Slaves and Peasants in the Era of Emancipation Padraic X. Scanlan

Journal of British Studies 59 (July 2020): 495–520. doi:10.1017/jbr.2020.39 © The North American Conference on British Studies, 2020 Slaves and Peasants in the Era of Emancipation Padraic X. Scanlan Abstract From the middle of the eighteenth century until the late 1830s, the idea of enslaved people as “peasants” was a commonplace among both antislavery and proslav- ery writers and activists in Britain. Slaveholders, faced with antislavery attacks, argued that the people they claimed to own were not an exploited labor force but a contented peasantry. Abolitionists expressed the hope that after emancipation, freedpeople would become peasants. Yet the “peasants” invoked in these debates were not smallholders or tenant farmers but plantation laborers, either held in bondage or paid low wages. British abolitionists promoted institutions and ideas invented by slaveholders to defend the plantation system. The idea of a servile and grateful “peasant” plantation labor force became, for British abolitionists, a justification for the “civilization” and subordination of freedpeople. n 1830, a wave of arson and sabotage by poor farmworkers broke over Kent, Ispreading to other centers of British commercial farming. Anxious landlords received threatening letters from “Swing” demanding relief from rent, access to enclosed wastelands, and cheaper beer and food. In London, booksellers rushed pamphlets on the “life of Swing” to press. Radicals blamed the Swing riots on greedy absentee proprietors speculating on the price of corn during and after the wars with France.1 Tories proposed that “Swing” had “learned his enmity to thrash- ing-instruments” from Luddite kin in Lancashire and “took up the dreadful practice of setting fire to hay. from his Irish cousin.”2 However, whether government had failed the farm laborers or whether they had failed themselves, no one denied that mechanization and enclosure were the principal causes of the “sinking of yeomanry into peasantry, and of peasantry into paupers.”3 In Kent in 1830, cornfields and threshers burned; in Jamaica in 1831, it was cane- pieces and sugar works. On Christmas Day, tens of thousands of enslaved workers, led by the Baptist deacon Samuel Sharpe, put down their tools. On 27 December, Padraic X. Scanlan is assistant professor at the Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources and the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. He thanks Christopher M. Florio, Catherine L. Evans, the participants in the faculty work-in-progress seminar in the Department of International History at the London School of Economics, and anonymous reviewers for the Journal of British Studies for suggestions and helpful criticism. He also thanks Linda Colley and Jan C. Jansen for their invitation to present an early version of this argument at the workshop “Emigration and Exile in an Age of War and Revolution, c. 1750–1830,” at Re:Work in Berlin in June 2018. Please direct any correspondence to [email protected]. 1 See, for example, [Francis Swing, pseud.], The Life and History of Swing: The Kent Rickburner (London, 1830). 2 Charles James Blomfield, A True Account of the Life and Death of Swing, the Rick-Burner, 19th ed. (London, 1831), 6–9. 3 Blomfield, True Account, 10. 495 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Athens, on 02 Oct 2021 at 17:07:05, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2020.39 496 ▪ SCANLAN fires were set across Saint James Parish on the north side of the island. After a week of skirmishes, British regulars and the colonial militia suppressed the rebellion. The militia then began a bloody reprisal. One missionary guessed that, in addition to several hundred enslaved people executed under a thin pretense of martial law, mili- tiamen murdered as many as two thousand more, “shot or hanged in cold blood.”4 A second wave of violence followed, directed this time at white Baptist and Methodist missionaries and preachers. In 1833, Parliament passed legislation to abolish slavery in Britain’s colonial empire, effective 1 August 1834. Agrarian revolt shook Britain and Jamaica, islands stitched together by slavery and money. Agriculture in both islands was heavily capitalized, and neither had a peasant economy of smallholding farmers. The ownership of Caribbean plantations in particular tended to consolidate, as mortgages passed into fewer and fewer hands.5 Enslaved people in Britain’s Caribbean colonies, especially more land-rich colonies like Jamaica, Trinidad, and British Guiana, often had access to provision grounds, parcels of land where they grew food for subsistence and for sale.6 In Britain, farmworkers generally depended on wages, and farms were concentrated in the hands of a smaller and smaller class of landowners. As Eric Hobsbawm put it, by the nineteenth century, “only the pedant can speak of a British peasantry in the continental sense,” as a mere four thousand people owned nearly 60 percent of Britain’s cultivated land and rented it out to commercial farmers who employed nearly 1.25 million hired hands.7 From 1825 to 1850, the proportion of the British economy devoted to agriculture shrank from a quarter to roughly a fifth.8 There were in fact few peasants in either Britain or Jamaica. And yet, throughout the era of British campaigns against the slave trade and colonial slavery, from roughly the 1780s to the end of the era of apprenticeship in 1838, writers on both sides of the slavery debate routinely compared enslaved workers to “peasants.” The comparison seems to have first been made by slave owners hoping to blunt critiques of slavery. When slave owners called enslaved people “peasants,” they implicitly and explicitly drew comparisons with the parlous lives of British laborers and cast the violent, pseudo-industrial work of sugar production as Arcadian. The comparison was soon absorbed into antislavery rhetoric. Abolitionist writers argued that emancipation would turn enslaved people into an obedient free “peasantry,” managed by impe- rial officials and missionaries. The concept of slaves as peasants was eventually woven 4 Speech of Rev. Henry Bleby, Missionary from Barbadoes, on the Results of Emancipation in the British W.I. Colonies: Delivered at the Celebration of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, Held at Island Grove, Abington, July 31st, 1858 (Boston, 1858), 8. 5 Among other many other works on capital and land in the British Caribbean, see Elsa V.Goveia, Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands at the End of the Eighteenth Century (New Haven, 1965); J. R. Ward, British West Indian Slavery, 1750–1834: The Process of Amelioration (Oxford, 1988); Philip D. Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History (Cambridge, 1998); Eric Williams, Cap- italism and Slavery, new ed. (Chapel Hill, 1994); Robin Blackburn, The Making of New WorldSlavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800, 2nd ed. (London, 2010). 6 Sidney W. Mintz, “The Jamaican Internal Marketing Pattern: Some Notes and Hypotheses,” Social and Economic Studies 4, no. 1 (1955): 95–103; Sidney W. Mintz and Douglas Hall, The Origins of the Jamaican Internal Marketing System (New Haven, 1960); Michael Craton, “Proto-Peasant Revolts? The Late Slave Rebellions in the British West Indies, 1816–1832,” Past and Present, no. 85 (1979): 99–125. 7 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 (London, 1962), 150. 8 Phyllis Deane, The First Industrial Revolution, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 1979), 203–18; Arthur Redford, Labour Migration in England, 1800–1850, ed. W. H. Chaloner, 3rd ed. (Manchester, 1976). Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Athens, on 02 Oct 2021 at 17:07:05, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2020.39 SLAVES AND PEASANTS IN THE ERA OF EMANCIPATION ▪ 497 into formal plans for emancipation. White British abolitionists argued against slavery but accepted an idea about black incapacity and obedience to white authority that slave owners had invented to justify it. The blurring of the line between slave and peasant was particular to debates over slavery and emancipation. Political economists clearly distinguished the two: a peasant was a smallholding subsistence farmer or a tenant farmer not dependent on a wage; an enslaved laborer was legally chattel and worked for the exclusive benefit of his or her putative owner. John Stuart Mill admitted the two forms of labor had similarities: “In the regime of peasant properties as in that of slavery, the whole produce belongs to a single owner, and the distinction of rent, profits, and wages, does not exist.” And yet, Mill explained, slavery “is the state of greatest oppression and degradation to the labouring class,” while peasantry is “that in which they are the most uncontrolled arbiters of their own lot.”9 Many British colonial officials beyond the Caribbean adopted this orthodox definition. For example, British officials in India reclassified cultivators of all kinds as peasants and imagined them as the substrate of a static, feudal agrarian economy.10 But the debate over emancipation was not a debate over whether enslaved people were or could become analogues to Indian ryots. When abolitionists and slave owners debated the “peasantry,” they generally used the word in three overlapping ways, estranged from the term as used in political economy. First, “peasant” was sometimes used vaguely and interchangeably with generalities like “farm laborer.” Second, “peasant” sometimes had a specific, con- tested political valence. On the one hand, invocations of the British peasant were associated with nostalgic Tory politics. For example, William Wordsworth in his later years described the Lakes District as a throwback to a better English country- side, “a perfect Republic of Shepherds and Agriculturalists.”11 Radicals like William Cobbett, in contrast, came to identify “peasantry” and “slavery” with enclosure and dispossession in Britain.

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