EP 04 - Money not Morality ended British Enslavement

Money not Morality ended British Enslavement

- Episode 04 -

The Ship that sank and took the slave trade down with it

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#58 The Ship that sank and took the slave trade with it

Sunday 18 September 2022

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Rose Hall, Montego Bay, Jamaica, built on slave sugar in Jamaican Georgian style

Historian Seymour Drescher says morality not money ended British Enslavement

In 1977 an American historian called Seymour Drescher brought out a book that turned historical studies of enslavement upside down.

Drescher argued that, when the slave trade was abolished in 1807, it had been at the height of its profitability. From 1783-1815, said Drescher, the sugar trade boomed. The property value of the slave colonies doubled. The trade in slaves was increasingly profitable and reaching a peak, and Britain’s share of it was bigger than ever.

In fact, Drescher pointed out, the banning of the slave trade in 1807 came at a moment when Napoleon had closed virtually the whole of Europe to British trade. So commerce with the Caribbean islands was at that moment more vital to Britain than it had ever been.

Far from giving up a business that had run its course, as Caribbean historian Eric Williams argued, the British, according to Drescher, had voluntarily surrendered one of their most precious possessions. The extraordinary, popular, moral campaign had triumphed over the country’s economic interest.

Drescher called his book Econocide, ‘the radical termination of a profitable trade by a newly empowered political movement.’
Suddenly, the old ‘it was Wilberforce wot dun it’ was back on the table.

In 2007 Simon Schama agreed with Drescher - the slave trade had been ‘a Klondike of money.’ Abolition had been ‘an absolutely spectacular act of irrationality.’ HOWEVER WE DISAGREE, as you'll discover from our podcast #58.

#wilberforce #enslavement #margaretmiddleton #Zong #granvillesharp #trafficking

Planting sugar cane, 18th century painting

They started growing the wrong kind of sugar

After a massive slave revolt in 1791, on French owned sugar island St Doninique, British planters tried to profit from the huge gap it had left in the market.

They ripped up their old sugar canes and planted new, so-called Bourbon canes, which produced more sugar per acre.

As the historian David Beck Ryden points out, it was a disaster. The new sugar was lower quality. Worse, the new canes exhausted the soil and soon began to produce less and less sugar. It was useless to dig them up and plant the old ones back because the soil was now useless.

The Jamaican planters had blown their opportunity. They had borrowed heavily to extend their estates and to plant the disastrous bourbon canes, and were caught out horribly as the European market became glutted and then crashed. They were now in a spiral of high slave prices, expensive credit, and rapidly diminishing returns.

In islands like Barbados where the planters by contrast had for years been shifting to a more sustainable system, growing more food, they were enabling their enslaved populations to have families so that they would not have to buy any more slaves. Many of these planters, and those for example in the new British territory of Guiana, did still manage to make money after the American war of Independence.

But what Drescher didn’t factor in to his theory of ‘econocide’ was that it was Jamaica that dominated the West Indies sugar trade. And it was above all the Jamaican sugar economy that was in trouble.

#slaveship #lutine #abolition #emancipation #drescher #schama #beckryden #lloydsoflondon

The bell of HMS Lutine at Lloyd's of London was rung on Thurs 15 2022 to mark the death of Queen Elizabeth

The bell of HMS Lutine in the underwriting room at Lloyd's of London, salvaged in 1857 and rung last Thursday to mark the death of Queen Elizabeth

The collapse of the European sugar market and the sinking of HMS Lutine with a million pounds on board

Things were bad for Jamaican sugar planters and then came the winter of 1799. The river Elbe froze over and Hamburg – which was now the centre of European sugar trade - was cut off. Suddenly its commodity market nosedived and a wide-scale banking and market collapse looked inevitable.

The British government acted fast. It poured something like a million pounds in gold and silver coins into barrels, loaded them onto the frigate HMS Lutine and sent them to bail the Hamburg market out.

Well, the ship never made it. On 9 October 1799 it went down in a storm off the Dutch coast, with the loss of all but one of the 239 people aboard, and all the cash. Its bell was recovered many years later and, until recently, was rung at international insurers Lloyds of London if ever a ship they’d insured was missing.

Lloyds had insured the cash aboard the Lutine. It refunded the British its million pounds in two weeks – about the equivalent of £100m today. But it was too late for to save the Hamburg market.

152 merchant houses collapsed and they took the European sugar prices with them. Not long afterwards the British blockaded Hamburg as part of their economic warfare against Napoleon. But the British blockade of Hamburg meant the European sugar market was effectively closed to the Britain’s own, West Indian planters.

After the Hamburg crash – which Seymour Drescher barely mentions – the situation was reaching the point where the Jamaicans were simply running out of credit on which to trade.

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Contemporary engraving depicting HMS Lutine being blown ashore onto Terschelling where she was wrecked on the night of 9/10 October 1799

Why we think historian David Beck Ryden writes more sense than Seymour Drescher

In 1977 an American historian Seymour Drescher claimed that sugar prices were going up in the period before the slave trade was banned. He suggested that the British had ended the trade for purely moral reasons, at a time when it was actually against their economic interests.

But take a closer look and you find that, although prices in London were going up, that largely reflected inflation and escalating costs, especially costs of shipping. The price the planters were getting after inflation was in fact going down.

Way back in 1775 - 4 years before the sinking of the Lutine and the collapse of the European sugar market - the whole system of British Caribbean sugar had looked like collapsing.

In 2015 historian Nichola Radburn showed that in that year, 1775, one Jamaican lawyer had proposed a solution. It’s very significant. What he suggested was a 7-year moratorium on purchasing any more enslaved people so that everyone could recover their finances. Call a halt to the planters most ruinous financial outlay and give everyone a chance to recover their debts and get things back on an even keel.

By 1780s propping this whole elaborate network of credit up had become a serious problem in England. Three quarters of the merchants in Liverpool, perhaps the chief slave-trading port, now quit. By 1790 Liverpool town council was injecting cash into the local shipping fleet – which was still trading to the British West Indies - to prop it up.

In 1799 the European sugar market collapsed with the Hamburg crash. It was curtains for the Jamaican planters who, after the revolt in French-held St Domingue, had expanded their estates in order to compete in the European market and now had no way of paying the enormous debts they’d run up.

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