A Man and a Brother

We are not long past the two hundredth anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire. The important question, one that I’m not sure has been fully considered, is why opinion swung so decisively against a practice that had long been part of the national economy. The answer is simple: slavery had been tolerable, like so many other abuses over time, for as long as it was invisible. By the late eighteenth century this was no longer the case.

Slavery and the slave trade were activities both remote from British shores and thus removed from popular consciousness. This changed after the conclusion in 1763 of the Seven Years' War, when ever increasing numbers of enslaved men and women began to appear in London, brought by their owners.

The immediacy was shocking enough, but it also raised questions about the validity of the institution in a country where there was no slave law. It lead directly to Somerset v Steuart in 1772, when Granville Sharp argued before Lord Mansfield at the Court of King's Bench that slaveholding in England was a violation of the Common Law. To ship slave law into the country would, as Sharp put it, make England "as base, wicked, and tyrannical as our colonies." Mansfield, in finding for the plaintiff, effectively curtailed the liberties of the slave owners. Though evading the more general question about the legality of slavery as such, he had, in effect, encouraged the view that the practice was "repugnant to English laws", as one slaveholder expressed it.

There was an acute irony at work here; for the Mansfield decision defined Britain as a 'land of liberty', not long before the slave-owning American colonies began to object to being subordinated to the 'tyranny' of Parliament. "Why", Samuel Johnson asked, "do we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of Negroes?" In the ideological debates between the two sides, slavery became a political issue in a way that it had never been in the past, with the Americans insisting that if there were slaves in the colonies it was because British traders had put them there. Practically speaking, of course, it was all posturing, and neither side took any meaningful steps to address the issues raised; but it still drew attention to slavery as a moral problem; that slavery was a vice and that opposition to slavery was a virtue.

Before the American Revolution, the British Empire was little more than a commercial opportunity; afterwards it started the process of rebirth as a kind of moral mission, where rule should be exercised, as Edmund Burke put it, "for the benefit of the governed as well as the governors." Evangelicals within the Church of England pressed for the proper pastoral care of slaves within the Empire, just as officers returning from the war urged the government to give support and assistance to the escaped American slaves who had fought with the British Army.

It was now that the Quakers, who had always disliked slavery, but had not challenged the existence of the institution, began to press for abolition. Buoyed up by the conviction that the British people now considered slavery as a national embarrassment, they moved forward, gathering support and momentum along the way. By the early 1790s the consumption of West Indian Sugar, the chief product of slavery, was plummeting, showing that abolition had indeed become the cause of the nation. All that was needed was someone to direct opinion; all that was needed was William Wilberforce.

In Praise of Empire

The British Empire was a force for good in the world. There, I’ve said it! I’m not the first, though, to swim against the tide on this question. Those who wish an effective counter to all of the past negativity could do no better than have a look through Naill Ferguson’s Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World.

Yes, we did make the modern world, not through a self-conscious and ugly imperialism that characterised the French colonial enterprise; no, but simply in the pursuit of trading opportunities, the life blood of a mercantile island nation. In the wake of the traders and the buccaneers our people(stress here on the possessive pronoun!) travelled across the earth, building up the great English-speaking nations; building what was to become the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, as well as a host of smaller nations within this great backbone of liberty and democracy.

The British also in a very real sense helped to create modern India, giving it a political unity it never before possessed in its history; giving it a rail transport system which still functions today; giving it a common language which has managed to unite such a diverse and polyglot nation, allowing it to make an impact on the modern world.

Even in leaving Empire there was often a magnanimity and greatness. There is no better contrast here than with how the British dealt with the communist insurgency in Malaya, while nurturing moves towards independence, and how the French dealt with that in Indochina. And just imagine what would have happened if the French had predominated in North America and, more particularly, what would have happened if they had not been kicked them out of India. Our exit from India was far from tidy but how much worse it would have been going by the French example, the example of Vietnam and Algeria.

The British Empire was also a huge exporter of capital, building roads, railways and industries all over the earth, to great benefit to local economies, as indeed was the introduction of a system of education. Administrators sent out from England were generally scrupulously fair, bringing government and order to places that often had neither the one nor the other.

The system of English common law was another of our exports, still used and valued across much of the world, as indeed was the parliamentary system of government and the economic model of free-trade capitalism.

Paradoxically the British, true to their rather diffident nature, did not value the Empire during its heyday, a point I made in a recent post. I’m not asking for a retrospective attachment to that which is dead and gone, just a better understanding of how important the Empire was and, for all its faults, how benevolent, greater even than Rome at its apogee.

But yet I know, where’er I go,
That there hath pass’d away a glory from the earth

Losing America

A new archive of letters was discovered recently which illustrate how much personal responsibility George III bears for the loss of the American colonies. What they show in particular is the communication gap, with a king and an administration hopelessly out of touch with events in America; a king whose optimism contrasts sharply with the pessimism of the commanders on the ground.

The collection, which goes on sale at Sotheby’s in New York in a series of auctions beginning in April, indicate that the commanders began to despair of victory almost as soon as the conflict began in 1775. A letter by General John Burgoyne, written in Boston on 25 June, 1775, is the earliest assessment of how bad things were. The British position is described as

…a crisis that my little reading in history cannot parallel…such a pittance of troops as Great Britain and Ireland can supply will only serve to protract the war, to incur fruitless expense and to insure disappointment.

It was not just the pittance of troops that was a problem; it was also the kind of troops that the crown possessed. In the previous wars with the French for the control o the Continent the British had relied on the support of colonial militias, who knew the country and could make the most effective use of the terrain; skirmishers, who knew how to use hit and run tactics and fighting skills learned from the natives. On occasions these highly mobile forces were to prove superior to conventional armies, tied to roads and dependent on supply columns, as Burgoyne was to find to his own cost at Saratoga.

The collection also includes a copy of George III’s proclamation of August 1775 calling for the “suppression of rebellion and sedition”, one of only twenty in existence. Other correspondence from London emphasises just how absurdly sanguine the authorities were, continually hoping that the rebels would see their error and sue for pardon. The problem is quite clear: king and cabinet obviously saw events in America as an old-fashioned rebellion, much like that of the Scottish Jacobites earlier in the century. It was nothing of the kind: it was a revolution.

Thoughts of Empire

On reading Kipling I used to wonder to what extent, if at all, the overseas Empire impacted on the consciousness of British people at the time. The simple answer is far less than is imagined; far less than those in the school of Edward Said would have us believe. Indeed, for the best part of the nineteenth century it hardly impacted at all. The patriotic concept of Empire was a relatively late creation, really only emerging when a sense of crisis set in the years leading up to the outbreak of the First World War.

In high culture it hardly features at all, and no major novel of the day has an imperial theme. In architecture the 'Imperial style', if such an expression can even be used, effectively disappears after the time of George IV, as Britain adopted the same Greco-Roman fashion preferred throughout the western world, non-imperial societies included. Even in boys' fiction the subject of Empire is almost completely avoided before the advent of G. A. Henty. R. M. Ballantyne's 1858 novel Coral Island is 'exotic', rather than imperial, as indeed are the works of Rider Haggard. The stories and poems of Rudyard Kipling were a relatively late addition to the literary canon, and his enthusiasm for Empire is in large measure explained by the fact that he was born in India. The general indifference in Britain itself was a source of frustration to some, including the historian J. R. Seeley, who complained that the Empire seemed to have been acquired "in a fit of absent-mindedness."

Native British lack of enthusiasm for the project of Empire is, in large measure, explained by the educational system of the day, which placed no importance whatsoever on international affairs and contemporary politics. In 1902, when a Member of Parliament asked a class of school leavers who among them had heard of the Indian Mutiny, only one boy raised his hand.

It is also important to realise that British schools, unlike those in the United States, placed almost no value on the importance of patriotism. Indeed, the British political elite tended to view any enthusiasm of this kind with a high degree of suspicion, because of its association, via the French Revolution, with republicanism and democracy. British people belonged to specific social classes, and classes had duties, not rights. The upper classes were taught to rule, at both home and abroad; the lower classes were taught to obey; and the middle-classes were taught how to create wealth. Empire was merely a distraction. In 1893, Lord Kimberly, himself former Colonial Secretary, when asked if children should not be given some lessons in imperial patriotism, said that they would be better off "given practical lessons in the geography of their own localities rather than being shown maps [of the Empire] they are not well versed in, and which do not convey much to their minds."

One also has to consider the nature of the British Empire itself to understand why it played so small part in the consciousness of the nation. The 'Imperial Red' maps-which did not start to appear until the 1880s-are actually quite deceptive, suggesting something centralised and unified, like the ancient Roman or the modern Russian Empires. The British Empire, in contrast, was possibly the most decentralised in history, in that a good part was administered by local elites, which meant that it could be maintained at the minimum of cost, and with the minimum of personnel. In other words, no national effort was required to sustain it. The small class of Imperial Civil Servants was proud of their exclusivity: it was their Empire, not 'the peoples'.

These attitudes began to change somewhat by the beginning of the twentieth century, at the time of the Second Boer War and after, when the Empire came under threat from rival powers and home-grown nationalism. It was only at this time that the imperial propaganda movement got underway. But apart from brief bursts of enthusiasm, the general response remained muted. In 1911 an executive of the Victoria League remarked of a lecture given at the Workers Educational Association that the "audience gave the impression of suspicion, of hostility to the subject and of considerable indifference to the conditions prevailing in the colonies."

Yes, the Empire was there, yes it had important economic and political consequences; but the deeper sense it was like an iceberg-virtually invisible until the very last moment.

Fighting for the Falklands

It's an historical oddity that the Falkland Islands, remote, wind-swept, with little strategic importance and no mineral wealth, have taken England to the threshold-and over the threshold-of war some five times; with Spain, with France and with Argentina. In fact it was the 1770 'crisis in a tea cup' that begins the whole sequence.

English sailors first caught sight of the Falklands in the late sixteenth century. In the following century the government was to make a half-hearted claim, though under the Treaty of Tordesillas they fell within the Spanish orbit. It was only in 1748, with the report of Admiral Lord Anson, that London began to give the matter its serious attention, sounding out the Spanish on the question of sovereignty. This only had the effect of drawing up the battle lines, though the matter was put to one side for the time being. An uncertain equilibrium might have remained but for the unexpected intervention of a third party-France.

After the conclusion of the Seven Years War, the French, attempting to improve their position in the South Atlantic, landed in the Falklands, establishing a base at St. Louis, now Port Stanley. At the same time, the one unbeknown to the other, the British made their own landing at Port Egmont in the west. Responding to Spanish objections, the French handed over Port Louis, now renamed as Port Soledad, though neither party was as yet aware of the proximity of the English, until a chance sighting of some ships in December 1769. And now we have a little overture to what was to come just over two hundred years later.

In June 1770 the Spanish governor of Buenos Aires sent five frigates to Port Egmont, landing some 1600 marines. The small British force present promptly surrendered. When Parliament assembled in November, the MPs, outraged by this insult to national honour, demanded action from the government. The Spanish attempted to strengthen their position by winning the support of France, invoking the Pacte de Famille between the two Bourbon crowns. For a time it looked as if all three countries were about to go to war, especially as the Duc de Choiseul, the French minister or war and foreign affairs, was in a militant mood. But Louis XV took fright, telling Charles III that "My minister wishes for war, but I do not." Choiseul was dismissed from office, and without French support the Spanish were obliged to seek a compromise with the British.

In January 1771 the British were allowed to restore the base at Port Egmont, although the whole question of sovereignty was simply sidestepped, a source of future trouble. The best verdict on the little fracas was passed by Samuel Johnson in his pamphlet Thoughts on the late Transactions Respecting Falkland's Island, looking at the British problem in holding such remote islands against a hostile mainland, "...a colony that could never become independent, for it could never be able to maintain itself." And so it remains today.