Scotland's Real Dark Enlightenment
Slavery and Anti-Slavery
Edinburgh University’s recent inquiry into its own history is a sobering account of ill-gotten gains from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, and the slave mines and sugar plantations of Brazil (which abolished slavery in 1888). The report also exposes academic support of racial pseudoscience and colonialism. In sum, it alleges that the thinking of the Scottish Enlightenment justified racial hierarchies.
In 2018 a BBC television documentary, Slavery: Scotland’s Hidden Shame, was aired. I reviewed it as follows.
The Real Dark Enlightenment: Slavery
The Scots have long thought of themselves as an enlightened nation, schooled in a collective spirit of equality and freedom. But in recent decades, Scottish historians and Black activists have challenged such complacency. Recently (November 2018), the BBC has aired a lavishly-produced two-part television documentary, Slavery: Scotland’s Hidden Shame, which has at last given their work the attention it deserves. Presented by actor, David Hayman, the documentary provides a salutary exposure of the systematic erasure of the dark aspects of the ‘Scottish Enlightenment’ in the 18th and early 19th centuries. The slave trade wasn’t just the province of English merchants in Liverpool, Bristol and London. As Hayman points out:
“Scots were plantation and slave owners, merchants, ship owners and crews, surgeons, investors and book keepers. The profits from the slave trade fired Scotland’s industrial growth. And in every corner of our nation you will find civic buildings and private homes built from the profits of slavery: bricks drenched in blood.”
Adebusulo Debra Ramsay, a young Black activist who conducts walking tours of Glasgow’s historical landmarks, says:
“For me it started off as a personal journey for understanding the history of racism and where it comes from, so that I could understand what I’m experiencing… It’s important because this is how we change the narrative, and how we address the collective amnesia and forgetting is by giving the information to everyone.”
The triangular trade that spawned the wealth of the Scottish nation was a system involving the shipping from British ports of beads, alcohol, copper bars, and firearms which were exchanged for Africans rounded up for chattel slavery. The slaves were then shipped to North America and the Caribbean to be exchanged for the raw materials – such as sugar, rum, tobacco and cotton – which fuelled British industry and commerce.
On Bunce Island, 20 miles from Sierra Leone’s capital city Freetown, lies the ruin of a fort, once the province of the Royal African Company, which was leased from the local African king. Here, from 1728 to 1807, Scottish companies incarcerated Africans in preparation for the horrific journey across the Atlantic on the slave ships. According to maritime historian Eric Graham.
“There were no Europeans on the coast of Africa capturing Black people and enslaving them. That’s a myth. It was done by their own chiefs. They’re brought down the river systems to these forts, which sit there independent of anything else, and you go and collect your slaves through the surf.”[i]
Abolitionism
In 1807 the British Parliament finally abolished the Atlantic slave trade; and in 1833 abolished slavery throughout the British Empire (whilst paying out massive sums in compensation to the former slave-owners). Various forces contributed to these reforms. Abolitionism was in part driven by Christian reformers of the Quaker and Unitarian churches in alliance with campaigners such as the independent parliamentarian William Wilberforce and the Scottish statesman and British Lord Chancellor Henry Brougham. Adam Smith, the famous Scots political economist and moral philosopher, argued for the abolition of slave labour on the grounds that free wage-labour was more productive. Another crucial factor, highlighted in Slavery: Scotland’s Hidden Shame by the Black Glasgow Green Party councillor Graham Campbell, was the successful armed slave rebellions in Jamaica led by Sam Sharpe, who was hanged by the British colonial authorities in 1832.
Abolitionism was also a key element of the burgeoning popular radical movements in Britain; from the founding of the pro-Jacobin London Corresponding Society in 1792 to the launch of the People’s Charter campaign in 1838.[ii] In the 1830s the Anti-Slavery campaigns coincided with the new struggles of the working classes against the workhouses, and for trade union rights and universal male suffrage.
In the latter case, once the slavery system of the British Empire had been destroyed, the radical abolitionists turned their attentions to international struggles against slavery in America, Cuba, Brazil and elsewhere. As regards America, the attitudes of working-class radicals towards chattel slavery in the cotton plantations was somewhat ambivalent. For example, Chartist leader and socialist educator Bronterre O’Brien, who regarded the American Revolution of 1776 as a pivotal event in world history which had given birth to modern democracy, was certainly opposed to American Slavery. Bronterre however, rooted the evil in the rule of private property and ‘class legislation’. To him, the conditions of wage-slaves in Lancashire cotton mills seemed just as bad, if not worse, than those of plantation slaves in America.[iii]
The fact that American slavery was a ‘divisive issue’ in Chartism did not discourage some in the movement from confronting it. One of them was Helen Macfarlane (1818-60). Chartist journalist, associate of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and first translator of the Communist Manifesto, as serialised in the Chartist weekly, the Red Republican in 1850.
[To be continued in the next newsletter]
[i] In the first century of the European slave trade – the 1400s – the Portuguese did in fact carry out raids for slaves along the coasts of West Africa. When this practice was found to be too dangerous (because the Africans fought back) to make it worthwhile, it was abandoned, and local kings were bribed or coerced to do it for them.
[ii] James Walvin The Impact of Slavery on British Radical Politics: 1787-1838, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1977.
[iii] Michael Turner, Chartism, Bronterre O’Brien and the ‘Luminous Political Example of America’, History, Vol. 97, No. 1, January 2012.
[iv] James Shaw, A Country Schoolmaster. Edited by Robert Wallace. (Edinburgh: 1899), pp. 146-52.
[v] Alexander Wilson, The Chartist Movement in Scotland (Manchester University Press: 1970). p 107.
[vi] Lindy Moore, Young Ladies Institutions: the Development of Secondary Schools for Girls in Scotland, 1833-circa.1870, History of Education, 2003, Vol.32, No. 3.
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