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Capitalism and Slavery: World Economy, the British Empire, and the End of the Slave Trade to Brazil

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Capitalism and Slavery: World Economy, the British Empire, and the End of the Slave Trade to Brazil Capitalism and Slavery: World Economy, the British Empire, and the End of the Slave Trade to Brazil Tâmis Parron This essay presents partial results of an ongoing research project on the systemic causes for the rise and fall of slavery in the United States, Brazil, and Cuba in the first nineteenth century (1763-1865). Whereas most scholars frame their narratives on slavery within national boundaries, I examine slavery as an international subsystem of an increasingly antislavery world system; and while historians who put slavery into larger contexts often hold capitalism as a constant system, I propose to understand nineteenth-century capitalism through a sequence of three commodity market integrations, each of which posed specific economic and political challenges for slaveholders. The sections of my research are organized along these three commodity market integrations, and the present essay is a case study developed out of the last section, devoted to the “center-intensive commodity market integration” (1842-1861). I. Introduction: State, Agency, and Capitalism Melcher Todd was a West Indian planter who had just married when he produced 290 metric tons of brown sugar in 1847. To bring his sugar to Great Britain, Todd paid 145 pounds sterling (£) for colonial customs, £1,000 for insurance, £1,150 for freight, and £4,030 in metropolitan customs for a sum total of US$30,000, a fortune at the time. The new husband thought his produce would sell for good prices and pay off his expenses. But he was wrong. A year earlier, Great Britain had opened its sugar market for international competition, and the ensuing influx of foreign supplies knocked sugar prices down, bringing Todd a loss of £720 (US$3,500). Todd lamented: “I have simply labored to pay customs’ duties.” “Not one farthing reverts to me or my family”, and “I am now […] obliged to mortgage my property.” “With what force,” he went on, “do the lines of the great Latin poet commencing ‘Sic vos non vobis’ apply here.” The poet Todd had in mind was Virgil, to whom medieval traditional had attributed a poem on the expropriation of labor. “I wrote these lines,” said the poem, “another takes the praise; so you, birds, make your nests, but you do not do this for yourselves; so do you, 1 sheep, bear wool, but not for yourselves.” In fact, the great Latin poet may have never crafted these lines, but this didn’t seem to bother the planter. Todd was used to taking the fruits of others’ labor and, proud of his sugar mountain, he selectively forgot that his workers had made it all, but not for themselves.1 The phrase sic vos non vobis, which an idiomatic translation would render as “you do, but you do not benefit from it”, may also encompass the idea of unequal distribution of wealth. Put this way, the phrase sheds light not only on Todd’s ledger books; on a more general level, it also illuminates the great impact the recasting of the British Empire through free trade had across different spaces of the world during the mid-nineteenth century. While promising gains for all, free trade was a zero-sum game, with a clear line between those who would reap the rewards and those who would bear the costs of its practices. In effect, the metaphor Todd used suggests even more than met the planter’s eye: free trade not only affected the relations of government and citizens within the British Empire, but also changed factor and sector returns in several continents, striking workers and capitalists in different countries across the globe. The impact of the British tariff reforms was so spectacular that it displaced the social bases of national and imperial compacts within the British Empire and beyond, inducing planters and politicians to painstakingly reconstruct political consensus to better protect their interests. The common thread of global free trade political economy thus linked apparently unconnected events around midcentury – from the geographical reconfiguration of wheat world markets to the U.S. Compromise of 1850, from British high imperialism in the East to American annexationism in the Caribbean.2 In this essay, I argue that one of these key systemic linkages can be established between the end of sugar protectionism in Great Britain and the suppression of the contraband slave trade to Brazil in 1850. At the time, this infamous commerce was the world’s most voluminous 1 Melcher Todd, Castries, January 27, 1848. In: Colonel Reid (Governor’s Dispatches), St. Lucia, January 28, 1848. UKNA, CO 253/91. Todd’s marriage was announced in Colburn’s United State Service and Naval and Military Journal. London: Henry Colburn, part III, p. 638. 2 Tâmis Parron. A política da escravidão na era da liberdade: Estados Unidos, Brasil e Cuba, 1787-1846. Phd. Dissertation. University of São Paulo (USP), 2015 (available at: http://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/8/8138/tde-09102015-151621/pt-br.php); and “Global Economy and the Crisis of Slavery in the Americas: A World System View, 1842-1854.” Latin American History Workshop, University of Chicago, June 2, 2016. 2 trafficking in enslaved human beings. It created endogenous capital accumulation in Portuguese America, connected Brazilian capitalists with global financial webs from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, and fed the reproduction of Brazilian slave society over time and space.3 Historians attribute the extinction of the Brazilian slave trade to different causes. Early interpretations dwell on international relations. They suggest that decision makers in Rio de Janeiro cracked down on the infamous commerce because the British state forced them to do so. More recent analyses focused less on interstate actions, instead turning their attention to subaltern agency. Some scholars argued that culturally-shaped social practices of Bantu-speaking African slaves in the Paraíba Valley allowed for a slave conspiracy in 1848, pushing Brazilian slaveholders to discontinue the importation of enslaved Africans; or that the microbiological side effects of Afro-Brazilian commerce, mainly the yellow fever outbreak of 1850, drove public opinion against the contraband slave trade.4 Lately, other scholars have concluded that the Royal Navy’s raids against Rio de Janeiro were ultimately the main factor in the final suppression of the Brazilian slave trade.5 This most recent historiographical shift has brought Britain 3 See, among others, R. A. Ferreira. Cross-Cultural Exchange in the Atlantic World: Angola and Brazil during the Era of the Slave Trade. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012; L. F. de Alencastro. O trato dos viventes: formação do Brasil no Atlântico Sul. São Paulo: Cia. das Letras, 2000; M. Florentino. Em costas negras: uma história do tráfico de escravos entre a África e o Rio de Janeiro (1997). São Paulo: Cia. das Letras, 2002; J. L. R. Fragoso. Homens de grossa aventura: acumulação e hierarquia na praça mercantil do Rio de Janeiro (1790-1830). Rio de Janeiro: Arquivo Nacional, 1992; and J. C. Miller, “Some Aspects of the Commercial Organization of Slavery at Luanda, Angola-1760-1830”. In: Henry A. Gemery & Jan S. Hogendorn (eds.). The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade. Nova York: Academic Press, 1979, p. 77-106; and Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730-1830. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998. On abolitionism and colonial policies for Africa, O. Pétré-Grenouilleau. From Slave Trade to Empire: Europe and the Colonization of Black Africa, 1780s-1880s. Londons: Routledge, 2004; and R. Huzzey. Freedom Burning: Anti-Slavery and Empire in Victorian Britain. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012. 4 See, respectively, L. Bethell The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade, 1807-1869. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970; R. Slenes. “‘Malungo, Ngoma vem’: África coberta e descoberta no Brasil.” Revista USP, 12, 1991/1992, p. 48-67; “A árvore de Nsanda Transplantada: cultos kongo de aflição e identidade escrava no sudeste brasileiro (século XIX)”. In: D. C. Libby & J. F. Furtado. Trabalho livre, trabalho escravo: Brasil e Europa, séculos XVIII e XIX. São Paulo: Annablume, 2007, p. 273-314; S. Chalhoub. Cidade febril. São Paulo: Cia. das Letras, 2004, p. 60-96, and D. T. Graden, “An Act ‘Even of Public Security’: Slave Resistance, Social Tensions, and the End of the International Slave Trade to Brazil, 1835-1856”. Hispanic American Historical Review, v. 76, n. 2 (May, 1996), p. 249-282. 5 J. D. Needell, The Party of Order: The Conservatives, the State, and Slavery in the Brazilian Monarchy, 1831-1871. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006, p. 138-155; J. Rodrigues, “O fim do tráfico transatlântico de escravos para o Brasil: paradigmas em questão”. In: K. Grinberg and R. Salles (eds). O Brasil imperial. Vol. II: 1831-1870. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2009, p. 297-238; T. Parron. A 3 back in, enabling new consideration of a classic question largely ignored in the last decades by scholars engaged with Brazilian history: what were, after all, the systemic conditions that placed Britain on a collision route with the largest transatlantic slave trade at the time? British historians have already put forward interpretations of the motives guiding Britain in its quasi-war with Brazil. Leslie Bethell suggested that abolitionism was London’s driving force in the campaign against the transatlantic slave trade. In his account, the need to protect the West Indian sugar economy after slave emancipation or British pent-up frustration with the deliberate pro-slave trade inaction of the Brazilian government were of secondary importance. David Eltis, in turn, defined abolitionism as a social movement devoted to a system of beliefs that held up uncoerced labor as the best social engine designed for human progress.
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