Essay: Remembering the slave trade yesterday and today
And the misery goes on
The slave trade was an atrocity that shaped the modern world. Without Britain the commercial trade in human beings could never have become such a vast and profitable trans-national industry. Written to mark the 200th anniversary of the trade’s abolition, the following essay by Mark Cantrell pointed out that a modern version of slavery is alive and well and unlikely to be abolished anytime soon
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| Am I Not A Man And A Brother? |
Imagine the scene, as a disgruntled Wilberforce is
barged aside by Tony Blair desperate for any legacy but a 19th
Century equivalent of the Iraq War; perceive his finery and mad grinning visage
as he proclaims: “We have not so much abolished slavery as modernised it. Er…”
Then wait for the titters, as the audience realise
that in his love of ‘modernity’ Blair has caught himself in a tangled web of
his own conceit, while the freed slaves accept the minimum wage and Gordon
Brown’s sleight of hand tax ‘cut’ through gritted teeth. Of course, after the
brutalities of total slavery, the transition to wage slavery must seem like
freedom indeed. But that’s by the by.
Abolition
TODAY, 25 March 2007 [as it was when this essay was first published], the UK
celebrates the bi-centenary of the abolition of the slave trade. It brought to
an end what had hitherto been a major and profitable British commercial
venture. Fortunes were made for a few, misery and death for the many, and the
consequences of this hideous business linger to this day.
Racism was born of slavery. So, it gained a new lease
of life as the Imperial project took off in the Nineteenth Century with the
orgy of colonial land-grabbing, but it was born in the blood and savagery of
the slave trade. It was manufactured to justify the trade and the institution,
to excuse the brutal treatment, the torture, rape and murder of human beings.
While the practitioners may not have thought it through quite so rationally,
the academic CLR James put it succinctly in his book The Black Jacobins. In answer to the question, why would traders tolerate
so much destruction of their valuable wares, he answered: because clearly and
inescapably their captives were human beings – not beasts – and so they had to
be broken, abused, physically and psychologically ground into the dirt. It was
a brutal and brutalising business.
As a slaver’s manual noted at the time: “Terror must
operate to keep them in subjection.”
Conservative estimates say that between 10 and 15
million people were shipped across the Atlantic. Other figures put it as high
as 30 million people. Casualty figures amongst the captives are put at around
five per cent in prisons and as much as ten per cent once the voyage commenced.
As we know of the conditions aboard ship, they were packed into the hold as
tight as proverbial sardines. They were kept like that for months, little
exercise, little food, with brutal reprisals for disobedience or even the
merest hint of rebellion. Sometimes, slaves were killed simply as a warning to
the others – who might have been forced to eat a slice of the hapless victim’s
organs.
Slaves did rebel of course. Even shipboard, they
sometimes managed to slip their shackles and overpower the crews. The film Amistad took its story from one such
group of slaves who managed to seize control of the ship carrying them, though
it focused on the idealistic reformers who fought for their freedom in the
pre-Civil War US courts. It’s telling in two senses, this film, the first in
that slaves could and did overpower their oppressors, and in the second that
their own actions in the slow, painful death of slavery tends to be airbrushed
out of the scene.
On the whole, we who live in the nations that
invested in – and profited from – the trans-Atlantic slave trade, find our
focus directed towards the white, generally affluent, individuals who
campaigned for the end of the trade. As in Amistad,
and as in the new released film Amazing Grace, black figures are rendered the recipients of white justice and
idealism, with a few token noble and dignified – but otherwise somewhat passive
– black faces to play a supporting role.
“Material being produced today to mark the
anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade makes it appear that white
people liberated black – the assumption being that they could not do it
themselves,” Ken Livingstone wrote recently in the Guardian newspaper. “In reality, slaves rose against the trade from
its inception. This broke it… No one denigrates William Wilberforce, but it was
black resistance and economic development that destroyed slavery, not white
philanthropy.”
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| William Wilberforce |
The first recorded slave revolt took place in 1570.
In the centuries of the slave trade’s existence, there were over 200 shipboard
rebellions. In the Caribbean islands, a brutal and violent society flourished
as the slave owners found themselves surrounded inevitably by hundreds of
thousands, millions, of enslaved people. Outnumbered, the reign of the day was
terror and brutality – but it never stopped revolts and even protracted
episodes of guerrilla war as the slaves resisted.
In the wake of the French Revolution, in 1791, when
the ideals of the rights of man were lighting fires of idealism across the
world, the colony of St Domingue erupted in revolt. At its head was an
illiterate slave named Toussaint L’Ouverture. He and his self-liberated slaves
went on to defeat the British and the French militaries – two of the most powerful armed forces in
their day – sent to put down the revolt. The only successful slave revolt in
history founded the first independent black republic of Haiti. Alas, what
military might failed to achieve, in time global economics brought it back
under the fold of dominant European-spawned powers.
Toussaint was fired by the ideals of the French
Revolution and the Enlightenment (at least those parts of Enlightenment
thinking that hadn’t declared him to be a sub-species). He was a believer, and
believed that men of reason could talk through their differences, and to that
end he travelled to Paris in the hope of negotiating a settlement with
Napoleon.
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| Toussaint Louverture |
The British arm of the slave trade continued, for a
few brief years, until its abolition in 1807, yet slavery itself wasn’t
abolished in British controlled territory until 1833, and of course it lingered
longer in the United States until the Civil War finally put paid to it.
Slavery’s last stand.
In Britain’s northern industrial cities, the
denizens of the ‘dark satanic mills’ also played their part in the wider
context of slavery’s demise. As the industrial revolution continued its
breakneck conquest of human life, subjecting more and more to its rigours and
the poverty of market-defined subsistence wages, these workers, these wage
slaves, were making connections between their own plight and the plight of the
slaves. These men and women perceived a sense of solidarity, as they faced their
own brutal punishments for resisting the rising wealth of the captains of
industry. Bitter strikes and disputes wracked the urban landscape in Britain.
Proto-unions were forming, and often, former slaves and anti-slavery
campaigners would find a willing audience among these rough and degraded people
who worked the new capitalism of industry.
As the century passed from that 1807 abolition of
the trade, many British workers continued their sense of solidarity with their
enslaved ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’ across the Atlantic. As the Civil War in
America raged, the loss of cotton for the mills led to unemployment and
hardship for Manchester mill workers, but even so, many supported the war
against the Confederacy and its proclaimed aim of ridding slavery for good.
Such solidarity, while it might in practice have had
an often contradictory expression, and while the individuals themselves might
have been tainted by the racist legacy of the trade, nevertheless played a
significant part in the groundswell of opinion that drove slavery to its death.
The struggles of slaves to achieve
self-emancipation, coupled with the rise of early working class militancy,
religious and moral outrage, and the rise of a new industrial mode of wealth
creation, all conspired against the slavers. The trade had its roots in the
earliest phase of capitalism, but capitalism as an economic system has no sense
of sentimentality or tradition – it eats it own and it helped to destroy what
it first helped to birth. In a sense, however, slavery had done its job: it
helped to shape the birth of the modern world. By the time the trade ended, the
blood of millions of people had bought and paid for the West’s rise to global
domination.
Alas, the story of slavery doesn’t end there.
Modernisation
TODAY, on the 25 March 2007 [as was when first published], two centuries after the
formal abolition of the slave trade, it is worth pointing out that slavery
exists in the context of wider economic forces. It doesn’t float in some
abstract sea of abuse – and since a slave is a source of labour then it fits
into the spectrum of the exploitation of labour.
As in 1807, so too in 2007, slavery persists.
Whereas it once operated in the full light of day,
with those in the trade – at least in the upper echelons – perceived as
‘respectable’ businessmen, it now operates in the shadows of criminality.
Economic conditions still play their part, however, for what is a slave but the
attempt to obtain and control the cheapest extraction of value from human
labour? It remains profitable enough to survive, even if it clings only to the
niches and fringes of the mainstream economy.
The trade is nothing like its trans-Atlantic
predecessor, of course, but the forms that slavery takes today breed no less
misery for the victims. So, in the run up to the bi-centenary, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) published ‘Modern Slavery In The UK’, a report into the prevalence of slavery today. It was
carried out by a joint team from the University of Hull and Anti-Slavery International. It shows that slavery is alive and well in the UK, particularly
as a result of people trafficking, and makes the valid point that the problems
exist within an international context that will inevitably make difficult
strategies to combat the modern slavers.
“All forms share elements of the exploitative
relationships which have historically constituted slavery,” the JRF said when
launching the report. “[These are] severe economic exploitation, the lack of a
human rights framework, and one person’s control of another through the
prospect or reality of violence. Slavery is defined and prohibited under
international law. Coercion distinguishes slavery from poor working
conditions.”
The latter is surely a moot point; when is coercion
not coercion? Of course, we take it to mean direct physical or psychological
compulsion to force someone to work for very little or no pay at all. However,
in conditions of abject poverty, if someone faces the ‘free’ choice of
gruelling toil rather than begging or starvation, is that not a form of indirect
coercion?
It’s a question that can distract from the focus on
slavery, from the point of view expressed in the report. Inevitably, given its
remit, it is the more direct coercion and ‘theft of liberty’ that forms a
slave. Otherwise, there is a danger of losing the focus in the myriad forms of
social problems faced by people today.
Having said that however, it raises the important
point about the context of slavery. It exists in a spectrum of labour
relations. If slavery represents the dark and brutal pole of ‘employment’, then
the other pole is work as we know it. The kind where we take a job with a going
rate, enjoy statutory protections and rights, have the ability to leave that
job without fear of reprisal, or indeed withhold our labour in a time of
dispute with our employer. Between these two poles is the global context of
child labour, sweatshops, economic migrants as they are called, and so on.
Slavery exists in a place where so many factors and
issues overlap, forever in danger of falling through the cracks and gaps where
overlaps fail to quite mesh. While being an important human rights issue, it is
also a matter of workers’ rights. An attack on the rights and protections of
one worker is an attack on them all – and let’s face it, the slave is the
weakest and most exploited of all labour. For workers, no matter what they
enjoy, it is an important issue for the preservation of the wider employment
protections. And, in an echo of old, the shipment – or trafficking to give its
modern term – across national borders brings in the sphere of immigration
policy.
These days, so many countries have little regard for
the majority of immigrants; they are a source of fear and loathing and cheap
macho politics that it creates a useful smokescreen to mask the trafficker.
According to Anti-Slavery International, there are
some 12 million people in slavery across the world. While the International
Labour Organisation says that 2.4 million people are enslaved by people
traffickers, forced to work for the gangs who smuggle them, often in the sex
trade. Not every slave is trafficked by clandestine gangs smuggling them over
borders. Some arrive in a country quite legally, but then are violated into the
abusive world of slavery, their passports and documents withheld and threatened
with violence to themselves or their family members.
Some UK companies, knowingly or otherwise, are
relying on people working in slavery to produce the goods they sell, the
organisation said. A complex web of sub-contracting and supply chains, managed
by agents elsewhere, masks the slavery: a murky screen blinding us to the
existence of the abused slave in our midst.
The JRF added: “Slavery in contemporary Britain
cannot be seen in isolation. Most of those working as slaves in the UK have come
from elsewhere, often legally. This makes slavery an international issue. Many
relationships of enslavement trap people by withdrawing their passports or ID
documents, making escape unlikely. Evidence shows that those who protest about
the appalling working conditions may be beaten, abused, raped, deported or even
killed.”
Furthermore, trafficked people are often subjected
to forced labour through a mix of enforced debt, as well as intimidation. For
those who might escape the clutches of their captors, they also run the risk of
finding the UK authorities unsympathetic – perceiving them as illegal
immigrants rather than victims. Often, not only is the victim unaware of any
rights they may have, so too are the authorities who might subsequently end up dealing
with the victim.
Part of the problem in the UK’s approach to tackling
trafficking, according to the JRF, is the Government’s view of it as an issue
of migration control. In other words, the ever-shifting goalposts on
immigration, and the endless changes and confusions bred to keep people out,
are assisting the traffickers to control their wares. There is little in the
way of joined-up protection for those who fall victim to the slavers.
In part, this is no doubt because our vision of
slavery is shaped by the understanding of its classic form abolished two
centuries ago, but mainly the hugely negative paranoia and anti-immigrant
feeling whipped up by successive generations of politicians out for a cheap
headline.
It leaves the vulnerable even more exposed.
“Current protection and support services for
trafficked men, women and children are inadequate and there is no specific
assistance available to those who are trafficked for labour exploitation,” said
Professor Robert Craig. He is one of the report’s co-authors and the Associate
Director of the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation
at the University of Hull.
He added: “A review of the position of most
organisations active in this field suggests that formal adoption by the UK
Government of the various treaties and conventions in place would be an
important first step.”
Frankly, given New Labour’s record on the
immigration issue, such as the use of deprivation and poverty as a failed attempt to force asylum seekers
out of the country, it is unlikely the Government will take any serious steps
to combat the modern scourge of slavery.
Government ministers like to boast of their
progressive record, yet as headlines in other topics show, it is becoming
ever-more strident in its authoritarianism. In New Labour’s time in Government
the gap between rich and poor has widened. Yet the Government likes to boast of
the numbers it has raised from poverty, even though such numbers are still
swamped by levels of deprivation. It boasts of the minimum wage it introduced,
raised recently by a most generous 17 pence an hour, even while the cost of
living has steadily risen. To this, add Gordon Brown’s flourish as he – hopes –
to graciously accept the keys to No 10: his final Budget. The generous tax cut
for the lowest earners, commentators and analysts agree, is anything but.
Gordon gives with one hand and takes with the other,
it was said. As with the Budget, so it can be with rights and protections
granted to vulnerable sections of the workforce.
Spurred on by cases of abuse experienced by migrant
workers who came to this country to work as cooks, cleaners and nannies, the
Government introduced legal protections in 1998. They arrived in the country
legally to work in their employer’s home. In some cases, they also lived there.
Some fell victim to sexual abuse, physical assault and sometimes were kept as
an effective prisoner by their employer. Not so much domestic workers, as
domestic house slaves.
Under the legislation, they are legally entitled to
leave their employer for another job if they are abused and receive basic
protection, and also to receive the minimum wage under UK employment law. It
was seen as a positive move to end what for some workers had become ‘virtual
slavery’.
Some 17,000 such migrant workers come to the UK
every year, but now they face losing the protections they gained courtesy of a
Home Office plan to introduce new immigration rules, which will drastically
curtail their rights. The plan means that such workers can only enter the
country on non-renewable business visa and are barred from finding another job
if they leave their employer’s service because of mistreatment. The intention
is to stop ‘abuse’ of border controls, the Home Office claims.
A Home Office spokesman told the Independent newspaper: “These are not
migrant workers but people who are ordinarily employed and resident outside the
UK, so changing employers in the UK would not be appropriate. As part of our
continued work to combat trafficking, our emphasis will be upon delivering
robust pre-entry procedures, including appropriate safeguards, such as the
identification of cases of possible abuse at the pre-entry stage to minimise
the risk of subsequent exploitation.”
Quite how such bureaucratic procedures can combat
the commercial shipping and trading of human beings is quite another matter. As
far as campaigners who work with victims of such abuse, it will do nothing to
help those who are smuggled in for the sex trade or as illegal workers in other
trades, merely leave this group of migrant workers isolated and defenceless.
Unless, of course, they wish to present themselves to the authorities and be
processed as some kind of criminal. Or, indeed, accept their status as slave.
Naturally, the Government has been accused of
hypocrisy.
A lack of joined up thinking, or the result of
deliberate policy? The police, of course, deal with the situation on the
ground: the actual cases of abuse. The immigration service deals with caseloads
and the bureaucratic implementation of policy from ‘on high’. And for all the
tabloids foam at the mouth over the issue of the Government’s ‘softness’, this
is not an immigrant-friendly government.
On the anniversary of the classic slave trade’s
abolition, it might be something for the Government to commit to some drastic
and far-reaching endeavour to abolish the modern trade. At least something
positive to help the victims who manage to slip their shackles, but for all its
vocalised commitment to combat trafficking, it is more than likely that
Government deed will contradict Government proclamation. Spin and
self-aggrandisement as ever comes before substance.
They can’t even apologise for Britain’s role in the
slave trade, it happened so long ago, yet they’ll take a share of the glory of
its two-century-old abolition. An apology would cost them nothing, show
character, acknowledge that the trade was a terrible crime against humanity.
The city of Liverpool was heavily involved in the trade, and in 1999 the
council showed the strength of character to formally apologise for its past
role. The Church of England Synod followed suit.
In his article in the Guardian, Ken Livingstone, London’s elected Mayor, took the
opportunity to apologise for London’s role in profiting from the trade. He
called upon the Government to do the same.
“The British Government’s refusal of such an apology
is squalid,” he added. “Until recently, almost unbelievably, it refused even to
recognise the slave trade as a crime against humanity on the grounds that it
was legal at the time… Slavery was the mass murder of millions of people.
Germany apologised for the Holocaust. We must for the slave trade.”
One is
tempted to suggest don’t hold your breath. Tony Blair, looking to leave No 10
and the ‘ingratitude’ of the nation behind, is seeking to secure his legacy and
move on. Doubtless, after gaining the legacy of Iraq, and trying desperately to
leave it behind, apologising for the British State’s involvement in an atrocity
abolished 200 years ago is perhaps a little too close to the bone. Slavery both
new and old is someone else’s problem now.
When it comes to ending the modern trade in human
beings, as with the end of the classic slave trade, it is a mistake to expect
the ‘great and the good’ to eradicate the scourge and emancipate the victims.
While a few sincere and dedicated individuals will take a stand and campaign,
putting a public face on the wider grass roots opposition, it is the latter
rattling and shaking the chains that will truly end the abomination of slavery.
As before, it will be a long hard, thankless struggle.
As for
New Labour, no Government of Wilberforces is this; expect them to take the
credit and bask in the second-hand glow of glory, but don’t expect any action.
This essay was written for, and first appeared on, one of the author's earlier blogs and appeared circa April 2007.
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