Consumers and slaves
Slave-owning planters, and merchants who dealt in slaves and slave produce, were among the richest people in 18th-century Britain. Profits from these activities helped to endow All Souls College, Oxford, with a splendid library, to build a score of banks, including Barclays, and to finance the experiments of James Watt, inventor of the first really efficient steam engine.
Liverpool merchant bankers, heavily involved in the slave-based trades, extended vital credit to the early cotton manufacturers of its Lancashire hinterland. West Indian planters built stately homes - some, ridiculously extravagant dwellings such as William Beckford's Fonthill - and furthered the modernisation of British agriculture by 'improving' their estates. Others invested in canals. And, of course, many spent their ill-gotten gains on gambling, prize fights and riotous living.
'Consumers had little idea of the terrible human cost of production.'
The plantations were themselves by-products of a new economic system. Plantation slavery thrived thanks to a consumer revolution that took place in Britain and the Netherlands in the 17th century. In these countries, consumer markets widened as farmers and manufacturers hired wage workers as the best way to expand output and sales.
The fact that farmers had to pay rent, and that labourers needed a job if they were to feed their families, was the germ of a new economic system - what we now call capitalism.
Many different types of people now needed money in their pocket or purse. They no longer produced the food they ate or the clothes they wore. The better-off bought fine wines or oriental silks. But even the day labourer could buy tobacco and sugar. Merchants met this new demand by setting up slave plantations in Virginia and the Caribbean. While there was a growing taste for exotic stimulants and luxuries, consumers had little idea of the terrible human cost involved in their production.
But those directly engaged in the Atlantic slave trade or plantations certainly knew of the terrible loss of life and the unrelenting toil of slavery. Planters and merchants bought Africans partly because they were better than white people at surviving in the tropics, and partly because they could deprive their African captives of any rights.
White servants were badly treated too, but there were limits when abuse exposed them to legal action and personal censure from their neighbours. Non-slaving colonists sometimes objected to the growing power of slave-owners, but it was fatally easy to let the Africans do all the harshest work. The planters soon discovered that they could play on white fears to construct a thoroughly commercial and racial version of an old institution - slavery.
Published: 2006-12-18
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