In Black Jacobins (1938), CLR James’ polemical account of the slave revolution of San Domingo/Haiti (1791-1804) under the leadership of Toussaint Louverture, one of the Trinidadian historian’s goals is to puncture Britain’s ‘national vanity’, as he calls it, over its role in the abolition of slavery.
For James, Britain’s motive for wanting the slave trade to end had nothing to do with morality or theology and everything to do with economics and geopolitics.
Thus, after the loss of America (1783) and the collapse of the mercantilist economic model it represented, James argues, the emerging British industrial bourgeoisie turned its attentions to free trade and the exploitation of India.
In particular, India seemed to represent a ripe alternative to the West Indies when it came to sugar production, an industry whose crude economic methods – i.e. the reliance on slave labour – were criticised by Adam Smith, ideologue of the new economic thinking, not on grounds of inhumanity but cost:
‘It appears from the experience of all ages and nations…that the work done by freemen comes cheaper in the end than that performed by slaves.’ (Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations).
But how then to sabotage French interests in the West Indies – particularly on San Domingo, which had become the wealthiest colony in the world – and capture the European sugar market from France?
Prime minister William Pitt, a disciple of Adam Smith, seemed to have found the answer when he discovered that 50% of the slaves imported into the British West Indies were sold on to neighbouring French colonies.
As James says: ‘It was the British slave-trade, which was increasing French colonial produce and putting the European market into French hands. Britain was cutting its own throat.’
Clearly, the solution was to abolish the slave trade and do it as soon as possible in order not to give French slave-traders – ‘who had neither the capital nor the organisation to make good the deficiency at once’ – the opportunity to fill the gap British slave merchants would leave by giving up their lucrative role in the capture and transportation of African human cargo.
It was at this point (1786), James argues, that Pitt turned to William Wilberforce to begin the abolitionist campaign. Wilberforce, James says mockingly, ‘had a great reputation, all the humanity, justice, stain on national character, etc, etc,’ to serve the purpose.
‘Rich as was the French bourgeoisie, the colonial trade was too big for it. The British bourgeois, most successful of slave-traders, sold thousands of smuggled slaves every year to the French colonists and particularly to San Domingo. But even while they sold the slaves to San Domingo, the British were watching the progress of this colony with alarm and with envy.
‘After the independence of America in 1783, this amazing French colony suddenly made such a leap as almost to double its production between 1783 and 1789. In those years Bordeaux alone invested 100 millions in San Domingo.
‘The British bourgeois were the great rivals of the French. All through the eighteenth century they fought in every part of the world. The French had jumped gleefully in to help drive them out of America. San Domingo was now incomparably the finest colony in the world and its possibilities seemed limitless.
‘The British bourgeoisie investigated the new situation in the West Indies, and on the basis of what it saw, prepared a bombshell for its rivals. Without slaves San Domingo was doomed. The British colonies had enough slaves for all the trade they were ever likely to do. With the tears rolling down their cheeks for the poor suffering blacks, those British bourgeois who had no West Indian interests set up a great howl for the abolition of the slave-trade.’