In The Belly of The Beast
A Sickly Condition
While countless horrors were being perpetuated in the colonies, the situation for the broad majority of citizens of the colonial empires was also dismal. A violent and rapacious legal process called “enclosure”, drove millions of formerly self-sufficient peasants from their lands so that they could be turned into pasture for cattle and sheep, while the peasants were driven into squalid cities and compelled to work in grueling sweatshops on pain of imprisonment. The governments of Europe, after sanctioning a great mass dispossession of land, made vagrancy illegal, and created a system of forced labor in the workhouses and penal labor.
An intellectual revolution took place in Europe that transformed the world from a demon-haunted veil of tears humans merely passed through, to one where men, particularly rich men of good breeding, could rationally understand and master the world. Men could act as agents of God and execute his will by controlling other men and forcing them to live according to principles of diligence, moral purity and hard work. And perhaps, in some enlightened circles it was thought, these men could replace God all together and perfect mankind without him.
The British ruling class and professionals adopted an ideology of the redemptive effect of work so deranged that they put prisoners on treadmills and set them to turning cranks with no practical output, or smashing rocks for no reason, just to keep them from being idle. Children, it was believed, were harmed by being left to romp and roam and instead ought to be put to work in factories filled with dangerous chemicals and machines hungry for their nimble fingers. The vast majority of humanity had moral purpose only insofar as they were used as tools by their betters. All of this was sanctioned from the pulpits of churches from those of the Roman Catholics, Church of England to the Presbyterians.
A New Kind of Power
What the working Europeans in this brave new world of grueling work for the profit of the few had, that the slaves in the colonies did not, was wages. Rather than take an interest in the physical reproduction of the laborers in their workshops, mines and mills, the way they did with their human property abroad, the newly emerged capitalists found it much easier to simply pay for a laborer’s capacity to work and let the workers sort out for themselves how they got shelter, food and did the business of rearing future generations of workers for the capitalists’ factories. “Laissez faire,” the French term for ‘let it happen,’ was the order of the day. It didn’t concern an Industrialist whether the people he worked for 16 hours a day on subsistence wages slept five families to a cramped basement. It simply wasn’t his problem. What was his problem, was how to get those people to be able to afford the confections his factories made by making their output ever more efficient with new technologies, cheaper imports, and the occasional chemical adulterant.
As an industrialist critical of the new economic system noted of food production in England: “Pounded rice and other cheap materials are mixed in sugar, and sold at full price. A chemical substance — the refuse of the soap manufactories — is also mixed with other substances and sold as sugar.”
Sugar, tea, coffee, chocolate and other stimulating luxuries rapidly became staples for the industrial working class. They were necessary for workers to sustain arduous labor with only the fear of destitution, rather than the lash, keeping them going. As production expanded while cultivation and processing techniques improved, these commodities became ever more affordable to a greater number of workers, increasing demand even further. Sugar went from a luxury only for the elites, to a necessary staple for even the most miserable and degraded of European workers.
With a pliant stock of sugar-dependent hired hands working their factories, industrialists in Europe, alongside the men of God in the state churches, the landed nobility and the crowned monarchs invested ever more in the plantation economies of the colonies. New machines and wonders of science made labor in Europe so productive that workers could band together to demand a larger share of the value they produced without seriously threatening the continued growth of the wealth of their rulers. The employers themselves even supported legal reductions in the workday since the degradation of labor was no longer necessary, and was in fact harmful to their profits, in conditions of widespread machine production. All together, this meant that the workers of the western European countries were able to enjoy a growing share of the plunder and brutalization of the colonies, even as they were exploited, even more intensively, for their own labor.
Am I Not a Man and Brother?
This happy arrangement could not go on without conflict though. Glaring contradictions emerged in western European society, despite the best efforts of philosophers like John Locke who justified slavery on the basis of property rights. Liberal ideologies premised on the ideal of human equality and equally on the sanctity of private property ruptured as a growing share of Europeans across all levels of society chose to reject slavery and affirm the inherent dignity of all humans. An easier position to hold when slavery was no longer necessary for them to maintain their historically unprecedented levels of consumption. Wage-slavery worked just fine.
The radical wing of Liberalism embodied in intellectuals like the English poet Percy Shelley and the French lawyer Maximilien Robespierre stridently rejected slavery while defenders of Order and polite society like King William IV and Napoleon Bonaparte defended slavery and believed in inherent white superiority over Africans. Most early socialists were intimately tied to the abolition movement, though many still prioritized improvements for workers in their own country over the conditions of people half a world away.
Sugar was a symbolic fault-line in this struggle. Taking your tea with or without sugar, especially in public, told people where you stood on slavery. To hear many educated young men-and increasingly women-drinking tea with sugar was no different than drinking blood. And in Britain many progressive-minded rich families exclusively ordered sugar from India, where the brutally exploited workers were given wages for their efforts; they even had labels like ‘Slavery Free’ conspicuously inscribed on their sugar bowels.
King William’s father, George III, privately opposed slavery, even rejecting sugar in his tea in line with popular fashion, but it was under William IV that popular pressure in Britain grew so great that moderate proposal for the abolition of slavery, which included compensation to the tune of twenty-million pounds sterling to slaveowners for their former property, was granted. A great portion of the wealth held by the British royal family today is directly traceable back to slavery. Several monarchs possessed financial interests and shares in enterprises built on slavery and the plantation economy. This wealth continues to grow through contemporary investments, sheltered from any kind of tax obligation, and special legal structures like the Royal Duchies.
Shockingly, in Australia while chattel ownership was abolished in 1833, Aboriginal people were enslaved by the government, forced to endure hideously intensive labor conditions, until the 1970s. The Australians also kidnapped thousands of South Pacific Islanders between 1863 to 1902 to work in sugar plantations, after which the Australians expelled them to maintain a racially pure society.
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We Have Dared to Be Free
The impact of the sugar-slave revolt in Haiti cannot be understated. Not only did the workers of the sugar plantations free themselves, and defy the armed might of one of the greatest empires the world had seen, their rebellion was crucial for the collapse of the wider Spanish Empire in Latin America. The Haitians gave refuge and material support for the young revolutionary Simon Bolivar, the great liberator. Bolivar, initially indifferent to slavery, became a fierce abolitionist after his experience in Haiti and ended slavery in every South American nation he freed. Some Latin American nations followed suit during their own process of emancipation from Europe, but others like Brazil held out until late in the 19th century.
While it is true that many Europeans and Americans, from radical intellectuals, Baptist preachers, or principled capitalists to British sailors turned slaver-hunters and American Union Army soldiers during the Civil War, made enormous contributions to ending the scourge of Slavery that should not be dismissed, it must be remembered that it was the actions of slaves themselves like Toussaint Louverture and Nat Turner whose heroic struggle made the continuation of slavery impossible.