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"The Language, of the Traffic": Colonial Slavery and Political Discourse in the Late Eighteenth Century Brinley Price

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"THE LANGUAGE, OF THE TRAFFIC": COLONIAL SLAVERY AND POLITICAL DISCOURSE IN THE LATE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY BRINLEY PRICE DPHIL THE UNIVERSITY OF YORK DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND RELATED LIIEHATURE OCTOBER 1997 TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract iv INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1 "Political Slavery": Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Political Discourse 25 Introduction 26 The Constituents of Political Discourse 31 ii Political Slavery, 1689-1789 51 iii The Colonial Slave in Political Discourse 77 Conclusion 94 CHAPTER 2 "Modern Slavery": The Formation of Abolitionist Discourse 100 Introduction 101 Capturing Slavery: The Semantic Strategy 103 . Colonial Slavery and the Dominant Ideology 121 iii Abolitionists and the Territories of Liberty and Utility 133 iv Men, Brothers and Heroes: The New Territory 145 The Confluence of Abolitionism and Radicalism 160 Conclusion 168 CHAPTER 3 "A Gang of Maroon Slaves": Colonial Slavery and Radical Pamphlets in the 1790s 173 Introduction 174 Generations the Property of Generations: Paine's Rights. of Man 177 ii "House Slaves": Wollstonecraft's Rights of Woman 191 iii Corresponding Society and Sociolinguistic Correspondence: Thelwall's Rights of Nature 215 iv "A Clash of Live Social Accents": A Range of Pamphlets Explored 240 Conclusion 262 CHAPTER 4 "Enslavd Humanity": Colonial Slavery and Romantic Poetry in the 1790s 265 Introduction 266 A "Silent Link"?: Early Wordsworth and Colonial Slavery 269 ii "The Worst of Slaves": Coleridge's Radical Poems 297 iii "Free Born Joy": Blake's African 321 Conclusion 351 BIBLIOGRAPHY 356 ABSTR4CT In this thesis I explore the impact of black chattel slavery in the New World colonies on the language of domestic politics in the eighteenth century, paying particular attention to the figurative uses of the words slave and slavery. When eighteenth- century writers represent other politicians, or the public at large, or the working class, or women, as slaves, what form of slavery do they have in mind - ancient chattel slavery, or medieval serfdom, or colonial slavery? If any of these groups are compared to colonial slaves, how are we to interpret such comparisons? Are they predominantly antislavery or proslavery? Are colonial slaves seen as victims to be pitied or as agents in their own liberation? In the introduction I outline the broad issues of this thesis, discuss and modify some existing theories of language, and apply these theories to figurative language in a way I intend as helpful to the thesis rather than as a theoretical foundation for it. In the first chapter I argue that when political writers of the early and mid eighteenth century refer to slavery they are rarely using figures of colonial slavery, and when they do use such figures it is hardly ever in opposition to colonial slavery. In the second chapter I investigate the formation of antislavery discourse in the late eighteenth century, which I . see as the main factor behind the emergence of figures of colonial slavery in radical discourse in the 1790s. The third chapter discusses various uses of the discourses of colonial slavery by radical prose writers in the 1790s, but suggests that contemporary slave resistance in the Caribbean had little influence on the language of opposition in Britain. In the fourth and final chapter I explore figures of colonial slavery in the poetic language of the first-generation Romantics in their radical years. In the case of poets in whose works such figures are clearly present, I suggest this presence may be related to a combination of linguistic creativity and abolitionist commitment. INTRODUCTION. I The subject of this study is the impact of the production- mode of colonial slavery on the discourse of British domestic politics in the late eighteenth century. By production-mode I mean that complex of economic forces and of economic and social relations which, whether as colonial slavery or industrial capitalism, I see as influencing if not underlying the political and cultural phenomena of a historical period. In the case of colonial slavery such forces would include the slave ship, the sugar plantation and the slave's manual labour, and such relations would include the power-relation between white slaveholder and black slave. Both Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson have, for understandable reasons, criticised the orthodox Marxist concept of the economic base (a concept approximating to that of the mode of production). Williams thinks there is a danger in using the term base in that it might give the impression of something "static", (1) while Thompson regards the base-superstructure analogy as "mechanical". (2) However, Williams does not completely reject the notion of the base, provided it is viewed as process, and Thompson does not avoid using the term mode of production. I feel that the term is valuable, but I add that by mode of production I mean not only a complex of forces and relations but also a complex of processes and practices. (1) Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays (London: NLB, 1980), pp. 33-34. (2) E.P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory: Or an Orrery of Errors (London: Merlin Press, 1978), pp . 212-213. I should also define what I mean by discourse, a word which allows me more precision than "language" or "utterance". By discourse I mean a practice of linguistic communication which encompasses a certain area of reality, a certain frame of reference, and certain participants including an audience. When I use the term discourse I do not particularly stress nor entirely exclude the idea of structures constraining consciousness, since in my view both structure and agency are realities in a society of human beings. I would only add to this, taking on board what Alex Callinicos has written in another context, structures can enable as well as constrain. (1) Colonial slavery was a mode of production adjacent and inseparably linked to the agricultural and mercantile capitalist mode dominant in Britain for most of the eighteenth century. Colonial slavery was essential to the massive economic growth occurring during the eighteenth century and, it has been argued by several historians, helped fuel the industrial revolution which began towards the century's end. (2) Signs Of the existence and importance of colonial slavery were omnipresent in Hanoverian Britain, ranging from adverts for runaway slaves to antislavery protests, from paintings of nobles accompanied by black servants to tavern signs such as "The Black's Head". (3) (1) Alex Callinicos, Making History: Agency, Structure and Change in Social Theory (Oxford: Polity Press, 1987), p. 235. (2) Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London and Sidney: Pluto Press, 1987), p. 16. (3) David Dabydeen, Hogarth's Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth Century English Art (Mundestrup, Denmark, and Kingston upon Thames, England: Dangaroo Press, 1985), p. 18. The words slavery and slave were key terms in political discourse throughout the eighteenth century, and, even earlier, throughout the seventeenth. Whether protesting against the oppression of themselves or their readers, or condemning the evident vices of their political enemies, eighteenth-century polemicists often had recourse to such words. Therefore it might be assumed that such political terms "reflected" in a very simple way the hugely important production-mode of colonial slavery which had emerged in the mid-seventeenth century and had become ascendant by the early eighteenth century. However, despite the economic significance of colonial slavery in the eighteenth century, and the noticeable impact of colonial slavery on the cultural formations of that century, it seems that political terms such as slavery (at least as discursive structures) did not originate as metaphors with colonial slavery as their vehicle. In fact such terms had their origin in the constitutive structures of eighteenth-century political discourse - in the traditions of classicàl republicanism, biblical republicanism and the "Norman Yoke" - traditions preceding the predominance, even the existence, of black chattel slavery in the American and West Indian colonies. For most of the eighteenth century, in most political polemics, there tends to be a lack of relation between the kind of subservience referred to as "political slavery" and the chattel slavery endured by Africans in the New World. Proslavery ideology, coupled with constraining discursive structures, conspire to exclude the black chattel slave from political discourse whether as a victim in his/her on right or as a simile or metaphor. 4 It might be asserted, then, that the structures of political discourse serve to mediate, in what Raymond Williams sees as the negative sense of mediation (namely that of projection and disguise), the production-mode of colonial slavery. (1) Due to a submerged contradiction within the dominant ideology, in which Africans are regarded as naturally the slaves of Europeans and yet liberty is regarded as the birthright of all human beings, the political term slave comes to appear as a kind of slip of the tongue by most political polemicists for much of the century. The black chattel slave, a silent consonant in the language of liberty, becomes audible usually in this way only. The concept of political slavery had its origin in the classical republics of antiquity, societies whose wealth and power were founded on systematic chattel slavery. For Aristotle the chattel slave was one naturally deficient in reason and virtue, and he was willing to apply the term slavery to those he considered similarly deficient - such as artisans. (2) Therefore classical-republican writers of eighteenth-century Britain (a society itself largely resting on chattel slavery), when they denounce political slavery, perhaps can never quite succeed in sundering this kind of slavery from the kind existing in Britain's New World colonies. Occasionally, in the political writings of the early and mid-eighteenth centuries, colonial slavery seems to be mediated in the second positive sense described by Williams: a process (1) Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, Marxist Introductions, (OUP, 1977), p.
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