Padraic Scanlan on anti-masturbation & Empire

Padraic Scanlan believes that 'the British Empire was first built on slavery and then on the moral and economic self-confidence of antislavery.'

This is foolish. The British Empire in India had nothing whatsoever to do with slavery. Nor did it gain any African possessions for the purpose of slave trading. The reverse was the case. Stamping out slavery was quoted as a reason for the acquisition of African colonies at a later point in time. By contrast, Portugal and Brazil were the biggest importers of slaves. During the eighteenth century, the British mercantile Marine was the second largest actor in the Transatlantic slave trade but the acquisition of the Assiento did not itself involve the acquisition of any particular territory. 

Padraic has an Irish sounding name. Ireland was part of the British Empire. But the Irish were not enslaved by the British. On the other hand, the residents of Baltimore- a small town in Ireland- were kidnapped by Barbary corsairs and sold in the slave markets of North Africa. But those corsairs did not create an Empire. They were themselves conquered by European powers. 

There were Empires in Africa which were based on the trade in gold and ivory and 'black gold'. One factor in their collapse may have been the ending of the Transatlantic slave trade. 

Padraic writes in Aeon-

Britain ended its slave trade in 1807, and abolished slavery in much of its colonial empire in 1834.

Why? Because Protestant Evangelicals and Quakers, etc, loathed that Satanic institution. However, they were equally ardent in their opposition to masturbation- at least they pretended to be. 

By contrast,  plenty of 'Liberals' had no problem with slavery- provided it was dusky folk, or those descended from them under the 'one drop rule' who were the slaves. After all, sex with slaves doesn't count as masturbation. 

 Four years later, Queen Victoria was crowned. For British liberals, the timing was auspicious, and the lessons were obvious. 

British Liberals were pleased by the 1832 Reform Bill. Slave owners had been very generously compensated. Indentured labor from India and elsewhere was replacing the emancipated slave. Nobody greatly cared about this issue any longer.

The 18th-century empire of enslaved labour, rebellious colonies and benighted protectionism had been purified by the ‘sacrifice’ of the profits of slavery to the principles of free trade, free labour and free markets.

Nonsense! The Corn Law was still in force as were various other Mercantilist measures. Free Trade did not triumph till Gladstone's first Chancellorship. 

 But the empire that slavery made endured.

Coz the US was still ruled by Queenji- right? Wrong. The jewel in the crown of the British Empire was India. But slavery had not made that Empire. It played no role whatsoever in it.

Although individual enslaved people were often brought to Britain by the people who claimed to own them,

This was only the case for domestic slaves whose position was similar to domestic servants. By contrast, Portugal imported a lot of slaves to work in agriculture. Between 1444, when Portugal brought the first sizeable shipment of African slaves to Europe, to 1761, when it abolished slavery in its European territory, the slave population of Portugal reached ten percent of the total. The Portuguese also enslaved and transported a lot of Asians which, however, the Japanese resented. By contrast, Britain merely participated in the Atlantic slave trade. It neither initiated it nor itself relied on slave labor. 

 for most Britons, mass enslavement was something that happened ‘over there’ – 

in Portugal, which was Catholic. In the opinion of the British power elite, Catholicism sucked ass big time. 

in the colonies, especially the sugar-producing islands of the Caribbean. 

There was slavery in the Caribbean because African potentates were busy enslaving and selling Africans to the highest bidder. Britain acquired its Caribbean colonies from other European powers.

This fact of geography shaped British antislavery. 

Only because British geography shaped Britain. 

The ‘mother country’ could also be the stern but benignant ‘father’, 

Coz Mummies can be Daddies just by growing a dick- right? 

correcting children in the ‘infant colonies’.

George Washington was a cuddly little baby who kicked George III's ass but good. 

 In the slave colonies, opposition to slavery could be a revolutionary threat to the social order. 

It's quite true that the rebellion in Haiti changed attitudes to Slavery. It became obvious that if 'Blacks' became the majority, then they would kill or chase away the Whites and take control. 

In Britain, antislavery affirmed Britain’s superior virtue in relationship to its empire.

No. British Naval Supremacy- not being a Quaker or a member of the Clapham Sect- affirmed Britain's superiority- was the foundation of the Empire. Superior martial qualities might enable the British Army to kick ass but then again if a territory could not pay for its occupation then it ceased to be part of the Empire. 

This contented patriotism

did not exist.

 was a feature of British antislavery, decades before the leaders of the movement succeeded in securing the abolition of the slave trade. In 1785, William Cowper

who had gone insane and thus become morbidly religious. It must be said that Evangelical Christianity seems to have ameliorated his condition. A humorous anecdote related to him by a lady of that creed led to him writing a comic ballad which, Chesterton thought, saved his sanity. 

Why is Padraic pretending that Cowper was 'contesting nationalism' or was some sort of 'public intellectual'? The fellow had gone mad. He was a charity case. Still, he wrote quite well and 'John Gilpin' was a success as Surtees' Jorrocks was a success. 

 published ‘The Task’, a long poem in blank verse. 

Cowper's 'divine chit-chat' did catch the Evangelical spirit of his day.

In Book II, Cowper celebrates Somerset v Stewart, the 1772 case that set a precedent for enslaved people from Britain’s colonies to sue for freedom in metropolitan courts. He wrote:
Slaves cannot breathe in England; if their lungs
Receive our air, that moment they are free
They touch our country and their shackles fall.
That is noble, and bespeaks a nation proud
And jealous of the blessing. Spread it then,
And let it circulate through every vein
Of all your empire; that where Britain’s power
Is felt, mankind may feel her mercy too.

By contrast Bowper and Dowper wrote even longer poems urging the Brits to shove red hot pokers up the bums of any free man or woman detected in the realm.

William Wilberforce, the leader in Parliament of the campaign to abolish the British slave trade, admired Cowper’s eye for evidence of Providence. He was his favourite poet. For both men, antislavery confirmed Britain’s special place in human and divine affairs. 

Britain has a special place in human and divine affairs for those of us who live here. I myself have appealed to Queenji, Gor bless 'er, to take the lead in opposing evil Iyengars who are spreading rumors that Iyers put garlic in the sambar. 

To Wilberforce, slavery kept an enslaved person from choosing salvation.

No. Anybody at all can choose salvation. However, nothing of the sort is achieved save by God's gratuitous gift. Both Cowper and Wilberforce were influenced by Evangelicals repenting of their own connection with that loathsome trade. The latter, an independently wealthy member of Parliament, gained fame for his oratory in this cause but it was by far being his sole or even chief interest. The truth is, once Whites realized that Black slaves who turned into a majority would turn the tables on them with a vengeance, they saw the folly of being the instruments of their own destruction. Every Empire which began to import muscular slaves ended up being ruled by 'Slave' or 'barbarian' dynasties. 

 Consequently, to enslave was a terrible sin.

The Pope had granted the Portuguese permission to trade in African and Asiatic slaves provided slaves were converted to Christianity. The Evangelicals maintained the opposite position because they were anti-Catholic.  

Emancipation, however, did not imply independence.

Independence does not imply that every type of dependence ceases to exist. It just means you can choose whom to be dependent on for employment or various useful services.

 Social hierarchy was natural, and therefore desirable.

Farting is natural. It is a highly undesirable method of punctuating the perorations of  Parliamentary orators. 

 Virtue flowed downhill from the powerful to the weak, the rich to the poor, Britain to the colonies.

In the opinion of Padraic, not Wilberforce. The Clapham Sect saw that it was easier to appear to get rid of slavery far away rather than actually help kids being beaten and buggered and bought and sold within a hundred yards of Westminster. 

 Wilberforce assumed that Britain would hold the interests of freed people in trust during a long journey toward civilisation.

No. The guy was a Christian. Civilization was not the aim. Salvation was.

 What greater proof of advanced civilisation could a nation offer than opposition to slavery?

Christianity. Being saved. Fuck is wrong with Padraic? Has he never met a God botherer?

For Cowper and Wilberforce, Britain was exceptional

for the same reason that Mummy is exceptional- coz she iz our Mummy

 – and in historical memory, the antislavery movement is still offered as evidence of British exceptionalism.

Offered to whom? Perhaps Padraic, pacing the mean streets of the two Cambridges, is constantly being accosted by men in dirty raincoats who expose themselves as evidence of British exceptionalism. He naturally assumes this has something to do with the anti-slavery movement because this allows him to get off a snappy comeback to do with the Potato famine.

 For conservative Eurosceptics such as the Oxford theologian Nigel Biggar, antislavery is the antidote to criticism of empire. 

If so, the fellow is a fool. The correct antidote to criticism of empire is saying 'how come every ex-colony kept British Institutions unless it turned into a shithole like Myanmar'? 

‘Between the slave-trade and slavery of the 18th century and the present,’ Biggar writes in a widely circulated recent essay for the group Briefings for Britain, ‘lies 150 years of imperial penance …’ With his talk of penance and his totting-up of the ‘gifts’ given by empire – English, railroads, parliaments, property rights – Biggar performs a mawkish pageant of the pith helmet, the Bible and the flag. Antislavery, from this point of view, symbolises Britain’s moral awakening and special destiny, first and greatest among the European empires.

'First'? Nope. Portugal and Spain were first. Holland was initially more successful. France got off to a better start in India. But it was the Brits who prevailed and became the 'greatest'. 

In the United States, a similar caricature of British antislavery as especially precocious and virtuous has become a useful foil for reimagining American history, in The New York Times’s 1619 Project and elsewhere. If slavery is the American ‘original sin’, and the preservation of slavery was a cause of the American Revolution, British antislavery becomes an avenging force driven out of the new United States. And yet, when white Virginia colonists first purchased enslaved African workers to cultivate tobacco in 1619, the colonists thought of themselves as English. They looked south to Spain and Portugal’s colonies, where plantation slavery was well-established, and hoped to make a fortune. To the colonists, hierarchy was natural and defined by God. Coerced, enserfed or enslaved labour was unremarkable – and, from the colonists’ perspective, necessary – gentlemen, by definition, did not work in the fields. The sins weren’t original, and they weren’t ‘American’.

So the original sin was that of Portugal. The problem is, everybody likes the Portuguese. On the other hand, it must be said that British anti-slaver naval patrols hurt Portugal- England's oldest ally. 

The Caribbean, not the colonies that became the American South, was the focus of debate for supporters and opponents of slavery in the British Empire. During the nearly three centuries of the transatlantic slave trade, more than 2.3 million enslaved people disembarked in Britain’s Caribbean colonies, compared with roughly 390,000 in the Thirteen Colonies and the US. In 1783, Britain lost the Thirteen Colonies, but retained more than a dozen sugar-producing colonies in the Caribbean. After the disruption of the Revolutionary War, colonists in the Caribbean resumed importing nearly everything, from barrel staves to livestock, from the US and Britain. Sugar was so profitable that one British slaveholder claimed that an acre planted with sugarcane would yield enough sugar to buy and import five acres’ worth of grain.

Padraic is White. Is this why he doesn't mention the big game-changing event in the Caribbean- viz. the revolt in Haiti which began in 1791? Wilberforce told Parliament that even if slaves were a minority, they would make common cause with an invader- i.e. if France or some other nation at war with Britain managed to get a couple of ships to an island, then the slaves would ally with them and kill off the whites. Thus, not only would the European enemy have to be defeated at Sea, the whole island would have to be reconquered and re-populated. Far better to free the slaves and give them some small stake in the system. Wilberforce seems to have been unaware, till about 1804, that the West India Regiments were buying slaves for enlistment. These 'uncivilized negroes', freshly landed, were paid and treated the same as Whites but were they slaves- subject to colonial slave laws- or free men subject to the Mutiny Act? The mutiny of the 8th West India Regiment in 1802 concentrated minds on this issue. Clearly, blacks who had been trained to wield weapons felt they were not slaves and refused to do the work of slaves. Plantation owners did not want discharged soldiers of this description anywhere around their own slaves. Yet, it was obvious that Whites died like flies in the unhealthier portions of the islands. Black soldiers were necessary and perfectly disciplined if paid properly and treated fairly. However, if they feared that disbandment of the regiment would mean being sold as slaves then they would rebel. Thus, purely military considerations militated for emancipation. In 1805 the Government spent 280,000 pounds to buy 4000 slaves for the West India Regiments. These 'uncivilized negroes' may have been better fighters and more suited to the climate than Britishers but they were being paid the same. However this scarcely justified paying triple the price given to an English 'scrimp' (who lured men to enlist by devious or downright criminal means). By contrast, plenty of West Indian colored people would enlist for a lower wage than the White British and, what's more, prove better soldiers. However, for this to happen you had to get rid of the Slave Acts under which colored soldiers were mistreated by the Colonial Magistrates. But this required Emancipation. The bonus was that the British military could enlist all the slaves the Navy captured from enemy vessels. On the other hand, the 1807 declaration that all 'negro' soldiers were free meant that 10,000 men gained legal, if not very effectual, emancipation. The other big consequence was that the policy of non-interference in Colonial affairs (caused by the American Revolution) was breached. In theory, in not in practice, Westminster had declared its supremacy. 

Sadly, the enfranchised black soldier, more often than not, was sent off to Sierra Leone which Pitt supported seeing it as a means of getting poor Black people out of London.

Despite geographic affinities and deep commercial relationships with the North American colonies in rebellion, the Caribbean colonies remained a part of the British Empire. The white planters who dominated the British Caribbean had strong incentives for loyalty. 

They had no incentive for disloyalty.

The Navigation Acts, which governed imperial trade, guaranteed them a protected market for their sugar in Britain. The Acts also barred the often cheaper and higher-quality sugar produced in other European plantation colonies, especially the French colony of Saint-Domingue, overthrown by the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804). Moreover, unlike most American colonists, Caribbean planters generally thought of Britain as home. Wealthy colonists bought property in Britain, invested in British firms, and sent their children away to British boarding schools. The West Indian ‘interest’ in British politics, while far from unified, resisted attempts in Parliament even to regulate either the slave trade or enslaved labour.

To be fair, this was not a burning issue for most British people because...urm... they weren't Black. Similarly, few Brits cared about the Indian independence struggle.

 The British slave trade survived for nearly a quarter-century after American independence,

but America continued to deal in slaves.

 British colonial slavery as long again, ending half a century after US independence.

but thirty years before America embraced Emancipation.

The antislavery movement, like the West India interest, was not unified.

It was unified but not homogeneous. 

 It grew from many roots during the 18th century. Among economic theorists, the idea that enslaved labour was more expensive than wage labour became an axiom of imperial political economy. 

Imperial political economy did not exist. If Slavery was uneconomic, it would disappear by itself. 

Among British Quakers and among the growing community of Evangelical Protestants, inside and outside the Church of England, slavery – long tolerated in Christian theology – became an obstacle to orderly religious communion and to evangelism.

How so? Did Quakers find that their meeting houses had been turned into barracoons? Was Uncle Tom constantly emerging from his cabin to disrupt communion services?

The fact is the anti-slavery movement was part of a wider repugnance against cruel and barbaric customs and beliefs.

 For Enlightened intellectuals interested in comparing Britain to Rome, slavery was culturally backward – an obstacle to imperial consolidation and a symbol of barbarism. 

Many Enlightened intellectuals believed in the natural inferiority of Women, Blacks, Asiatics etc. Furthermore, nobody could argue that slavery was an 'obstacle to imperial consolidation' because there had been a huge increase in the thing over the previous century. Banning slavery might lead to some colonies wanting to break away. That was one reason for the American Civil war.

For Britons increasingly sensitive to torture and corporal punishment – common in public spaces in Britain for much of the 18th century – the disgusting conditions and violence endured by the enslaved became shocking and intolerable to contemplate.

This was true for a few British people. Most didn't care. Out of sight was out of mind.

For a growing middle class, and especially for middle-class women, otherwise excluded from most of political life, antislavery was a means to influence policy. 

This may have been true for one or two Mrs. Jellybys. Most middle class women were preoccupied with the question of how to become upper class or, at least, remain middle class. 

After the American Revolution, a new generation of British politicians hoped to tighten and centralise control over Britain’s remaining colonies. 

No. Britain decided that colonies should be self-governing as far as possible. However, during the Napoleonic Wars, it became obvious that the West Indian colonies could not defend themselves. In particular, Blacks in the West India Regiments had to be defended against Colonial Courts.

Finally, after the Haitian Revolution, the threat of a successful rebellion overthrowing slavery made the prospect of a slow, managed transition to freedom appealing.

Not really. The Brits realized that freed slaves would resent their former oppression. Thus, many freed soldiers etc. were shipped off to Sierra Leone. Previously, Blacks who had fought on the British side against the American rebels were resettled in other colonies- including Newfoundland. 

There is a common thread connecting these disparate political, cultural and intellectual movements that coalesced into popular antislavery in Britain: all flowed from the growth of the 18th-century empire. 

Not really. The slave trade was as repugnant when Brazil was the port of landing as when it was Jamaica. The rise of literacy and a genre of Christian as well as Radical pamphleteering did play a role.

The prosperity and expansion that slavery made possible in the British Empire

where? Only in the West Indies which were declining in significance. Canada had pretty much good rid of slavery by the end of the eighteenth century. India became the jewel in the crown. Slavery was irrelevant in that vast territory. Anti-slavery did play a part in the expansion of the Empire into sub-Saharan Africa but that was towards the end of the nineteenth century. 

We may say that slave trading played a role in the rise of British Mercantile Marine, which in turn boosted the fighting power of the Royal Navy. But Britain soon found more profitable items to ship. Sadly, this included opium.

 also helped to make antislavery a powerful, if inchoate, part of British culture. 

Did it though? If so, how come Gladstone didn't side with the North in the Civil War? Henry Adams felt that saintly hypocrite was saying one thing but secretly helping the bad guys.

Empire raised British consciousness against slavery. At the same time, antislavery presumed British power and superiority – abolishing slavery would prove that Britain was modern, enlightened and fit to govern its empire.

This is nonsense. There already was an Empire which was being profitably governed. There was no need to prove anything in that respect. Why not say, antislavery presumed British decency? Abolishing slavery would prove that Brits were modern enough and enlightened enough to wipe their own bums rather than prance around the place with a turd protruding from their arsehole.

When the 1807 Slave Trade Act passed, Britain was at war with Napoleonic France. 

Which had reinstituted slavery.

Ending the slave trade was a way gradually to reform the Caribbean colonies, and to prevent a revolution like Haiti’s, as well as a reason to attack and search neutral shipping to look for enslaved people aboard.

Male slaves were impressed into the Army or Navy.

 The Act was a triumph for the antislavery cause, but it was also part of the war effort. Henry Thornton, a Member of Parliament (MP) and a close ally of Wilberforce, saw the Act as proof that Britain was a new Rome.

Romans owned plenty of slaves.

 ‘Civilisation,’ Thornton said in the House of Commons, ‘has always been promoted in the world chiefly by the communication of light from a civilised to a barbarous people.’ Imperial power carried new responsibilities. ‘Ought we not generally to prevent man from preying upon man?’ Thornton asked. ‘[W]e profess to act on higher principles than other countries.’
Thornton was a Merchant Banker. Having high principles has a reputational benefit in that line of work. He was a member of the Clapham Sect and responsible for the dissemination of their Tracts. He was also instrumental in founding and maintaining Sierra Leone as a refuge- or dumping ground- for freed slaves or Black people in London and other British cities. Emancipation with compensation was helpful to bankers because it increased money circulation. Wealth was no longer tied up in human bodies. 

After 1807, antislavery leaders assumed that ‘natural’ economic laws would erode Caribbean slavery. Without a supply of enslaved labour, slaveholders would need gradually to improve living and working conditions on plantations until slavery gradually disappeared. ‘I am not afraid,’ Wilberforce had told the House of Commons in 1792, ‘of being told I design to emancipate the slaves.’ However, he continued, ‘True Liberty is the child of Reason and of Order; it is indeed a plant of celestial growth, but the soil must be prepared for its reception.’ After the end of the slave trade, enslaved people would learn to be wage workers; slaveholders would learn to be employers. In antislavery rhetoric, absentee slaveholders, because they lived in genteel houses in Britain and patronised the same charities and institutions as leading abolitionists, could be partners in this project of ‘ameliorating’ the conditions of enslaved labour. If absentees returned to the Caribbean as patrician landlords, they would be unable to resist the decline of slavery, and might also help to rehabilitate a British agricultural aristocracy that seemed in decline. ‘Now the legitimate and rightful lord,’ Cowper had mourned, in a passage about the sale of old aristocratic acres in Britain, ‘is but a transient guest, newly arrived.’

There are two different points to note in this connection. Some West Indian landlords- like alderman Beckford (father of the author of Vathek)- were considered radicals (as were some 'Nabobs' from India. Their ability to purchase pocket boroughs was considered a threat to the established order by people like Burke. Ending slavery would cut them down to size. What would be even better is if they fucked off back to where they came from. 

The other point is that the Clapham sect had a theory that if slaves were forced to endure their system of education then they would understand that God wanted them to serve Whitey more obediently and productively. The same would happen in England. The working poor would understand that God would fuck them up if they weren't good and obedient servants to their betters. 

Some wealthy slaveholders shared this vision of themselves as patricians. Bryan Edwards, slaveholder, MP and historian of the Caribbean, believed that slavery was necessary to empire, but that it should be reformed. He thought of himself as a father to the people he claimed to own and, as an MP, led a movement to repeal colonial laws that allowed enslaved people to be sold to pay off debts, a common reason for family separations.

I didn't know that. I suppose he was reacting to pressure from the antislavery movement who highlighted the atrocious manner in which families were broken up.

 He restricted the use of corporal punishment on his plantations. There was little daylight between Edwards and Joshua Steele, an obscure Barbados planter who experimented on his plantation with a scheme to convert enslaved labourers into semi-indentured tenants. Thomas Clarkson, a prominent antislavery campaigner, compared Steele to Toussaint Louverture, the Haitian revolutionary hero. They were, he wrote, ‘two great men, quite unknown to each other; one of whom (Mr Steele) was concerned in preparing Negro-slaves for freedom, and the other (Toussaint) in devising the best mode of managing them after they had been suddenly made free.’ To 19th-century eyes, the distinctions among ‘progressive’ planters, antislavery activists and even revolutionary leaders could easily blur.

I think the 'elephant in the room' is race. Anti-slavery sentiments could be Christian or humanitarian but it could also be about sending black people back to Africa where some yet more cruel manner of exploiting them might be found- as indeed happened in King Leopold's 'Free State of Congo'. 

I am reminded of a lady who asked a greengrocer whether the oranges he was selling came from South Africa- which she was boycotting because of apartheid. It turned out that they were indeed South African and so as she moved away the greengrocer expressed his sympathy. His wife too had qualms about eating fruit which had been plucked by black hands.  

But ‘amelioration’ did not end slavery. Colonial legislatures resisted amelioration. Enslaved people – like the rebels who fought against colonial militias and British troops in Barbados in 1816, in Demerara (later part of British Guiana) in 1823 and in Jamaica in 1831 and 1832 – forced emancipation on to the Parliamentary agenda, but the emancipation that Parliament granted in 1833 was not what enslaved rebels fought for. Unlike emancipation in Haiti or the US, won through armed struggle and secured with radical constitutional settlements, the end of slavery in the British Empire happened by Act of Parliament, to public acclaim. On 1 August 1834, the hundreds of thousands of enslaved people in the British colonial empire were free, but most passed from slavery into ‘apprenticeship’ for four more years of forced labour.

Arguably, the slave-owner gained 'financial capital' without losing very much because cheap 'indentured labor' from India and elsewhere supplied them a ready source of sweated labour. 

Scanlan rightly observes- 

Compensation freed up capital that had been sunk into a plantation economy in decline by the 1830s, and anchored by imperial protection of colonial sugar, wavering under threat from supporters of free trade.

Moreover, the wealthy retained political and judicial power. In the mid 1860's Governor Eyre rolled back forcibly any sliver of political power acquired by urban and other more prosperous 'colored' people.

Scanlan sees the anti-slavery movement as part of Capitalism's legitimating ideology. He won't admit that the real issue was Racism- Blacks could only be tolerated as an oppressed minority regardless of economic logic. 

Antislavery aligned capitalism with morality. 

No. Christianity could align capitalism with morality but Racism was not interested in either Christianity or morality. 

The freedom to sell one’s labour did not require violent coercion

yet 'violent coercion' was used against Trade Unionists and those 'transported' for various supposed crimes. Indentured laborers were often treated worse than slaves. In Australia, there was also the practice of 'blackbirding'- i.e. kidnapping Pacific islanders and using them as slaves. 

 or treat human beings as chattel. But wage labour would do more, activists argued.

This was in connection with the demand by various Christian denominations to receive Government money in return for educating children in the doctrines of their own sects. This was a hot potato because the Dissenters and Catholics considered this a plot to strengthen the Anglican Church. Even at the beginning of the Twentieth Century there was a Civil Disobedience Movement whereby people who refused to pay their rates- so as not to finance the Church run schools- risked being sold up or being sent to jail. 

Gladstone had proposed that freed slaves receive Anglican education because of some supposed connection between Anglican orthodoxy and an obedient working class which would show deference to their social superiors. 

It would transform wage labourers into more prudent, pious and civilised subjects. The British government presented emancipation to Parliament and the public as a test of the obedience and work ethic of freedpeople. In 1833, Edward Stanley, the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, told the House of Commons that freedom was an experiment ‘more mighty … than any experiment ever attempted to be carried into effect by any nation in any period of the history of the world.’ Slavery, he argued, had knocked enslaved workers far down the ladder of civilisation, convincing them that ‘the greatest of human curses is labour, so the height of human bliss and enjoyment is the relaxation from labour.’ Apprenticeship was designed to correct this misconception.

After the Great Reform Bill of 1832, the big question facing the ruling class was how to prevent the extension of the franchise to the working class- a key demand of the 'Chartists'. During this period, the claim was made that the Anglican Religion had some magical power to turn even people of African origin into deferential and obedient workers content to eat gruel while their masters gadded about in silk top hats. 

Nobody really believed this nonsense but politicians had to pay lip service to it. The other big problem had to do with the resentment of the urban middle and working classes at the high price of bread- due to the Corn Laws (which benefited aristocratic land-lords)- and the high price of sugar and other such commodities. As the cause of 'Free Trade' triumphed, the terms of trade shifted away from primary products towards manufacturing. This in turn meant that further expansion of the franchise was inevitable. 

As sugar plantations declined in the Caribbean colonies after emancipation, freedpeople were blamed for failing the ‘mighty experiment’. For a decade after 1834, reams of data were published in Britain, comparing the quantity of sugar produced by apprentices (after 1838, fully free workers) to yields from the era of slavery, and from other European colonies that still used enslaved labour. In 1846, the Sugar Duties Act introduced a schedule for the end of imperial protection for sugar.

There was a duty on slave-grown sugar. Abolishing it lowered prices for the consumer.

 Cheaper imported sugar from outside the empire flooded British markets. In 1847, at least 48 merchant banks specialising in Caribbean trade went bankrupt. Jamaican estates that had been worth £80,000 under slavery could now be had for as little as £500. Slavery remained profitable. Between 1827 and 1840, Cuba had doubled its sugar production using enslaved labour, and now claimed 20 per cent of the entire global market.

Cuba had adopted sensible economic policies. By 1818, it had Free Trade. Slavery was one factor but from 1840 onward Cuba also introduced new technology and thus raised productivity. A fall in coffee prices meant that Cuba concentrated on sugar, thus gaining economies of scope and scale. Its sugar production grew rapidly till American protectionism during the Great Depression put a ceiling on further growth. This also sparked a Revolution in 1933. 

As the British sugar industry collapsed, many antislavery activists turned to West Africa.

By then, it was known that Sierra Leone & Liberia weren't successful experiments. Nobody at the time believed West Africa could become a big exporter of food or cotton. However, a measure of 'indirect rule' was affordable on the basis of profits from gold and other luxury items. 

 Once again, free-market capitalism and free labour were touted as cure-alls. 

No. It was accepted that rule could only be indirect and pro forma in poorer regions in the interior whose administration would have to be paid for by the richer areas on the coast.

To build civilisation, by these standards, was to create conditions that would impel people to follow the ‘natural’ laws of political economy.

The French may have paid lip service to centralized rule characterized by 'homonoia' but the Brits understood that absent navigable rivers and other topographic advantages, the best that could be achieved on a tight budget was paramountcy with much of the administration being left to local potentates. 

 The argument that ‘Africa’ was undifferentiated, culturally empty and economically backward had been a commonplace for slave-traders.

The only arguments traders are interested in involve where they can buy most cheaply and where they can sell at the highest price. Drug-dealers and pimps have the same mentality. Who on earth would listen to their 'arguments'? 

 After the end of British colonial slavery, ‘darkest Africa’ was useful for antislavery imperialism.

No it wasn't. It was obvious that freed slaves would not be turned by magic into obedient servants of her Brittanic majesty, happy to toil away so that the Queen could build herself some more palaces. 

 In West Africa, Britain had two overlapping objectives, wrote the Quaker industrialist and antislavery leader John Joseph Gurney, ‘of developing the resources of the soil of Africa, and of raising the native mind.’

He was more famous as a Quaker who objected to alcohol, capital punishment and fishing. But he had nothing to do with West Africa. 

Fowell Buxton 

was a part of the Niger expedition of 1841. But quarter of the members died of various Tropical illnesses. Africa was kept safe by its mosquitoes and other disease vectors.

advocated for a larger fleet to interdict slave ships in West African waters. Gunships would not only stop slave ships; they would convince African leaders to sign treaties giving up the slave trade in exchange for commercial preferment. Europe would import finished goods; Africa would grow crops and extract minerals. Africans who might have been sold into slavery would find secure employment and civilisation as wage workers in industries useful to British importers and merchants. ‘The principles, then … are these,’ Buxton wrote: ‘Free Trade. Free Labour.’ In West Africa, forcing open labour and commodity markets in the name of antislavery cut a path for conquest.

But conquest had to be delayed till Medicine had improved and White people had a better chance of surviving in Africa.

In 1851, to secure an antislavery treaty, British warships shelled Lagos, forcing the abdication of the Oba (or ruler), Kosoko.

The Brits were were restoring the old Oba.

 A new Oba, Akitoye,

who was actually the old Oba who had been deposed

 installed by the British, 

who had been persuaded to do so by the first African to become an Anglican Bishop. An African sailor who participated in the expedition became a wealthy businessman and merchant mariner. He married a god-daughter of Queen Victoria. The fact is Nigerians played a part in the creation of modern Nigeria. 

abjured the slave trade and opened the port to British ships – free trade. Meanwhile, at Abeokuta, a town near Lagos, the Church Missionary Society (CMS) established an Industrial Institution to teach cotton cultivation to locals. In partnership with Thomas Clegg, a Manchester cotton merchant, the CMS sent missionaries, of both European and African origin, far and wide with cotton seed, gins, screw presses and other gear. Cotton exports from Lagos rose from 11,492 lbs in 1856 to 220,099 lbs in 1858 – free labour.  

While the slaves of the American South produced 2 billion bales. During the Civil war production shifted to Egypt, India, Central Asia and even Argentina. Africa's people were industrious but transport infrastructure was a bigger problem. Also, it may be that real wages were higher. 

In 1861, Britain annexed Lagos as a Crown Colony. In 1885, at the Berlin Conference, Britain leveraged its claim on Lagos into possession of the territories that were unified in 1914 as the Protectorate of Nigeria. 

This is nonsense. You can't leverage claims. Either you control territory or you don't. Portugal claimed vast territories in Africa. Everybody laughed at them when they tried to 'leverage' these claims. This was one reason why the monarchy fell. 

Antislavery was a natural partner

but to a smaller extent than anti-masturbation and anti-farting-in-people's-faces 

for a global order centred on free-trading, industrial-capitalist Britain. 

Nope. The Royal Navy was the natural partner. You can't have free trade if pirates grab your ships or enemies sink them.

It promised low-cost and highly productive labour from colonial subjects.

But anti-masturbation promises you not just that your workers will be more productive because they are no longer fiddling with themselves and jizzing, but that you yourself will no longer need to wear glasses or have hair growing on the palms of your hands. 

 Since working for wages was inherently civilising,

but only if you didn't play with yourself and keep jizzing over your work bench.

 and since low wages encouraged prudence and sobriety, to be exploited was to be educated.

unless you kept playing with yourself and jizzing.

 The campaigns against the slave trade and slavery aligned well with the interests of an industrial and capitalist British Empire.

There is no evidence that this was the case. A few Quakers and Clapham Sect type propagandists might have had some influence at a particular time but there were military and political considerations of greater salience. Essentially, the power of the West Indian planters had to be curtailed. 1832 reduced their political power. But it increased the importance of manufacturing districts which wanted cheap bread, cheap sugar and cheap cotton. The working class got sick and tired of the Bible bashers who kept telling them that the true message of the Gospel was to work extra hard for less money so that the rich could live large the way God intended. 

 The end of slavery and the beginning of free labour, the leaders of the antislavery movement promised, would secure rebellious Caribbean subjects to British rule.

Subjects weren't rebellious. Slaves were. 

 The discipline of wage labour would be a civilising force,

provided workers didn't play with themselves and jizz all over the place 

teaching thrift and forbearance to people who were believed to be mired in moral and economic depravity.

So anti-masturbation, not anti-slavery, was what was truly important. The trouble is nobody wants to read about great anti-masturbationists like myself who have urged G20 leaders to form a Bananarama tribute band rather than just play with themselves incessantly. On the other hand, BoJo should definitely jizz all over Macron till he stops trying to steal our fish. 

 As the Trinidadian historian, later first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, Eric Williams argued in Capitalism and Slavery (1944), in the era of abolition, economic conditions favoured cheap, easily exploited wage labour over enslaved labour. 

He was wrong. That's why slave sugar from Cuba took market-share from Trinidad. Anyway, Indian indentured laborers weren't exactly free. 

Antislavery Britons believed in justice and freedom, and enjoyed how their beliefs made them feel.

But antislavery Britons were also anti-masturbationists though no doubt they'd crack one off now and again to feel better about themselves. 

 But what justice and freedom meant, and Britain’s responsibility to carry them around the world by force, if necessary, were shaped by imperial power. 

Which depended on whether the use of military force could earn an economic return. 

The public celebrated. Parliament made the laws, and capital called the tune.

No. The Royal Navy called the tune. Without it, Napoleon or Hitler or some other such nutter would have colonized us. Like the Indians, we would have been subjected to fellatio and cunnilingus and thus we would have been drained off our precious bodily fluids by evil foreigners. Anti-masturbation is about Sperm Conservation. The entire planet would be knee deep in jizz but for my own global anti-jerking off jihad. Mind it kindly. Aiyayo.