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Brazilian Gold, Cuban Copper and the Final Frontier of British Anti-Slavery

2012; Frank Cass & Co.; Volume: 34; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/0144039x.2012.709039

1743-9523

Chris Evans,

Cuban History and Society

Abstract This paper concerns the problems that transnational mining companies posed for British abolitionists in the years after emancipation in Britain's Caribbean empire. British-owned mines, operating in Cuba and Brazil, were the largest slave enterprises in the western hemisphere c. 1840. Abolitionists were, of course, outraged by the existence of London-based companies that exploited slave labour, but an attempt in 1843 to prohibit the owning of slaves by British subjects anywhere in the world, regardless of local jurisdiction, proved ineffectual. This paper explores the reasons for this failure and raises questions about the potency of abolitionism within early Victorian political culture. Notes John Hardy junior to Palmerston, December 27, 1836, FO 84/201, The National Archives (hereafter TNA). David Turnbull, Travels in the West. Cuba; With Notices of Porto Rico, and the Slave Trade (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1840), 9. Seymour Drescher, The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). As much recent literature makes clear, bonded labour was a dynamic and adaptable element in the nineteenth-century world economy. See David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Dale W. Tomich, 'The "Second Slavery": Bonded Labor and the Transformation of the Nineteenth-Century World Economy', in Through the Prism of Slavery: Labor, Capital and World Economy, ed. Dale W. Tomich (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2004), 56–71; Laird W. Bergad, The Comparative Histories of Slavery in Brazil, Cuba and the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R.H. Campbell and A.S. Skinner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 387. Howard Temperley, British Anti-Slavery 1833–1870 (London: Longman, 1972), 14. The Act was not entirely without precedent. Joseph Foster Barham, MP for Stockbridge, introduced a bill in 1815 to curb British involvement in trading slaves to countries where importation remained legal. The proposals in the bill, which ultimately failed in the House of Lords, were far-reaching and included a prohibition on the lending of money secured on land in such countries. See Foster Barham's entry in The History of Parliament Online, http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1790-1820/member/foster-barham-joseph-1759-1832 (accessed February 20, 2012). I am grateful to an anonymous referee for bringing this to my attention. For this earlier phase, see A.J.R. Wood, 'The Gold Cycle, c. 1690–1750', in Colonial Brazil, ed. Leslie Bethell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 190–243. Geoffrey Alderman, 'Goldsmid, Sir Isaac Lyon, first baronet (1778–1859)', in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford University Press, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/10920 (accessed March 13, 2010). The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry for John Williams, the father of the IBMA director, gives some impression of the family's mining interests: Edmund Newell, 'Williams, John (1753–1841)', in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford University Press, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/29522 (accessed March 9, 2010). Imperial Brazilian Mining Association, Reports of the Directors to Shareholders, vol. 1, 105. The directors' reports from 1826 to 1841 are shelved in the British Library at 08247.g.14. Slave numbers hovered around the 400 mark through the 1830s: see Slavery at Gongo Soco in Brazil, 1826–1857 (Penzance, 1864), 3. This anonymous and privately distributed publication is attributed in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography to the mining engineer Jory Henwood who travelled to Brazil on behalf of the IBMA in 1843: Denise Crook, 'Henwood, (William) Jory (1805–1875)', in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford University Press, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/12997 (accessed November 3, 2009). Malcolm Deas, 'Powles, John Diston (1787/8–1867)', in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H.C.G. Matthew and Harrison (Oxford University Press, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/57749 (accessed March 15, 2010). Report of the directors to the sixth annual general meeting, May 5, 1836, St John d'El Rey Mining Company archive, Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin (hereafter St John d'El Rey archive); George Pilkington to Joseph Sturge, September 17, 1840, Mss Brit. Emp. s. 22 G79, The Bodleian Library of Commonwealth and African Studies at Rhodes House (hereafter Rhodes House). Edmund Newell, '"Copperopolis": The Rise and Fall of the Copper industry in the Swansea District, 1826–1921', Business History 32, no. 3 (1990): 78–80. The redevelopment of El Cobre is documented in Chris Evans, 'El Cobre: Cuban ore and the globalisation of Swansea copper, 1830–1870', http://glam.academia.edu/ChrisEvans/Papers/743474/El_Cobre_Cuban_ore_and_the_globalisation_of_Swansea_copper_1830–1870. For the earlier period, see María Elena Díaz, The Virgin, the King, and the Royal Slaves of El Cobre: Negotiating Freedom in Colonial Cuba, 1670–1780 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). Vicente González Loscertales and Inés Roldán de Montaud, 'La minería del Cobre en Cuba. Su organización, problemas administrativos y repercusiones sociales (1828–1849)', Revista de Indias 40, nos. 159–162 (1980): 275. In 1841, when the Cobre Company had a slave workforce of 479, the St John Company had 450 at Morro Velho: Report of the directors to the twelfth annual general meeting, May 27, 1842, St John d'El Rey archive. Cuba could boast the New World's largest sugar plantations at this time, but they were significantly smaller than the British-owned mines. A survey of 437 ingenios in the Havana region in 1826 found an average complement of 105 slaves: Robert L. Paquette, Sugar is Made with Blood: The Conspiracy of La Escalera and the Conflict between Empires over Slavery in Cuba (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 52. BFASS minutes, July 26, 1839, Mss Brit. Emp. s. 20 E2/6, Rhodes House. Undated instructions to Captain George Pilkington, Mss Brit. Emp. s. 22 G79, Rhodes House. British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Reporter [hereafter BFASR], October 7, 1840, 257–8. 'CRF' to J.H. Tredgold, June 28, 1841, Mss Brit. Emp. s. 22 G77, Rhodes House. BFASR, September 22, 1841, 1, col. 3. When the Cobre Company first came under scrutiny from the Foreign Office, its local manager was careful to claim that its workers were 'acclimated Africans of long Standing' rather than freshly landed bozales: John Hardy junior to Palmerston, December 27, 1836, FO 84/201, TNA. BFASS minutes, October 30 and November 27, 1840, and January, 15; July 2 and August 13, 1841, Mss Brit. Emp. s. 20 E2/6, Rhodes House. John Scoble to Lord Brougham, September 10, 1841, Brougham MS 25000, University College London Archives. BFASR, September 22, 1841, 1, col. 3. Brougham's speech introducing the petition is reported in Hansard, House of Lords, 1841, vol. 59, 20 September, cols 608–10. BFASS minutes, February 7, 1842, Mss Brit. Emp. s. 20 E2/6, Rhodes House. BFASS minutes, January 1, 1841, Mss Brit. Emp. s. 20 E2/6, Rhodes House; Temperley, British Anti-Slavery, 232. Morning Chronicle, March 5, 1841, p. 1, col. 2; Thirtieth Report of the Directors of the Imperial Brazilian Mining Association, Read at the Half-Yearly Meeting, on Thursday, 13th May, 1841 (London, 1841), 6–7. Temperley, British Anti-Slavery, chapter 3. See Temperley, British Anti-Slavery, 137–67, and C. Duncan Rice, '"Humanity Sold for Sugar!": The British Abolitionist Response to Free Trade in Slave-Grown Sugar', Historical Journal 13, no. 3 (1970): 402–18. Recent contributions to the literature argue for a more complex reading of the relationship between anti-slavery and laissez faire and suggest that the two were not antithetical values within British political culture. See Richard Huzzey, 'Free Trade, Free Labour and Slave Sugar in Victorian Britain', Historical Journal 53, no. 2 (2010): 359–79, and Simon Morgan, 'The Anti-Corn Law League and British Anti-Slavery in Transatlantic Perspective', Historical Journal 52, no. 1 (2009): 87–107. The fact remains, however, that the debate over sugar duties produced a politically debilitating spat in the 1840s. These included, Kentish claimed, the prominent Quakers businessmen Joseph John Gurney and Joseph Fry. The Odd Fellow, June 16, 1841, 100, col. 2. 'The humble PETITION of the Directors of the St John del Rey Mining Company' enclosed with J.D. Powles to Lord Aberdeen, June 17, 1843, FO 84/501, TNA. 'Slave Trade Suppression Bill', FO 84/501, TNA. Privately, the St John directors knew different. 'Mine Report no. 436', dated 19 March 1842, spoke of an 'Outbreak of Negroes at Gongo Soco/Their Minds poisoned by pretended Philanthropists in England/The disturbance put down in a short time at the expence of a few broken heads' (Extracts of miscellaneous reports 1842–1844, St John d'El Rey archive). 'Lord Brougham's Suppression of Slavery Bill' enclosed with Joshua Walker to Lord Aberdeen, June 16, 1843, FO 84/501, TNA. John Orbell, 'Baring, Alexander, first Baron Ashburton (1773–1848)', in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford University Press, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/1380 (accessed June 23, 2010). Indeed, he was fresh from putting his seal to the 1842 Webster–Ashburton Treaty, which resolved territorial disputes along the US–Canadian border and, ironically in view of the role that Ashburton was to play in undermining Brougham's bill, laid the basis for Anglo-American naval cooperation in combating the slave trade. George Keogh to Joseph Buckley, August 9, 1843 (quotation), and J.D. Powles to Ashburton, July 10, 1843, Letters no. 4, St John d'El Rey archive. Gladstone, when pressed on the government's view, pledged 'every assistance' but cautioned that 'ineffectual legislation would occasion discredit to the House, and injury to the cause to which the noble and learned lord, the author of the bill, had at heart'. BFASR, August 9, 1843, 151, col. 1. The bill's sponsor was Robert Vernon, later first Baron Lyveden, the rather lacklustre Whig MP for Northampton: the Directors to Charles Herring, August 2, 1843, Letters no. 4, St John d'El Rey archive. Vernon had been under-secretary at the Colonial Office in 1840 when a copy of the 'Introductory Letter … on the Frightful Horrors of Modern Slavery', J.A. Kentish's exposé of the IBMA, was delivered by its author. Vernon's view then was that the British government could not 'interfere to any good purpose'. See his marginal annotation on J.A. Kentish to Lord John Russell, November 18, 1840, CO 318/148, TNA. BFASS minutes, August 25, 1843, Mss Brit. Emp. s. 20 E2/7, Rhodes House. The Anti-Slavery Reporter elaborated: the amended bill 'legalizes the holding of slaves those companies already possess … Now there is little doubt that most, if not all the slaves possessed by the mining companies, have been illicitly imported into Cuba and Brazil, and consequently are forfeited under the laws of those countries, and their treaties with Great Britain for the suppression of the slave trade. It is likewise certain that the purchase of such slaves by these companies is a felony under the present laws. Why then should the holding of these slaves be now legalized?' BFASR, July 26, 1843, 140, col. 2. The Act was so forgotten that it features in none of the standard histories of British abolitionism or is confused with Lord Aberdeen's Act of 1845. The exception is Marika Sherwood's After Abolition: Britain and the Slave Trade since 1807 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007), which mentions the Act at 163–65. Richard F. Burton, The Highlands of Brazil (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1869), I, 272. Brougham's original bill had ruled out the hiring of slaves. The Act made no mention of it. The hiring out of slaves was a prominent feature of labour markets in both Cuba and Brazil: Bergad, Comparative Histories of Slavery, 194–5. 'Summary of the distribution of the operatives employed at the Royal Consolidated Cobre Mines', enclosed in John Hardy junior to Palmerston, December 27, 1836, FO 84/201, TNA. J.D. Powles to Charles Herring, September 6, 1843, Letters no.4, St John d'El Rey archive. Annual reports to shareholders for 1843 and 1849, St John d'El Rey archive. The assessment of the modern historian of the Company is this. 'With its renting policy, the St John was able to hire slaves in the peak of their productive years, and to discard them at no cost as they became less productive. From the company's perspective, this procedure contained the most attractive features of the slave and free labor systems; it provided a captive labour force with minimal social obligations'. Marshall C. Eakin, 'Business Imperialism and British Enterprise in Brazil: The St. John d'el Rey Mining Company Limited, 1830–1960', Hispanic American Historical Review 66, no. 4 (1986): 711–13. W.J. Henwood to BFASS, December 22, 1851, Mss Brit. Emp. s. 22 G 79, Rhodes House. See John Candler and Wilson Burgess, Narrative of a Recent Visit to Brazil to Present an Address on the Slave-Trade and Slavery, Issued by the Religious Society of Friends (London: Friends' Book and Tract Depository, 1853), 35, for a contemporary discussion. David R. Murray, Odious Commerce: Britain, Spain and the Abolition of the Cuban Slave Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), chapters 9 and 10; Paquette, Sugar is Made with Blood, passim. An American visitor of the 1860s found 'perfectly naked Chinese … the perspiration running off them' at work underground: Samuel Hazard, Cuba with Pen and Pencil (Oxford: Signal Books, 2007), 376. See also Evelyn Hu-Dehart, 'Chinese Coolie Labour in Cuba in the Nineteenth Century: Free Labour or Neo-Slavery?', Slavery and Abolition 14, no. 1 (1993): 67–86. Matt D. Childs, 'A Case of "Great Unstableness": A British Slaveholder and Brazilian Abolition', The Historian 60, no. 4 (1998), 717–40. Karen Roberts, 'Slavery and Freedom in the Ten Years' War, Cuba, 1868–1878', Slavery and Abolition 13, no. 3 (1992): 181–200. Selective manumission was practised for many years by the St John Company as a form of control over its workforce. See Matt D. Childs, 'Master-Slave Rituals of Power at a Gold Mine in Nineteenth-Century Brazil', History Workshop Journal 53, no. 1 (2002): 43–72. David Turley, The Culture of English Antislavery, 1780–1860 (London: Routledge, 1991), 16. The Cobre Company was divided into 12,000 shares in its first years. The Santiago Company, on the eve of its dissolution, was divided 17,000 ways. Turnbull, Travels in the West, 14; A. Snowden Piggott, The Chemistry and Metallurgy of Copper, including a Description of the Principal Copper Mines of the United States and Other Countries (Philadelphia: Lindsay and Blakiston, 1858), 215. Nicholas Draper, The Price of Emancipation: Slave-Ownership, Compensation and British Society at the End of Slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), chapter 2. Draper, The Price of Emancipation, passim. This compensation was sometimes disguised as restitution for shipping illegally condemned by British vice-admiralty courts during the Napoleonic Wars, as was the case with the £300,000 pledged to Portugal in 1817, or took the form of writing off wartime loans. The Anglo-Spanish treaty of 1817, on the other hand, provided for a £400,000 payment, which was openly described as 'for the losses which are a necessary consequence of the abolition of the said Traffic'. Jenny S. Martinez, 'Antislavery Courts and the Dawn of International Human Rights Law', The Yale Law Journal 117 (2007–2008): 577. The British had good reason for keeping on friendly terms with both Spain and Portugal: see Andrew Lambert, 'Slavery, Free Trade and Naval Strategy, 1840–1860', in Slavery, Diplomacy and Empire: Britain and the Suppression of the Slave Trade, 1807–1975, ed. Keith Hamilton and Patrick Salmon (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2009), 65–80. Christopher Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade: The Suppression of the African Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century (London: Longmans, 1949), 139–46. Only in Africa did the British feel free to disregard local jurisdiction, and even there it was not until the 1840s that British officialdom really satisfied itself that African polities were so 'barbarous' that they fell outside the law of nations: Robin Law, 'Abolition and Imperialism: International Law and the British Suppression of the Atlantic Slave Trade', in Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa, and the Atlantic, ed. Derek R. Peterson (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010), 150–74. 'I am strongly persuaded', wrote Joseph Sturge, 'of the correctness of the conclusion which Granville Sharp so early arrived at that to destroy slavery is the only means to extinguish the slave trade': Temperley, British Anti-Slavery, 172. Seymour Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 407–11, 453. Heather Montgomery, 'Child Sex Tourism: Is Extra-Territorial Legislation the Answer?', in Tourism and Crime: Key Themes, ed. David Botterill and Trevor Jones (Oxford: Goodfellow Publishing, 2010), 69–84, esp. 76. There is considerable debate as to whether such an 'abolitionist' approach to sex workers is an appropriate or effective response to a socially complex sex trade. Additional informationNotes on contributorsChris Evans Chris Evans teaches history at teaches history at the Faculty of Business and Society, University of Glamorgan, Treforest CF37 1DL, UK.