Atlantic Chattel Slavery and English Child-Slavery - the Silence of the Liberals

A cartoon from 1838

Another graphic from 1839: The Chartist Insurrection by David Black and Chris Ford.

This caricature from the Penny Satirist, 10 Feb 1838, features former Whig Lord High Chancellor Henry Brougham, wearing in a special constable’s uniform, and playing at gunboat diplomacy in a rowing boat. The canon, engraved with the words, USEFUL KNOWLEDGE, is a reference to the Society for Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, which he founded as an alternative to providing state-funded education.

One of the highlights of Brougham’s Parliamentary career was his role in passing the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act. which abolished slavery in the British Empire whilst generously compensating the slave-owners with £20 million — which then amounted to 40% of the Treasury's annual income.

The point of the cartoon is that Brougham’s Whig (Liberal) government did nothing about child-slavery in the Lancashire cotton mills. Instead, the Whigs transported workers to Australia for organising unions, established workhouses for the unemployed, suppressed radical newspapers, and opposed extending the right to vote to masses.

As Karl Marx explained: “Whilst the cotton industry introduced child-slavery in England, it gave in the United States a stimulus to the transformation of the earlier, more or less patriarchal slavery, into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact, the veiled slavery of the wage workers in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the new world.”