INTRODUCTION

Why did England establish and maintain an empire in the Americas during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? The expansion of the English Atlantic empire during the second half of the seventeenth century was not a foregone conclusion and could even be seen as something of a puzzle, given the strong opposition to colonial acquisition from politicians and economic writers who worried that colonial demand for labor drained England of its own valuable workforce. According to these thinkers, colonies did not supplement the nation’s economic prosperity but were in fact detrimental to it. “The Trade of England, and the Fishing Trade,” admonished the economic writer Roger Coke in 1670, “are so much diminished by how much they might have been supplied by those men who are diverted in our American Plantations.” The political writer William Petyt lamented in 1680, “England never was so populous as it might have been, and undeniably must now be far less populous than ever, having so lately peopled our vast American Plantations.”1

Despite these warnings, it was during the second half of the seventeenth century that the pace of England’s empire building across the Atlantic increased dramatically, as England established and/or fought to maintain Jamaica, Saint Christopher (Saint Kitts), Nova Scotia, New York, East and West Jersey, Carolina, and Pennsylvania, not to mention significant trading outposts in West Africa and India. How are we to account for this apparent discrepancy? Were the critics of empire simply ignored? Or in the end, were they appeased by the widespread use of African slavery in the West Indian colonies? After all, by relying on the forced labor of African slaves, English planters demanded fewer and fewer servants from the home country.

Competing Visions of Empire investigates how disputes over the projected goals and the perceived impact of England’s overseas colonial empire were deeply ideological and frequently centered on the issue of labor. It investigates whether or not it was merely coincidental that African slavery became an integral part of English imperial designs at the same time that economic thinkers raised the issue of the empire’s impact on England’s domestic labor supply. It shows that the establishment and growth of the early modern English empire and the prevalence of slavery in the West Indies colonies were inextricably linked to political and ideological conflicts in England and to political-economic debates on ideas of population, empire, and national wealth that took place throughout the early modern period.

The book focuses on the years 1650–1720, when imperial expansion became a paramount concern of the English state. It concentrates on the West Indies colonies of Barbados, the Leeward Islands, and Jamaica because contemporaries considered these colonies to be most important to England’s imperial economy. In addition, it was in these colonies that the transition to African slave labor was the most rapid and entrenched during the seventeenth century. The book focuses on such state-sponsored enterprises as the Western Design and the Royal African Company and illustrates how different groups, especially planters, privateers, merchants, and colonial officials, negotiated with, confronted, and accommodated state policies and institutions. Slavery and the slave trade emerged as key points of contention in these confrontations. The prevalence of slavery in the colonies transformed not only how colonials understood the empire and their place within it, but how metropolitans, particularly state actors, understood the empire and its purpose.

PREVAILING INTERPRETATIONS

Competing Visions of Empire examines the ideological origins of the English empire and its connections to unfree labor systems in the colonies. In doing so it challenges many of the dominant scholarly interpretations of the early English empire. Traditionally, the origins of European colonial endeavors in the early modern period have been described as mercantilist in nature and design. According to this interpretation, most famously articulated by historians George Louis Beer and Charles M. Andrews in the early twentieth century, England’s imperial agenda was based on a collection of commercial laws that aimed to restrict foreign access to colonial markets and goods. As Beer wrote, England’s early modern empire was managed by a series of “regulations whose fundamental aim was to create a self-sufficient commercial empire of mutually complementary economic parts.” This system, of course, came to be labeled “mercantilism,” and mercantilist policies included the promotion of state-sponsored monopoly corporations and the Acts of Trade and Navigation. This narrative describes a pervasive, hegemonic “mercantilist mind” that understood such policies governing overseas trade and colonial settlements as natural defenses against foreign economic and military competition. Simply put, if England did not seek out colonies and protect its overseas markets, other European powers would and England would necessarily lose access to wealth and resources.2

The idea that mercantilist economic ideas lay at the heart of England’s imperial designs in the early modern era has remained the dominant interpretive paradigm for over a century.³ The overwhelming historiographical acceptance of a static idea of mercantilism has meant that scholars have generally failed to recognize the connections between the rise of unfree labor in the colonies and significant debates about the empire’s purpose that took place throughout the period. Although many scholars acknowledge the mutability of mercantilism as a concept, few have explicitly recognized that imperial and commercial policies and the ideas and theories used to support them were highly contested. People in early modern England and the colonies disagreed over how to manage and regulate the overseas empire and whether or not colonies benefited the home country in the first place. One of the major fault lines of the debate was over the issue of labor, particularly the slave trade. Competing Visions of Empire uncovers and contextualizes the dissenting voices that complicate the notion of mercantilist consensus and explores the important roles they played in shaping English imperialism.⁴

One of the consequences of this overreliance on the mercantilist interpretative framework is that it has resulted in the prevalence of the idea that England’s colonial endeavors of the early modern period were not imperial. Indeed, when compared with the brutal regimes of the British empire in places like India and Africa in the nineteenth century, the small islands and coastal settlements that made up the so-called “first” empire hardly seem noteworthy. But it was during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries that the economic exploitation of colonial settlements was developed and perfected. The transatlantic slave trade grew in astonishing proportions at this time, and England and its colonies reaped the economic benefits of this oppressive labor system. If a regime is labeled imperial when it relies on territorial conquest and is militaristic and brutalizing to its subjects, then England’s early modern exploits in the Atlantic World were absolutely imperial. The fact that contemporaries sometimes failed to fully understand the implications of these exploits and did their best to maintain myths about the empire being “Protestant, commercial, maritime, and free” does not diminish its imperial nature.⁵ Colonization, genocide, slavery, and exploitative plantation agriculture made England’s transatlantic exploits imperial from a very early stage.

Rather than focus on the construction of the mythology of empire, this book considers how different contemporary constituencies understood England’s empire to uncover its ideological origins. Planters, merchants, privateers, trading companies, imperial authorities, and colonial officials all articulated their own imperial agendas, often in confrontation with, or at least in conversation with, one or more of the other groups. Slavery and the transatlantic slave trade played a significant role in shaping these imperial ideals. It is in these agendas that competing ideas about the purposes of empire, and how (or whether) England could best benefit from an overseas empire, emerged and evolved. By considering the ideas expressed by the people and institutions intimately involved in the highly contested process of empire building, the book illustrates that imperial ideologies existed at a variety of levels of English and colonial societies.6

Many historians have attempted to add more-nuanced interpretations of the origins of the English Atlantic empire than the traditional mercantilist narrative, with its primary emphasis on metropolitan concerns, has usually allowed. Richard S. Dunn’s pathbreaking book Sugar and Slaves has become perhaps the most influential interpretation of the social and economic development of England’s West Indies colonies. Rather than focus on metropolitan commercial policies and their implementation, Dunn is concerned with how “the early English planters in the West Indies responded to life in the tropics.” He argues quite convincingly that in Barbados, the Leeward Islands, and eventually Jamaica, a cohesive class of powerful and wealthy planters emerged during the seventeenth century. These men, motivated by the desire for personal profit, established large sugar plantations worked by thousands of African slaves, thereby creating a “social mode” that was “totally without precedent in the English experience.” For Dunn, the origins of the English empire and the centrality of African slavery to it lay in the motivations and socioeconomic needs of colonial planters first and foremost, which resulted in colonial societies diverging dramatically from English models.⁷

Central to the idea that the English colonies were culturally and socially distinct from England was the astronomic growth of African slavery during the seventeenth century. But how and why did it become acceptable for the English and other Europeans to enslave Africans? Generally speaking, the framework for understanding the prevalence and longevity of African slavery in the Americas centers on the issues of race and contemporary European understandings of racial difference. Some historians, especially Eric Williams, have maintained that the motivations behind the widespread use of enslaved Africans in European colonies were purely economic and that racism inherent in the slave system was an ex post facto justification. Williams argues that it was simply cheaper to rely on the labor of enslaved Africans, and that was all the justification European planters and merchants needed. Other scholars, such as Winthrop Jordan and David Brion Davis, have traced engrained European cultural prejudices against “others” to ancient and medieval precedents to explain the rise of African slavery in the New World. They describe how over the course of the seventeenth century in English colonies, blackness came to be equated with slavery, which had its starkest expression in colonial laws and slave codes. Jordan argues that these ideas were so engrained in the European mind-set that the choice to enslave Africans was effectively an “unthinking decision.”8

Other scholars have taken on the idea that the decision to enslave Africans and sustain the transatlantic slave system for centuries was somehow accidental or “unthinking.” Taking an explicitly “cultural and ideological” approach, David Eltis has not only attempted to answer the question of why Europeans enslaved Africans, but argues that it would have made more economic sense for Europeans to have enslaved other Europeans. He determines that economic “motives operated under the aegis of fundamental non-economic values, in part socially constructed in the modern terminology, which created the Atlantic slave system and the slave trade that sustained it, just as much as the drive to consume and produce plantation produce.” Racist ideologies and pervasive notions of who lay “outside” of acceptable European society shaped these ideas. Eltis argues that the development of a particular kind of possessive individualism that valued property rights above all else sustained this binary construction and, in turn, the transatlantic slave system. As a result, he concludes that slavery was implemented in the colonies “without much reference to the metropolitan authorities.” Similarly, Susan Amussen has emphasized that imperial authorities were often confused about the legal implications and meanings of slavery in the colonies, thus accentuating a disconnect between metropolitan and colonial concerns.⁹

Investigating the lived experiences of the enslaved is another approach scholars have taken to understand how and why Europeans constructed concepts of racial difference, superiority, and inferiority. Stephanie Smallwood has uncovered, in moving and vivid detail, just how deliberate the process of commodification of human beings was, encompassing capture in Africa, captivity in Royal African Company forts, the horrors of the Middle Passage, and finally slave markets in the Americas. Each step was aimed at dehumanizing the African captive, and she concludes that in consequence the Middle Passage was a trauma that never ended for those who made it to the New World. It was a calculated, violent, and purposeful system. Trevor Burnard has investigated the development of white mastery in colonial Jamaica and how it was practiced and sustained in its most raw, brutal forms by a slave owner named Thomas Thistlewood. Using Thistlewood’s diaries, Burnard has vividly described the violence inherent in a system that was based on oppressing the vast majority of the population. He argues that the structures of power in colonial Jamaica emphasized the stark contrast between slavery and freedom, which whites desperately tried to maintain through the use of brute force and sexual violence. Although Jamaican society in some ways resembled contemporary British society in its structures of power, it “deviated” in a crucial way by “abandoning the principle that property was paramount in favor of doctrines that increasingly emphasized race in all matters. Race was the foundation of the social system—white skin meant freedom, dominion, and power; black skin meant slavery, submission, and powerlessness.”10

These analyses of cultural constructs of race and racial superiority and of the deliberate and violent nature of the slave system have provided tremendous insight into how the system was sustained for centuries. Jack Greene has explored some of the implications of these constructions of racial superiority by whites in the West Indies in the development of what he calls “West Indian political thought” during the eighteenth century. Historians of colonial British America have long recognized that colonists regularly articulated ideas of English legal guarantees of liberty when negotiating with and confronting metropolitan authority. These concepts had particular resonance for white colonists in the West Indies, who wished to emphasize their “English liberties” in order to draw the sharpest contrast possible from the legal status of their slaves. According to Greene, by the mid-1700s this “West Indian political thought” stressed “metropolitan complicity” in creating and maintaining colonial slave societies. According to this position, imperial authorities and metropolitan consumers were just as responsible for the expansion of slavery in the colonies as West Indian planters were and reaped just as many, if not more, of its economic rewards.¹¹

Competing Visions of Empire explores the seventeenth-century origins of these ideas, especially the notion of metropolitan responsibility for the expansion of slavery in the colonies. In 2002, Christopher Brown expressed concern that the extensive scholarship on slavery in the early English empire did not yet provide “a connected account of the political history of slavery.” He suggested a number of approaches historians could take, considering the numerous ways the establishment of slave regimes informed issues of state building, war, and political thought.¹² Competing Visions of Empire provides a step in this direction, by focusing on the ways that the expansion of slavery and the English state’s desire to dominate the transatlantic slave trade contributed to the shaping of imperial policies and directives. This often resulted in confrontations over the place of slavery and the slave trade in English imperial designs. For those invested in constructing societies built on white mastery of black slaves, these confrontations informed how they articulated and explained their own imperial ideals. It illustrates that over time, a variety of colonial interests used the institution of slavery to justify the very existence of the empire.

Rather than focus solely on how human networks built the empire on the “periphery,” Competing Visions of Empire argues that in order to determine how and why slavery became so important to English imperialism, one must take into account the fact that empire building involved transoceanic networks of individuals and, just as importantly, the institutions they served, patronized, confronted, and resisted.13 It was in these confrontations and negotiations that imperial ideals emerged and evolved and translated into rival interpretations about the purpose of empire and its proper management and administration. They also reveal the variety of ways that English people, both at home and in the colonies, perceived the central role that unfree labor, especially African slavery, played in the overall imperial economy. The book illustrates the extent to which the English state was intimately involved in the growth and development of slavery in the colonies.

SCOPE OF THE BOOK

The question of unfree labor was central to English imperialism as it evolved during the early modern period, even before the English became heavily involved in the slave trade. Chapter 1 begins with a consideration of one of the earliest justifications for overseas colonization: the need for England to unburden itself of its apparent “surplus” population. It explores the development of indentured service and convict transportation in places like Virginia and Barbados. It pays particular attention to the colonial merchants who profited from and promoted the servant trades, many of whom became key players in the transatlantic slave trade by the mid-1600s. The chapter considers why in the long run neither indentured service nor convict transportation became viable alternatives to slave labor in the West Indies by connecting the issue of unfree colonial labor to contemporary debates over population and political economy. Just as these debates became heated, the English government became involved in overseas imperial designs in earnest.

Chapter 2 focuses on the imperial projects of the English state beginning in the 1650s, paying particular attention to the campaign authorized by Oliver Cromwell that resulted in the capture of Jamaica from the Spanish in 1655, the Western Design. This military and commercial campaign, organized by many of the same colonial merchants at the center of the indentured servant, slave, tobacco, and sugar trades, was a plan to conquer territory from Spain in the New World. Coming on the heels of Cromwell’s successful subjugation of Scotland and Ireland, these men easily convinced the notoriously Hispanophobic Cromwell of the necessity to embark on a transatlantic imperial plan. In addition to territorial conquest, the Western Design was specifically aimed at bringing the existing English Caribbean colonies of Barbados and the Leeward Islands under closer control of the government by enforcing the new Acts of Trade and Navigation, which outlawed trade with non-English merchants. Although the conquest of Jamaica was considered a disappointment to some contemporaries, this campaign marked a significant turning point in English imperialism. In the end, the merchants who had been so heavily involved in the Western Design were disappointed by the Protectorate’s lack of enthusiasm for Jamaica’s development. They were optimistic, however, about the imperial direction of the restored monarchy, of Charles II’s decision in 1660 to hold on to Cromwell’s conquest.

The same month the Privy Council chose to keep Jamaica, Charles II issued a charter establishing the Company of Royal Adventurers into Africa. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 survey the influence of this and the two subsequent African Companies over imperial administration and colonial governance as a means to investigate the company’s centrality to the Restoration imperial agenda. The company was a joint-stock corporation that was closely controlled by the Stuart family (specifically Charles II’s brother, James, Duke of York, who served as its governor) and that held a monopoly on all African trade.14 The African Company embodied the Stuarts’ economic and political vision of empire. It was created with the explicit purpose of siphoning trade away from other European powers, which reflected an inability to envision a world in which economic prosperity could be shared among nations. In addition, the company’s monopoly rested firmly in the authority of the royal prerogative through its charter granted by the king. Belief in the unconditional power of the royal prerogative was one of the most consistent ideologies held by the late Stuarts. Starting in the mid-1660s, the African Company played a central role in implementing the Crown’s imperial agenda by influencing colonial appointments and shaping imperial policies. And as English politics became increasingly ideologically driven in the late seventeenth century, so did the politics of empire. Conflicts frequently arose over the company’s political, economic, and military jurisdictions. Colonial planters were some of the most vocal critics of the company’s monopoly. They frequently argued that an open, though still regulated, slave trade would be the most beneficial for their economic livelihoods. Privateers, a powerful constituency in Jamaica, resented the company’s attempts to maintain peaceful trade in slaves with the Spanish, the usual target of buccaneers’ plundering. In confronting the company and by extension the Crown, these groups articulated their own imperial agendas. In response, the Crown frequently had to compromise over issues of colonial governance and learned that one of the best ways to keep colonial interest groups happy, and therefore more compliant to imperial directives, was to make sure they had steady supplies of enslaved Africans. These chapters illustrate how these competing and overlapping imperial ideologies from a variety of constituencies played a significant role in shaping early modern English imperialism.

The final two chapters of the book consider how, by the turn of the eighteenth century, African slavery and the slave trade were understood to be in the national interest by a wide portion of English society. After the removal of James II in the Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689, the African Company effectively lost its monopoly as well as its position at the center of imperial affairs. Over the next two decades, heated debates took place in Parliament and in dozens of published pamphlets over the proper management of the slave trade. Some argued for a continuation of the company’s monopoly, while others clamored for an open slave trade. But it became commonplace for all sides to portray the enslavement of Africans as essential to the economic functioning of the empire, which had emerged to buttress and sustain the white mastery West Indies planters had so carefully constructed in the colonies. This emphasis on the perceived economic importance of those colonies with slaves to the empire required a fundamental reimagining of the colonies as fully integrated components of the realm. Slavery thus became a justification for the empire itself. Chapter 6 pays particular attention to the two immediate effects of the Glorious Revolution on the Atlantic empire: war with France and the removal of the Royal African Company from the center of English imperial designs. The constant threat of warfare threw a particular dilemma in England’s Caribbean colonies into sharp focus: the diminishing number of white people in those colonies. Throughout the 1690s officials in the West Indies complained to imperial authorities that they desperately needed white servants to fill their militias in case of foreign attack or slave revolt. Yet there were only feeble attempts to fulfill these requests, and it was generally left up to individual merchants and governors to fix the haphazard indentured servant and convict trades. The African slave trade, however, continued to be expanded and promoted, despite the increased dangers of trading during wartime and apparent fears of slave uprisings in the colonies.

The book ends with an exploration of how slavery and the slave trade came to be understood as being in Britain’s national interest by the early eighteenth century by investigating Britain’s winning the asiento, the exclusive contract to supply the Spanish American colonies with slaves. As part of the Treaty of Utrecht, which ended the War of Spanish Succession in 1713, Britain was granted the long-coveted asiento. Queen Anne gave the contract to the South Sea Company, which had been formed by her trusted adviser and Lord Treasurer, Sir Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, in 1711. The company had been created with the asiento in mind and was given a monopoly on all trade to Spanish America. Chapter 7 explores how the South Sea Company’s emergence with the promise of managing the asiento occurred at a time when slavery and Britain’s participation in the transatlantic slave trade had been at the center of national debate for two decades. The establishment of the South Sea Company and the asiento indicated that by the turn of the eighteenth century, slavery and the international slave trade were perceived to be completely interconnected with the national interest.

Competing Visions of Empire provides a new framework for understanding the origins of unfree labor and the English empire, one that focuses on conflict rather than consensus. It is neither an isolated colonial nor a narrow metropolitan history but is an integrative narrative of the ideological origins of the British empire. The project emphasizes that the overwhelming acceptance of African slavery by the English was by no means inevitable, or something that only mattered in the colonies. Ultimately, the events described in this book were crucial in laying the foundations for Britain’s domination of the slave trade for the remainder of the eighteenth century.