Padraic X Scanlan On How Slavery Fuelled The British Empire | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra
"‘I think there's a kind of national myth in Britain, that Britain may have been a very enthusiastic slave trader and a very enthusiastic employer of slave labor. But that in the 19th century, Britain turned against slavery and kind of reversed the the polarity of its empire, it went from being an empire devoted to slavery to an empire devoted to freedom, and not only an empire that abolished slavery, but an empire that actively kind of prosecuted anti slavery wars. And I think that that's, that's just not true. And one of the core arguments of my book, Slave Empire, is that you can't understand the anti slavery movement in Britain without understanding the ways that it is entangled with the rise of the British Empire in the 18th century. So Britain built its empire, this empire that in the Victorian era was very proudly an empire of free trade, free labor, and political freedom throughout the world. But that Empire was entangled with and couldn't be separated from the Empire that was built on slavery in the 18th century. So the institutions of British imperial power, especially in the Atlantic world, were built on slavery. And those foundations survived the abolition of slavery. So the idea that anti slavery reversed the British Empire and turned it from kind of a from an an empire of slavery into an empire of liberty just just isn't true.'
'Yeah, I think that that is one of the most fascinating aspects of your book, this idea that Britain used abolition in the narrative about itself to say, we have learned from the past, and now we're morally superior. How did that take on abolition that idea that Britain had moved beyond slavery and become morally superior actually help aid, imperialist aims?'
'Well, let me give you an example. So in the in the 1850s, and 1860s, Britain had abandoned its association with within slave labor. You know, since since the abolition of colonial slavery in the 1830s, since the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807. But in West Africa, Britain had ambitions or British merchants had ambitions of taking over the palm oil trade. And so one of the kind of key reasons for the British takeover of what became eventually the Nigeria protectorate, so the the kind of shelling of Lagos in the 1860s, was anti slavery. So Britain was able to in the name of abolishing the slave trade, and in the name of enforcing the abolition of the slave trade, was able to effectively you know, seize territory, especially in West Africa. And that's a kind of very specific example.
But anti slavery gave impetus to all kinds of projects for British imperial reform. And if you want to think of a kind of core ideological foundation of the Victorian British Empire, it was this idea of civilization, right that Britain represented the summit of civilization, and that Britain's role as an empire was to teach civilization to either the places that it conquered directly, the places where it sent settlers by the millions, or the places where its economic influence reached. And that idea of civilization got a lot of power from anti slavery right?
What better proof of Britain's moral superiority than Britain's claim to have been the first European Empire to have disengaged itself first from the slave trade and then from slavery so that that concept was a really powerful one in the Victorian Empire of the 19th century. And it kind of put the light to the fact of Britain's continuing involvement in slavery in the 19th century. So, I mean, the the kind of core product of industrializing Britain drew was with cotton.
And Britain's primary source of raw cotton was the United States of America. And cotton in the US was overwhelmingly produced by enslaved laborers in the in the American South. And at the same time, the other kind of core product that Britain offered to the world in the 19th century was financial services. And so Britain's didn't own slave people are claimed to own enslaved people. But plenty of British investors owned, for example, bonds issued by the states in the United States, by the southern states, in the US, states that were founded on slave labor and on the kind of power of slaveholders...
Part of the problem with thinking about slavery and anti slavery in the past is exactly what you've hit upon, this kind of problem of hypocrisy. Because I think. It's maybe not quite right to think of it as hypocritical. One of the deep veins and something that I tried to explore in the book, one of the deep veins of anti slavery thought was this idea that commerce could be a civilizing force. Right. And so, you know, in a sense, I think, anti slavery activists understood that their investments were related to slavery in some way. But they also thought that they could be purified, and that if you could only figure out how to rectify and correct the kind of financial system, commerce would be a powerful force for civilization and for kind of healing the rifts within the Empire and the kind of resolving the slavery, anti slavery dispute. And that's something that reached all the way back to the 18 century, right?'"
So it was cultural imperialism for the British Empire to try to end slavery in other areas. Outstanding logic.
