BOOK OF THE DAY: Micheal O'Siochrureviews Sweet Water and Bitter: The Ships that Stopped the Slave TradeBy Siân Rees Chatto Windus 340pp, £20.00
WHEN IT comes to Africa, the British state has plenty to feel guilty about. For much of the 18th century, Britain was the largest transatlantic carrier of slaves; during the second half of the 19th century, it participated in the ruthless carving up of Africa by the great colonial powers. The bitter legacy of this involvement is still felt throughout the continent today. Anxious to avoid “current obsessions” with the attribution of responsibility and blame, Rees focuses instead on the attempts by the British to suppress the West African slave trade in the early decades of the 19th century.
This is a compelling tale, replete with crusading abolitionists, ambitious naval commanders, wily European slave traders and ruthless African monarchs. For 60 years, British warships of the Preventative Squadron patrolled the western coastline of Africa in an admirable but largely ineffectual effort to sever the transatlantic slave routes. They freed over 150,000 people. Slavers nonetheless successfully shipped millions of men, women and children to the principal ports of Brazil and Cuba.
Rees portrays with great skill the heroism of British seamen, as they struggled with inadequate resources against the harsh climate, determined opponents and the intricacies of international law. The misery inflicted on the native Africans makes for difficult reading at times. Shackled in appalling conditions on overcrowded slave ships, those who survived the crossing experienced untold miseries working on vast plantations.
Rees explains how shockingly high mortality rates meant the plantations constantly required additional manpower. As long as slaves fetched a high price in the markets of Havana and Bahia, the shameful trade in humanity continued to flourish. In fact, the west African slave routes only ceased with the abolition of slavery in the US and Cuba in the 1860s.
Despite cross-party support at Westminster for the Preventative Squadron, many influential figures in Britain vigorously opposed the abolitionist agenda. The shipping magnates of Liverpool, the merchants of Manchester and Birmingham, the bankers and insurers of London remained heavily implicated in the slave trade after its abolition by parliament in 1807.
Rival colonial powers accused the Preventative Squadron of excluding them from legitimate trade in the region and described its campaign “as a stepping stone to the conquest of Africa”. Rees rejects these allegations as largely unfounded without examining them in any great detail. The extension of British power in Africa may well have been an unintended consequence of the abolition campaign but it happened nonetheless. Moreover, as Rees points out, not only did slavery continue to exist elsewhere in the world, but a new type of enslavement emerged in British colonies, using so-called “free-emigrants” from Africa and contract labour from India, whose working conditions proved little better than the slaves they replaced. The Irish had experienced something similar centuries earlier, with the forced transportation of over 60,000 “indentured servants” to the sugar plantations of Barbados during the Cromwellian occupation in the 1650s.
Writing in 1845, a British merchant bemoaned the fact that not “one nation under Heaven gives us credit for disinterested sincerity in this large expenditure of money and philanthropy” to abolish slavery and the slave trade. “Whether the calm verdict of posterity will redress this injustice,” he continued, “time alone can show.”
This study goes some way towards redeeming Britain’s reputation in Africa but the links between abolitionism, commercialism, colonialism and imperialism throughout the 19th century cannot and should not be easily dismissed.
Micheál Ó Siochrú is a lecturer in history at TCD. His latest book,
God’s Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland
, was published by Faber last year.