Let's pick back up from that conversation we had about slavery back in Chapter 3. Slavery had existed for a very long time, thousands and thousands of years. With the rise of monotheism though, it became more limited, as people didn't believe they could own other people who shared their religion. It was replaced by a less egregious form of indenturment called serfdom, but that too started to die down after the Black Death.
Then, starting around 1450, and for the next 400 years, slavery ratcheted it up and became more race-based. Most African slaves could survive the tropical climate of the Caribbean much better than indentured Europeans could. Reliable trade contacts and networks were established between European colonizers, merchant vessels, on the high seas, and African slavers on the continent's west coast, regularly supplying Europeans with thousands of newly captured people for sale. Those Europeans who did not use slave labor soon found themselves at a disadvantage compared to their economic rivals who did use it.
So, until governments were to intervene, slavery would only become more common and more cruel. But that was a tough sell to the European governments, with the huge influx of silver from the New World mines and ample arable land there and the native peoples of that land decimated by disease. Shadow slavery made the plantation system Europe's economic success story. In the late 17th century, Europeans transported roughly 30,000 Africans to their new world plantations every year.
By the late 18th century, it was more like 75,000 per year. However before, had slavery been so productive, nor was it expanded so rapidly as it was between 1450 and 1750. And by 1750, European colonies across the world were demographically dominated by slaves, to a degree unprecedented anywhere on Earth. And also by 1750, in large part because of the increasingly liberal humanist outlooks of the hegemonic French and British, the concept of slavery had become entirely interwoven with racism.
It was wrong to own human beings, but as many Europeans chose to see it, blacks were not really human beings in their book. Then came the backlash, not only to race-based slavery, but to all slavery. Over the course of the 19th century, it was almost entirely eliminated across the globe. By the time the Nazis and various communist regimes were using forced labor in the mid-20th century, Westerners had come to view it as a crime against humanity.
And a practice that had existed for as long as the written word was made universally illegal. But the abolition of slavery did not happen overnight. It was a gradual process in many countries across the world. And before outright abolition, many of them decided first to tackle the slave trade.
Here's how it happened. This is the Industrial Revolutions, Chapter 26, ending the slave trade. Alright, I have a quick correction from last week. At Rational Gene tweeted me to correct my pronunciation of Count Francisco Zumbakari.
I was pronouncing it Zembachari. Sorry about that. He also mentions that the first hot air balloon flight in Italy was made by a young aristocrat named Count Paulo Adriani, near Milan in March 1784. I didn't really go into this in Chapter 25, but the Italians were probably only second to the French in terms of their enthusiasm for hot air balloons.
Anyway, thank you at Rational Gene. Among the things that set France and Britain apart from the countries of the Iberian Peninsula, the Italian Peninsula, and Eastern Europe was the fact that there were no Muslims in their neighborhood, at least not in the 15th or 16th or 17th centuries. And therefore, there was no basis for them to own slaves in France or Britain. And during those centuries, the French and British started building concepts of liberty.
Certainly, they were a bit stronger in Britain than in France, but in both cases it was considered a given that slavery just didn't exist within their realms. As the Enlightenment picked up, this freedom principle became ingrained in law. Jurists held that all persons in their jurisdictions were, by right, free. However, they still recognized slavery as a legal practice beyond their free soil and free air.
The French and British came to the Empire game a little later than their Spanish and Portuguese rivals. The French and French had made slavery a key element of new world imperialism. To catch up, the French and British adopted slavery in their colonies too. Whether or not they could adopt slavery was a bit of a legal grey area.
In Britain, common law forbade hereditary indentured servitude, now that serfdom was gone. Only by first freely entering a contract of limited duration could you become something like a slave. But in the colonies, where Parliament was effectively inconsequential, the local colonists could write their own rules. And generally, they decided that Africans who entered the colony were automatically subject to a life of indenturment that would be passed on to their children.
And the British government, like the French, made a point of it to turn a blind eye. Racism played a big part in this, of course. In Chapter 3, I mentioned the legend of the Curse of Ham, which supposedly gave a biblical justification for enslaving dark-skinned Africans. There was also a long-standing rumour, first promulgated by North African Muslims hundreds of years earlier, that Black West Africans were more servile than others by their nature.
By the 17th century, this racism had become inseparable from European ideas about slavery. In his two treatises, the Father of Liberalism, John Locke, writes, quote, slavery is so vile and miserable in a state of man, and so directly opposite to the generous temper and courage of our nation that it is hardly to be conceived that an Englishman, much less a gentleman, should plead for it. At the same time, the treatises are so protective of man's right to property, Locke also points to the legitimacy of a planter in the West Indies to have power, quote, over servants born in his house and bought with his money. As anyone who has ever read about the Milgram experiments, or the Stanford Prison Experiment allows, that power often comes with cruelty, and the cruelty forced onto black slaves in the New World was virtually unparalleled in the long history of slavery.
Humiliation, rape, and even torture were fairly common. The major reason why the slave trade kept growing and growing was the high mortality rate among slaves on the dangerous Caribbean sugar plantations. But there was also resistance. Revolts on slave ships were fairly common, and it has been estimated that they may have reduced the size of the would-have-been enslaved population by one million.
These denominations also began questioning the morality of slavery, especially non-conformist Protestant denominations, especially the Quakers. Abolitionism was on the rise. In 1777, the first legislative act formally abolished slavery in an independent sovereign country was passed in, wait for it, Vermont. Yes, they were not yet part of the American Union.
But others would follow, including France. France had a complicated view of slavery in its colonies. Officially, France did not allow slavery. With serfdom fading away, the concept of slavery became somewhat taboo there.
And by the 18th century, anyone on French soil was considered automatically free. Of course, that would be a problem for slavers transporting slaves through France, so French bureaucrats would classify them as no-wears or people in service, rather than slaves. And slavers got away with the ambiguity. Several times, a black slave would reach French soil and then sue for freedom.
But the courts were unwilling to acknowledge their freedom as a matter of practicality. Similarly, French Enlightenment thinkers found slavery morally dubious, but feared the consequences of abolition. French economists, for example, were not as convinced as, say Adam Smith was, that slavery was less productive than free-labor. Nowhere else that France have a more valuable and slave workforce than in the sugar-cultivating colony of Saint-Domingue.
What is now Haiti? By 1790, half a million slaves were working on some 8,000 plantations there. 40% of French imports came from Saint-Domingue. Now, some abolitionists were organizing in France beforehand.
The Society of Friends of the Blacks comes to mind. Limited by the pro-slavery monarchy, though, they simply published a journal of news from Britain's abolitionist movement, helping spread their ideas in France. Among those who joined the society was a character who, up until now, has only received passing mention in this podcast, Gilbert du Mortier, the Marquis de Lafayette. Born in 1757, Gilbert du Mortier was the only son of the previous Marquis de Lafayette, who died and battled during the Seven Years' War.
Inheriting his father's title, the two-year-old Marquis de Lafayette was raised by his grandmother, who taught him the ideals of military glory. At age 15, he was commissioned as an army officer, and two years later he was married. The moment that really sprung him into the history books came in 1776, when, at 19 years old, he learned that Louis XVI was allowing French officers to go to the British colonies in North America, to help the colonists fight for independence. As an Enlightenment liberal, Lafayette romanticized the ideas of liberty and the glory that would come from securing it through military leadership.
Paying his own way there, and insisting on no pay for his service, he left for America and joined George Washington's army. Despite having no significant military experience, Washington made him a key general of the revolution. After helping secure ultimate victory for the Americans at the Battle of Yorktown, Lafayette returned to France. There he joined the Society of Friends of the Blacks, and in 1785, purchased land in the French colony of Cayenne on the South American continent.
What is today French Guiana? Now, that territory is sort of notorious in French history. Yellow fever and malaria were so prevalent there that a European sent to French Guiana was effectively receiving a death sentence. But Lafayette wasn't purchasing it for the white man.
With the purchase came 70 slaves, who Lafayette freed and hired as paid laborers. He prohibited any of them from being sold or unduly punished, and he set up a school to educate their children. He wanted to prove that this free plantation could outcompete slave plantations. But he had to hand over the day-to-day affairs of the South American plantation to his wife, because then came the French Revolution.
When the estates general asked the local communities across the country to submit petitions regarding topics they should address, the Society of Friends of the Blacks made their big move, getting the issue of slavery inserted in nearly 50 of the 600 petitions, albeit in those petitions slavery tended to rank way, way lower than most of the other big issues of the day. Then one of the king's key advisors, Jacques and Kerr, made reference to the plight of black slaves in a speech, and the king himself noted the issue needed to be addressed. But at first the pro-slavery lobby in Paris, made up of the Caribbean colonists, managed to defeat virtually every anti-slavery proposal taken up by the estates general. But as colonists, they were sort of in an awkward position, advocating both for their rights and liberties as French citizens in the New World, and for the continued bondage of the black people they exploited for labor in that New World.
But if they were to be represented politically in France, would that representation be a portion for all people in the colonies, or just free people, or just white people? This would become an important question after July 1789, when Lafayette presented his masterpiece to the new National Assembly, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Written with his friend Thomas Jefferson, the document made no explicit mention of the practice of slavery, but with its first article reading, quote, men are born and remain free and equal in rights, yeah it's a little hard to justify slavery then. The Declaration was adopted as the preamble to the coming French Constitution, effectively making its contents the supreme law of the land, the significance of which would reverberate across the French Empire and the world.
Yet on March 8, 1790, the National Assembly decreed that the revolution would not interfere with the local customs of French colonies, that overseas slaves were the secure property of their masters, and that the transatlantic slave trade would continue, business as usual. But later that year, when a free man of color in Saint-Domingue was denied the right to vote, which he believed the rights of man did in fact cover, that free man of color led a small insurrection. He was eventually captured and executed, but the ordeal had primed the pump for another insurrection in the colony, a slave revolt. On the night of August 21, 1791, thousands of slaves attended a secret voodoo ceremony, went home, and started killing their masters.
Within ten days, they controlled nearly the entire northern province of the colony. The revolt continued into 1792, and the slave army took more and more territory. During it would spread to their colonies, Britain and Spain declared war on France, and tried to take over Saint-Domingue. Then, fearing they'd lose the colony altogether if they didn't bolster the slaves, the French commissioner, Saint-Domingue, recently sent by the increasingly radical revolutionary government in France, declared slavery abolished across the colony in late 1793.
Not only did the government back in Paris confirm the commissioner's decision, they went a big step further. On February 4, 1794, they passed a law abolishing slavery in its entirety, across France and all French colonies. They also promised full citizenship and equal rights for blacks in the French orbit in the upcoming constitution, although in all the chaos of the French Revolution, that constitution was never adopted. In the years that followed, the slave army in Saint-Domingue, led by Toussaintlovich, successfully fought off the British and Spanish.
Then they wanted an independent state, with a government of, for, and by, the majority black and mixed race population. But that was a problem for France's new empire-minded council, Napoleon Bonaparte. In 1802, he sent an expedition to retake the colony. Violence started up again, and within a few months, Loverture was captured, and he died in prison not long after.
But Napoleon wasn't done. Also in 1802, he re-established slavery, and the slave trade. France became the only country during this period to re-establish its slave trade. Over the next three decades, it would abolish slavery again, resurrect it again, and finally abolish it again in 1848.
The slave trade was finally banned in 1817, by the restored Bourbon monarchy, although it would take many years before the ban was fully implemented. Why did they ban it? Well, by this point, the French recognized that they were far behind the times on this issue. Most other Western powers had already outlawed the slave trade by this point, including France's traditional rival, the British.
Officially, there was no such thing as slavery in Great Britain. The Kingdom acknowledged the so-called freedom principle, by which all persons were, by right and birth, free, unless they were justly found guilty of a crime, or engaged in a contract of indentured servitude. In practice, this wasn't always strictly true, at least not with blacks brought to the island Kingdom. But outside the Kingdom, in the British colonies, it was the principle of property rights that reigns supreme.
Two free-the-slaves would be to rob the slaveholders of their property. In a rather remarkable exchange of views in Parliament, David Hartley and Peay raised the question of the slave trade, suggesting it was immoral, to which another MP countered that, quote, some gentlemen may indeed object to the slave trade as inhuman and impious. But the Kingdom's sugar colonies required cultivation, and cultivation required Africans. Without further imports, the laboring population would decline.
Other powers stood ready to meet British needs, as well as their own. No one challenged these points, not even Hartley, who instead simply urged the board of trade to look for ways to reduce the extreme cruelties of the slave trade. But the inertia wouldn't last. In the years leading up to the 19th century, parliamentary debates had become a daily feature in newspapers across Great Britain.
Public buildings began to offer their spaces for public meetings, where citizens could discuss the issues of the day. Partitioning and lobbying activities increased. It was a new age of increasing public participation in the political process, and among those who were mobilizing, most effectively, was the abolitionist movement. Now, pertinent to us, some historians also credit the industrial revolution, with the movement to abolish slavery.
As Robert Blackburn puts it, the movement happened, quote, at a time of exceptional, national danger, derivative of a radical revival, and a shake-up within the ruling oligarchy. Gritoms from Adam Smith and John Wesley, to Josiah Wedgwood and Joseph Friesley, became decisively abolitionist. Across Great Britain, harvests were better than ever. Industry was booming.
Mass production of textiles and iron were increasing material well-being. Despite losing the 13 colonies in North America, the empire was still growing under the financial stability of war capitalism. Now, in reality, the economic success of Britain was due in large part to the availability of cheap goods from slave colonies, cheap sugar, cheap tobacco, and especially cheap cotton. But the British people, particularly the thriving liberal bourgeoisie, were no longer convinced that the empire needed to continue the morally dubious practice of slavery.
The moment the tide turned came in 1787, when the society for the affecting the abolition of the slave trade formed in London. Better known simply as the London Committee, it combined the efforts of disparate abolitionists who had been spinning their wheels in the mud for years. While funded by Quaker industrialists and bankers, the London Committee was one of the best organized lobbies in history to that point. It had a sophisticated network for publishing and distributing pamphlets and public reports, creating local meetings and gathering petitions to send to Parliament.
Among the founding members of the London Committee was Granville Sharp. The son of an Anglican theologian, Sharp had been a parentest to a Linmaker as a boy, but he had an unusually sharp mind and he ended up taking a position as a clerk in the office of ordinance. He became a lawyer and a bit of an Enlightenment scholar. The moment that changed his life came in 1765, when he visited the office of his brother, a surgeon, who was treating a young man named Jonathan Strong.
A former slave from Barbados, Strong had been badly beaten by his master, leaving him nearly blind. His psych problems became an impediment to his work, so his master cast him out onto the streets where he became a homeless beggar. The sharks decided to help Strong, providing him the medical care he needed and helping him get a job, with a Quaker pharmacist they knew. But then the old master decided he never really stopped owning Strong, and he tried to sell him to a plantation in Jamaica.
Sharp went to the Lord Mayor to get Strong freed. A legal battle started, and at one point the slave challenged Sharp to a duel. Eventually, Sharp managed to win Strong's freedom, but not without affirming the quote unquote, property rights of slave owners. Sharp was soon approached by other slaves to advocate for their freedom as well.
The most famous was the 1772 case of James Somerset, an African native who had been captured and sent to the then colony of Virginia. He had been taken to England by his master, then escaped. For nearly two months on the run, he was captured. By this point, Sharp had become well-read on English law and its concepts of liberty.
He briefed Somerset's lawyers, who advocated successfully for his release. The victory sent shockwaves across the British Empire, as the judge's opinion not only seemed to confirm the humanity of James Somerset, but also the notion that England was free soil, and that meant that all those places where slavery was practiced couldn't really be considered free. Sharp became more than a legal advocate for slaves. He also became a dedicated proponent of abolishing slavery and the slave trade everywhere, long before that idea was popular.
Even as it started gaining popularity, it was soon scrambled by the situation in North America. Because so many Americans had wanted the slave trade to end, and we'll discuss why later in this episode, the American Revolution actually hampered Sharp's political efforts, as it lost him key allies for the cause. But for all the allies he lost across the pond, he found many more among the religious society of friends in his own country. But while the Quakers took the lead with the London Committee's financing and organization, they needed Sharp to be the visible leader of the movement.
Because as a civil servant and as an Anglican, Sharp would have much more clout with Parliament. Together, they didn't just enlist Quakers and Anglicans, but Unitarians, Congregationalists, Baptists, and Methodists. Religion was the bedrock of the movement because it hit at the blatant immorality of modern slavery. Some industrialists got on board with abolition, but others, particularly textile manufacturers who depended on access to cheap cotton, resisted.
Yet, they could never come close to matching the organized effort of the London Committee, who gathered more than 10,000 names in a petition to Parliament, who took up the issue. While said petitions were dismissed then by the Government of William Pitt the Younger, bills to abolish the slave trade came up in the House of Commons 12 times over the next 18 years. Twice, they passed in the lower house before being squashed by the House of Lords. But in those years, the London Committee kept organizing and kept petitioning.
It wasn't just white men in this movement, but black men too. Former slaves like Audubako Guano and Olauda Equiano became empowered voices for abolition in Britain. Equiano wrote an astonishing memoir about his life as a slave, which opened up British eyes to the horrors of the practice. And it wasn't just men, but women too, holding ladies-only meetings where they banned public speeches against slavery and drafted petitions.
In all, women made up about 10% of the abolitionist petitions, which is pretty striking for the late 18th and early 19th centuries. As Britain entered the 19th century and joined a United Kingdom with Ireland, it began to slow its shipping of slaves from Africa to the Caribbean. Then the Whigs made major gains in the 1802 and 1806 elections, which also saw the introduction of overwhelmingly anti-slavery MPs from Ireland. And as the Whigs took over the reigns of government, the London Committee made its next big push.
The Slave Trade Act of 1807 was submitted to the House of Lords in February that year. On February 10th, they approved the bill 134. After February 23rd, the House of Commons debated the issue, and two days later, at four in the morning, they voted 283-16 to abolish the slave trade. About a month later, the Slave Trade Act of 1807 was approved by royal assent.
The forced transportation of Africans to new world plantations to live out a life of brutal bondage and forced labor was made illegal throughout the British Empire. It was many more years before slavery itself was finally abolished across the Empire, but an important move in the direction of liberty had been made. And it wasn't lost on the members of Parliament that their vote would be a good slap in the face to their ungrateful former colonies, which professed the love of liberty but were importing slaves at unprecedented rates. But before the British Bill could become law, those former colonies would themselves pass legislation outlawing the slave trade.
The Industrial Revolution may have played a role in the abolition of the slave trade, but as we have seen before, it also played a role in the continuation of slavery well into the 1800s. Deep cotton fueled industrialization. Still, the Industrial Revolution was taking off at the same time as a new philosophy, liberalism. And with the liberal ideas of the Enlightenment, many countries began making moves in the direction of this most basic liberty.
In 1792, Denmark became the first European country to ban the slave trade in its still young empire. As the Age Revolution spread across Latin America, Spain ended the slave trade across its colonies in 1811. Sweden followed in 1813 and the Netherlands in 1814. In 1819, Portugal ended the slave trade at their ports and colonies in the northern hemisphere.
And the slave trade was even addressed in the newest modern nation, the United States. A little background, northern states were more reformed Protestant and Quaker than the southern states, and in the latter half of the 18th century, those denominations started turning on the concept of slavery. In the south, meanwhile, white settlers often felt uneasy about the large enslaved black population. Over 60% of the population in South Carolina, for example, was enslaved blacks.
The whites were afraid that it could lead to a slave revolt, which would put their lives in property and danger. So they too favored limiting the importation of additional slaves to North America. Among the early leaders to ban the slave trade was Anthony Benisey. Born in France in 1713 to a Huguenot family, he had emigrated to Britain at a very young age where he became a Quaker before moving to Philadelphia.
Almost immediately then, he became an outspoken abolitionist, and perhaps more than anyone else, worked to turn opinion against slavery among his fellow Quakers. His writings became influential on both sides of the Atlantic. Then came the American Revolution. The colonists declared their inherent liberty and equality.
The hypocrisy of it did not go unnoticed. As the Tory Enlightenment thinker and man responsible for the dictionary, Samuel Johnson put it, American cries for freedom were quote, yelps for liberty from quote, drivers of Negroes. Other Brits pointed to Thomas Jefferson, in particular, for writing his grand words about rights and freedom in the Declaration of Independence with his one hand, while shackling on chains his slaves with the other. It wasn't lost on the Americans either, at least not most Americans, and after they achieved their independence and started working on a constitution, the subject of slavery became a major sticking point.
It could be in part because the slave trade had taken a massive hit due to the revolution. Between 1778 and 1781, the volume of the British slave trade fell to its lowest point since the 1600s. But it was also in part because of growing religious unease about slavery in the northern states. And it could also be in part because of the heightened spirit of liberty in the air, especially among the Enlightenment thinkers, some of whom owned slaves themselves and were uncomfortable about it, like Washington, Jefferson, and Madison.
At the convention, the northern states wanted to end the slave trade, but most delegates from the southern states didn't want slavery to be subject to federal laws. Now, all international trade, including the slave trade, was really supposed to be regulated by the federal government. But slavery itself was to be a state issue. And from the 1780s to the 1820s, every single state, north of Maryland, abolished the practice of slavery.
Still, compromise was going to be needed to get the south on board. So, the delegates inserted this clause into Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution. Quote, "'The migration or importation of such persons as any of the states now existing shall think proper to admit shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the year 1808, but a tax or duty may be imposed on such importation, not exceeding $10 for each person." End quote. By delaying such a law that could ban the slave trade, the slave trade clause served as one of the many important compromises needed for the Constitution's eventual success in passage and ratification.
Now, by 1803, every state had banned foreign ships from delivering slaves. And so, by 1807, when the British passed their own act to end the slave trade, Congress also took up the issue. At the behest of, now President Thomas Jefferson, they passed the act prohibiting importation of slaves. It took effect January 1, 1808, the first they allowed by the Constitution.
All ships, American or otherwise, were prohibited from bringing Africans to the United States to sell its slaves. And it was understood that eliminating the slave trade would gradually eliminate slavery. By the time of the American Revolution, only about 22% of slaves were actually born on the North American continent. The slave trade was crucial to keeping slavery alive.
And that meant that the new law was not going to be followed all too closely, because the reality of the industrial revolution was Britain-needed cotton, and soon other European countries needed cotton as industrialization spread to the continent. And yes, in time, northern states in the US needed cotton because they were developing textile industries of their own. With that increasing demand came an increasing demand for slave labor. And so, plenty of slavers were still willing to transport Africans to the new world, in spite of the prohibition.
It is estimated that 50,000 additional slaves were imported to the US between 1808 and the American Civil War. Next time on the industrial revolutions, we're going to turn our attention to what made the industrial revolution possible, help that spread across the globe, improved life on planet Earth significantly in many ways, and also made life on planet Earth unpredictable, unstable, and oftentimes, icky. High finance. See you then.
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