CHAPTER 6
A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats
“I THINK IT MUST HAVE BEEN about 1855 that the material was bought in Newcastle,” a mother wrote to her daughter in the early twentieth century. “Some Friends there were anxious to encourage some Friends in the U.S.A. (of whom a prominent one was Levi Coffin) who were doing what they could for the escaped slaves.” The Quakers “had arranged with a shopkeeper,” George Richardson and his daughter Ellen, “to be willing to sell ‘Free Labour’ goods, obtained from the U.S.A.” The writer, G. M. Gillett, who must have only been a child at the time, remembered her family’s participation with the free-labor movement fondly. “I believe we bought all our cotton things there … of course Joseph Sturge and his family were warm supporters.”1 Included with the letter was a piece of paisley printed cotton, accompanied by the label “Made by escaped Slaves, work which Friends in the United States organised.”2
This sample of cloth made “by escaped slaves” in the United States and sold in Newcastle was a piece of family history, but also, by the twentieth century, a point of family pride, an heirloom handed down from mother to daughter and, in 1927, from daughter to the Quaker archives. By shopping at George and Ellen Richardson’s store, the Sturges and Gilletts were supporting free black laborers in the United States, something they hoped their children and grandchildren would be proud to have been a part of long after emancipation took place. It should be no surprise that cotton goods would be incredibly important commodities for this group of abolitionists. Ethical cotton, which could be grown in West Africa by free or enslaved labor, in other parts of the world like Egypt and India, or by free labor in white settler colonies, inspired debate, innovation, and creative thinking as businesses sought different suppliers, traders, and manufacturers. Undoubtedly this commodity grew in importance as the British abolition of slavery went into effect in 1834 and sourcing free sugar was no longer a concern.
Fig 6.1 Free-cotton sample. Photograph © Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Britain.
We have seen how the argument for consumer activism was posited as the most consistent way of tackling the slavery question. What were the ramifications of this approach, as the supply chain became the focus of both British and American concerns regarding questions of ethical labor supply? How could businesses ensure that the products they sourced from Africa or India were actually produced without enslaved labor? Creating an ethical brand was one thing; creating, and ensuring, an ethical supply chain was another thing altogether. Problems could arise in defining what was ethical, in identifying it in the marketplace, in paying for it, and in using government connections to get it to consumers. Abolitionists who supported ethical commerce placed rhetorical emphasis on the “consistency” of their commercial protest, but this made any inconsistency in the supply chain an easy target for criticism.
When laborers came to be thought about as consumers in their own right, consumption as the driver of the economy would ultimately be the solution to questions of the benefits the economy would receive from emancipation. If consumers incentivized producers, then laborers would be attracted to work by their ability to consume the products of their labor (through wages). Alternatively, if the slave trade and enslaved labor created conditions of suboptimal consumption, either by creating a “state of war” in Africa to generate enslaved captives to the Atlantic markets, or by creating a class of enslaved workers who were unable to participate on their own terms in market commerce, then abolition alone would improve their living standards, it was argued, regardless of the conditions of their freedom.
As ethical-commerce arguments were challenged by proslavery agitators, by radical abolitionists, or by obvious facts, defenders of ethical capitalism honed their views of the world system. Consumption, production, labor, land, and global inequality all had to be incorporated into the conception of how the global economy would work in everyone’s best interest if it was operated justly. Ethical capitalism was not, to paraphrase Christopher Brown and Kevin Grant, a campaign against capitalism, but was a campaign to reform capitalism.3 Ultimately, its proponents were trying to preserve a system that was working for most of the people they were trying to persuade to abandon specific, morally loathsome practices. For middlemen and women in the antislavery business, the experience of sourcing internationally, the growing commitment to the idea of consumer value, and the defensive position they found themselves in between the radical antislavery movement and the proslavery movement ultimately led to the emergence of a moral relativism about global labor conditions within the abolitionist movement. This chapter will investigate the ways in which debates about slavery in African and Indian production contributed to the promotion of the argument for a global division of labor in which different standards of “freedom” would apply.
New Sources of Cotton
In 1853 the American Free Produce Association reported, “The Cotton Spinners of Manchester are turning their attention to every quarter of the globe for supplies, in order not to be dependent on the Slaves of America.” There were plenty of attempts to prove the free-labor argument with commercial agricultural schemes during this period of gradual colonial expansion into Africa, Australia, the American and Canadian West, and the Russian East. The AFPA’s interest in British projects highlights both the interconnected nature of their antislavery movements, but also their mutual economic dependence—and corresponding antagonism—with regard to cotton. “Over an extent of five hundred and thirty miles of the Australian coast,” the Free Produce advocates wrote, “cotton of the best description perennially thrives. There is a river available for steam navigation every forty miles along this whole extent, and on the banks of these are millions of acres of the richest land in one of the finest climates in the world.”4 For free-produce advocates, international trade—and tariff-free trade especially—was a crucial component of antislavery political economy because of the potential it offered to prove that free labor was economically superior to enslaved labor by turning to producers in Haiti after independence in 1804, Latin American states that had abolished slavery after independence in the 1820s, or the British West Indies after the abolition of slave labor in 1833. For American merchants in the expansionist era of the Monroe Doctrine, news of free cotton grown in Latin America was particularly hopeful: “A small quantity has recently been transmitted from La Plata, with advices that it was a sample of cotton growing wild on the banks of the Parana, where any quantity may be had for the gathering.”5
Antislavery advocates were often especially keen to frequent businesses that were supporting formerly enslaved people, and “back-to-Africa” colonies provided a good place for experimentation with plantation-produced goods like coffee, sugar, and cotton. In 1798, while still governor of the Sierra Leone Company, Zachary Macaulay had gone to the Company’s factory in Freeport to sell the local slave traders on abolition. Although he was unsure of their enthusiasm for the abolition of the slave trade, he commented, “Their mouths were full of proposals to trade with us and plant Cotton and Coffee.”6 Macaulay, always seeking an opportunity for profit in Sierra Leone, wrote at the moment of handover from the Sierra Leone Company to the British government, “With the cultivation of Cotton the Natives are already acquainted. What would chiefly be required with respect to this article would be to introduce among them the seeds of a better species of Cotton than now grows generally in Africa, and to instruct them in expeditious methods of cleaning it.”7 Although his rice and sugar plans had relied on local production, he was not the first to suggest that the African climate was ideal for growing free-labor versions of tropical commodities, and he was far from the last. British merchants based along the Gambia River petitioned the government to encourage Europeans to embark on the cotton trade there because “cotton is grown in considerable Quantities in the neighbourhood of the River and an article of commerce amongst the natives.”8
But abolitionists were not alone in seeking these new sources of supply. Colonial competition also drove interest in finding new regions in which to grow tropical staples, and abolitionist arguments tapped into existing concerns about the precarious and dependent nature of global supply.9 At the time of the British government’s takeover of the colony in 1808, the Sierra Leone Company’s successor, the African Institution, declared that Sierra Leone would be the new British center for growing cotton in case “circumstances arise to interrupt our commercial relations with America.”10 Macaulay commented that near the Danish fort at Accra, on the Gold Coast, “about 50 to 60 miles up the Rio Volta are large Plantations settled by Danes to whom a permission is given to hold slaves for a limited time. They raise only Provisions as yet and Cattle, but their object is Coffee, Cotton, and Sugar. The Danes possess immense tracts of land on the Rio Volta.”11 Macaulay was impressed by their efforts at plantation agriculture, and seemed particularly intrigued by the Danish use of white settlers and African enslaved labor. This model of agricultural legitimate commerce cast the benefits of abolition as an end to the horrors of the actual movement of enslaved peoples through the Middle Passage, rather than an end to enslaved labor itself.12 This argument was popular among gradual abolitionists in the 1790s, and although it went out of favor by the 1820s, an element of acceptance of unfree labor persisted in Africa.
Britain and France were particularly enthusiastic to follow up commercial agricultural schemes for Africa in the post-Napoleonic period, with the return to a regional balance of power in the redistribution of colonial possessions along the African coast, and the closing of their ports to American ships. The point of this new colonial system of the 1820s was to provide the home markets in France and Britain with tropical items their own merchants were responsible for having produced, which bolstered the national economy and secured its independence from foreign production. The end of wartime conditions allowed France and Britain to reassert their own economic agency by experimenting with colonial plantations, and shutting out American merchants like Brown & Ives from British and French ports in West Africa. The African plantation schemes of various abolitionist capitalists now came into their own. French plans for Senegal and Algeria and British plans for Sierra Leone and Nigeria all emphasized the agricultural potential of the colonies.13
Thomas Clegg, a Manchester manufacturer who produced cloth for George W. Taylor, began to weave cotton grown on an Anglican missionary plantation in Nigeria for Quaker consumers in the United States and Britain. The British Anti-Slavery Reporter was pleased to note that efforts by the Church Missionary Society (CMS) to initiate cotton production had so far been successful, resulting in five bales sent to Britain. The partnership between Clegg and the CMS took off in the second half of the 1850s—in 1857 importing 1,250 one-hundred-pound bales—and Clegg began to regularly source cotton from Abeokuta and Ibadan.14 The Abeokuta mission project attested to the already important role of cotton production in a number of West African societies.15 But it was also incentivized by the kinds of prizes that got Zachary Macaulay in trouble. British Quaker banker and philanthropist Edward Gurney donated £1,000 to the Church Missionary Society in 1859 specifically to encourage cotton production by freed American slaves in Nigeria, tying British and American projects together and suggesting that the abolitionist financier saw continued value in promoting a connection between the employment of emancipated African Americans and the search for new environments from which to source free cotton.16
In fact, as far back as the 1790s Macaulay had established his own cotton plantation on the outskirts of Freetown, where he grew “a good deal of Pernambuco Cotton.” He explained to the Sierra Leone Company that the farm, which also grew sugar cane, yams, coffee, and rice, had cost $300, plus $10 per acre cleared, and “the labor of the Year will cost me about 12 or 15 Dollars an acre more.”17 He thought that “this short statement will give you some notion of the Capital a man would require to begin a plantation on a tolerably large scale here.” But if he was primarily interested in the fate of former slaves, he did not see much cause for celebration. He felt that they were not committed to attempting to grow cotton or other cash crops because “they prefer eating casada in a miserable way to climbing the Hill where they may enrich themselves.”18 He held that the main reason for the failure of European-led plantation schemes was “the want of any constraining power over the natives, which joined to their very great indolence rendered their labour of very little value.” Macaulay and others in the African Institution would later promote the practice of apprenticeship for formerly enslaved workers in order to “train” them to be productive. But as John Stuart Mill would point out in the case of West Indian emancipation, it was not a problem of training that was preventing free laborers from engaging in planting, but too comfortable a life. If workers did not need to work tirelessly in agriculture to accumulate consumer goods, then they would not, and the fairly high standard of living in Freetown made this point obvious.19 In Freetown, trade, not agriculture, was unsurprisingly lucrative, and large amounts of credit in the commodity trade made goods cheap for consumers. Strangely, while acknowledgment of self-interest in the case of American and European consumers and producers was at the heart of ethical-commerce arguments, Macaulay and others were flummoxed by the self-interested behavior of formerly enslaved workers.
Macaulay was also deeply involved with the French abolition movement in the 1820s, and his hand can be seen in the agricultural plans for Senegal that dominated in that decade.20 The agricultural designs of the abolitionist-leaning Governor Roger included plans for the region’s black population that reflected those Macaulay promoted in Sierra Leone that used former slaves for agricultural production. Roger encouraged Saint-Louis habitants to invest in plantation schemes to grow oranges, lemons, coffee, bananas, olives, cotton, and sugar.21 This was at least partially successful: a list of agricultural establishments in operation in 1825 includes the Pellegrin family, of the Saint-Louis habitant elite.22 Laborers for the plantations would be drawn from the local population through a variety of contracts, demonstrating that older abolitionist principle that tropical commodities could be produced in Africa, making obsolete the cruel and unpopular Atlantic slave trade.23 But much of this labor was unfree, relying on indentures, the purchase and freeing of enslaved labor on indenture contracts, and the hiring of enslaved labor from Gorée and Saint-Louis. There were reports that the free workers were only willing to work until they had the goods they wanted, including a gun, which usually meant they went home after eight or nine months. They were also too expensive, according to French officials on the ground, who thought that 10 francs a month, plus food and the cook to feed the workers, made the plantations uncompetitive.24 Experiments in plantation agriculture in Senegal had largely been abandoned by the 1830s, in favor of the African-led legitimate commerce in groundnuts and gum there, and the establishment of Algerian plantations—run by white French settlers and worked by local Algerian labor.25
Historians’ explanation for the expense of local African labor differs quite markedly from the assumptions of the time. Indications are that the wages would have to be staggeringly high to draw free laborers, and the need for compulsion—in the form of taxation or corvée labor—in order to control and manage labor for the colonies, did not reflect “laziness” among the African workers or a lack of interest in participation in the consumption of global goods. These wage realities were the result of a high ratio of land to labor—which had also been the basis for the “need” for enslaved labor in both Africa and the Americas—which made the command of labor a political priority for all African states. Land abundance made subsistence cheap relative to the situation in France or England at the same time. It also meant that both European colonial governments and African states sought more control over the movement of peoples in order to lower labor costs, while merchants turned to monopsony in order to tie their debtors into a labor–consumption relationship.26
Liberian “Free” Produce
As France and Britain began to expand their formal influence in West Africa to promote the production of tropical commodities within their imperial systems, American free-produce merchants turned to their connections with Liberia. The colony had emerged just in time to replace the existing legitimate-commerce connections, with Monrovia effectively established (after some false starts) in 1821, at the same time that French and British African ports were closed to American ships. But Liberia was always a complicated project, loathed by many abolitionists and proslavery advocates alike, and as the colony developed its commercial agriculture and legitimate commerce, controversies about its use of indigenous labor began to swirl.27
The letters of American Free Produce Association president George W. Taylor to his Liberian contacts suggest that his search for free-labor goods shared much in common with the colonial rationale used by British and French free-labor advocates. While it was all well and good that he could access East India rice, cotton, and sugar, and Jamaican coffee and sugar, he really wanted to encourage the development of these crops in Liberia so that he would not be reliant on either British colonial production or slave production in the American south. In letter after letter to his Liberian commercial contacts, he emphasized the need for free-labor products, especially rice, sugar, cotton, and coffee, that could be sourced more cheaply and reliably than either British or American alternatives
Taylor’s emphatic, repeated restatement of the necessity of obtaining Liberian commodities as the product of free labor was a response to reports of slave labor in places purporting to be free. By emphasizing the “consistency” of the movement, free-produce proponents set themselves up for criticism by proslavery advocates as well as by radical abolitionists. Liberia had faced criticism for years for its employment of the indigenous workforce. The Kru, Gola, and Vai hired themselves out for 25 cents per day; this practice frustrated new settlers, who found it hard to hire themselves out as farm laborers at 75 cents a day, but it made large-scale commercial plantations efficient.28 Additionally, a system of land ownership and inheritance allowed commercial farming to flourish in Liberia.29 The African Repository—the newspaper of the American Colonization Society—was keen to point out that in 1852 there were 224 plantations producing for export.30 This local approach to the implementation of “legitimate commerce” ideology was important because it meant that the settlers’ American antislavery allies could cite the flourishing of Liberian-grown cotton, coffee, and other goods as proof of the success of their colonization vision. But it also revealed that production on this scale would necessarily rely on the exploitation of cheap local labor.
For recently freed slaves arriving in Liberia, establishing a new plantation may have been a rather remote possibility. Manumitted emigrants to Liberia often arrived with a skill or a trade with which they could get started. “Recaptives” or “Liberated Africans” had a harder time of it, especially in Liberia. These former slaves were seized from illegal slaving vessels after 1808 and processed at courts in Freetown, Havana, and Bahia. Boats that had been captured by American patrol vessels disembarked the former slaves directly in Liberia, where they were known as “Congos.” The fortunes of these former slaves, as well as African slaves who freed themselves by running away to Freetown or the Liberian towns, were much more varied. Some were apprenticed. Some lived beyond the reach of the system. Some moved back to America and published accusations in William Lloyd Garrison’s immediate-abolition newspaper, the Liberator, and other anticolonization publications, that Liberian settlers were using enslaved labor.31
In 1853 Taylor contacted Benson requesting reassurances about the free-labor provenance of Liberian goods: “I am told lately that the Liberians are employing slave labour and buying slaves from the interior. I told my informant it was impossible. Do tell me what I shall say by authority on that subject.”32 Although Benson’s response doesn’t survive, Taylor must have been satisfied, as their trading partnership continued. But although claims that Liberian settlers were using enslaved labor were intended for abolitionist audiences, in order to discourage participation in the colonization movement, proslavery writers latched on to the claims as part of their effort to demonstrate that abolitionists were hypocritical and that slavery was the only way to produce tropical commodities.33
Slavery in the Supply Chain
The emphasis of free-produce consumers on their consistency in purchasing goods that supported their moral stance against the slave trade and slave labor was an easy target for slavery apologists. As mentioned in Chapter 5, in the 1820s Joseph Marryat and John Gladstone accused Macaulay and Cropper of substituting East Indian slavery for West Indian.34 Marryat argued that “the existence of slavery in Bengal is admitted by the East India Directors,” and that increased demand for the production of sugar by these laborers would only increase the number of persons enslaved, “and thus a new slave trade be established in the East Indies of infinitely greater magnitude than that which we have abolished in our West Indian colonies.”35 Macaulay responded, true to form, with a flurry of pamphlets arguing that East Indian labor was paid, but at low rates that made it cheaper than enslaved labor.36 Cropper, meanwhile, published a circular, donated to the American Free Produce Association, that claimed that “in India cotton is grown almost entirely without the aid of British skill and capital, and the natives know so few wants, that an increase in price does not always, where left to themselves, operate as in Europe or in America, to the increase of quantity.”37
Here, the commercial men who spent evenings attending meetings of missionary and abolition societies proclaiming the equality of all men, argued that the laws of political economy were different in places like India. Cropper and others argued that free labor was more efficient partly because the amount of investment required by imperial commerce was so low. But they also worried that a lack of investment in other sources of cotton would cripple Britain if there was an American crisis. Antislavery commercial pragmatism turned out to be one of the more effective arguments put forward by the abolition movement. Cropper and Macaulay’s defensiveness about Indian labor practices helped lay the foundation for skepticism regarding their motives, which historians have wrestled with ever since in trying to understand the motivations for abolitionism.
But these defenses were also important for their contributions to the development of ethical capitalism’s ability to justify global wage disparities. Responding to critiques of Cropper and Macaulay’s free-sugar company, the Edinburgh Review addressed claims about East India slavery, replying that it had no imported slaves, and painting a picture of serfdom rather than slavery, where “the relation of master and slave appears to impose the duty of protection and cherishment on the master, as much as that of fidelity and obedience on the slave.”38 Macaulay, along with David Ricardo and other East India shareholders who had pushed for the equalization of tariffs, argued publicly that “there was no slavery in the Bengal provinces, where sugar was produced, and that, where it was found, it was slavery only in name.”39 Abolitionists began to portray a stark caricature of plantation slavery in the U.S. South and West Indies in order to more easily contrast it with the practices of servile labor found elsewhere. Marryat pointed this out. Replying to Macaulay’s pamphlet East and West India Sugar, Marryat wrote, “the great object of this writer appears to be, to excite such an odium against the West Indian planters, as will dispose their fellow-subjects to ruin them without pity or remorse.”40 The increasingly narrow definition of the oppression faced by the enslaved of the West Indies and the United States helped isolate the rest of capitalism from criticism centered on labor relations. Nothing was as bad as white-owned plantation slavery, and therefore everything else could be described as ethical capitalism.
That was actually partly the point. Attempting to prove that free labor was cheaper meant that some commerce-minded abolitionists favored “outsourcing” that free labor. The global division of labor would work to eliminate the need for slavery, they argued. For instance, David Livingstone, the famous missionary to Africa and antislavery advocate, visited the cotton plantations in Abeokuta in 1857. He told the Morning Post that they “could become a very competitive enterprise, due to the very low local rates of pay.”41 Egyptian cotton was also promoted by some abolitionists as a free-labor source of supply.42 In a letter to the proslavery New Times, “Mercator,” the pen name for John Gladstone, worried about the labor practices on these distant plantations: “We must keep it in mind, however, that the supply of Cotton from Egypt, depends on the life and will of one man, the present Pacha. Its cultivation proceeds on a system of force, and is carried on for the Pacha’s individual advantage. Our trade with Egypt, therefore, has not the solid foundation of an interchange of commodities, for the supply of the wants of the people on both sides. The Pacha obtains labour by compulsion, and is paid for his Cotton chiefly in dollars.”43 The irony of replacing one kind of enslaved labor with a different kind was often cited those who were skeptical of abolitionist businessmen’s motives.
Indentured Labor
The American Genius of Universal Emancipation addressed the problem of slavery in the free-produce supply chain and tried to alert its readers to the questions raised about labor practices in Mauritius: “ ‘East India Sugar’ is the term generally used to designate the produce of Bengal, but it is objectionable, as Mauritius Sugar is also East India Sugar; and it nearly resembles that of Bengal, but it should be more carefully avoided than even West India Sugar, the sacrifice of Slave life being so very great in that Island.”44 While advocating for East India sugar equalization, Macaulay and Cropper had already begun sending ships to Mauritius to source free-labor supplies. Indian and Chinese indentured labor was already common there. Macaulay, who had advocated for apprenticeship to “civilize” the Liberated Africans resettled in Sierra Leone, saw indenture and apprenticeship as ways of training the workforce. He was not alone. Even some immediatist abolitionists in Britain thought that some period of apprenticeship or indenture was necessary as a transition from enslaved to free labor, in order to prepare the formerly enslaved for life as free laborers.45
At a time when many abolitionists were ambivalent about the abolition of enslaved labor, and much more concerned with the treatment of people as global commodities in the slave trade, the redirection of African labor into the production of goods was proof that the moral rationale of abolition would be supported by economic logic.46 Thomas Clarkson argued, “The barbarous and inhuman treatment that generally fell to the lot of slaves” originated from “the commerce: for if men could be considered as possessional if, like cattle, they could be bought and sold it will not be difficult to suppose, that they could be held in the same consideration, or treated in the same manner.”47 First the trade needed to be replaced. Then Africans would be treated better as laborers. He and other gradualists believed that the economic logic of supply and demand would ensure that the irreplaceable labor performed by the enslaved on Atlantic plantations would encourage the “amelioration” of the grossest excesses of the system that were wasting enslaved labor. Inefficiency plagued the system, they believed, because a steady supply of cheap slaves from West Africa “allowed” plantation overseers to work their slaves to death rather than treating them as investments.
For those searching for cheap free-labor commodities, the argument that industrious production and participation in agriculture would allow people to move out of a state of barbarism and into a state of productive, and consuming, civilization was powerful. Free-produce businessmen and women did what they could to use the sugar tariff debates to demonstrate the efficiency of free labor, but they were also committed to the cause, and were happy to distort inconvenient facts to explain away their more expensive free produce.48 But this did not resolve the problem of free labor’s efficiency. Over the course of the 1840s it became increasingly obvious that free labor’s “efficiency” alone would not prove that the “invisible hand” abhorred slavery. The best way to demonstrate that logic would have been after emancipation went into effect in the Caribbean sugar-producing islands. But the efficiency of free labor was called into question there as British and Haitian free sugar competed with Cuban slave-produced sugar. The image of the lazy, formerly enslaved West Indian worker eating pumpkin and working half an hour a day, conjured up by Thomas Carlyle and circulated in proslavery circles, had to be addressed by abolitionist-leaning economic tracts.49 Drawing on the language used in the apprenticeship debates in West Africa, British and American writers cited the need for education, training, and discipline for formerly enslaved workers.50
John Stuart Mill came out with a strong rebuke to Carlyle’s assumptions about the labor discipline of West Indian workers, arguing that their ability to live off of half a day’s wages reflected the realities of labor supply and demand, and that if West Indian planters wanted to pay lower wages, they would need a larger supply of workers. In other words, free labor was only more costly in this situation because of restricted supply.51 French and British producers tried to combat this by importing “free” labor through indenture. They moved workers from India, Africa, and China to try to match productive land with the cheapest possible free labor.52 Many indentured laborers were taken to former slave colonies, like Mauritius, Reunion, and the Caribbean islands. Others were brought to mines and plantations in new regions, like Algeria and South Africa.53 The Aborigines Protection Society and the British Anti-Slavery Society both protested that indenture was merely a form of slavery in disguise, especially when Cropper’s nemesis, John Gladstone, turned around and used his emancipation compensation from the British government to purchase indentured laborers from India. Knowing that this would undermine the position of formerly enslaved workers who hoped to negotiate for better wages and better treatment, they campaigned against the “Gladstone slave trade” as they branded it.54 As a result Britain effectively suspended the importation of indentured labor, temporarily, in the late 1830s.55 French use of engagé labor to populate their plantations frustrated British humanitarians but also confirmed their existing suspicions about French commitment to liberty.
Ironically, though, the abolitionist insistence that indenture was a disguised form of slavery helped to support slaveholders’ views that plantation production of staples like cotton and sugar was economically impossible without slavery. The inability to explain why indentured (but free) labor could also be bad without resorting to the language of slavery was partially a problem of ethical capitalism, which was attempting to dodge the deeper problems rooted in the global supply chain. Distinctions between free and unfree labor were important to maintain, but the hard line between them was flexible enough for rhetorical purposes. The Caribbean plantations’ new reliance on indentured labor and other forms of migrant labor for sugar production allowed slaveholders in the United States, for instance, to argue that the experiment of emancipation was over.56
But once again the promotion of a market solution to the problem of slavery transformed into a position of supporting consumer interests over those of formerly enslaved workers and indentured laborers. Jonathan Connolly has highlighted how abolitionist arguments came to infuse broader liberal trade discussions in this period.57 The Economist, for instance, had fully accepted Elizabeth Heyrick’s reasoning that “the extent and activity of the slave trade have been mainly governed by the demand for the products of slave labor in Europe.”58 As antislavery morality became political consensus in Britain in the 1850s, Connolly points out, Colonial Secretary Edward Bulwer-Lytton noted, “Every hundred weight of sugar produced by the immigrant at Jamaica is a hundred weight of sugar withdrawn from the market of Cuban slaves. Will slave states follow our example, unless capital flourish under it? Can capital flourish unless it has the right to hire labor wherever labor is willing to be hired?”59 The arrival of indentured laborers was cast as a means of undercutting Cuban slavery, as well as educating, training, and “emancipating” the laborers of India and Africa by allowing them to engage in the market for their labor.60
“Training” Former Slaves
“Made by escaped slaves” was a label abolitionists could be proud of, as G. M. Gillett’s family clearly was. Abolitionists supported projects to help rehabilitate “escaped slaves” and raised money to support destitute free black populations. They promoted educational projects and sought to “train” former slaves in disciplined labor. In 1827 the Genius of Universal Emancipation advertised, “British Ladies have devised, to draw the public attention to the important subject of West Indian Slavery and distress, that of making ‘Work Bags,’ and vending them with tracts, and periodical publications,” the proceeds of which “are thrown into a fund, part of which is made up of other contributions, donations, &c to be appropriated” to the “relief of the distresses of the West Indian Slaves.” A card was included inside each work bag that read: “The money raised by the sale of the Society’s Work Bags and Albums, is employed in CIRCULATING INFORMATION, in relieving NEGLECTED AND DESERTED NEGROES, and in promoting the EDUCATION OF BRITISH SLAVES.”61
Education was a fine goal, but was primarily directed by British male and female philanthropists at “practical” training in agriculture and the domestic arts. The well-meaning but doomed 1841 Niger Expedition—the culmination of British abolitionist Thomas Fowell Buxton’s activism—sought to establish a model farm on the Niger River for freed slaves, run by missionaries, in order to train Africans in Christianity, domesticity, and European agricultural techniques.62 Its failure put off some activists, but redirected others to the field of West Indian emancipated slave “rehabilitation.” Missionary efforts in the West Indies included training in agricultural techniques that formerly enslaved workers were very familiar with, as well as mechanical training, training in domestic service, general biblically focused education, and an encouragement toward the formation of nuclear families in which women and men operated in different economic spheres.63 In all of these cases, philanthropically minded individuals saw labor as the salvation of the formerly enslaved—on the model of workhouse or prisoner labor—not the provision of land or capital, which would have dramatically changed their fortunes. The assumption was that the reason free labor was not proving to be cheaper than enslaved labor in plantation production was simply a matter of education, apprenticeship, and training.64 Mill, for instance, believed that slavery “deadened the intellect, hindered the search for improvements, and lowered worker productivity” which would mean that the switch to wage labor would always require a period of transition.65
Approaches to Liberated African management in the Atlantic as well as Indian Ocean worlds by British and French governments demonstrated that there was, certainly by midcentury, consensus that compulsion was a necessary part of educating formerly enslaved laborers. Training in the form of service to the state—in the military, through apprenticeships, or through corvée labor—could both be beneficial to the trainee, they believed, and help build the kinds of institutions needed to promote “civilization.” Their own arguments about the guilt of the consumer remained untouched by this approach, since this kind of labor was not consumed. It was used to build infrastructure or defend the empire; even when it was meant to contribute to growing crops for export, it could be argued that they were providing skills training in agriculture. Liberated Africans in different parts of the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds were subject to a variety of models that allowed them theoretical “freedom” without the flexibility to work for themselves. In Brazil, forms of guardianship for Liberated Africans lasted up to three generations after emancipation.66 In East Africa, Liberated Africans were educated at mission stations in domestic service and agricultural labor.67 And in Sierra Leone, the Liberated African Department combined mission education with apprenticeships, where those who had been recently sold at the coast and loaded onto slave ships bound for the Americas were trained in a skill or agricultural labor or, more often, used as a general servant for the families who had “purchased” their apprenticeship from the colonial government. While “made by escaped slaves” might have signified a rehabilitation of laborers who had been brought up in a system in which coercion had directed their efforts, the application of these approaches to the recaptured slaves settled in Sierra Leone demonstrated the racial underpinnings of the assumptions about labor discipline made by abolitionists like Macaulay. If the slave trade had created a state of war in Africa, which had undermined Africans’ ability to labor industriously and consume reasonably, these Liberated Africans would need to be educated in labor discipline.68
African Domestic Slavery
This educational mission went beyond former slaves, however. In part this complicity with slavery elsewhere in the world had emerged among ethical capitalists because, as Malthus, Smith, Ricardo, and others had expressed, there were concerns that African societies would be able to transition away from the slave trade without the institution of slavery. African slavery had been the subject of both antislavery polemics and classical political economy theorizing. Malthus drew on the travel writing of Mungo Park to explain that only newly purchased or captured slaves could be sold; “domestic” slaves and slaves born into captivity were supposedly treated as part of the integral household.69 This was a popular view in the nineteenth century, repeated by numerous travel writers and colonial officials.70 Proslavery advocates used this kind of information to argue that Africans were more suited to slavery or that New World slavery, rather than being a “peculiar institution,” was part of the “natural” lifestyle of Africans. But antislavery activists had begun to mobilize this information in a different way: as evidence of the backward nature of slavery. Like ancient Rome, or medieval feudal states, the argument went, economies that continued to rely on slavery were old-fashioned, inefficient, and paternalistic.71 For an advanced, modern economy, slavery must be abolished. But, the “stadial theory” argument continued—some places were not advanced, modern societies, and in those places, domestic slavery was an important social institution that would take time to eradicate.72 This argument was extremely important in colonial justifications of continued domestic slavery.73
Slavery in Africa was a social, economic, and political institution, as it was in America, but increasingly the argument became that slavery was an intrinsic, protean element of African society, not an institution that had evolved in response to increased economic globalization.74 Rudolph Ware notes, “The nearly complete erasure of the memory of the Almaami’s abolition” in Futa Toro “offers a reminder that the rulers who squashed African resistance to slavery (with European help) normalized the institution of slavery and erased earlier legacies of struggles. Like the Almaami’s son, rulers re-enslaved people and re-established slave trades and pretended that they had inalienable customary or Islamic legal rights to do so.”75 Large-scale slave production had existed in African economies prior to the expansion of the Atlantic slave trade, but by the late eighteenth century, when abolitionist arguments about the nature of African society and the effects of the slave trade became increasingly widespread in popular culture, slave-based plantation production had become fundamental to some African economies.76 Ownership of slaves for production had also spread beyond the military elite; for instance, one “commoner” near Timbo owned 140 slaves who produced “cotton, rice and provisions.”77 Macaulay reported that just outside of Freetown, King Tom had about eighty prisoners in his village, “whom at present he causes to work in his Rice grounds, but whom he will probably begin to dispose of as soon as his crop is put in.”78 Not only had enslaved labor been important for growing and transporting the rice used by slave ships, slaves were being used to grow crops deemed part of the legitimate-commerce experiment.79 As slave prices went down in the immediate aftermath of the abolition acts, in some places declining to half of their pre-abolition peak, more African slave owners could afford to keep slaves working on plantations, or sell them regionally rather than turning to the Atlantic trade.80 Cheap plantation production paradoxically required underpopulated land (so that economies of scale could work) but also a cheap and, more importantly, stationary labor force. This was as true for Africa as for the Americas, where wealth was also invested, mortgaged, and capitalized through slavery. Groundnut exports, fueled by both free and enslaved labor, increased in the Rio Nunez to over 4,000 tons exported per year by the end of the 1860s, and in the Rio Pongo that figure was 2,000 tons.81 Freetown’s exports of groundnuts grown in their hinterland grew from 2,644 bushels in 1831 to 145,113 bushels in 1866.82 This expansion was made possible by migrations from the Futa Jallon highlands by free laborers seeking autonomy from the state. But it was also a result of the expansion of commercial agriculture facilitated by enslaved labor.
The concept of “wealth in people” has been at the heart of anthropological understandings of African systems of value, and how they intersected with the rise of “wealth in things” that developed over the long nineteenth century.83 As would become clear over the course of the nineteenth century, wealth in people was easily shifted from the transatlantic slave trade to the production of the very commodities sought by anti-slave-trade activists to undermine the slave trade.84 In West Africa, especially in the era of increasingly valuable Atlantic slave trading, property was not accumulated in land, but in people, as numerous observers began to articulate by the late nineteenth century. In the Igbo language, for instance, the difference between two types of wealth suggests the manner by which property grows, with one word (uba) implying increase through natural multiplication, and another (akhu) deriving from the word “catch,” which suggests etymologically how some people viewed the ability to expand their human property.85 Emily Lynn Osborn recounts that in the Milo River Valley of Guinea, “slavery ownership also became a key resource to young men seeking to attain the trappings of adulthood, for the families of marriageable young women demanded bridewealth payments in slaves, and … household heads depended increasingly on slave labor to carry out agricultural production.”86 And as groundnut exports increased over the mid-nineteenth century, the ability to mobilize a labor force to produce those commodities became a crucial determinant of an individual’s ability to shift smoothly from the slave trade to legitimate commerce.
Zachary Macaulay relayed a story while he was in charge of Freetown about a slave of Bunce Island named “Smart”:
This Smart [a “native”] I have formerly told you had been a slave on Bance [Bunce] Island. He is a Native of the Loko Country which lies three days journey or more beyond Rokelle. He had been intended for a ship bound to the West Indies, but on the day the Slaves were put on board, he had concealed himself & so escaped for that time. In the meantime he was employed in boats & shewing much acuteness and fidelity, he was retained on the Island. He grew in favour and was at length promoted to be a factor and sent to Rokelle with goods to buy Slaves. As this was the key to his native country, he had an opportunity of buying numbers of his own Countrymen, none of whom he sent to the Island, but either kept them as Domestics, or exchanged them with their friends, for slaves of other Nations. By this Policy he has made himself powerful and independent so that even Bance Island whose slave he is stands in awe of him and scarce ventures to press for the Payment of 150 slaves which he owes them. His adherents amount to several Hundreds, exclusive of his own family, which consists of no less than thirty wives and eighty Children alive.87
This story clearly complicated the notion of slavery. If slaves could own slaves, and if slaves could command the power of 150 people, plus their own extensive kin network, were they even really slaves in the sense of that word’s hardening definition in the European and American context? Examples of African domestic slaves eating from the same dishes as their masters, or of living in nondifferentiated spaces in places like Gorée, or of living in entirely autonomous plantation villages, disrupted abolitionists’ arguments about what “slavery” and “freedom” meant.
What remained a crucial distinction for abolitionists between African and American slavery was participation in family life. As the example of “Smart” shows, being a slave of Bunce Island had not prevented him from having thirty wives and eighty living children. American slavery, on the other hand, was regularly characterized as horrifically disruptive of family life. Fugitive slaves narrated their trauma at being separated from parents or children.88 The rationale that allowed a shift among free-produce consumers toward accepting unfree labor conditions globally was the argument that African slavery, or East Indian slavery, was different from New World slavery. This myth persisted long after the end of the age of abolition, and has inspired lively debate among historians and anthropologists up to the present day.89 New World slavery was described as “economic, social, and political deprivation, legal impotence and oppression, all this as part of a system of social stratification.”90
But importantly, this definition emerged as abolitionists tried to articulate both what was so heinous about the New World enslaved labor they were campaigning against, and as they honed their definitions of freedom in response to proslavery challenges. If a wage laborer in industrial Britain was oppressed by dependence on an employer, was his “freedom” really all that different from slavery? Well, yes, the abolitionists explained, because the wage laborer was free to leave and find a new employer; the wage laborer was free to engage socially with whomever he pleased; the wage laborer had legal rights. But what about the laborers on the African and Indian plantations, who were producing “free labor” goods for ethical commerce? Well, the abolitionists argued, their relationships with their owners were more like family relationships. Never mind that paternalistic slaveholders in the American South made similar arguments about their own relationships with enslaved workers.91 The new political and economic structures of ethical capitalism ultimately supported the rights of property owners and middlemen (the largest class of consumers), rather than the rights of laborers.
In contrast to this image of an “unchanging” and benign form of kinship, the realities of an evolving African system of slavery, tied to the global development of capitalism, could be witnessed in the acts of the enslaved themselves, and in the various West African legal codes inherited by colonial powers over the course of the nineteenth century. Women and men fled slavery, coming to colonial cities they believed would uphold their claim to freedom, but often finding surprisingly bureaucratic courts willing to listen to former owners’ claims that the formerly enslaved were in fact working off debts, or were wives, or wards. Not wanting to disrupt the trading relations essential to demonstrating the value of ethical commerce to the global economy, governors in Sierra Leone, Gambia, Cape Coast, and Senegal were wary of fugitive slaves who fled to territories where slavery was outlawed, because they disrupted the delicate balance of power in which the often thinly stretched colonial officials and merchant houses relied on local African commercial elites.92 Even in Freetown, governors from Macaulay onward through the late nineteenth century responded tepidly to the freedom claims of runaway slaves who reached the city.93 As Trevor Getz recounts, in Senegal, the Brak of Waalo, the chief suppliers of cattle to Saint-Louis, along with the Damel of Kajoor, and the Trarza, who were the major suppliers of gum to the French, all boycotted trade with Saint-Louis to put pressure on the French colonial government to return runaway slaves and not enforce the French 1848 abolition act.94 These states were exercising their commercial power in the commodity and provisioning trades to maintain control of an asset that was important to their economies—enslaved laborers. Legitimate traders responded to that African commercial power, pressuring the colonial governments to ignore “benign” domestic slavery and making arguments for the beneficial nature of “civilizing” work. The question of who would benefit from ethical commerce in Africa, and how, was a process of negotiation between African slaveholders, middlemen, and the enslaved themselves.
Laborers as Consumers
In justifying questionable labor practices in other countries, the argument in support of British and French manufacturers was increasingly important as cotton became the dominant industry of the mid-nineteenth century. The evidence of free labor’s economic superiority over enslaved labor was patchy, but at least free laborers could be consumers in their own right, which further stimulated manufacturing and industry back in the home market. As the Edinburgh Review explained the logic, the consumers of India—“100 millions of industrious and ingenious inhabitants”—would be an “infinitely more extensive market for British manufactured goods than the islands of Jamaica, Barbados, &c.”95 The free-labor argument was a catch-all for economic anxieties, an attempt to get the most supporters on board and to cast slave labor and the slave trade as an economic burden affecting far more people than just the enslaved themselves. And so the American Genius of Universal Emancipation republished a British argument: “At a moment too, when the manufacturing districts in this country are suffering most heavily for want of a market for their goods, and when the manufactures of other countries are treading closely upon our heels; it is of great importance, that the people of Great Britain should be fully acquainted with the restrictions, which cramp our trade with our own Empire in the East Indies.”96 Because the East Indies “belonged” to Britain, it would suit everyone better if the country could source free-labor cotton produced there for manufacture in Britain. Arguing in support of equalizing sugar tariffs in 1823, alongside fellow East India Company shareholder David Ricardo, Zachary Macaulay “alluded to the Hon Gentleman’s denial, his distinct denial, that the cheapness of labour in India gave any advantage to the merchant in the market of England; nothing but a love of paradox could have led to such a proposition as that.”97
Consumer interest was important for framing the seeming contradiction between arguments for free labor in Britain and America. The point was to empower consumers, not laborers. A focus on West Africa shows that ideas of ethical capitalism were about improving the consumer power of West Africans, but also that of the American and British (and French) laborers, who would then be able to buy cheaper goods, undercutting demand for higher wages at home. Over the first half of the eighteenth century, although historians are divided about this, there does seem to have been an increase in the value of labor as related to the ability to consume around the world.98 This allowed for unprecedented access to consumer goods, which caused a moral and political crisis by the end of the century. As ethical-commerce advocates involved with African trade and speculative colonization and governance schemes emphasized increasingly over the nineteenth century, free labor would reduce the costs of production, allowing living standards for consumers to continue to rise even as labor value was eroded.
Macaulay, his friend David Ricardo, and others had become obsessed with discovering the value of a basic unit of labor—what is one hour of labor worth—which Ricardo argued ought to be the same across sectors within the economy. Smith’s labor theory of value was problematic because consumer prices always had to factor into the production the consumer was doing to get the money to buy the product in the first place. Ricardo wanted the labor theory of value to “determine the value of the commodity independently of variations in wages.”99 Ricardo’s transformative intervention—comparative advantage—worked because “the labor theory of value holds within each country, but not between countries.”100 This explains why the moral-commerce proponents fixated on reducing consumer prices: that was the only way to achieve a higher standard of living once the labor unit of value reached equilibrium.
David Ricardo’s arguments about the global division of labor and the relationship between wages, profits, and cost of living (developed further by Mill), were influential in shaping abolitionist polemics, but their practical work in abolitionist commerce helped create and reify ideas about who, globally, should be responsible for different kinds of labor.101 By the 1850s tropical commodity production had become unmistakably enmeshed with an understanding of an inherent global division of labor, justified for ethical consumers by a rhetoric that ascribed it to “benign” African domestic slavery or “intractable” Indian caste prejudice or “lazy” West Indian former slaves. Free-produce shopkeepers, importers, manufacturers, and financiers made pragmatic business decisions in the search for raw and manufactured free-labor cotton. Those decisions and their rationalizations helped change ideas about who global producers, manufacturers, and consumers were, and could be.
The emergence of these ideas had origins in a vision for Africa that saw legitimate commerce there after the slave trade helping both to support Africans in the transition away from the slave trade, and to support free-labor projects worldwide in opposition to slave labor in the New World. The diversion of labor away from local manufacturing toward plantation-style agriculture and (enslaved or coerced or underpaid) labor, and the focus on exporting for global commodities markets, kept Atlantic West Africa within the same production and consumption chains of the earlier Atlantic system, but with new, “ethical” products as the driver. In Egypt and India, the shift contributed to a growing reliance on British finance and manufactured goods.102 The image of Africa, India, and other areas was firmly of unskilled laborers whom global ethical capitalism’s division of labor had given an important, if inferior, role in the global supply chain. Free labor was cheaper than slave labor, as long as it was taking place in inexpensive labor markets. The irony is that the free laborers French and British West African governors deemed “too expensive” or “too lazy” were experiencing a boom in their ability to consume cheaply, and certainly did not need educational reforms aimed at making them industrious consumers.103
Obviously, it was not the free-produce movement or the businesses involved in sourcing, producing, manufacturing, and selling free cotton who were responsible for the global division of labor: that was already at the heart of the nineteenth-century economy. What the free-produce businesses—and their spokespeople—did was articulate specific interventions consumers could make in the global supply chain, while lending moral justification to the continuation of racial disparities in labor exploitation. Securing plantation products from Africa and India would support legitimate commerce and would undermine demand for slave produce from the southern United States and West Indies. But questions about labor practices gave rise to new forms of moral reasoning by free-labor advocates. Relying on evidence from travel writers, merchants, and their own suppliers, they argued both that African and Asian domestic slavery was a different, more benign institution than Western slavery, and that the practice of indenture by Western economies was a means of training workers in the discipline of wage labor. Low wages, meanwhile, were justified by relative cost of living.104 The cheaper the raw materials were, the cheaper the manufactures could be, which meant that wages could stay low and an improving standard of living would continue to “civilize” the backwaters of the global economy. Even more importantly, without low wages—which, it now appeared, could be ensured only by creating a high volume of mobile labor—the logic of free labor’s efficiency would evaporate. All of this rested on a logic that was constantly reformulating a definition of slavery based on whatever abolitionist political economists were reacting to in proslavery arguments. Low wages may have been bad, indenture may have been bad, but nothing was as bad as slavery.
Manufacturing Core and Agricultural Periphery
With the efficient global division of labor and the new science of comparative advantage, places that had previously produced their own cotton for local use and regional export turned into monocultural export economies. This was explained as an important benefit for the places producing those export commodities, for the reasons outlined above. Moving the manufacturing jobs to Britain might also help to solve another social ill domestic campaigners feared—expanding East Indian cotton production, the New Times argued, could be a boon to Ireland: “If the people of Ireland are to be employed in manufactures, not only will a supply of the raw material be wanted, but a new market must be found for the manufactured article. Now both these wants may be adequately supplied by British India. And what prevents it? Chiefly the narrow policy which obstructs the migration to India of an adequate number of intelligent agents, and the high duties imposed on East-Indian produce.”105 This would, the newspaper argued, prevent the Irish from flocking to England and, apparently inevitably, filling the jails. The free labor of Indians, the free flow of capital, and the free trade in commodities, then, could help prevent what the writer saw as the problem of the free movement of labor.
Of course, northern manufacturers in the United States argued for their own protectionist measures specifically to overcome British arguments for comparative advantage.106 In part this was pragmatic: both the British and American arguments were largely formulated to attract new free-produce customers from both within and outside the antislavery movement. This meant that writers drew on both antislavery arguments about the sin of the consumer and the popular economic language in circulation. But in associating their moral cause with the debates over the effects of trade, they gave a particular view of the world economy their ethical approval. In encouraging British and American consumers to purchase global free-labor goods, free-produce importers and manufacturers were creating new global supply chains that disrupted local industries and regional manufacturing networks.
To counteract those effects, some middlemen attempted to bring aspects of manufacturing to Africa. In 1856 Benson reported he had a Liberian-developed mill huller for his coffee that could prepare “one thousand pounds of coffee in marketable order in a week.”107 In the 1850s, cotton grown in Abeokuta kept “between two and three hundred gins” at work and “about five to six warehouses” filled for export.108 In 1857, Lagos exported 868 bales of cotton at a price of £3,490, and 50,000 “Native cotton cloths” valued at £25,000.109 The promotion of the export of native cotton cloths never really took off, however. It is hard to even call it a failure; it was not even considered by the British and American-based traders and merchants promoting African legitimate commerce, and it certainly wasn’t an idea supported by manufacturing interests in Liverpool and Manchester, which had only just begun to overtake Indian cloth in supplying international demand.110 One of the great ironies of the post-slave-trade commercial relationships between Britain and West Africa was that American slave-grown cotton was being manufactured into textiles in Manchester and Liverpool then sent to West Africa, where it was exchanged for legitimate produce, including raw cotton.
Brown & Ives exemplified this strange triangle. In 1818 they sent to Senegal and Sierra Leone on their ship Charlotte $1,786 worth of orange, red, and blue cotton yarn. The Charlotte, which became embroiled in US congressional hearings over ad valorem import tariffs, also imported 16 bales of cotton and 574 pieces of serge from the African coast, valued at $2,870.111 The exported cotton textiles destined for West Africa were purchased from Blackstone Manufacturing, in which Brown & Ives were investors (and which was founded by Moses Brown, the Quaker abolitionist and uncle of Nicholas Brown).112 Blackstone sourced its raw cotton from New Orleans, where it was purchased by their agent, Thomas Ives’s nephew, Thomas Bancroft. The slave-produced cotton was purchased on account with Baring Brothers, the London financiers who were simultaneously bankrolling legitimate-commerce expeditions for palm oil in West Africa.113 And while providing market information on cotton in New Orleans, Bancroft also wrote to Brown & Ives with information about sources of free-produce sugar (from Batavia in the East Indies) and rice.114 In other words, the global chain of producers, manufacturers, financiers, merchants, shopkeepers, and consumers was far more complicated than even dedicated free-produce businessmen could acknowledge. Pursuing free-produce goods from one source could mean accepting slave-produced goods from another.
In India, the combination of greater demand for British cloths in the West African trade and the pressure from British businesses and the colonial government actually pushed Indians out of manufacturing into cotton agriculture (or low-paid agricultural labor).115 The emerging logic of comparative advantage was deployed to argue that industrialized manufacturing in Britain was more efficient than Indian or African methods, but that free trade with those places was an important part of making that advantage.116 Without the ability to trade something for those manufactures, though, Indian and African consumers would have to withdraw from the market, a variation of the legitimate-commerce argument. David Ricardo himself, a member of the committee of East India shareholders, commented, “Those who exported must have got a return in something else they had not before had. If we send cotton goods to India, they must be paid for. Our cotton goods were purchased with other manufactures; new branches of trade were thus struck out, and both countries were ultimately benefited.”117 As the focus shifted from the role of enslaved labor in the production of sugar to its role in cotton production by the late 1840s, British observers commented that it was obvious that “India can compete with any free labour countries or Java, but the Indian trade cannot be conducted without some general mode of remittance by produce. If cotton, for instance, could at once take the place of sugar.”118 Everyone needed to produce something they could make more cheaply than other people, so they could sell it for export and continue to buy manufactures from Britain.
This vision of global free labor also reinforced the argument made by abolitionist political economists that any wage—no matter how low—was better than slavery; wage labor was in itself a civilizing force. No matter how low the wage, it made the recipient a better citizen and consumer, and increased industriousness and civilization the world over. The point was to use global free trade to find the cheapest free labor. The wages paid to those laborers would “civilize” them, allowing them to participate in global commerce and gradually raising their standard of living. The American slave system kept prices artificially high because it required protection and because enslaved laborers were inefficient, as demonstrated, abolitionists argued, by the fact that overseers resorted to the lash and other punishments to compel labor. This was contrasted with hardworking free laborers, who could see their lives improving through industrious behavior, and who were incentivized to work harder by the consumer manufactures they could buy with their wages.119 But together with the arguments justifying African and Asian domestic slavery, this image of the civilizing nature of labor and consumption required a reimagining of Africa and Asia as places that were not yet really consumers. Unlike the earlier legitimate traders such as Brown & Ives, they were painting Africa as a place of production rather than as a ready and important consumer market.
WHEN G. M. GILLETT’S FAMILY bought their cotton textiles “made by escaped slaves,” they were buying one of the many varieties of free-labor cotton on the market. They could have equally searched out cotton grown by free white laborers in America or Australia. They could have purchased one of Thomas Clegg’s Nigerian cotton cloths, or the East Indian cotton cloths manufactured by Cropper, Benson & Co. The fact that Gillett told her daughter it was specifically cotton made by American escaped slaves says something about the state of global commerce by the time she was writing, several decades after the American Civil War. The moral associations linked to East India or Egyptian or West African cotton production had mostly evaporated in what was largely by the end of the nineteenth century the “colonial world.” By that point, it was a matter of common knowledge that these colonies produced raw materials for manufacture in the industrial centers of Britain, France, and Germany. But abolitionists had actually been at the forefront of arguing that these overseas territories were Britain’s best hope for achieving independence from America’s slave-produced cotton supply.
Free produce allowed consumers to imagine a morally responsible global division of labor, where they could continue to use the “luxury” tropical goods associated with slavery, while imagining a different future of “self-reliance”—largely by subdividing the world into manufacturers and producers, and either ignoring overseas labor practices or condoning them based on an understanding of “domestic slavery” that rested on assumptions about the role of slavery in societies deemed to be backward in part because of their participation in the institution of slavery. Highly aware of this circular logic with regard to the American economy, ethical consumers conveniently overlooked it in Africa and Asia. African traders and, increasingly, commercial agriculturalists, who had been at the heart of arguments for legitimate commerce’s ability to be in the interest of Africa, seemed poised to benefit from this as long as they could control the distribution of land and labor and not become overly indebted to Europeans. Merchants and consumers worked together to produce economic and political, as well as moral, justifications for the exploitation of foreign workers. Ideas of “benign” domestic slavery and uneducated workforces allowed British and American antislavery activists to ignore the inherent labor problems of tropical commodity production in search of a more just supply source.
By the 1850s and 1860s the focus of African legitimate-commerce arguments had shifted to the beneficial nature of work (as part of the civilizing mission) and the ability of that commerce to provide a new supply of mass-produced raw commodities. The inability of the American Free Produce Association or the various independent merchants on either side of the Atlantic to tackle the whole supply chain left businesses and the movement as a whole with decisions about where to focus their capital. The resulting proliferation of business schemes led to a gradual but perceptible shift toward an acceptance of global divisions of labor that included endorsing slavery in “backward” societies provided that these abolitionists could convince themselves they were helping the overall moral improvement of global capitalism: a rising tide lifting all boats.