and : , the , and the End of the Slave Trade to

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 , 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 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 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,

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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 .2 In this essay, I argue that one of these key systemic linkages can be established between the end of sugar 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 : 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 . 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 and colonial policies for , O. Pétré-Grenouilleau. From Slave Trade to Empire: 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. He argued that such a belief galvanized Britain against the slave trade, inducing it to even contradict its material interests – which would be fostered by investments in both the slave trade and slavery within and beyond the British imperial framework. Finally, Seymour Drescher proposed that abolitionism became a successful social force in Britain as a result of an Anglo-Saxon political culture based on stable representative regime, and that antislavery triumphed internationally because of the position Britain occupied within the world system. These readings (focused respectively on abolitionism; contradictions between abolitionism and economic interests; and the political triumph of abolitionism) share a critical approach to ’s classic Capitalism and Slavery. According to Williams, the turned both slavery and the slave trade into obsolete, contradictory, and unwelcome institutions in the British Empire. Targeting William’s arguments, Bethell, Eltis, and Drescher propose that British economy and geopolitics – which they understand to have remained relatively unchanged in the first half of the nineteenth century – were compatible with black bondage, setting up an unfavorable scenario

política da escravidão no Império do Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2011, p. 230-266; D. Graden. Disease, Resistance, and Lies: The Demise of the Transatlantic Slave Trade to Brazil and Cuba. : Louisiana State University Press, 2014; and T. Parron, “A Certain View of History, or History Itself? Subaltern Agency and Political Context”. A Contracorriente, v. 13, n. 2 (2016), p. 363-372. 4

abolitionism rose against. Not coincidentally, the three historians state that the abolition of the Brazilian slave trade was “the last important stand of humanitarian politics.”6 In the following pages I offer an alternative view to this anti-Williams reading. My argument is threefold. First, I suggest that the direct encounter of two opposing forces – the British Industrial Revolution and the political economy of the post- Napoleonic world order – intensified social contradictions and class conflicts inside Great Britain, leading Westminster to reformulate its imperial policy and adopt a new political economy between 1839 and 1846 (item II). As a result of these changes, I argue that both metropole and colonies entered into a process of profound imperial renegotiation in which abolitionism, class conflict, material interests, and imperial geopolitics – that is, structural constraints, pressure of social groups, and state action – became inextricably intertwined (item III). Finally, I propose that the rewriting of the British imperial compact in the late 1840s transformed the traditional British antislavery diplomacy into unprecedented military aggression against Brazil by 1850 (item IV). With a wider lens, it is possible to notice that national political events may have unforeseen implications on a global scale, which, in turn, feed back into national histories. In this sense, a question apparently restricted to Anglo-Brazilian relations also sheds light on essential aspects of the nineteenth-century world system. It may clarify how policies designed to combine labor, land, and capital in certain areas of the world economy affected national agreements, imperial administration, diplomacy and war in others.

II. Breaking through the World Order: Imperialism and Free Trade The Industrial Revolution redefined the geographical horizon of the British economy between 1780 and 1860. As the mechanization of spinning and weaving took off in Britain, the West Indies, which had been the core of the imperial economy in the

6 L. Bethell. The Abolition, p. 296-327; D. Eltis. Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987, p. 3-30, 102-123 and 207-222; and S. Drescher. Abolition: a History of Slavery and Antislavery. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 205- 241 and 267-293; and The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 179-201; and E. Williams. Capitalism and Slavery (1944). Intr. by Colin Palmer. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. 5

eighteenth century, failed to perform their role as both reliable suppliers of raw materials and consumer markets for manufactures. Britain increasingly relied on foreign jurisdictions to close its main industrial commodity chains. On one end it came to depend upon the United States for the provision of short-staple and, on the other, it counted on the European Continent, the United States, and Latin America as dynamic consumer markets of textiles. Although the British economy had never been self- sufficient, it reached an unprecedented level of dependence during the first half of the nineteenth century. In political terms, this industrial economic geography exposed Britain to the influence of other countries’ domestic economic policies that London fell short of controlling. Among those policies was protectionism.7 In the post-Napoleonic world order, key Atlantic states implemented protectionist measures strategically selected for the sectorial protection of their economies. Old colonial powers such as France and Spain, having lost colonies that balanced their foreign trade, restricted imports for their own financial stability. Urban regions with capital and manufacturing traditions such as New York, Mulhouse (French Alsace), Barcelona (Spain), Ghent (Belgium), Wiesenthal (Baden) and Chemnitz (Saxony), which had thrived during the system of reciprocal blockades (Continental Blockade, Orders in Council, U.S. embargos), asked for high taxes against British textiles after 1815. Lastly, virtually all countries suffered deep deficits incurred during the revolutionary conflicts and resorted to tariff increases to pay them off. Tariff changes generally affect prices, volume of trade, scale of production, distribution of gains from trade, marginal propensity to consume, consumption patterns, employment levels, fiscal revenues, and trade balance. Over time, protectionist political economy depressed prices of manufactures and shrank the profit margin of British industrialists, which made working conditions in factories more precarious than they already were.

7 R. Davis. The Industrial. Revolution and British Overseas Trade. Atlantic Highlands, Nova Jersey: Humanities Press, 1979; “English Foreign Trade, 1660-1700”. EHR, New Series, v. 7, n. 2 (1954), p. 150- 166; “English Foreign Trade, 1700-1774”. EHR, New Series, v. 15, n. 2 (1962), p. 285-303; and P. J. Cain & A. G. Hopkins, “The Political Economy of British Expansion Overseas, 1750-1914”, EHR, vol. 33, n. 4 (Nov., 1980), p. 463-490. See also J. Osterhammel. The Transformation of the World: a Global History of the Nineteenth Century. Princeton University Press, 2014, p. 637-672; and R. C. Allen. The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 1-23. 6

The post-Napoleonic world order, managed by London, also shaped the power that managed it.8 Protectionism built up systemic pressures on Britain, increasing the appeal of two policies that could potentially offset the combination of expanding output and diminishing returns in the industrial sector. On the one hand, private investors and policy makers pushed for a more thorough colonization of through international commercialization of Indian crops to generate local income to import British goods. Throughout the first half of the century, opium occupied a prominent position in this colonial arrangement: traded in China for tea, it became so crucial that its value reached US$15 million in 1828 (for comparison, U.S. raw cotton exports totaled US$22 million in the same year). Indigo was the second most important Indian commodity until the 1830s. With the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies, investors redirected capital to sugar and coffee trade in the East, allowing sugar to eventually replace indigo as a major means of payment for metropolitan manufactures. Pulled by opium, indigo and sugar, India rose briskly as a thriving consumer market. The seventh most important global buyer of British cotton goods in 1820, India surpassed the West Indies a few years later, caught up with the United States by the mid-thirties and took first place at the turn of the forties.9 The rise of the Indian consumer market explains why Britain castigated China during the First Opium War (1839-1842), when Beijing suspended opium imports. As an English pamphlet stated, opium profits “have not only tended to turn the balance of trade between Great Britain and China in favour of the former.”

8 On protectionism and the industrial sector, see S. Beckert. Empire of Cotton: a Global History. New York: Alfred Knopf, 2014, p. 136-174. For its impact on ’s slave systems, see T. Parron, “World Prices and National Politics: The Shaping of Slave Systems in the Americas, c.1750-c.1840”. Review of Fernand Braudel Center, v. 26, 2, p. 233-286. 9 On metropolitan tensions and imperialism in Britain, see J. Gallagher and R. Robinson, “The Imperialism of Free Trade”. (EHR), New Series, vol. 6, n. 1 (1953), p. 1-15; P. G. Cain & A. G. Hopkins, “Gentlemanly Capitalism and British Expansion Overseas I. The Old Colonial System, 1688-1850”. EHR, Vol. 39, No. 4 (Nov., 1986), p. 501-525; and “Gentlemanly Capitalism and British Expansion Overseas II: New Imperialism, 1850-1945”. EHR, vol. 40, n. 1 (Feb., 1987), p. 1-26; both articles were expanded into British Imperialism, 1688-2000 (1993). London: Routledge, 2002. Opium and cotton export data are, respectively, in Parliamentary Papers Relating to the Opium Trade: viz., Extracts from reports, &c. London: T. R. Harrison, 1840, p. 148; and Letter from the Secretary of the Treasury of the Commerce and Navigation of the United States for 1828. Washington: Gales and Seaton, 1829, p. 122-123. For India’s indigo and cotton exports, see J. Eacott. Selling Empire: India in the Making of Britain and America, 1600-1830. Williamsburg, VA: Omohundro, 2016, p. 333-381. 7

Together with sugar and indigo, opium enabled India “to increase ten-fold its consumption of British manufactures”.10 In a protectionist world order, British capital in the Indo-Pacific had become too big to fail, as suggested in the chart below:

Sources: For the years 1820-1831, Tables of the Revenue, Population, Commerce etc. of the and its Dependencies. London: W. Clowes, 1833, p. 65-70; for 1832-1834, Tables of the Revenue, Population, Commerce etc. of the United Kingdom and its Dependencies. London: W. Clowes, 1835, p. 194-197; for 1834, Idem (published in 1835), p. 197; for 1835, id. (1836), p. 96-97; for 1836, id. (1838), p. 96-97; for 1837, id. (1839), p. 102-103; for 1838, id. (1840), p. 124-125; for 1839, id. (1841), p. 116-117.

The Indian safety valve, important as it was, did not prevent international protectionism from intensifying class conflicts in Britain. By inducing wage cuts, protectionism helped bring Chartism to life, a vertical social movement composed of workers and middle classes in favor of radically reforming both the economy and state of Britain. Whitehall faced this domestic challenge not only by favoring high imperialism in the East, but also by unilaterally adopting free trade in the Atlantic.11

10 Samuel Warren. The Opium Question (1839). London: James Ridgway, 1840, p. 125. See K. Pomeranz. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000, p. 1-108; and M. Greenberg. British Trade and the Opening of China, 1800-42 (1951). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969. 11 Peter Gurney. Wanting and Having: Popular Politics and Liberal Consumerism in England, 1830-70. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015; C. Schonhardt-Bailey. From the Corn Laws to Free Trade: Interests, Ideas, and Institutions in Historical Perspective. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. 8

Richard Cobden, a Lancashire industrialist and head of the powerful Anti-Corn Law League, didactically summed up the free trade solutions for class conflicts in Great Britain. Slashing tariffs on imports such as meat, sugar and wheat, he argued, would cheapen workers’ basic diet items. (Statistics indicate that British workers, two and a half times more costly to their employers than their German counterparts, spent two- thirds of their income on daily food.) By balancing the worker’s budget, free trade would satisfy poor classes and weaken the popular appeal of Chartism. In addition, Cobden suggested, free trade would turn Britain into the most coveted food court of the world economy, and thus induce protectionist countries to relocate their scarce resources (labor, land, and capital) from industry to . This political economy would act as a powerful drill to pierce through the tariff walls that several states had put up against Britain. In technical terms, free trade would realign class conflict in Britain by reorganizing the international division of labor in the world economy.12 From 1842 on, the British Parliament passed a series of acts for opening the metropolitan domestic market to global producers of food . The Repeal of the Corn Laws and the Sugar Act, both of 1846 and the main landmarks of the tariff reforms, turned Britain into an economic zone of commodity market integration for food produced in core countries or areas under their direct control. By freeing up the world system’s greatest sugar and wheat marketplace, British tariff reforms changed factor returns (capital, land, and labor) and sector returns (mining, food, clothing) across the Atlantic. Among those most affected were slaveholding regions. In regard to sugar specifically, slaveholders responded to the new commodity market integration in Britain with much greater elasticity than traditional British West Indian suppliers, as Figure 2 shows:

12P. Pickering & A. Tyrell. The People’s Bread: a History of the Anti-Corn Law League. London: Leicester University Press, 2000; A. Morrison (ed.). Free Trade and its Reception 1815-1960. Freedom and Trade: vol. 1. London: Routledge, 1998, p. 1-206; R. F. Spall Jr., “Free Trade, Foreign Relations, and the Anti-Corn Law League”. The International History Review, v. 10, n. 3 (Aug., 1988): 405-432; and N. McCord. The Anti-Corn Law League. London: George Allen, 1958. 9

Sources: Tables of the Revenue, Population, Commerce etc. of the United Kingdom and its Dependencies. London: Clowes and Sons, 1843, p. 61; for 1842, idem (1844), p. 57; for 1843, idem (1845), p. 60; for 1844, idem (1846), p. 53; for 1845, idem (1847), p. 51; for 1846, idem (1848), p. 59; for 1847, idem (1849), p. 59; for 1848, idem (1850), p. 59; for 1849, idem (1851), p. 64.

Although the Atlantic’s major sugar economies increased their sales in British markets after the 1846, Brazil and Cuba broke into it more successfully as they offered slave-made products at lower prices than their rivals. This altered expectations on future returns on investments in food commodities among British subjects and, eventually, redefined the British imperial compact.

III. Free Trade and Negotiating Empire The 1846 British bread and sugar policy struck hard against colonial exporters who had been enjoying a monopoly over the metropolitan market: merchants and wheat growers in Canada, potential farmers in Australia, and merchants and planters across sugar enclaves in the West Indies, Mauritius, and India. To mollify them, Whitehall decision makers instituted the principle of trade reciprocity between metropole and colonies with the Colonial Possessions Act (1846). This law dictated that if London had abolished the metropolitan tariff protection over colonial products (wheat and sugar), overseas possessions were allowed to abolish colonial tariff protections over

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metropolitan products (manufactures). The act encompassed all colonies except for India.13 Contrary to expectations, the Colonial Possessions Act did not dispel colonial anxieties. Canadians and Australians required additional concessions as broad as self- government, and Caribbean sugar planters drew up a long list of demands to the British Crown. Their claims varied in size and importance. Minor demands aimed at boosting the metropolitan market for sugar (as, for example, the request for admitting sugar and colonial rum into British distilleries and breweries on an equal footing with malt). Major demands touched the most sensitive nerves of the British Empire. One of them was ending the Navigation Acts, the set of laws that raised foreign freights in Britain’s colonial trade and that British shipbuilding lobbyists fiercely defended. Another called for deregulating the recruitment of African free workers in order to increase labor supply and correspondingly reduce production costs, a measure that abolitionists repudiated for prompting enslavement practices in Africa. All in all, the sugar lobby intended to socialize the costs of free competition with different actors. Admitting sugar cane derivatives in breweries and distilleries would push up sugar prices for metropolitan consumers. Suppressing Navigation Acts would narrow profit margins of ship owners. Massive immigration schemes would shrink colonial workers’ wages.14 Initially, the transatlantic slave trade was not a topic of concern for the colonists. However, a deep economic crisis in Britain after 1847 transformed the nature, strength, and scope of their lobbying. The economic crisis was born out of speculation.

13 J. Darwin. Unfinished Empire, p. 144-179; G. Stewart. The Origins of Canadian Politics: A Comparative Approach. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1986; E. Shann. An Economic History of Australia. Cambridge: CUP, 1930. 14 For rum, see Governor of to Colonial Office, Sep. 14, 1846, CO 28/165, fo. 14-16; resolutions of Trinidad, Sep. 18, 1846, in the Governor’s dispatch to Colonial Office, Oct. 3, 1846, CO 295/152, fo. 11-15; and report of the Committee of Privy Council for Trade. Whitehall, Feb. 12, 1847, CO 28/167, fo. 251-252. On Navigation Acts, Sugar Duties, Confidential. London: Foreign Office, 1848, UKNA, CO 884/1, p. 3; “The Humble Memorial of Your Majesty’s Humble and Devoted Subjects, the Assembly of Jamaica”, April 1, 1847, attached to the governor’s dispatch to Colonial Office, April, 6, 1847, UKNA, CO 137/291, fo. 214-245; and “The Humble Petition of the Board of Council and House of Assembly of the Island of Antigua”, in the governor’s dispatch to Colonial Office, Dec. 26, 1847, UKNA, CO 7/87 (no folios). On immigration, see resolutions of Trinidad, 18 de set. de 1846; and memorial of the Government Council of Trinidad, April 2, 1849, in the governor’s dispatch to Colonial Office, April 6, 1849, UKNA, CO 295/167, fo. 52-62. Such claims were summed up in the Report of the Acting Committee to the Standing Committee of West India Planters and Merchants. London: Maurice, 1847. 11

Businessmen imported huge quantities of low-tariff wheat and sugar in 1846 and 1847, hoping to catch the high monopoly prices still in effect before free trade brought them down. Their scheme was thwarted in the second half of 1847 when cereal and sugar prices plummeted respectively 50% and 30% due to oversupply. Forty-three firms, many of which involved with wheat and sugar trade, went bankrupt. The Royal Bank of Liverpool, the Liverpool Banking Company, the North and South Wales Banking Company and the Union Bank of Newcastle became insolvent. Companies “connected with India, particularly those engaged in the export of British manufacturing,” operated at a huge loss. And colonial planters were forced to mortgage “everything they had.”15 With both metropolitan and overseas economies in distress, the British state started a process of imperial renegotiation. Besides granting Canadians responsible government (1849) and passing the Australian Government Colonies Act (1850), the British Parliament set up a series of Select Committees to put out the flames free trade had fueled everywhere: the Select Committee on the British commercial crisis, the Select Committee on general public expenditures, the Select Committee on the Navigation Acts, the Select Committee on sugar and coffee planting in the British Empire, the Select Committee on the illegal transatlantic slave trade, and the Select Committee on Ceylon and British Guiana. These parliamentary investigations branched out of the same trunk: they examined the new positions Britain and its colonies occupied within an imperial economy dramatically refashioned by free trade. By doing so, they sought to define who would pay for losses inflicted by the new political economy. To understand the immediate origins of the Royal Navy’s violent actions against Rio de Janeiro to fight the Brazilian slave trade by 1850, it is necessary to read the volumes of the Select Committee on Sugar and Coffee Planting.16

15 D. Morier Evans. The Commercial Crisis 1847–1848. London: Letts, Son and Steer 1849; Ward- Perkins, C.N., ‘The Commercial Crisis of 1847’, Oxford Economic Papers, v. 2, n. 1, 1950, pp. 75-94; and Report from the Select Committee of the House of the Lords appointed to enquire into the Causes of the Distress which has for sometime Prevailed among the Commercial Classes. London: The House of , 1848, 2 vols. (quote from vol. 1, p. v-vi). 16 Report from the Select Committee on Sugar and Coffee Planting. London: House of Commons, 1848, 8 vols.; Report from the Select Committee of the House of the Lords Appointed to Enquire into the Causes of the Distress which Has for Sometime Prevailed among the Commercial Classes. London: House of Comuns, 1848, 2 vols.; Report from the Select Committee on Slave Trade. London: House of Comuns, 1848, 4 vols; Report from the Select Committee on Slave Trade. London: House of Comuns, 1849, 2 12

From February to April of 1848 the Select Committee gathered 86 testimonies along 2,317 pages and 16,833 questions, totaling the most comprehensive documentary record of congressional investigations in that year. Witnesses comprised a full catalogue of the colonial bestiary: directors, president and bureaucrats of the East India Company (EIC); the undersecretary of the Ministry of Colonies, the inspector general of customs in Britain, the colonial secretary of Ceylon; importers and brokers of from India, the British Caribbean, Cuba and Brazil; metropolitan distillers; coffee importers connected to Brazil, Ceylon and the Caribbean; Royal Navy officers experienced in fighting slave trading; shipmasters involved in free Africans transportation; and owners or administrators of sugar mills in Indochina, India (Madras and Calcutta), Mauritius, Jamaica, Barbados, Demerara, British Guiana, St. Kitts, Antigua, Grenada, Trinidad and St. Lucia. The Select Committee was instrumental in generalizing West Indian demands for colonial sugar protection. According to George Bentinck, the committee chair, lower tariffs would sink the nearly shipwrecked Caribbean economy as much as imperil emergent sugar interests in the East. Slave-made sugar would outpace Indian sugar and thus impair India’s capacity to import manufactures, affecting the very metropolitan interests free traders meant to safeguard. This outlook gave the Select Committee a significant external buttress. In July 1848 the British magazine The Economist reported that “130 major bankers, merchants and trading houses in the City” held a meeting chaired by Thomas Baring to express support for the conclusions of the Select Committee. In other words, the economic crisis of 1848 universalized West Indian claims.17 In-bond prices in London for brown sugar coming from different parts of the world between 1840 and 1853 confirm the committee findings. In-bond prices leave off vols.; and Report from the Select Committee of the House of Lords appointed to consider the best means which Great Britain can adopt for the Final Extinction of the African Slave Trade. London: House of Comuns, 1849-1850, 2 vols.; First, Second, Third and Fourth Reports from the Select Committee on Navigation Laws. London: House of Comuns, 1847; Report from the Select Committee of the House of Lords appointed to enquire into the Policy and Operation of the Navigation Laws and to Report Thereon to the House. London: House of Comuns: 1848, 4 vols; Report from the Select Committee on Ceylon and British Guiana. London: House of Comuns: 1849, 3 vols.; and Report from the Select Committee on Ceylon. London: House of Comuns: 1850, 3 vols. 17 Report from the Select Committee on Sugar and Coffee Planting; for the City meeting, The Economist, June 3, 1848, p. 631. On City’s financiers sometimes turning against free trade, M. Daunton, ‘Gentlemanly capitalism and British industry, 1820–1914’, Past and Present, no. 122 (1989), p. 119–58. 13

the value of import tariffs, but they take in the remaining costs of commodity trading (prices in colonial port, export taxes, freight, insurance and commissions), describing the value of colonial goods when coming out of a vessel. The 1840-1853 in-bond sugar prices are as shown below:

Sources: Return of the Quantities of Unrefined and Refined Sugar, of , and Rum, Imported and Cleared for Consumption, in each Year ending 5 July from 1842 to 1854. London: House of Commons, 1854 (Parliamentary Papers, 1854, vol. LXV, doc. n. 429, p. 9); and West Indies. Correspondence on the Subject of West India. London: Foreign Office, 1854, p. 4. UNKA, CO 884/1.

Figure 3 presents clear-cut phases that mirror the process of international sugar market integration in Britain. After slavery abolition cut back sugar production in the West Indies, the value of the Caribbean brown sugar hit its peak in the post-Napoleonic world order. Its high prices, coupled by a tariff reform suppressing differential duties on West and East Indian sugars, signaled hefty profits for entrepreneurs willing to invest in sugar production in the Indian Ocean. Indeed, India and Mauritius emerged in the following five years as the two main sugar suppliers for Britain, and their rise explains the market value decline of a hundredweight brown sugar to £1.7 from £2.5 (1840- 1843). Between abolition and the early 1840s, protectionism created a bubble in the British imperial economy, within which the interplay of metropolitan demand and 14

colonial supply almost exclusively commanded sugar prices, as foreign slave-made sugar had to pay tariffs equivalent to 300% its in-bond prices. In 1846, the Sugar Act prickled the bubble, slave-made sugar broke into the British market, and the gap between free and slave sugar prices nearly closed (1847-1853).18 In 1848 the British average colonial sugar price was as low as in 1831. In both years a hundredweight of brown sugar was worth £1,18. But prices have distinct social meanings across space and time. They can hide deep social differences behind their equivalent face value, and, indeed, the years 1831 and 1848 were a world apart. In 1831, planters of the British Empire were concentrated in the Caribbean region and had slaves to whom they could transfer the pressure of competitive markets. By 1848 sugar producers were spread out in the Caribbean, Mauritius, Madras, and Bengal, and they administered uncoerced labor. Colonial producers and metropolitan politicians still needed to assess whether they could socialize losses inflicted by practices among free local subordinate actors. Their ability to socialize losses varied according to how local economic conditions and larger economic processes interacted. The export sugar economy built in Bengal Presidency, the main British supplier in India, was based upon the zamindari system. In this system, native merchants advanced resources to peasants (ryots), who gave in exchange a half-processed juicy sugar resold to European-owned sugar mills around Calcutta and other cities. Technology and labor costs were not decisive limiting factors for Europeans, since sugar mill plants accommodated steam machines, vacuum boilers and carbon filters (the cutting-edge technology at the time), and local wages in populous India were low. The secret to run business at a profit lied in the ability to dictate purchase prices of half-

18 D. Eltis and S. Drescher suggest that abolitionism produced “a profound change in the distribution of sugar production toward the slave importing economies [Cuba and Brazil]” (Eltis, “The Slave Economies of the Caribbean: Structure, Performance, Evolution and Significance,” in General History of the Caribbean, III The Slave Societies of the Caribbean. F. W. Knight, ed., London: UNESCO, 1997, p. 121; and Drescher, Mighty Experiment, p. 189-190, and Abolition, p. 287-288). Their analysis underplays the reorganization of sugar trade within the British Empire between the 1830s and 1850s. On the sugar economy in the Indian Ocean, Select Committee on Sugar and Coffee, v. 1, p. 25-26, 31-32, 37, 89, 119- 121, 132, 210, and 292-293 (appendix 4); idem, vol. 2, p. 42-43 and 45; U. Bosma. The Sugar in India and Indonesia. Industrial Production, 1770-2010. Cambridge: CUP, 2013, p. 1-163; and Kris Manjapra, “Plantation Century: The Global Spread of Industrial Agriculture, 1830-1930” (unpublished paper shared by the author). Prices of Cuban sugar rose in the mid-forties, before free trade, because of hurricanes devastated Cuban in 1844 and 1846. 15

processed sugar. “It all depends upon the price at which they can buy the raw material from the natives”, said a witness before the Select Committee on Sugar and Coffee. If Europeans bought it cheap, they had sufficient profit margins to face Cuban and Brazilian slaveholders in Britain. If not, they sustained losses. An efficient way to command prices in India was to become a heavy buyer in local marketplaces, but the British fell short of becoming so. When Europeans offered prices the natives deemed too low, the natives shifted their slushy sugar to Indian domestic markets or Eastern foreign outlets (Central Asia, Persia, Russia, and the Pakistani Punjab). “India has markets for sugar independently of England” and “below a certain price she will not permit her sugar to leave India to come here; unless we can get it a certain price, we cannot bring it.” The British were halfway in the process of incorporating India into the capitalist world economy. Despite the military apparatus of the EIC, control over labor and marketing practices in large swaths of India still rested with actors who could reallocate resources to more promising markets. When the British colonialists tried to socialize the costs of free trade with Indians, the colonized made their way out of the squeeze.19 The Indian sugar trade mattered for London, as it was driving the British imperial swing to the East. Not only did sugar compose a quarter (US$7.2 million) of total Indian annual exports to Britain in the 1840s, but its production in Mauritius created a dynamic intercolonial market for Indian worth US$1 million a year. This happened because the manpower recruited to the island’s plantations came from India (the so-called coolies) and followed a rice-based diet. Together, sugar and rice exports from India made up the bulk of cargo in vessels returning to Britain and provided means of payment for British manufactures. Outselling Indian sugar with slave-grown produce hit at the core of this system. “If they will not take the produce of India in payment,” an EIC chairman explained referring to British importers, “India cannot purchase their manufactures.” Slaveholders could replace Indians as sugar suppliers, but they would do

19 Select Committee on Sugar and Coffee, vol. 1, p. 20 (“It all depends”), 169-171 (alternative Eastern markets), 181 (“India has markets”), and 186. For similar challenges regarding sugar and cotton, see U. Bosma. The Sugar Plantation; S. Beckert. Empire of Cotton; and C. Florio, “From Poverty to Slavery: Abolitionists, Overseers, and the Global Struggle for Labor in India”. The Journal of American History, 102 (4), 2016, p. 1005-1024. 16

poorly as consumers of textiles. “And what are Cuba and Brazil as markets,” he went on, “compared with the magnificent territory of British India, containing many millions of consumers, who will, I trust, in time become opulent consumers if their industry be fairly encouraged?” The illegal transatlantic slave trade, to this point mainly a topic of abolitionist philanthropy, now crossed into the domain of London imperial geopolitics.20 Other sugar colonies, where the plantation system prevailed, had their own challenges. In Mauritius and the Caribbean Islands the British exercised such control over land, capital, and debt that planters had no alternative outlets when confronted with money-losing prices and had to pass on part of the competitive burdens to fieldworkers. The cost of labor (without neglecting factors such as soil and climate) turned out to be crucial for their success in the new free trade era: “the whole question regarding the existence of Mauritius and all our sugar-producing colonies in the present state of affairs,” said a witness before the Select Committee, “is that of labour.” “Six-twelfths is; fully half goes in wages and provisions,” another stated. Output data of twenty British sugar colonies show that Barbados had the most consistent expansion of production capacity after 1846. A key to its success appears in the following comparative pay scale for fieldworkers in the late 1840s – an index that suggests the approximate cost of colonial labor, as it does not consider labor productivity.21

20 Select Committee on Sugar and Coffee, v. 1, p. 82, 117, 172, 240, 282 and v. 2, p. 51, 69-70 (intercolonial rice trade); v. 1, p. 121 and 181 (sugar and rice as shiploads); and v. 1, p. 206 (“And what are Cuba and Brazil”). The coffee economy in Ceylon was also linked to Indian rice exports (Select Committee on Sugar and Coffee, v. 6, p. 58). 21 On plantation, see L. Best and K. P. Levitt. The Theory of Plantation Economy: A Historical and Institutional Approach to Caribbean Economic Development. Jamaica: University of the West Indies, 2009. For quotation, see Select Committee on Sugar and Coffee, v. 2, p. 3 and v. 1, p. 220 (“The whole question”). See operating variables other than labor in D. Tomich, “Commodity Frontiers, Spatial Economy and Technological Innovation in the Caribbean Sugar Industry, 1783-1878”. In: Adrian Leonard and David Pretel (eds.). The Caribbean and the Atlantic World Economy. London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2015, p. 184-216. 17

T1. Fieldworkers’ Average Wage in British Sugar Colonies, 1845-1847 Colonies Value 24- day monthly costs cost (pence) (shilling) per day Sta. Lucia 15 31 Trinidad 13 26 Jamaica 12 24 Grenada 12 24 St. Vincent 8 16 Mauritius 6-8 12-16 Barbados 6 12 Sources: Memoranda on the Charges brought before the Committee [of the House of Commons] on Sugar [and Coffee Planting] Duties etc. 1848. UKNA, CO 38/179, fo. 138-140 (Jamaica, Sta. Lucia, Grenada, Barbados); Parliamentary Papers, 1849, vol. XXXVII, doc. n. 280 (Return to an Address of the Honourable the House of Commons, Feb. 9, 1849), p. 94, p. 120, 139 and 153 (Mauritius; values shown in the table preceded wage cuts); governor’s dispatch, Trinidad, April 6, 1849, CO 295/167, fo. 53 (rounded figures). Values are approximate and vary in time. See, for instance, State of the West Indies in 1855. [London]: n.d. [1856], p. 10-11, and State of the West Indies in 1862. London: n.d. [1862], p. 1-2, both in UKNA, CO 884/1.

Barbados presented the wage floor in the post-emancipation West Indies due to particular geo-historical conditions. Small for the number of its inhabitants, “with a population more dense than that of China,” Barbados had pervasive and rich limestone soils, which induced planters to devote almost all its agrarian landscape to . As a result, ex-slaves lacked plots for their produce and depended on markets for food. Trapped in such a land pattern that ruled out self-sufficiency, workers were forced to accept reduced wages. In the remaining sugar colonies, the scenario changed. Thanks to marginal but available uncultivated lands, former slaves preferred subsistence to meagre wages, a peasant life to rural proletarization, pushing up wages. Sugar prices in colonial ports followed the level of their respective workers’ resistance and the consequent cost of labor pointed out in the table above: Barbados planters could offer the ton of brown sugar for £15,5 (US$74,4), Mauritius planters for £20 (US$96) and the Jamaicans for £22,75 (US$109,2).22

22 On Barbados, see State of the West Indies in 1855. S.l.: s.d. [1856], p. 10-11, and State of the West Indies in 1862. S.l. [London]: s. d. [1862], UKNA, CO 884/1. Committee on Sugar and Coffee, v. 8, p. xvi (“with a population”) and xiii (“Free on Board” prices, which include local commissions and export tariffs, but not freight nor insurance). 18

Before the 1847-48 Financial Crisis and the virtual equalization of sugar prices (Figure 3), the West Indian lobby expected from Colonial Office actions to drown workers’ resistance by raising the water level in the labor pool. Sugar businessmen wanted to open the faucet on one hand (“immigration on a most extensive scale,” “not fettered by any unnecessary restrictions”) and close the outflow on the other (“laws to prevent vagrancy and informal possession of lands”). Eventually, the invisible hand of the market would worsen labor relations and knock wages down. The Standing Committee of West India Planters and Merchants filed a colonial claim along these lines just before the 1847-48 storm: “the West India colonies possess the necessary works and machineries and cleared lands and means of transport for a much larger production than they can at present accomplish. To render their cultivation again profitable, they only require enjoyment of freedom in procuring labour.” Right after this note, however, the Caribbean lobby was taken aback by the brutal sugar price equalization. Teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, colonial planters, instead of waiting for the invisible hand to strike at workers, decided to slash wages with their own hands.23 British sugar producers delayed payments for months. They canceled the customary offer of free health assistance to workers. Worse, they made a 30% to 50% reduction in wages in Santa Lucia, Montserrat, Antigua, Saint Vincent, British Guiana and Trinidad, apparently seeking the Barbadian 6-pence wage bottom line. Stung by such attacks, the laboring classes broke out in revolt and made their own People’s Spring in 1848. Montserrat workers prevented sugar from leaving plantations and rose up against taxes levied on livestock and land. In British Guiana (Berbice and Demerara) workers held strikes, uttered “threatening speeches” and burned dozens of cane fields. Trinidadian fieldworkers rushed into public buildings, beat police forces, swore death to the whites, torched cane fields and surrounded the governor’s carriage armed with machetes and hoes. In Jamaica, an island full of marginal lands allocated for subsistence, the sheer attempt to cut wages caused mass desertion into the hinterlands, and the colony went into a tailspin. “1,848 sugar plantations have been abandoned so far,” reported the Spanish consul in Kingston. A British observer looked into its future:

23 Petition of Trinidad, Sep. 18, 1846, in governor’s dispatch, Oct. 3, 1846, UKNA, CO 295/152, fo. 11- 15; Report of the Acting Committee, p. 15 (“the West India colonies”). 19

“as a sugar-growing country, she is never likely again to hold a very high rank.” Free trade damaged an already debilitated Jamaica beyond repair, paving the way for the traumatic Morant Bay Rebellion (1865) and the subsequent suppression of the representative regime in the colony.24 Pay cuts turned out to be a delicate, if not foolhardy, social operation, something planters quickly noticed. Heretofore, the sugar lobby had sought to supply the British Antilles with free Africans. Thenceforth, they strove to deprive their competitors of enslaved Africans. The inversion is an important one: for the first time, they placed the end of the illegal transatlantic slave trade high on their list of demands, hoping not so much to reduce their own production costs but to increase slaveholders’ and, thus, relieve West Indian social tensions. This change in the geopolitical views of the sugar lobby is apparent in a chronological breakdown of Caribbean petitions sent to Parliament for suppressing the slave trade: by 1846 no anti-slave trade petition had ever been delivered; between 1846 and 1850, twenty-four made their way to London. Out of these, only one is from 1846. All others date from the second half of 1847 onwards, when the commodity market integration in Britain slashed sugar prices, forced down wages, and sent a wave of social unrest through the colonies. If plotted on a chart, the curve of anti-slave trade petitions would be inversely proportional to the curve of sugar prices on Figure 3. One fed the other.25

24 State of the West Indies in 1855. [London]: n.d. [1856], UKNA, CO 884/1, p. 10-11; governor’s dispatch, Montserrat, May 23, 1848, UKNA, CO 7/91 (no folio number); idem, Trinidad, April 6, 1849, UKNA, CO 295/167, fo. 52-57; idem, Barbados, Oct. 26,1848, UKNA, CO 260/69, fo. 39-47; idem, Trinidad, Oct. 6, 1849, UKNA, CO 265/168, fo. 230-231; idem, British Guiana, Dec. 31, 1847, Jan. 18 and 31, Aug. 31, Sept. 16 and Nov. 1, 1848, UKNA, CO, 112/29; Select Committee on Sugar and Coffee, v. 5, p. 7 (“threatening speeches”); and Juan de Castillo to Captain General of Cuba, Kingston, Aug. 14, 1848. In: Trabajadores negros libres, Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid, fo. 45-47. See also V. B. Thomas. The Economic History of the Caribbean since the Napoleonic Wars. Cambridge: CUP, 2013; W. A. Green. British Slave Emancipation: the Sugar Colonies and the Great Experiment 1830–1865. Oxford: OUP, 1976; and A. Adamson. Sugar Without Slaves: the Political Economy of British Guiana, 1838- 1904. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1972. 25 For this and the following paragraphs, see “Memorial on the Subject of the Foreign Slave Trade to Her Majesty Principal Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs”, Saint George, Jamaica, Sept.18, 1847, UKNA, CO 137/293, fo. 87-88; “The Humble Memorial of Your Majesty’s Loyal and Dutiful Subjects, the Assembly of Jamaica”, Dec. 24, 1847. In: Select Committee on Sugar and Coffee, v. 3, p. 374-376; “The Humble Memorial of the Undersigned Inhabitants of the Parish of Portland”, Jamaica, Jan. 31, 1848. In: Select Committee on Sugar and Coffee, v. 7, p. 237-238; “The Humble Memorial of the Council of Jamaica”, Sept. 19, 1848, Journals of the Legislature Council, UKNA, CO 140/139; “To the Queen’s Most Excellent Majesty, the Humble Memorial of the Assembly of Jamaica”, Nov. 16, 1848, CO 137/301, 20

Both the collective efforts for drawing up anti-slave trade petitions and the wording of the petitions themselves confirm that social instability pushed Caribbean elites for an explicit campaign against the slave trade. Only 38% of the petitions were signed within the peaceful walls of colonial legislatures. The rest (62%) came up in feverish public meetings open to rich and poor, white and black, former masters and ex- slaves, workers and planters alike. Witnessed by dozens, hundreds and even thousands of people, the ritual of writing open petitions restrengthened social ties and vertical solidarity among those dismayed by plummeting prices that Cubans and Brazilians were bringing about in the metropolitan market. The content of the texts also suggests this. “We,” the 1,658 signatories of Barbados stated, “numbers of whom were once slaves, and besides are of African descent,” meeting with those “who were themselves owners of slaves,” “solicit your Majesty not to discontinue or relax, but graciously to double your Royal exertions for the suppression of this remorseless system of wholesale fo. 58-72; “To the Queen's most Excellent Majesty, the Humble Memorial of the Inhabitants of Jamaica”, Spanish Town, May 24, 1849, UKNA, CO 137/302, fo. 369-377; “To the Queen’s Most Excellent Majesty”, Clarendon, June 16, 1849, CO 137/303, fo. 3-7; “The Humble Memorial of the Inhabitants of Kingston, Jamaica”, June 25, 1849, CO 137/303, fo. 20-24; “The Humble Memorial of the Small Settlers and Labourers of the Parish of St. David [Jamaica]”, July 13, 1849, UKNA, CO 137/303, fo. 75-82; “The Humble Memorial of a Large Body of the Labouring Population of Trelawny in the Island of Jamaica”, Aug. 2, 1849, UKNA, CO 137/303, fo. 122-125; “The Humble Petition of the Council and Assembly of the Island of Barbados”, Nov. 7, 1848, CO 28/169, fo. 94-102; “To the Queen’s Most Excellent Majesty, the Humble Petition of the Undersigned Inhabitants of the Island of Barbados”, n.d., in the dispatch of Feb. 20, 1849, UKNA, CO 28/170, fo. 121-133; memorandum, Trinidad, 6 de ago. de 1850, UKNA, 28/172, fo. 317-320; “The Humble Petition of the President and Members of Her Majesty’s Council and the Honorable Speaker and Members of the House of Assembly of the Island of Grenada and its Dependences”, in the dispatch of March 27, 1849, CO 28/170, fo. 131; “The Humble Petition of the Board of Council and House of Assembly of the Island of Antigua”, in the dispatch of Dec. 26, 1847, UKNA, CO 7/87 (no folio number); “Petition to Her Majesty from the Inhabitant of Roseau”, Aug. 8, 1849, reproduced in Parliamentary Papers, 1850, LV, (doc. n. 149) Slave Trade: Copies of All Memorials Transmitted to Her Majesty's Government from the West Indies, in the Years 1848 and 1849, Relative to the Slave Trade, p. 8; petition of Trinidad, Sep. 18, 1846, CO 295/152, fo. 11-15; “The Humble Petition of the Undersigned, Inhabitants of Trinidad, Interested in the Cultivation of Sugar”, in the dispatch of Sept. 18, 1847, UKNA, CO 295/157, fo. 356-365; “Meeting of Planters and Others”, Trinidad, Jan. 17, 1848, UKNA, CO 295/160; “To the Queen’s most Excellent Majesty, The Humble Petition of the Inhabitants of Trinidad”, June 5, 1848. In: 1850, LV, Slave Trade: Copies, p. 9; “The Petition of Your Majesty’s Dutiful and Loyal Subjects, the Undersigned Inhabitants of the Island of Saint Lucia”, in the dispatch of April 19, 1848, UKNA, CO 253/92 (no folio number); “Meeting of Planters to Consider a Memorial to the Queen and Both Houses of Parliament on the State of the Colony and the Supression of the Slave Trade with Foreign Countries”, British Guiana, Nov. 29, 1848, CO 72/843 and printed in 1850 (149) Slave trade, p. 6; and Report of The Acting Committee to the Standing Committee of West India Planters and Merchants. London: J. Nichols & Milton, 1850, p. 15-16 (Jan. 16, 1850). Some Jamaican petitions were reproduced in The Jamaica Movement for Promoting the Enforcement of Slave-Trade Treaties, and the Suppression of the Slave-Trade. London: Charles Gilpin, 1850. Slave Trade: Copies includes fifteen petitions. 21

oppression and murder” (the slave trade), because “whatever claims to compete with your Majesty’s free colonial subjects other nations may be considered to possess, such claims cannot be otherwise than forfeited by those who support their competition by wrong and robbery.” Other subjects were just as explicit in their complaints. The Sugar Act, they said, “placed [Britain’s] sugar-producing colonies in a disastrous competition with slave-labour countries.” For this reason, the colonial order mirrored less the “comparative tranquility” of Britain than the “commotion and discord [that] have so generally prevailed in the other kingdoms of Europe” (the Peoples’ Spring of 1848). They also argued that the slave trade menaced “British interests at stake in the East and West Indies.” Jamaican politicians summed all up: “the permanent happiness of the rural population is inseparably interwoven with the prosperity of the agricultural interests.”26 Initially making a non-specific call against the slave trade, the colonists turned to more aggressive means as they were battered by falling prices, social turmoil, property damage, and strikes. In a public meeting in Trinidad in September 1847, they demanded the emancipation of all Africans smuggled into Cuba (since 1820) and Brazil (since 1831): “new and vigorous measures [should] be adopted for the detection and liberation of such slaves as have heretofore been feloniously introduced into foreign countries.” In June 1848 they quoted a Palmerston’s testimony before the Select Committee on Sugar and Coffee Plantation and required the “speedy liberation of those unfortunate Africans now brought under your Majesty’s special notice as being illegally and unjustifiably held in the most cruel slavery.” Others followed the Trinidadians. In Jamaica, where abolitionist David Turnbull had been living since he was kicked out of Cuba for antislavery activities, colonists unearthed his project for liberating enslaved Africans illegally imported into Cuba: if Turnbull’s proposal were “now urged on the Spanish and Brazilian Governments with suitable energy, it would prove beneficial and effective

26 “To the Queen’s Most Excellent Majesty”, Barbados, UKNA, CO 28/170, fo. 121-133. References to the Sugar Act are in Slave Trade. Copies, p. 8; “To the Queen's most excellent Majesty”, Jamaica, May 24, 1849 (in The Jamaica Movement, p. 89-90); “The Humble Memorial of the Inhabitants of Kingston”, Jamaica, June 25, 1849, “The Humble Memorial of the Small Settlers and Labourers”, Jamaica, July 13, 1849, both in UKNA, CO 137/303. See also “The Humble Petition of the President and Members of Her Majesty’s Council and the Honorable Speaker and Members of the House of Assembly of the Island of Grenada and its dependences”, UKNA, CO 28/170 (references to Spring’s People); and “The Humble Memorial of the Council of Jamaica”, Sept. 19, 1848 (“the permanent happiness”). 22

in enabling the emancipated colonies of Great Britain to withstand and outlive the competition with the slave grown produce.” The issue made its way into three more colonial petitions (Dominica, British Guiana, Jamaica again) and the agenda of a committee representing planters in the metropole. These colonial petitions filed past the Colonial Office, signaling that their true interlocutor was Lord Palmerston, then the head of British international relations. 27 When free trade plunged the Empire into turmoil and raised a series of committees in Parliament, the government came under attacks not only from overseas and the City, but also from Richard Cobden’s artillery. Lancashire free traders believed they could have both Indian and Brazilian markets. In their opinion, India had the capacity to buy British manufactures even without sugar; and London could extract from Rio de Janeiro a commercial treaty to open the Brazilian market in exchange for relaxing its grip on the slave trade. They did not stop there. Like current neoliberals, they envisioned a state with low taxes and restricted spending; a state that would cut its budget after giving up tax revenues on wheat and sugar. To pursue this they manned in 1848 two Select Committees apparently disconnected, but essentially united: one on Miscellaneous Expenditure and another on the Slave Trade. While the former tracked budget overspending across the state, the latter focused on the specific outlay for the Royal Navy. The Navy had recently increased operations in the River Plate and off the African coast, accounting for 66% of the public spending increase in the years 1845- 1848 (when compared to 1841-44). Free traders such as Richard Cobden and the editors of The Economist wanted a cheap Navy, which implied free rein for slave dealers. “The Brazilian or the Cuban planter is not singular in desiring that others should work for him,” taught The Economist. “To prohibit the transport of Africans as laborers to the Brazils will only make what might be a decent, well-regulated emigration, a smuggling

27 Historians of the Caribbean region (note 22) know well the colonial popular revolts of 1848, but they do not relate them to the sugar lobbying for the end of the transatlantic slave trade. Historians who study the slave trade (notes 3 and 4) know well the Jamaican pressure for the end of the slave trade, but they do not relate it to the colonial popular revolts in the Caribbean. For quotes, see “The Humble Petition of the Undersigned, Inhabitants of Trinidad, Interested in the Cultivation of Sugar”, Sept. 18, 1847 (“new and vigorous”); “To the Most Excellent Majesty”, Trinidad, June 5, 1848 (“speedy liberation”); “To the Queen’s Most Excellent Majesty” Jamaica, Nov. 16, 1848 (“now urged on”). See also British Guiana, Dec. 19, 1848; “The Humble Memorial of a Large Body of the Labouring Population of Trelawny”, Jamaica, Aug. 2, 1849; and “Petition to Her Majesty”, Dominica, Aug. 8, 1849. 23

trade, pregnant with horrors.” The ethics of free traders was selective. They pointed out that the fight against the slave trade had cost the British state an accumulated value of £21 million (roughly $100 million) since 1815. But they forgot that British national debt interest payments were draining each year at least £ 24 million between 1830 and 1848, almost half of the British annual income. Their priorities were crystal clear even when undeclared. Disabling the African Squadron – and sacrificing thousands of African lives – would help the British state to generate primary surplus and honor bondholders’ profits.28

IV. Imperial Reorganizing: British Anti-Slave Trade Geopolitics Redefined Cornered by both Lancashire free traders and the colonial sugar lobby in 1848, Westminster signaled it would foster a new imperial compact, a compromise that would protect interests common to the West Indies, the financial center of London and the East Indies and that, although different from Lancashire’s expectations, would nevertheless guard industrialists’ investments. Westminster would enact the compromise on two fronts. On the one hand, the government would postpone the complete tariff equalization on sugar, scheduled for 1851, by three years, a demand set forth by the Select Committee on Sugar and Coffee. On the other hand, it would address the labor question by forcing slaveholding competitors to give up the transatlantic slave trade. Testifying before the Select Committee on Sugar and Coffee, Palmerston indicated the new geopolitical orientation of the British state. “I believe”, he said, “that a comparatively small force around Cuba and on the coast of Brazil would be sufficient, and the Admiralty are taking measures to place cruisers on both those stations.”29

28 Hansard Debates, House of Commons, March, 20, 1848, p. 844-845 and 996-997; and Feb. 22, 1848, p. 1091 (£21 millions); and The Economist, July 15, 1848, p. 789. The Board of Trade of Manchester sent a petition to Parliament for the repeal of the Aberdeen Act, the 1845 British statute that subjected Brazilian vessels suspected of slave-trading to British courts (Hansard Debates, House of Commons, April 20, 1849, p. 533). For British yearly spent on interest rates, see Tables of the Revenue, Population and Commerce of the United Kingdom and its Dependencies. London: 1834-1850, 24 vols. 29 Select Committee on Sugar and Coffee, v. 1, p. 5. A further sign of Britain’s new geopolitical stance is Palmerston’s proposal to apply the Aberdeen Act, so far restricted to Brazilian vessels, to Brazilian citizens (Palmerston to the Admiralty, Aug. 5, 1848, UKNA, FO 84/745, fo. 59-62). Scholars attribute the origin of such extreme ideas to a deep-rooted ethics that Palmerston acquired back in the early 1840s (Bethell. The Abolition, p. 349; Eltis. Economic Growth, p. 212). However, Palmerston preferred bilateral conventions to unilateral attacks in the first years of his tenure (Palmerston to Lord Howden, n. 1, June 4, 24

Personally, Palmerston made no distinction between Brazil and Cuba, targeting both with the same energy. After reading four anti-slave trade petitions from Jamaica, one from Antigua, one from St. Lucia and four from Trinidad (two of which requested a “quick release” of African slaves), he wrote to Prime Minister Lord John Russell: “I have received these from the Colonial Office.” “What I would propose to you,” he went on, “is as follows: […] we should instruct Dundonald [Navy Commander] to go to the Havana.” Once there, Dundonald would announce Britain’s desire to “demand the immediate and entire freedom of all the negroes now in Cuba who have been landed therein since the date mentioned in the law above mentioned [1820].” Dundonald would further promise that, if the slave trade was to continue, “a naval force [would] interrupt effectually the commercial intercourse of the ports of Cuba with other ports of the world.” Struck by such a brazen proposal, Russell hemmed in his minister. “My Dear Palmerston: This is much too large a question to be decided without consulting the Cabinet.” Russell knew the late American annexation of Texas and California had transformed the geopolitical frame of the Atlantic; that a unilateral blockade of Cuba would push the colony into the hands of the U.S.; and that such a change of sovereignty in Cuba would have deep implications for the European balance of power, affecting Britain’s structural position within Europe. Moreover, the Cuban slave trade had dramatically diminished after La Escalera (1844), falling to 8% of its activities ten years earlier and representing only 3% of what Brazilian dealers were carrying out since 1845 (8,000 vs. 272,000). “The export trade from Africa to America,” Palmerston gave in, “is now almost exclusively confined [...] to the supply of Brazil.” Cuba had all its flanks protected. The Royal Navy therefore set its sights on .30

1847, UKNA, FO 84/677, fo. 24-104). Only after 1848 did the proposal of attacking Brazil become stronger, as Palmerston himself would recognize in a note to Russell: “when in 1847 I proposed a slave trade treaty to Brazil, the British Government had not determined to resort to active naval operations on the coast of Brazil” (Jan. 19, 1853, fo. 174-175, UKNA, PRO 30/22/10G). 30 For contraband estimates, see slavevoyages.com. North-American vessels and capital became more largely employed in the slave trade to Brazil in the 1840s, after the Palmerston Act (1839) and La Esclaera Conspiracy (1844), as one can see in W. S. Howard, American Slavers and the Federal Law, 1837–1862. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963; and L. Marques. The United States and the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the Americas, 1776-1867. New Haven: Yale U. Press, 2016. For why Britain singled out Brazil as target for violent naval actions, see R. Marquese, T. Parron & M. Berbel. Slavery and Politics: Brazil and Cuba, 1790-1850. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2016. Quotes are taken from Palmerston to Russell, [London], Nov. 14, 1848; Russell to Palmerston, [London], 25

The Royal Navy first attacked Brazil in May, 1848, when the man-of-war Grecian seized a slaver around Salvador (Bahia) and anchored in the city, refusing to hand its prize over to Brazilian Naval authorities. “Such an event, Sir Minister,” said a lawmaker of the Brazilian Parliament and owner of hundreds of slaves in a town close to Salvador (Cachoeira), “if reiterated, if repeated again in Bahia, may jeopardize both the domestic peace of the province and our foreign relations.” Seeing the British reorganizing their Empire, the Brazilian coast attacked by a British man-of-war, and Brazilian dealers isolated in the world geography of the slave trade, the Brazilian government made a realistic analysis of the new international settings and decided to move. In August, 1848, Foreign Minister Bernardo de Souza Franco sought out the British diplomat in Rio to preempt new attacks. “I hope that the measures we are considering”, he said, “will show Lord Palmerston we mean it seriously and that he will no longer need cruisers”. The measures Souza Franco mentioned were two bills the Executive had just come up with, one for European migration and another against the transatlantic slave trade. Whereas he spoke to Hudson in Rio, his diplomat in London spread the same news throughout Whitehall.31 The anti-slave trade project that the Brazilian Executive put forth was an old proposal the Senate had passed in 1837 and that had been waiting for a vote in the House of Representatives ever since. The bill was intended to suppress the slave trade, but its Article 13 was tricky: it repealed the important law of November 7, 1831, which

Nov. 18, 1848. Hartley Library, Southampton, The Palmerston Papers, GV/RU/230; and Palmerston to the Admiralty, Aug. 5, 1848, UKNA, FO 84/745, fo. 59-62 (“O comércio de exportação”). 31 The Grecian operations resonated in both opposition and government newspapers (O Brasil, RJ, May 13, 1848, p. 2; O Correio Mercantil, RJ, May, 1848, p. 1), as well as in the Parliament (ACD, May 17, 1848, p. 93). The parliamentary speech (“Such an event”), by Manuel Vieira Tosta, Baron of Muritiba, is abridged in the ACD, but was entirely printed in Correio Mercantil, May 19, 1848, p. 2. See also Palmerston to Hudson, London, July 15, 1848; Palmerston to Lisboa, London, Sept. 18, 1848, UKNA, FO 84/726, fo. 6-8 and 345-354; and Palmerston to the Admiralty, London, Aug. 5, 1848, UKNA, FO 84/745, fo. 59-62. For Souza Franco’s comments, see Hudson to Palmerston, Rio de Janeiro, Aug. 5, FO 84/726, fo. 47-58. Although the Grecian attack on Brazil was not the first of the sort, London’s unconditional endorsement of it was new, as suggested by the contrast with a similar case in 1846, for which the Foreign Office offered Brazil a formal apology: “After an attentive consideration of the circumstances of this case, H. M. Government are of opinion that the complain of the Government of H. I. M. is well founded and that an apology is due to that Government for the seizure of the Soy within the Brazilian territory and for not delivering up the vessel when required to do so but the Brazilian officers in command at the Bahia station” (H. Hamilton to Limpo de Abreu, RJ, March 25, 1846, and the reply of the Brazilian Government to Hamilton, RJ, March 30, 1846, UKNA, 84/678, fo. 82-84 and 89-90). 26

had declared free all Africans smuggled into the country after its passage (roughly 600,000 people by 1848) and whose enforcement had been suspended through informal political compromises. The imperial Executive feared that further raids by the Royal Navy, coupled with the illegal status of hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans, menaced the security of the country – something the Bahian lawmaker had in mind when alluding to “both the domestic peace of the province and our foreign relations”. To complicate matters, while the Grecian was attacking off Salvador, police authorities in the coffee-growing town of Vassouras (Rio de Janeiro) uncovered plans for a slave rebellion in the Paraíba Valley. They found out that a secret society plotted to poison masters and to subsequently crown an African king. In the government’s view, the anti- slave trade bill, with its Article 13, would legalize the slave status of all these rebellious people and prevent subsequent British raids on the Brazilian coast.32 When introducing the bill to the House of Representatives, the Brazilian Cabinet did not anticipate that several antislavery members – coming from the ranks of its own Liberal Party – would bar Article 13 for abolishing the right Africans illegally reduced to bondage had to their freedom. The Executive tried to win them over by using the slave revolt card. In a secret parliamentary session in September 1848, a Cabinet member read notes the British diplomat James Hudson had written against Article 13, suggesting that “the British Legation arrogated to itself the right of trusteeship over all Africans brought into Brazil since 1831.” Hudson lamented this intentional misreading by the Cabinet, explaining to Palmerston that he had not meant to wield power over enslaved Africans when addressing the imperial government. It particularly annoyed him that Foreign Secretary Souza Franco, “though present in the Chamber, was at no pains to set the member right”. It is easy to explain the benevolent lapse of Souza Franco. He and his colleagues tried to inject a healthy dose of terror in the lawmakers in order to have Article 13 passed. Despite this maneuver, the antislavery phalanx resisted the Executive and scrapped Article 13 at the end of the secret session.33

32 In regard to emancipated Africans and the 1831 slave trade law, see B. G. Mamigonian. To be a liberated African in Brazil: Labour and Citizenship in the Nineteenth Century. Dissertation. Waterloo, Ontario: University of Waterloo, 2002. On the planned slave rebellion, see R. Slenes. “‘Malungo, Ngoma vem’, and “A árvore de Nsanda Transplantada”. 33 Hudson to Palmerston, Rio de Janeiro, Oct. 15, 1848, UKNA, FO 84/726, fo. 220-231. 27

The rejection of Article 13 brought down the Cabinet. The new ministry, of the Conservative Party, showed no fear of a collusion between British raids and subaltern actions, completely reversing the former Cabinet’s agenda. Bernardo Pereira de Vasconcelos, the powerful proslavery mind of the Conservatives, took the floor in the Senate to say that the anti-slave trade bill “was born eleven years ago” and “should not enter into debate” again. His message turned into action. New foreign minister Viscount of Olinda buried both the slave trade and the European colonization bills. Meanwhile, the Cabinet’s semiofficial mouthpiece newspaper (O Brasil) publicized the major pro- slave trade book published in Brazil (England and Brazil, by J. M. Pereira da Silva) and stated that the government should deal with “more serious issues”. At the same time, the Provincial Legislature of Rio de Janeiro set up a Select Committee to investigate the 1848 slave conspiracy; the Committee members denied that slave trading jeopardized public safety, concluding instead that public safety would be ensured by a new police system. Moreover, evidence suggests that pro-slave trade politicians underestimated the geopolitical implications of the British imperial reorganizing. In June, the Jornal do Commercio (Rio de Janeiro) happily reported that “discontent reigned in Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow because of the delay in making a treaty of trade with Brazil”. In November, the newspaper also announced that the British Select Committee on the Slave Trade had decided to present a bill for “the suppression of the squadron that the British government employs off the African coast to restrain the slave trade. France entertains a similar opinion now.” Later, Viscount of Olinda confided to the Spanish diplomat in Rio de Janeiro that experiments with free labor had been failing in Brazil and only enslaved Africans met the demands of . The true challenge for Rio de Janeiro was to have London “give up the commitment with which it hunted the trade in African slaves”. Contrary to what some historians suggest, the 1848 slave conspiracy did not determine the suppression of the slave trade in 1850.34

34 AS, Sept. 27, 1848, p. 384 (Vasconcelos); dispatch of Nov. 16, 1848 (on the 1837 bill being put aside), UKNA, FO 84/726, fo. 265-266; and Hudson to Palmerston, Rio de Janeiro, 8 de janeiro de 1849 (on the emigration bill), UKNA, FO 84/726, fo. 36-37. O Brasil (RJ), 14 de março de 1848, p. 2 (“more serious questions”). The advertizing of the pro-slave trade book lasted all year long in 1849: Jan. 4, 9, 19 and 30, Feb. 5, April 19, May 23, June 8 and 11, July 6, 23, 28, 30 and 31, Aug. 2, 3, 10, 11, 20, 27 and 31, Sept. 3, 14 and 22, Oct. 23 and 26, Nov. 3, 6 and 17, Dec. 1 and 6. Report of Comissão Especial da Assembleia Legislativa Provincial do Rio de Janeiro on the 1848 slave conspiracy, July 8, 1849, included in Hudson 28

Upon learning that pro-slave trade politicians had taken the upper hand in Brazil, Palmerston pushed harder in the South Atlantic. In April 1849 he ordered the Board of Trade to prepare the commercial balance between Brazil and Britain from 1840 to 1848 to show the industrial lobby that Brazilian imports of British manufactures remained stable despite the end of the Anglo-Brazilian commercial treaty in 1844. Until that moment Palmerston had backed the renewal of the treaty; now, he gave it up to freely attack Brazil. Palmerston designed an aggression scheme against Rio de Janeiro with the Admiralty. According to the new strategy, diplomat James Hudson and Commodore Thomas Herbert, Navy Commander for South America, would employ their knowledge of local conditions to devise attacks against slavers in Brazil’s territorial waters. In July, the Navy invaded the Bay of All Saints and seized two ships off Salvador. A pro- government and pro-slave trade newspaper cried out in Rio de Janeiro: “our ports are blocked in complete peace; ships that leave or come in are persecuted, seized under our batteries or on the beaches of our coast!”35 By late 1849 two correspondences encouraged Palmerston to go further. One of them came from Hudson. Brazilian antislavery deputies who had opposed Article 13 were outvoted when trying reelection for the Parliament and they lost faith in a national solution for the slave trade. They then sought out Hudson to make an appeal for a British military intervention against the Empire of Brazil. This might be one of the few examples in which national politicians have asked a foreign power to occupy their own country. Hudson dispatched the news to the Foreign Office: the Brazilian Anti-Slave Trade Party are of opinion that if England would insist upon […] the suppression of slave trade and, in case of refusal on the part of the Brazilian Government, would support their demand by the strict blockade of Bahia and Rio Janeiro, that no Brazilian Government would run the risk of refusing their consent […], because obstinacy on their part would infallibly lead to the dismemberment of the Brazilian Empire. [...] they recommended that England should hold some place or to Palmerston, Rio de Janeiro, Feb. 20, 1850, UKNA, FO 84/802, fo. 325-340. Jornal do Commercio, “O Tráfico da escravatura”, June 19, 1849, p. 1, and “Tráfico da escravatura – relações entre o Brasil e a França”, Nov. 10, 1849, p. 1; and José Delavat y Rincón to D. Fco. Martinez de Rosa (conversation with Olinda), Rio de Janeiro, May 22, 1850. AHM, H1413. 35 April 24, 1849, UKNA, FO 96/22/32, fo. 49 (Palmerston asking for trade data). For the scheme against Brazil, Lorde Eddisbury to Palmerston, 3 de abril de 1849, UKNA, FO 84/783, part I, fo. 6; and Palmerston to the Admiralty, April 23 and May 3, 1849. UKNA, FO 84/284, fo. 23-24 and 56-60. O Correio da Tarde (Rio de Janeiro), Aug. 13, 1849, p. 2, signed by “Brasilicus” (“our ports are blocked”). Brazilian Governmnent’s complaints are in Hudson, Sep. 3, 1849, UKNA, FO 84/766, fo. 36-39. 29

places on the Brazilian coast which should be retained by England until the Brazilian slave trade is effectually suppressed.36

The second correspondence that held sway over Palmerston was drafted 6,000 miles away from Rio de Janeiro. Lord Russell, who was growing concerned about the domestic backlash against the British anti-slave trade policy, gave in to the idea that the international sugar market integration in Britain was incompatible with the transatlantic slave trade and that the time had come for London to take a harder line. He listed as alternatives for action the three worst nightmares Brazilian and Cuban slaveholders could conjure up: “I am inclined to propose: 1. That you should enter into communications with the government of Spain and Brazil founded on your former overtures of 1840,” that is, Turnbull’s project to emancipate illegal Africans; “2. That until the slave trade is really suppressed by these two powers, we should suspend the operation of the Sugar Act”; “3. The alternative is to blockade Brazil and Cuba – but this is an alternative so violent that, although I should be prepared to adopt it, I do not think the Cabinet or the House of Commons would do so.” Hudson’s dispatch and Russell’s letter prescribed similar courses of action: Britain should either use military violence or force emancipation. This time, however, it was Palmerston who tempered Russell. He would rather apply both measures against Brazil and none against Cuba.37 In January, 1850 Palmerston endorsed new raids on Brazilian territorial waters and drafted a long dispatch to James Hudson in which, for the first time ever in Anglo- Brazilian relations, he demanded from Rio de Janeiro the emancipation of all Africans illegally enslaved in Brazil. At the time, this was probably 40% of the country’s total slave population: By the law of Nov. 1831 […] it was decreed that all slaves [….] who should thenceforward enter the territory of Brazil coming from abroad were free. Eighteen years have elapsed since the date of that law […] H. M. Government would be glad to know what steps the Brazilian

36 Hudson to Palmerston, Confidential, n. 38 (conversation with Brazilian antislavery men), Rio de Janeiro, Nov. 13, 1849, UKNA, FO 84/766, fo. 174-193. Hudson did not name the representatives he met. They are, probably, the same who would later seek him promising to combat the slave trade when returning to power: Manuel Alves Branco, Bernardo de Souza Franco, Teófilo Ottoni, Cristiano Ottoni, Jose Antonio Martin, Ernesto Ferreira France, plus two unidentified: Barreto and Ramos. Hudson to Palmerston, May 12, 1850, FO 84/801, fo. 178-182. 37 Russell to Palmerston [London], Nov. 24, 1849, Hartley Library, Southampton, The Palmerston Papers, GC/RU/306. 30

Government are prepared to take in order to restore this large number of much injured individuals to the full and complete enjoyment of their freedom, to which they have so long been entitled, and H. M. Government would propose as an arrangement well adapted to the attainment of this end the appointment of a mixed Brazilian and British Commission.

The dispatch was about to leave Downing Street when Russell and Palmerston switched roles again. “In considering your purposed draft,” Russell said, “I think the latter part should be modified. I do not think the Brazilian Government can be expected to agree bona fide to a proposal which would set free the greater part of their slaves and make a revolution.” Russell struck out the entire passage on the illegal slaves, and the final version of the dispatch to Rio de Janeiro ignored the fate of 600,000 Africans.38 On the other side of the Atlantic, the Brazilian Cabinet started following a carrot and stick policy for slave traders. In his report to the Parliament in January of 1850 the Foreign Minister suggested that only after colonization schemes took off “the slave trade would disappear on its own” (the carrot). At the same time, he promised a future law against the slave trade (the stick). The carrot and stick approach is understandable. The government was intent on preempting further blows by the Navy on the Brazilian coast, which would indeed happen: on January 2, the man-of-war Cormorant seized the steamer Santa Cruz right in front of São Sebastião (São Paulo), landed its crew on the beach and set fire to the vessel; on the 8th, the Rifleman took the Paquete de Santos and repeated the procedure (crew out, fire in); two days later the Cormorant seized another ship. Such raids received unexpected support in Brazil. Anti-slavery Liberals rushed to Hudson’s house (again) and pledged to fight the contraband to the end. Hudson bribed local newspapers, including the important Correio Mercantil, which cheered the Navy. The Philantropo, a newspaper also run with sterling pounds from the Foreign Office, published what Palmerston had proposed and Russell had vetoed: “All Africans younger than 20 years old that live now in Brazil as slaves are free; and as such they are entitled to demand from the imperial authorities their freedom and the enforcement of penalties that the law allows against their oppressors.” Lastly, a yellow fever outbreak flowing

38 Palmerston to Hudson, Dec. 26, 1849 UKNA, FO 84/766, fo. 18-19. For Palmerston’s original draft and its revision by Russell, see Palmerston, Jan. 31, 1850, Hartley Library Southampton, The Palmerston Papers, GC / RU / 317. Expurgated version of the note, as passed to the imperial government, is in Hudson to Palmerston, Rio de Janeiro, April 26, 1850, UKNA, FO 84/803, fo. 71-78. 31

from the slave trade struck Salvador and Rio de Janeiro, killing people such as Vasconcelos and the Emperor’s son. However, the Cabinet resisted everyone and everything (Navy’s raids, press opposition, politicizing of the freedom of illegal Africans, and yellow fever). Its members held back the 1837 anti-slave trade bill, as they expected diplomatic support from France or the United States and hoped for a triumph of free traders in London.39 The British Select Committee on the slave trade was the main hope of the Brazilian Cabinet, given that its chair, William Hutt, had proposed a motion to the House of Commons calling for the suppression of the African Squadron. The Brazilian diplomat in London understood the implications of Hutt’s motion, reporting to Rio de Janeiro that “its extinction would nearly imply the virtual repeal of the Bill of Lord Aberdeen: it would perhaps induce the Parliament to formally repeal it.” Indeed, Hutt’s motion tormented Russell and Palmerston. The Prime Minister and his Foreign Secretary took pains to get enough support among lawmakers to table the motion. To do so, Russell turned the issue into a question of confidence in the Cabinet and summoned a meeting with Whig representatives a couple of hours before the vote took place. No one (even Russell and Palmerston) knew for sure what would come of Hutt’s motion.40 The geopolitical conditions sustaining the Brazilian pro-slave trade policy melted away in May, 1850. The imperial diplomat in Washington sent home a graphic account of the clash between the South and the North on the admission of California as a free state into the Republic, suggesting the issue had become the all-consuming focus of the White House. Moreover, Russell voted down Hutt’s motion in the Commons, an outcome that the Brazilian diplomat in London sensed would make the cessation of

39 Paulino José Soares de Souza. Relatório da repartição dos negócios estrangeiros apresentado à Assembléia Geral Legislativa. Rio de Janeiro: Villeneuve, 1850, p. 14. For naval attacks, see Correspondence between the Brazilian Government and the British Legation at Rio de Janeiro, Relative to the Acts Committed by Vessels of War of H. B. M. against Brazilian Vessels, under the Pretext of Their Being Employed in the Slave Trade. No local: no printer, 1850, p. 2-3, attached to Sérgio Teixeira de Macedo to Paulino José Soares de Souza, Out. 25, 1850, AHI, 233/3/3. For the Brazilian press, see Hudson to Palmerston, Rio de Janeiro, Sept. 9, 1848, UKNA, FO 84/726, fo. 73-75; Palmerston to Hudson, London, Oct. 29, 1849, FO 84/766, fo. 10-11; and Hudson to Palmerston, Rio de Janeiro, May 12, 1850, FO 84/801, fo. 178-182. O Philantropo, Feb. 22, 1850, p. 1. On the yellow fever outbreak, see S. Chalhoub. Cidade febril, 68-78, and D. Graden. Disease, Resistance, and Lies, p. 120-149. 40 Joaquim Thomaz do Amaral a Paulino José Soares de Souza, April 26, 1850, and March 30, 1850, AHI, 217/3/6 32

British raids against Brazil “highly improbable.” Now, he went on, a coalition between Britain and France against the Brazilian slave trade loomed ahead. The news that the British Select Committee on the Slave Trade had been defeated led the semiofficial newspaper O Brasil to stop advertising Inglaterra e Brasil (the pro-slave trade book by J. M. Pereira da Silva) and encouraged Palmerston to embrace an even harder line.41 Following the suggestion of Brazilian Liberals, Palmerston warned Rio de Janeiro that Britain considered occupying Brazilian territory while the contraband went on. At the same time, he allowed the Navy to carry out new raids on Brazil. In June the Navy invaded Macaé (Province of Rio de Janeiro) and seized Polka, anchored in the harbor, under cross-fire. The Navy took away another ship from Cabo Frio (also in Rio de Janeiro) and arrested three more ships in Paranaguá (Province of Paraná) under fire from a local fortress. The latter was “one of the most serious events for the relations between both countries,” the imperial diplomat in London stated. Decades later, Brazil would enter the First World War because of a ship attacked in Europe. It officially joined the Second World War for having five ships assailed in the high seas. By June, 1850 Great Britain had seized or destroyed at least ten Brazilian ships, all located on national territorial waters and some even anchored in the country’s ports. The government then declared war – against the slave trade.42 On July 11, the Cabinet heard the State Council on the best course of action to deal with the British attacks on Brazil. The Foreign Minister defined the Anglo- Brazilian relations as an undeclared state of war. The Royal Navy was “visiting, seizing and sentencing our vessels, getting into our ports, burning our ships and destroying every resistance we can mount against it.” One of the councilors agreed that the scenario was “more than enough for us to consider ourselves under the force of pressure and in this state of war”. Against such a backdrop the government had limited options on the stage. It could: a) resist militarily; b) negotiate directly with Britain; c) seek

41 Sérgio Teixeira de Macedo to Paulino José Soares de Souza, Washington, Fev. 23, 1850, AHI, 233/3/5 (political crisis in the United States); O Correio da Tarde (Rio de Janeiro), May 29, 1850, p. 1 (defeat of Hutt’s motion); Joaquim Thomaz do Amaral to Paulino José Soares de Souza, March 30 and April 26, 1850, AHI, 217/3/6 (“highly improbable”) UKNA, FO 84/801, fo. 234-235. 42Joaquim T. do Amaral to Paulino J. Soares de Souza, 30 March and April 26, 1850, UKNA, FO 84/801, fo. 234-235; Palmerston to Amaral, 11 de nov. de 1850 (Polka affaire), UKNA, FO 84/801, fo. 234-235; and Amaral to Palmerston (“one of the most serious”), Oct. 30, 1850, UKNA, FO 84/101, fo. 251-254. 33

international mediation; d) publish a national official protest; e) or find alternative means to end the drama. The councilors realistically ruled out military retaliation and deemed a national protest insufficient to change the global order Britain was shaping against the slave trade in the South Atlantic. They then considered their further options (bilateral settlement, international mediation, and unilateral suppression of the slave trade), concluding that the latter action would make the first possible and the second superfluous. After this meeting, Justice Minister Eusébio de Queirós brought the State Council’s report to the House of Representatives, where he disclosed the content of the future law designed against the slave trade in a secret session. It is important to notice that the act, eventually passed in September of 1850, did not repeal the 1831 law. This suggests that the lawmakers did not fear the theoretical right of Africans to their freedom, a menace that a large proslavery political consensus could counter, but rather the combined implications of British raids and illegal slave property to the domestic social order. In keeping the 1831 law, the lawmakers assigned the massive illegal bondage of Africans to an informal compact. If they knew no law would back the status of a large part of captives in Brazil, they also trusted the Brazilian state would be on the slaveholders’ side.43

V. Final Remarks The British state embraced free trade in 1846 to solve domestic conflicts, embarked upon a process of imperial reorganizing and was brought back onto an interventionist track. After 1846 London provided planters across different colonies with loans at subsidized interest rates, changed the rules for admission of colonial sugar in metropolitan distilleries, devised schemes for massive recruitment of African and Indian colonial labor, and suppressed the Navigation Laws. The Royal Navy shelled African factories and slave-trading ports (Solyman River, Lagos, Mozambique) and militarily violated Brazilian sovereignty not only destroying vessels in Brazilian ports, but also sailing up national rivers (as in Guarapari River, Espírito Santo) and even landing mariners on national territory (as on Tijucas Grandes River banks, Santa

43 J. H. Rodrigues (ed.). Atas do Conselho de Estado. Brasília: Senado Federal, v. III, 1978, p. 247-267. 34

Catarina). How to explain such interventionism by free trade Britain? As usually happens in historical capitalism, creating a market regulated by demand and supply required state violence to recast the institutional environment of exchange. In regard to sugar, this meant ramming head-on into the problem of black slavery. When London integrated the international sugar market in Britain, slavery in the Americas set the standard for the experiment with free labor at the periphery of the British Empire. Black bondage shaped the minimum wage of fieldworkers (Caribbean Islands), the organization of labor recruitment (Caribbean and Mauritius) and the commercialization of sugar and rice (Mauritius and India). Indeed, free trade, thought of as a means of averting class conflict in Britain, worsened labor relations, intensified class conflict, and affected expected future returns on investments in the rest of the Empire. These contradictions transformed British traditional antislavery diplomacy into unprecedented military aggression against the transatlantic slave trade of an economically competitive, but geopolitically unprotected and militarily fragile country. Similar to a central bank that raises interest rates to reduce aggregate demand and curb inflation, the Foreign Office attacked the slave trade by 1850 to reduce sugar supply and increase sugar prices, thus protecting planters in the Atlantic, fostering intercolonial trade in the Indian Ocean and preserving the export capacity of India. The British state did not reach its ultimate goal, the total abolition of the slave trade, due to the impossibility of assailing Cuba. However, it successfully checked the expansion of sugar output in Brazil, which could affect sugar prices and give Westminster moral capital to conduct important midcentury colonial reforms. Interventionism unraveled the centrality of tropical commodities for the Empire at midcentury. Crucial for the West Indies, sugar had also become important in the imperial swing to the East, helping relieve the British industrial economy from negative effects of post-Napoleonic protectionism. From this standpoint, British interests in sugar and opium created a point of contact between the quasi-war with Brazil in 1848-1850 and the full-fledged war with China in 1839-1842. When necessary, the invisible hand of free trade fired cannons in peripheral regions to remain invisible at the core of the world.

35