CONCLUSION

The early modern English empire did not emerge free from conflict or controversy, nor did it occupy an unimportant or marginal place in the politics of late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century England. The acquisition of the colonial empire and the prevalence of African slavery as the dominant labor force in the West Indies colonies were deeply connected to transatlantic ideological debates over the purpose of empire and the proper management of population and labor. Imperial concerns played an increasingly significant role in contributing to the divisive and ideological nature of early modern English political culture. The almost constant confrontation and negotiation that took place among colonial merchants, planters, and officials and their counterparts in London proved this. The deep anxiety on the part of the burgeoning imperial state over the integrity of the empire during such divisive events as the Exclusion Crisis and the Nine Years’ War demonstrates that it is impossible to separate domestic from colonial concerns. The artificial separation between center and periphery that has persisted in scholarship on the early modern empire simply did not exist. Similarly, the prevalence of African slavery in the English West Indies colonies did not occur in isolation from events and affairs emanating from the metropolis, and it did not happen simply because of socioeconomic necessity on the part of colonial planters. Nor did English planters utilize and promote slave labor simply because they had been given the autonomy to do so. Although local issues certainly influenced colonial actors, African slavery did not emerge in a colonial vacuum but was deeply implicated in contemporary debates and disagreements on political economy and the purposes of an overseas territorial empire. The expansion of the Atlantic empire and the astronomic growth of slavery in the early modern period were deeply intertwined with metropolitan political concerns.

The power and influence of a cohesive group of London-based colonial merchants during the Commonwealth and Protectorate periods of the 1650s and the political-economic ideology they espoused provided the ideological foundations of the early English empire. Their imperial vision, which considered territorial expansion necessary for England to compete commercially and militarily with its rivals, was based on an overseas plantation empire supplied with indentured servants and African slaves. Also central to this ideal was the idea that England should utilize, through legal or illegal means, the wealth of the Spanish American colonies to promote its own imperial interests. Their imperial vision, with some modifications, continued to be supported by the restored monarchy of Charles II from the 1660s through the reign of James II in the 1680s. The Royal African Company became a key institution in the imperial designs of both Charles II and James II. Its royally granted charter, and therefore its very existence, was dependent on the royal prerogative and all of its political and economic associations. By limiting who could participate in the African trade through a state-controlled monopoly, it was thought that the benefits of the trade would come to England at the expense of other nations. The political influence exercised by the company over imperial administration demonstrated the important role institutions played in the evolution of the early modern empire. In addition, the African Company’s position at the center of Restoration imperial affairs during the 1670s and 1680s represented the imperial state’s commitment to promoting African slavery in the West Indies colonies.

After the Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689, the Royal African Company no longer held its guaranteed monopoly. The ensuing public debate over how the slave trade should be managed revealed a vision of empire shared by anti-monopolist colonial planters as well as the state: that African slavery in the West Indies was central to the functioning of the empire and that the empire was integral to England’s overall economy and polity. By embracing an open slave trade, the English state not only promoted slavery in the colonies, it accepted the oppressive racial slave regimes in the colonies. Over the course of decades of confrontations with colonial interests over the Royal African Company’s monopoly, the metropolitan government learned that the best way to placate West Indies planters and make them less likely to cause problems was to keep the slave trade open. It was hoped that West Indies planters would remain more compliant and complacent to imperial directives. In exchange, the English state also implicitly agreed to support and prop up the legal system of white mastery that planters in the colonies had constructed, in order to continue to reap slavery’s economic rewards. In this sense, there absolutely was metropolitan complicity in the development and promotion of slavery in the English colonies.1

The English government, in promoting slavery, also seemed to take domestic demographic concerns into consideration, especially as war with France continued for the better part of two decades, beginning in the 1690s. War affected the Caribbean colonies in surprising ways, as many colonial governors and militia officers were forced to arm slaves in order to help defend the islands from French attacks. By relying on African slaves, English colonists demanded fewer and fewer servants from England. Slavery and the empire were each used to justify the existence of the other. By the turn of the eighteenth century, planters and others with colonial interests were willing to lose a certain level of autonomy in exchange for opening the slave trade. They were even willing to endanger themselves and the safety of their colonies for the sake of profit, and the imperial state wanted to share in those revenues. The inclusion of the asiento as part of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 was a further indication of the embracing of slavery and the slave trade by the imperial state. It demonstrated that dominating the transatlantic slave trade was understood by Robert Harley and his allies to be in the national interest.

In order to understand how and why it became acceptable to expand and maintain such a brutal and horrific system of labor in the English colonies requires not only a consideration of colonial labor demand and cultural and racial prejudices, but an analysis of how slavery became important to the English state. The emergence of African slavery as a key component of English imperialism occurred as a result of all of these factors, and it greatly influenced the ways in which the empire was understood by contemporaries. The interconnections between the growth of slavery and the evolution of English imperialism in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries laid the foundations for British domination of the transatlantic slave trade in the eighteenth century, a defining feature of the modern British empire.