The Standard of Civilization: British World-Economic Hegemony and the Abolition of

the International Slave Trade (1807-1851)

Presented at:

The Politics of the Second Slavery: Conflict and Crisis on the Nineteenth Century

Atlantic Slave Frontier

Fernand Braudel Center October 15, 2010

Dale Tomich Fernand Braudel Center Binghamton University

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I. Introduction.

British abolition of the slave trade in 1807and its meaning have been subject to

interpretation and intense debate by politicians, scholars, and others since it occurred.

Whether regarded as necessary or contingent, or as the result of economic, moral, or

political forces, the abolition of the slave trade has by and large been treated as an event

within Britain and its Empire. It is generally privileged as the first of a sequence of events

leading to British slave emancipation, the abolition of the international slave trade, and

finally the dismantling of slavery throughout the hemisphere and elsewhere. Whether

viewed in moral, political, or economic terms, the agency of anti-slavery is

quintessentially British. For many the Saints crusade against slavery is regarded as an

integral element of British national character. Indeed, there seems to be a tacit

assumption that state policy is the result of the moral influence of the Saints (Anstey)

or of public opinion or the popular movement against slavery (Drescher). Once anti-

slavery was secured within Britain, the British state is treated as the agent of what is

virtually a moral crusade against the international slave trade. Although many scholars

regard slavery as incompatible with industrial capital and free trade and stress economic

motives for abolition (Williams), such moral and political interpretations are bolstered by

modern econometric studies that argue for the economic efficiency and profitability of

slavery. In either case, with the possible exception of the econometric studies, the archaic

and backward character of slavery is so universally accepted as to hardly bear

examination. At the same time, the movement against slavery is regarded as a defining

aspect of liberal capitalist modernity and treated through a straightforward narrative of

progress.

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Let me simply state that I am not convinced by such interpretations. Construed in

this manner, the debate over slavery operates within a binomial opposition between

political and moral factors on the one hand and economic factors on the other. Britain is

unilaterally privileged as the agency of anti-slavery. From such a perspective, slavery

outside the British Empire all too frequently is seen as an external context for British

anti-slavery. Non-British slave formations remain off stage and are only mobilized as

(passive) foils for British moral, political, or economic superiority. Inadequate attention is

paid to the volume of the trans-Atlantic slave trade (both legal and illegal) during the first

half of the nineteenth century and to the importance of dynamic new centers of slave-

based staple commodity production most notably, the US South, Cuba, and Brazil for

the expansion of the world economy and the redefinition of the world division of labor.

Consequently, such interpretations easily fall into a one-sided and linear narrative of

economic, political, and / or moral progress. Despite their increasingly sophisticated

analytical apparatus, they offer little beyond Thomas Clarksons own account of the

abolition of the slave trade as the intervention of Divine Providence or the celebratory

histories of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

I want to argue today that we may open up new perspectives for understanding

nineteenth century slavery and anti-slavery by exploring the efforts of the British state to

promote the abolition of the international slave trade. Pitt, Castlereagh, Canning, and

Palmerston were hardly misty-eyed humanitarians, fervent evangelicals, or under the

sway of social movements or popular opinion. Why should they have unilaterally and

systematically pursued as state policy the abolition of the slave trade? We may look for

an answer in the real and ideal interests of the British state itself (raison dtat). British

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anti-slavery policy needs to be examined, I propose, as a means to a political end -- the

establishment of British hegemony over the capitalist world-economy and more

specifically the creation of a new international order, institutional framework, and norms

of behavior among sovereign and formally equal states of the Atlantic. How the

international slave trade and the various anti-slave trade treaties affect interstate

relations? What role did these treaties play in the restructuring of the interstate system? I

want to suggest that the British states efforts to abolish the international slave trade

needs to be understood in the context of the creation of a new international political order

in the Atlantic world during the Age of Revolution, or, in the context of the

construction of British hegemony over the world-economy.

However, I want to emphasize that I am not arguing that abolitionism and British

anti-slavery are unimportant or that ending the slave trade was not the goal of British

policy. Rather, I want to suggest ways that efforts to abolish the international slave trade

might be more adequately understood within the framework of international politics, and

that politics might fruitfully be treated as the mediation between humanitarianism and

economic interest. Both abolitionism and anti-slavery policy operated in specific

international contexts from their inception. Various scholars have pointed out that the

American War for Independence provided the occasion for eclectic and disparate sources

of anti-slavery sentiment to coalesce into a movement. With the revolution in Saint

Domingue, the evangelical fervor and humanitarianism of British anti-slavery became

tempered by political and commercial concerns, while failure to conquer Saint Domingue

turned Pitt against the slave trade (Brown; Williams). Robin Blackburn offers a powerful

account of the conjuncture of domestic consensus in Britain and the possibility of global

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hegemony that shaped the decisive moment that Britain abolished its own slave trade in

1807. In his words: Britains oligarchy had a world to win if they could pull through

and a kingdom to lose if they did not (312). I wish to suggest that the international

situation at the end of the Napoleonic wars presented yet another set of conditions and

challenges that the British oligarchy had to confront in order to realize their global

ambition.

The cycle of independence in the Americas was a key moment for the

renegotiation and modification of basic structures of the interstate system, and the

campaign to abolish the international slave trade was a key component of that process.

Viewed in this light, British anti-slavery policy may be understood as part of an effort to

politically order the relations among states in the Americas and to establish a community

of states with shared institutions and norms of conduct under British hegemony that was

consistent with British interests. This project combines domination, legitimacy and moral

leadership in ways that have a clear affinity to Gramscis concept of hegemony. I would

like to review three interrelated and interdependent dimensions of this process: the

establishment of political order; the establishment of legal order; and the establishment of

moral order.

II. The Interstate System and the Anti-Slavery Campaign

After 1815, Britain was in a position to reshape the world economic, political, and

social order to its advantage. Whether or not one wishes to argue for an Industrial

Revolution, Britain was virtually the worlds only industrial country. The

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mechanization of the cotton industry fundamentally altered the relation between capital

and labor, supply and demand, and engendered forces that were to result in

unprecedented material and economic expansion and alter the world division of labor

(Hobsbawm). Further, Britain enjoyed clear financial commercial, and maritime

superiority over its rivals. Finally, it was the worlds dominant political power. Yet,

despite the disparity between Britain and the other states, the establishment of its

hegemony over the world-economy was by no means an automatic process. Rather, the

structures through which Britain exercised its dominance were constructed through a

prolonged, complex, and contested process of political maneuvering.

Distinguished diplomatic historian Ludwig Dehio calls attention to the distinctive

problems that confronted Britain at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Britain had to both

restore the Balance of Power in Europe and establish order in the Atlantic. These two

problems were intimately related to one another. Beginning in 1713 (the Peace of

Utrecht), Britain established the Balance of Power on the Continent and overseas

dominance. It avoided direct involvement in Continental politics but sought to arbitrate

them through its maritime supremacy. During the eighteenth century, European conflicts

were played out in the American colonies. After the Seven Years War in 1763 Britain

secured its maritime and colonial supremacy and was able to both manipulate the

continental Balance of Power and extend its maritime pre-eminence. However, by 1815

US and Haitian independence had, in their different ways, de-stabilized the colonial-

mercantile structure of European domination of the Americas. These events initiated a

cycle of political independence in the Americas that redefined the political character of

the region and its relation with Europe and exacerbated the problem of structuring

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interstate relations in the Atlantic. The emergence of independent states compelled the

Americas to be treated as a distinct issue. Britains capacity to control the European

Balance of Power and to continue overseas expansion were jeopardized if it could not

establish a stable political order in the Atlantic. The subsequent independence of South

America only made this problem more urgent.

At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, Britain orchestrated the restoration of the

Balance of Power in Europe. However, for Britains European policy to work, it had to

organize interstate relations among the newly independent states of the Americas in ways

that were compatible with British regional and world interests and ambition. To

accomplish this task, Britain had to achieve two political goals. First, it had to prevent the

recovery of European colonial power in the Americas. Secondly, it had to check United

States maritime and commercial power in the Americas. The US was the only

challenger to British overseas supremacy, and it was also outside of European politics

and the Congress. It is in this context that Britain pursued its efforts to abolish the

international slave trade.

British efforts to restructure interstate relations in the face of colonial decline and

the emergence of new independent states in the Americas were of course linked to and

complementary with British economic expansion and the organization of a world market.

Contrary to mercantilist expectations, Britains trade with the independent United States

was far greater than what it had been with the thirteen colonies. During the Napoleonic

Wars and Continental Blockade, Britain enjoyed exceptional access to Latin America.

After the war, it sought to remove colonial impediments and gain entry to Latin

American markets. It promoted the development of national economies and the

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formation of an international division of labor articulated through the market. Indeed, the

market was regarded as an entity outside of and above states and the interstate system. Its

unfettered operation was to regulate the economic relations among and within states.

However, I want to stress that Britains efforts to established a stable interstate

system and market relations in the Americas went hand in hand with further colonial

expansion elsewhere. In fact, Britain was engaged in unprecedented colonial expansion in

Africa, Asia, North America, and the Pacific. Arguably, the stabilization of interstate

relations in the Atlantic was the condition for colonial expansion in other regions of the

world.

III. The New Atlantic Political Order.

Britains effort to abolish the international slave trade and reorganize the

interstate system during the first half of the nineteenth century was a prolonged and

complex process that entailed negotiating continually shifting economic, political, and

social relationships. Despite numerous treaties calling for the abolition of the

international slave trade beginning in 1814, it took nearly fifty years to secure its

termination. During that period, more enslaved Africans were transported to the

Americas than at any other period in the history of the trade. Britain attempted to

negotiate the abolition of the slave trade with states that had neither the will nor the

interest in doing so, and indeed they resented Britains attempt to impose abolition as an

affront to their sovereignty. Further, the impact of abolition of the African trade on the

slave formations of the Americas increased the pressure for agreements in principle and

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gradualist solutions. Anti-slave trade initiatives were a regular feature of British

diplomacy. Nonetheless, Britains efforts to abolish the trade were at times inconsistent,

and British statesmen had to navigate between domestic abolitionist pressure and the

political and diplomatic requirements of the international situation.

Perhaps more fundamentally, slavery itself was dramatically reconfigured during

the first half of the nineteenth century. The abolition of the international slave trade and

British slave emancipation were not simply an outcome or the linear continuation of

British anti-slavery. Rather, the field of action was transformed after Britain abolished its

slave trade in 1807. Britain (and other actors) confronted a new set of problems,

possibilities and constraints. British efforts to abolish the slave trade had to confront the

expansion of the second slavery. The emergence of new slave commodity frontiers

created the crisis of the old colonial spaces that were unable to compete under the new

conditions. The formation of the US cotton frontier, the Cuban sugar frontier, and the

Brazilian coffee frontier entailed the massive redeployment of slave labor under new

conditions and the creation of new commodity circuits linking the Atlantic world. In

these new zones slavery itself was reconfigured with increasing scales of production,

growing pressure to increase the productivity of labor, new technologies of production

and transport, and new modes of labor discipline and social control. The traffic in slaves

legal and illegal, or international and internal was the motor of these developments,

even as slave trading operated under new logics and strategies.

The emergence of these new slave commodity frontiers represented a crisis of the

colonial division of labor in which competing metropolitan powers attempted to control

and manage the sources of production in their Atlantic colonies and confine trade within

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politically defined mercantilist circuits in order to promote national development. By the

late 1820s and early 1830s, sugar production stagnated and declined in the old slave

colonies of Britain and France as well as in the Brazilian Northeast whether or not they

had an active slave trade. The crisis of colonial slavery was accompanied by the

nationalization of slavery in the new productive zones. The creation of national slaveries

was the result of the independence of the new American states, but also of the varied

pressures to form national economies articulated with one another through the market,

not the least of which were Britains efforts to abolish the international slave trade. There

was a crisis of colonial slavery, but not a crisis of slavery as such. The second slavery

transformed the Atlantic as a political economic space. The strategic point of control in

the nineteenth century Atlantic would no longer be the sources of production, but the

flows of commodities.

Under these circumstances, continuation of the international slave trade

threatened British political and economic goals. Renewed prosecution of the slave trade

could provide the means for the old colonial powers France, Spain, and Portugal to

reassert their control over their American slave colonies. However, the requirements of

European politics complicated Britains strategy. In order to establish the Balance of

Power in Europe (and contain the threat of the social movement and nationalism whether

in the form of republicanism, Bonapartism, or socialism), Britain had to promote the

restoration of France, including its colonies, and support the Portuguese and Spanish

dynasties with their extensive slave holding colonies.

With the independence of Haiti, the French colonial empire was in shambles.

France had not only lost Haiti and Louisiana, but its navy and merchant marine were

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devastated, and its port cities were impoverished after the revolution wars and continental

blockade. The Haitian Revolution removed the worlds richest colony and the largest

producer of sugar and coffee from the Atlantic economy, and it ended French colonial

designs in the Americas. At the same time, it abolished slavery through the revolutionary

struggle of the enslaved population and may be seen as the first of a cycle of major slave

revolts that threatened Atlantic order from below. Against the opposition of the

abolitionists, Britain returned Martinique and Guadeloupe to France, and supported

French claims against Haiti. France followed an aggressively protectionist policy in its

remaining colonies to promote the recovery of its port cities and commercial fleet. By

1818, the French government, under British pressure, outlawed the slave trade to its

colonies. But it did little to enforce the law, and the trade continued unabated. By the

1820s Martinique, Guadeloupe, Guyana, and Reunion were producing more sugar than

Saint Domingue at its peak. The July Monarchy, eager for dtente with Britain,

definitively ended the French slave trade in 1831. However, by this time the demand for

slave labor had fallen off in the French colonies.

Both Portugal and Spain were part of the Vienna agreement. Both were then

severely weakened as a result of the decades of war and revolution. After the Peninsular

Wars each of them were susceptible to British influence and their ties with their extensive

colonial empires were weakened. In addition, the Portuguese emperor had established

the seat of his government in Rio de Janeiro with British assistance, and Portugal

remained under the shadow of annexation by Spain. On the other hand, the need to

protect both dynasties inhibited the execution of British policies against the slave trade.

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Portugal was actively involved in the slave trade and had colonies in Africa and

Brazil. By 1817, Portugal signed a treaty with Britain that prohibited the slave trade north

of the equator and gave British warships the right to inspect suspected Portuguese slaving

vessels. However, this agreement left the flourishing trade slave trade between Africa

and Brazil south of the equator untouched. This was to be a trade carried out by

Portuguese ships between Portuguese territories in Africa and Brazil. Portugal made a

vague commitment to abolishing the trade in the near future, but showed little inclination

to enforce the treaty. The slave trade was one of the issues caught up in the formation of

Portuguese territorial identity and the growing tensions with Brazil. With Brazilian

independence in 1822 the Portuguese slave trade lost its imperial justification. At the

same time, independent Brazil raised a new set of issues for British efforts to abolish the

slave trade. Slavery became a national phenomenon. With its rapidly expanding coffee

economy based on slavery the new planter elite aggressively defended slavery and

actively pursued the slave trade. (With Brazilian independence, Britain had to defend

Portuguese colonial claims in Africa in order to prevent interests in Luanda and Cabinda

from linking themselves to Brazil. Such an alliance would have created the kind of

slaving enclave insulated from the discipline of the world market that Britain was at pains

to avoid.)

The slave trading interest was not as important in Spain as it was in Portugal.

However, slave traders of various nations frequently sailed under the cover of the Spanish

flag. In 1817, Spain also acceded to British diplomacy and abolished the slave trade north

of the equator in exchange for an indemnity, and in 1820 the trade was prohibited south

of the equator as well. In addition, Spain granted British warships the right to inspect

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suspect slavers sailing under Spanish colors. However, like Portugal the Spanish

government demonstrated little inclination to enforce the ban. In practice, its position on

the slave trade was closely linked to Cuba. After the independence of Spanish America,

always faithful Cuba was the pivot of Spains efforts to establish its second empire.

Cuba remained a colony, and Spain itself was dependent upon Cuban revenues. With the

sugar boom, Cuba had a growing demand for slave labor, and the Cuban planters were

firmly committed to maintaining the transatlantic slave trade, having unrestricted access

to foreign markets, and guaranteeing domestic order. Cubans, Spaniards, North

Americans (either on their own account or in partnership with Cubans and Spaniards),

Portuguese and French engaged in the slave trade even after it was illegal. The United

States developed a strong economic presence in Cuba, and Spain maintained order.

The United States presented the most difficult obstacle for Britain. The

independent American republic was outside of European Balance of Power politics. It

was a Continental empire and a commercial and maritime power that presented Britain

with its only serious challenge in the Atlantic. US independence fractured the British

colonial system in the Americas and damaged the economic viability of the British West

Indian sugar colonies. The US developed close commercial relations first with Saint

Domingue and then Cuba and successively stimulated slave staple production in each.

The acquisitions of West Florida, Louisiana, and Texas opened expanding slave cotton

frontiers and internal struggles over slavery expansionism. The cotton South was the

major supplier of raw material to the British textile industry and made the US into a

major British trading partner. Even though it had outlawed the importation of slaves, the

US, and particularly the North, was heavily involved in the international slave trade, not

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only as traders, but also as shipbuilders and financiers. Their involvement with the slave

trade, particularly to Cuba and then Brazil strengthened commercial ties with those

countries. The South had a disproportionate voice in US politics and threatened to reopen

the slave trade and, on various occasions, considered annexation of Cuba, Mexico,

Central America, and the Amazon. US threats or Southern initiatives to revive the slave

trade threatened the creation of a stable Atlantic order under British hegemony. Thus,

Britain had to at once check US involvement in the slave trade and integrate it into the

Atlantic community of states, but doing so not only gave impetus to US national slavery

but also enabled the US overwhelming geographical advantage in the region and made it

a more effective commercial rival.

IV. The Legal Order.

The cycle of American independence was a key moment in which the interstate

system was re-negotiated and reformed in order to accommodate and incorporate the

independent states of the Americas. The problem for Britain was to create a new

institutional order in the Atlantic and new norms for interstate relations that nevertheless

were consistent with British power and aspirations and served British interests.

Domination alone was insufficient for these purposes. The ways in which Britain pursued

its anti-slavery strategy not only contributed to the political reordering of the Atlantic

state system but also to the creation of a stable institutional and normative order. The

institutional and normative dimensions of this process encourage us to go beyond the fact

of British political domination and consider the ways in which British action shaped the

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interstate system into what Gerrit Gong calls a society of states and how that society

served as an instrument of British hegemony. The society of states does not imply that

states had the same interests, but that there was a common framework and norms of

conduct within which individual states pursued their interests.

Unlike the previous interstate order that was organized through European dynastic

states and their imperial extensions, the new order was formed by sovereign and formally

equal territorial states. The independent states of the Americas made claims to

sovereignty in various forms, including both republic and empire while Cuba remained a

colony. Under such conditions, British policy effectively promoted territorialization and

nationalization of states. (To the degree that British policy prevented or weakened the

reassertion of European colonialism in the Americas, it also compelled European dynastic

states to behave as if they were liberal territorial states.) At the same time, it sought to

at once integrate the new American states into the society of states and bring them

under the discipline of the state system and the world market.

From this perspective, British anti-slavery may be seen as part of an effort to

institute new principles of sovereignty that brought the new states under the discipline of

the interstate system and world market. This project entailed an international legal order

that regulated the relations between states and between state and market. The doctrine of

state sovereignty, international law, and securing the consent of participating states

shaped the institutional framework of this new international order. If as Arrighi argues

(53) the new territorial states were controlled by communities of property holders, then

states had to possess institutional continuity and the capacity to adjust national and

private interests within a stable framework. The operation of markets and the flows of

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commodities and capital across national borders required that the rights of persons,

contracts, and property be guaranteed. Further, sovereign states had to negotiate their

relations with one another within a common political and legal framework. It is perhaps

no accident then that the reconfiguration of concepts of sovereignty and international law

during the first half of the nineteenth century are contemporaneous with the articulation

of the doctrine of comparative advantage.

Thus, international anti-slavery conventions may be seen instruments for

establishing by consent relations between sovereign territorial states and creating an

internationally agreed upon standard of law. It helped to create a new international legal-

political regime in which all states agreed to operate i.e. new rules of the game in

interstate relations. The point that I want to make here may appear self-evident, but it

nonetheless carries far-reaching implications. In order to make the interstate system

function and to transform it into a community of nations, Britain had to respect the

sovereignty of the new states and secure the consent of the new creole, (slaveholding)

elites. Consent took precedent over coercion. In its entire effort to abolish the

international slave trade, Britain proceeded by negotiating treaties and attempting to

secure compliance with treaty obligations. This is not to say that coercion was not an

element of the anti-slavery campaign, or that Britain did not abuse its position. But more

often than not, coercion was used to induce consent. Britains insistence that independent

Brazil assume the treaty commitments of Portugal, its attempts to secure cooperation in

the suppression of the slave trade once it was declared illegal, its claim to have the right

to search suspected slaving vessels on the high seas, and its equation of slave trading with

piracy may all be seen as points of contention between states. However, these were not

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merely instrumentalities for suppressing or continuing the slave trade. There were also

issues of sovereignty and international law at stake. The resolution of these issues was

obtained through conflict and negotiation. Through this process, new principles of

sovereignty and international law were established.

Viewed from the perspective of the reformation of the interstate system, Britains

strategy of attacking the international slave trade rather than the institution of slavery

itself appears not simply as a matter of expediency. Rather, it conforms to the conditions

of the emergent interstate order. Britain pursued its aims by challenging the external

conditions of the American slave regimes while formally respecting the sovereignty of

independent states and restraining itself from intervening directly in their internal affairs.1

By dealing with the slave trade rather than with slavery itself, British policy did not touch

directly on the domestic social question. Slaveholding elites remained firmly in control of

national affairs. This strategy allowed national elites to resolve questions of slavery, race,

and citizenship in national terms a wide range of response is possible -- while

pressuring them to do so in a manner consistent with the international order. Perhaps

more importantly, by not addressing the institution of slavery directly, Britain did not

encourage radical responses to the question of slavery, which would threaten the

economic and political status quo. Suppression of radical challenges to the slave order,

whether from Jacobinism, radical republicanism, or slave rebellion, remained the

1 Thomas Babbington MacCauleys statement on the occasion of the removal of the sugar

duties 9184) is relevant here: My special obligations with respect to Negro slavery ceased when slavery itself ceased in that part of the world for the welfare of which I, as a member of this House, was accountable. He refused to turn the fiscal code of the country into a penal code for the purposes of correcting vices in the institutions of independent states, or the tariff into an instrument for rewarding the justice and humanity of some foreign governments and punishing the barbarity of others (Williams, Capital & Slavery, 193).

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responsibility of national and local elites. While such a strategy empowered slaveholder

regimes in the national sphere, those regimes were also pressured to conform to the

conservative character of British liberalism in the international arena. Further, by

respecting the formal sovereignty of independent states, the emergent interstate order

allowed the social and material division of labor to form, as private actors inside and

outside the national state were able pursue their interests through the market. Such an

arrangement gave free reign to British industrial, commercial, and financial superiority

and transmuted the formal equality of sovereign states into substantive inequality.2

IV. The Moral Order.

Britains campaign against the international slave trade provided the dimension of

moral leadership that is a defining element of Britains hegemony over the new Atlantic

order. In its effort to reconstruct the interstate system through diplomacy and

international law based on mutual interest and (formally) equal rights among sovereign

states, Britain attempted to establish anti-slavery as a norm of international conduct. Anti-

slavery thus contributed to the construction of the interstate system as a moral order

among states. It provided a standard of performance against which nations are still judged

today and which forms part of what Garret Gong refers to as the standard of

civilization. This shared standard is a defining element of the community of civilized

states. It both enables reciprocal relations among states and provides the criteria for

determining which states are within the community of civilized states and which are

2 Cf. Cardoso and Faletto, the internalization of the external.

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not. Consequently, the standard of civilization also provides justification for the

civilizing mission.

The British anti-slavery campaign constructed British moral superiority and

mobilized the standard of civilization as the criteria for creating a hierarchy among

states, civilizations and peoples on moral and civilizational grounds. (Here we can speak

of the British states appropriation of the moral capital of the abolitionist movement

[Christopher Brown].) The struggle against the international slave trade was conducted as

a moral crusade. 3 Various authors have recognized that the campaign against slavery was

implicated in the production of colonial difference. Its classification of peoples,

civilizations, and states into categories of civilized, semi-civilized, and barbarous,

justified the civilizing mission and provided the rationale for subsequent colonizing

projects in Africa and Asia. At the level of the interstate system anti-slavery created the

conditions and classification that disqualified African polities and peoples from

participation in the community of nations and established conditions for colonial

tutelage.4

What has not received sufficient attention is that the standard of civilization also

gave Britain the moral edge that allowed it to apply judgments to the internal regimes of

American slave societies and the colonialism of others without intervening directly in

their affairs. (Condemnation of the international trade in slaves as piracy in 1827 must

3 The Congress of Vienna declared that slave trade is repugnant to principles of humanity and universal morality and the public voice in all civilized countries calls for its prompt suppression (Bethell, 14). 4 Palmerston felt that the Law of Nations governed the relations between European and American states and was not applicable to half naked and uncivilized Africans who should be compelled to abandon the slave trade where they were too barbarous to sign anti-slave trade treaties. (Bethell, 185-86.)

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also have had implications for the moral valorization of national slave regimes.) But

anti-slavery was not only a question of slavery, it was deployed as a universal moral and

civilizational criteria for the judgment not only of rival states, but of whole societies and

peoples:

it cannot be sufficiently borne in mind that all those Spaniards who are not absolutely indifferent to the abolition of the slave trade, are positively adverse to it. We think that an appeal to humanity must be conclusive. The word is not understood by a Spaniard appeal then to the humanity of such a nation in favor of a race which they look upon as mere beasts of the field (from George Villiers to Edward Villiers included in the latters Edinburgh Review 1836 in Murray Odious commerce, 99)

Within an international regime of formal political equality between states, anti-slavery

creates a regime of social and cultural inequality, even as it defines Britain as the cultural

arbiter of the interstate system, or better yet, the community of nations. The maintenance

of slavery [elsewhere] allowed the creation of a hierarchical [moral] ranking among

nations and produced moral inequality between equals such that Britain may tutor them

on proper comportment. In this way, anti-slavery constructs backwardness in the Age of

Improvement.

Anti-Slavery shapes the standard of civilization that enables Britain to establish

claims to moral superiority and a standard by which to judge other countries. It

establishes a normative standard for the behavior of states and societies and through the

application of this standard creates the backwardness (moral, cultural, economic, and

political) of slave holding societies. Through anti-slavery, British liberalism is construed

as the social, cultural, and political standard and other societies are pressured to conform

to its standards. Britain is thus able to regulate, and manipulate membership in the

community of nations and establish its hegemony over the interstate system.

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IV. Conclusion.

Let me conclude by saying the abolition of the slave trade deserves to be

examined as a subject that is both complex and important. To treat it within the crude

antimony between humanitarian concerns and material interest is far from adequate and

not entirely innocent. In many ways it reproduces the problematics of the apologetic

imperial histories of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that sought to justify

Britains claims that its own colonialism in Africa and Asia was a disinterested and

benevolent civilizing mission that benefitted the backward peoples. Indeed, the greatest

justification of the benevolence of British colonialism was that Britain abolished not only

the slave trade, but also slavery itself in its own colonies for humanitarian reasons. Here

politics disappear and we are left with ideological justification. Recognition of this

absence obliges us to develop more sophisticated analytical and interpretative

frameworks for studying slavery and anti-slavery, ones capable of addressing the

comprehensive scope and complexity of the political transformation of the interstate

system and world economy of the nineteenth centuries.

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References

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