality, its proximity to the coal supplies for fuel enabled it to sell cheaper than London, while it found in Ireland, the whole of South Wales and West England the markets for which it was destined by its geographical location.106 Sugar refining long remained one of the staples of Bristol. The refiners of the city petitioned Parliament in 1789 against the abolition of the slave trade on which “the welfare and prosperity, if not the actual existence, of the West India Islands depend.”107 In 1811 there were sixteen refineries in the town, whose connection with this industry ceased only towards the end of the nineteenth century, when bananas replaced sugar.108
Some of Bristol’s most prominent citizens were connected with the sugar refining business. Robert Aldworth, seventeenth century alderman, was closely identified with refining, while he was at the same time a merchant who built two docks to accommodate the increased shipping.109 William Miles was the outstanding refiner of the eighteenth century. His career is typical of many other cases. Miles came to Bristol with three halfpence in his pocket, worked as a porter, apprenticed himself to a shipbuilder, saved fifteen pounds, and sailed to Jamaica as a ship’s carpenter in a merchantman. He bought a cask or two of sugar which he sold in Bristol, at a huge profit, and with the proceeds bought articles in great demand in Jamaica and repeated his former investment. Miles soon became very wealthy and settled in Bristol as a refiner. This was the humble origin of one of the greatest fortunes made in the West Indian trade. Taking his son into partnership, Miles was wealthy enough to give him a check for £100,000 to enable him to marry the daughter of an aristocratic clergyman. The elder Miles became an alderman, and died rich and honored; the younger continued as a West Indian merchant dealing chiefly in sugar and slaves, and at his death in 1848 left property valued at more than a million.110 In 1833 he was in possession of 663 slaves in Trinidad and Jamaica, for which he received compensation to the amount of £17,850.111
The frequent association of Glasgow with the tobacco industry is only a part of the truth. The prosperity of the town in the eighteenth century was due at least as much to its sugar refining business. Sugar refining dated back to the second half of the seventeenth century. The Wester sugar-house was built in 1667, followed by the Easter in 1669, and shortly after the South sugar-house and another. Yet another followed in 1701. But Glasgow labored under the disadvantage that before 1707 direct trade relations with the colonies were illegal, and Glasgow’s sugar refiners were forced to depend on Bristol for their raw material. By the Act of Union and a happy accident this unsatisfactory situation was brought to an end. Two Scotch officers, Colonel William Macdowall, cadet of an ancient family, and Major James Milliken, while quartered in St. Kitts, wooed and won two heiresses, the widow Tovie and her daughter, owners of great sugar plantations. The missing link had been found. The arrival of the heiresses and their husbands meant that Glasgow became one of the leading ports of entry for the cargoes of West Indian sugar. In the very year of the happy event a new refinery was set up.112
The majority of the refineries were located in and around the capital—eighty compared with Bristol’s twenty. In 1774 there were eight refineries in Liverpool, one of them, the house of Branckers, a firm also engaged in the slave trade, being one of the most extensive in the whole kingdom.113 There were others in Manchester, Chester, Lancashire, Whitehaven, Newcastle, Hull, Southampton and Warrington.
It may well be asked why the refining of the raw sugar was not done at the source, on the plantations. The division of labor, between the agricultural operations in the tropical climate, and the industrial operations in the temperate climate, has survived to this day. The original reason had nothing to do with the skill of labor or the presence of natural resources. It was the result of the deliberate policy of the mother country. The ban on sugar refining in the islands corresponded to the ban on iron and textile manufacture on the mainland. Should they have refiners in England or the plantations? asked Sir Thomas Clifford in 1671. “Five ships go for the blacks,” was his answer, “and not above two if refined in the plantations; and so you destroy shipping, and all that belongs to it; and if you lose this advantage to England, you lose all.” Hence the heavy duty placed on refined sugar imported into England, four times as much as upon the brown sugar. By this policy England was called upon for a larger number of casks for the raw sugar, more coals and victuals were consumed, and the national revenues increased.114 Davenant’s pleas for permission of colonial refining115 fell on deaf ears.
It is significant that a similar struggle was taking place in France, resulting in a similar victory for the mercantilists. Colbert had permitted the refining of sugar in the French West Indies, and raw and refined sugar from the islands paid the same duty in France. But in 1682 the duty on refined sugar was doubled, while two years later, under penalty of a fine of 3,000 livres, it was forbidden to erect new refineries in the islands. A decree of 1698 was even more drastic. The duty on raw sugar from the West Indies was lowered from four to three livres per hundredweight, while the duty on refined sugar was increased from eight to twenty-two and a half livres. This latter figure was the same duty charged on refined sugar from foreign lands: “the drastic nature of the protection afforded the French refiners as against their compatriots in the colonies becomes apparent.”116
The sugar refining interest of England was encouraged by such legislation. It did not always see eye to eye with the planting interest on whom it depended for supplies. Under the mercantile system the sugar planters had a monopoly of the home market, and foreign imports were prohibited. It was therefore the policy of the planters to restrict production in order to maintain a high price. Their legal monopoly of the home market was a powerful weapon in their hands, and they used it mercilessly, at the expense of the whole population of England. While the price of sugar was being naturally forced down in the world market by the increase of sugar cultivation in the French, Spanish and Portuguese colonies, the British planters were intent on maintaining a monopoly price in the home market.
The friends of the planters warned them of the “fatal and wretched error” they were making, for “if the British plantations cannot, or will not, afford sugar, etc., plenty and cheap enough the French, Dutch, and Portuguese do, and will.”117 There were not wanting writers, as early as 1730, who urged the government to “open the sluices of the laws, and let in even the French sugar upon them, till they would serve us at least as cheap as our neighbors are serv’d.”118 In 1739 Jamaica requested assistance from the mother country. The Council of Trade and Plantations issued a clear and unmistakable warning. Jamaica had twice as much land as all the Leeward Islands combined, yet the exports of the Leeward Islands exceeded those of Jamaica. “From whence it would naturally follow that not one half of your lands are at present cultivated, and that Great Britain does not reap half the benefit from your Colony, which she might do if it were fully settled.”119
The planters would not listen. In the eighteenth century, they did not have to. The refiners of London, Westminster, Southwark and Bristol protested to Parliament in 1753 against the selfishness of the planters and the “most intolerable kind of a tax” represented by the higher price of British sugar. The refiners urged Parliament to make it the interest of the sugar planters to produce more raw sugar by increasing the area under cultivation. They were careful, however, not to pretend to “set ourselves in competition with the inhabitants of all the sugar colonies, either for numbers, wealth, or consequence to the public.” Parliament sidetracked the issue by passing resolutions about the encouragement of white settlers in Jamaica.120
Another crisis in relations between producers and processors developed during the American Revolution. Imports of sugar declined by one-third between 1774 and 1780. Prices were high, and the refiners, in distress, petitioned Parliament for relief in the form of the admission of prize sugar. Reading between the lines of the evidence taken by the parliamentary committee on the subject, we see the conflict of interests between refiner and planter. High prices benefited the planter, while the refiners wanted an increased supply which the planters would not, or could not, give. If they would not, make them; the refiners of Bristol recommended “a salutary law,” which would “make it the interest of the British sugar colonies, to extend the cultivation of their lands, in order to enable them to raise a larger produce, and to send greater quantities of sugar to Great Britain, and thereby become more useful to their mother country, its trade, navigation, and revenue.”121 If they could not, buy elsewhere—the French colonies, for example. “Was I a refiner,” said one witness, a wholesale grocer, “I should certainly prefer St. Domingo sugars to any other.”122 The chasm was yawning at the feet of the sugar planter, but, head held proudly in the air, he went his way mumbling the lesson he had been taught by the mercantilists and which he had learned not wisely but too well.
Yet another colonial raw material gave birth to yet another English industry. One of the important by-products of sugar is molasses, from which rum may be distilled. But rum never attained the importance of cotton, far less of sugar, as a contribution to British industry, partly, perhaps, because much rum was imported direct from the islands in its finished state. Imports from the islands increased from 58,000 gallons in 1721 to 320,000 in 1730. In 1763 the figure stood at one and a quarter million gallons and was steadily over two million between 1765 and 1779.123
Rum was indispensable in the fisheries and the fur trade, and as a naval ration. But its connection with the triangular trade was more direct still. Rum was an essential part of the cargo of the slave ship, particularly the colonial American slave ship. No slave trader could afford to dispense with a cargo of rum. It was profitable to spread a taste for liquor on the coast. The Negro dealers were plied with it, were induced to drink till they lost their reason, and then the bargain was struck.124 One slave dealer, his bag full of the gold paid him for his slaves, stupidly accepted the slave captain’s invitation to dinner. He was made drunk and awoke next morning to find his money gone and himself stripped, branded and enslaved with his own victims, to the great mirth of the sailors.125 In 1765 two distilleries were established at Liverpool for the express purpose of supplying ships bound for Africa.126 Of equal importance to the mercantilist was the fact that from molasses could be obtained, in addition to rum, brandy and low wines imported from France. The distilleries were an important evidence of Bristol’s interest in the sugar plantations, and many were the jeremiads which they sent to Parliament in defence of their interests and in opposition to the importation of French brandies. Bishop Berkeley voiced the prevailing feeling when he asked acidly, in strict mercantilist language, “whether if drunkenness be a necessary evil, men may not as well get drunk with the growth of their own country?”
The eighteenth century in England was notorious for its alcoholism. The popular drink was gin, immortalized by Hogarth in his Gin Lane. A classic advertisement of a gin shop in Southwark read: “Drunk for a penny, dead drunk for two-pence, clean straw for nothing.” Gin and rum contended for pride of place.
The West Indian planters argued that the rum they produced was equal to one-fourth of the value of all their other products. To prohibit the sale of rum would therefore be to ruin them, and drive the people to foreign substitutes. The planters expressed the hope that the suppression of the evils occasioned by the excessive use of spirituous liquors would not entail the destruction of the sugar trade.127 As they saw it, the question was not whether people should drink, but what they should drink. Gin, argued an anonymous writer, was “vastly more destructive to the human frame” than rum. “Gin is a spirit too fiery, acrid, and inflameing for inward use—but.... Rum is a spirit so mild, balsamic and benign, that if its properly used and attempered it may be made highly useful, both for the relief and regalement of human nature.”128 This was a strange description of the spirit which the Barbadians more appropriately nicknamed “Kill-Devill.”
Against the planters it was contended that the West Indian rum trade was too unimportant to permit the continuance of a glaring enormity which tended to destroy the health and morals of the people of Great Britain.129 It is not unlikely that other considerations were involved. Rum competed with spirits made from corn. The West India interest was therefore at odds with the English agricultural interest. The sugar planters charged that distilling from corn tended to raise the price of bread. This concern for the poor consumer of bread was touching, coming as it did from extortionists who wanted the poor to spend more money on their sugar, and it antedated by a hundred years a similar but more significant conflict between English farmers and English industralists, over cheaper bread or lower wages for the working classes. “Molasses” embittered the relations between West Indian sugar planter and English landlord as it embittered relations between planter and mainland colonist, and the West India interest was always quick to recommend its substitution in England whenever there was a grain shortage, they said, but in reality whenever there was a glut of sugar. “Sweet gentlemen!” wrote an anonymous champion of the barley counties in 1807. “They have sought a very far fetched argument in support of their saccharine cause”;130 and Michael Sadler, in 1831, opposed the idea: “A wholesome beverage might be made from that article, but the people of England did not like it.”131
The real enemy, however, of the West Indian distiller was not the English farmer but the New England distiller. The New England traders refused to purchase West Indian rum and insisted on molasses, which they themselves distilled, and sent to Newfoundland, the Indian tribes, and above all Africa. The rum trade on the slave coast became a virtual monopoly of New England. In 1770 New England exports of rum to Africa represented over four-fifths of the total colonial export of that year,132 and yet another important vested interest drew its sustenance from the triangular trade. But here, too, lay the seed of future disruption. French West Indian molasses was cheaper than British, because French distilling was not permitted to compete with the brandies of the home country. Rather than feed their molasses to their horses, they preferred to sell it to the mainland colonists. The latter therefore turned to the French planters, and molasses was one of the principal items in that trade between mainland and the foreign sugar colonies which, as the sequel showed, had far-reaching consequences for the British sugar planters.
The slave cargoes were incomplete without the “pacotille,” the sundry items and gewgaws which appealed to the Africans’ love of bright colors and for which, after having sold their fellows, they would, late in the nineteenth century, part with their land and grant mining concessions. Articles of glass and beads were always in demand on the slave coast, and on the plantations there was a great demand for bottles. Most of these articles were manufactured in Bristol.133 One slave dealer received a fine Negro from a prince in return for thirteen beads of coral, half a string of amber, twenty-eight silver bells, and three pairs of bracelets for his women; in acknowledgment of this liberality, he presented to the prince’s favorite a present of some rows of glass beads and about four ounces of scarlet wool.134 Individually these items were of negligible value; in the aggregate they constituted a trade of great importance, so essential a part of the slave transactions that the word “pacotille” is still commonly used in the West Indies today to denote a cheap and tawdry bauble given as compensation for objects of great value.
Slave trading demanded goods more gruesome though not a whit less useful than woolen and cotton manufacturers. Fetters and chains and padlocks were needed to fasten the Negroes more securely on the slave ships and thus prevent both mutiny and suicide. The practice of branding the slaves to identify them required red-hot irons. Legal regulations prescribed that on any ship designed for Africa, the East Indies, or the West Indies, “three-fourths of their proportion of beer was to be put in iron bound cask, hooped with iron hoops of good substance, and well wrought iron.”135 Iron bars were the trading medium on a large part of the African coast and were equivalent to four copper bars.136 Iron bars constituted nearly three-quarters of the value of the cargo of the Swallow in 1679, nearly one-quarter of the cargo of the Mary in 1690, nearly one-fifth of a slave cargo in 1733.137 In 1682 the Royal African Company was exporting about 10,000 bars of iron a year.138 The ironmasters, too, found a useful market in Africa.
Guns formed a regular part of every African cargo. Birmingham became the center of the gun trade as Manchester was of the cotton trade. The struggle between Birmingham and London over the gun trade was merely another angle to the struggle for free trade or monopoly which we have already noticed for the slave trade in general between the capital and the outports. In 1709 and 1710 the gun makers of London petitioned in favor of the Royal African Company’s monopoly. The Birmingham gun makers and iron makers threw their weight and influence against the company and the London interests. Three times, in 1708, 1709, and 1711, they petitioned against a renewal of the company’s monopoly which had been modified in 1698.139 Their trade had increased since then and they feared a renewal of the monopoly, which would subject their manufactures “to one buyer, or to anyone monopolizing society, exclusive of all others.”140
In the nineteenth century Birmingham guns were exchanged for African palm-oil, but the eighteenth century saw a less innocent exchange. The Birmingham guns of the eighteenth century were exchanged for men, and it was a common saying that the price of a Negro was one Birmingham gun. The African musket was an important Birmingham export, reaching a total of 100,000 to 150,000 annually. With the British government and the East India Company, Africa ranked as the most important customer of the Birmingham gunmakers.141
The needs of the plantations too were not to be despised. In the late seventeenth century the ironmasters, Sitwells, of Derbyshire were producing among their items sugar stoves and rollers for crushing cane in Barbados, and Birmingham, too, was interested in the plantations.142 Exports of wrought iron and nails went to the plantations, though these exports tended to fluctuate according to the condition of the sugar trade. As one ironmaster said in 1737: “The bad state of some of our sugar islands has been . . . some prejudice to the iron-trade; for the consumption of iron ware, in those islands, is more or less, as their trade for sugar is better or worse.”143 An old historian of the city has left us a picture of Birmingham’s interest in the colonial system: “axes for India, and tomahawks for the natives of North America; and to Cuba and the Brazils chains, handcuffs, and iron collars for the poor slaves. . . .In the primeval forests of America the Birmingham axe struck down the old trees; the cattle pastures of Australia rang with the sound of Birmingham bells; in East India and the West they tended the fields of sugar cane with Birmingham hoes.”144
Along with iron went brass, copper and lead. The exports of brass pans and kettles to Africa dated back before 1660 but increased with free trade after 1698. Thereafter Birmingham began to export large quantities of cutlery and brass goods, and throughout the eighteenth century British goods effectively sustained competition with foreign in colonial markets. The Cheadle Company, founded in North Staffordshire in 1719, soon became one of the leading brass and copper concerns in England. It extended the scope of its operations to include the brass wire, “the Guinea rods” and the “manelloes” (metal rings worn by the African tribes) used in the African trade. The company’s capital increased eleven times between 1734 and 1780 when the company was reorganized. “Starting from small beginnings . . ., it became one of the most important, if not the most important, of the brass and copper concerns of the eighteenth century.” According to tradition, ships sailed to Africa with the holds full of idols and “manelloes,” while the cabins were occupied by missionaries—“an edifying example of a material good in competition with an immaterial one.”145 The Baptist Mills of Bristol produced a prodigious quantity of brass which, drawn into wire and formed into “battery,” was extensively used in the African trade.146 The Holywell works, in addition to producing copper sheathing for the Liverpool ships, manufactured brass pans for the West Indian sugar and East India tea merchants, and all varieties of cheap and gaudy brass instruments for the African trade.147 Brass pans and kettles were exported to Africa and the plantations, and in one list, after the heading “brass pans,” we read “ditto large to wash their bodies in.”148 These “bath pans,” made now of galvanized tin, are still a normal feature of West Indian life today.
The needs of shipbuilding gave a further stimulus to heavy industry. The iron chain and anchor foundries, of which there were many in Liverpool, lived off the building of ships. Copper sheathing for the vessels gave rise to local industries in the town and adjacent districts to supply the demand. Between thirty and forty vessels were employed in transporting the copper, smelted in Lancashire and Cheshire, from the works at Holywell to the warehouses in Liverpool.149
The ironmaster’s interest in the slave trade continued throughout the century. When the question of abolition came before Parliament, the manufacturers of and dealers in iron, copper, brass and lead in Liverpool petitioned against the project, which would affect employment in the town and send forth thousands as “solitary wanderers into the world, to seek employment in foreign climes.”150 In the same year Birmingham declared that it was dependent on the slave trade to a considerable extent for a large part of its various manufactures. Abolition would ruin the town and impoverish many of its inhabitants.151
These apprehensions were exaggerated. The munitions demand for the commercial wars of the eighteenth century had prepared the ironmasters for the still greater demands to come during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. The colonial markets, moreover, were inadequate to absorb the increased production which resulted from the technological innovations. Between 1710 and 1735 iron exports almost trebled. In 1710 the British West Indies took over one-fifth of the exports, in 1735 less than one-sixth. In 1710, over one-third of the exports to the plantations went to the sugar islands, in 1735 over one-quarter. The peak was reached in 1729, when the West Indies took nearly one-quarter of the total exports, and nearly one-half of the exports to all the plantations.152 Expansion at home, contraction in the sugar islands. In 1783 the ironmasters, too, were beginning to look the other way. But Cinderella, decked out temporarily in her fancy clothes, was enjoying herself too much at the ball to pay any attention to the hands of the clock.