A People’s History of the World

by Chris Harman

Servants and slaves who worked together and socialised together could also fight back together. Cases of servants and slaves helping each other to run away began to worry the plantation owners. Their concern was highlighted by ‘Bacon’s Rebellion’ in Virginia in 1676, when opponents of the governor and the wealthy planters offered freedom both to indentured servants and to slaves who were prepared to help seize control of the colony. The motives of the rebels were mixed – one of their demands was for war to seize more land from the Indians. 43 But their actions showed how poor whites and Africans could unite against the landowners. The response of the colonial landowners was to push through measures which divided the two groups.

  As Robin Blackburn records in his history of colonial slavery, the Virginian House of Burgesses sought to strengthen the racial barrier between English servants and African slaves. In 1680 it prescribed 30 lashes on the bare back ‘if any negro or other slave shall presume to lift up his hand in opposition to any Christian’. A Virginia act of 1691 made it lawful ‘to kill and destroy such negroes, mulattos and other slaves’ who ‘unlawfully absent themselves from their masters’ or mistresses’ service’. It also decreed that any white man or woman who married ‘a negro, mulatto or Indian’ should be banished from the colony. 44 In other words, the planters recognised that far from white and black automatically hating each other, there was a likelihood of some whites establishing close relations with the slaves – and the colonial authorities sought to stamp this out by giving slave owners the power of life and death. It was now that racism began to develop as an ideology.

  The prevalence of racism today leads people to think it has always existed, arising from an innate aversion of people from one ethnic background for those from another. Slavery is then seen as a byproduct of racism, rather than the other way round.

  Yet in the ancient and medieval worlds, people did not regard skin colour as any more significant than, say, height, hair colour or eye colour. Tomb paintings from ancient Egypt show fairly random mixtures of light, brown and black figures. Many important figures in Roman history came from north Africa, including at least one emperor; no text bothers to mention whether they were light or dark skinned. In Dutch paintings of the early sixteenth century, black and white people are shown as mixing freely – as, for instance, in Jordaens’s painting Moses and Zipporah , which shows Moses’s wife as black. 45

  There was often deep hostility to Jews in medieval Europe. But this was hostility on the basis of religion, as Jews were the only non-Catholic group in a totally Christian society, not on the basis of allegedly inherent physical or mental characteristics. Their persecutors would leave them alone if they sacrificed their religious beliefs. What was involved was irrational religious hatred, not irrational biological racism. This only arose with the slave trade.

  The early slave traders and slave owners did not rely on racial differences to excuse their actions. Instead they turned to ancient Greek and Roman texts which justified the enslavement of those captured in war, or at least in ‘just wars’. Providing the owners had acquired their slaves by legitimate means, the slaves were private property and could be disposed of in any way. So it was that John Locke, the English philosopher so much admired by Voltaire, could justify slavery in the 1690s – and, through ownership of shares in the Royal Africa Company, be a beneficiary of the slave trade 46 – yet reject the idea that Africans were intrinsically different to Europeans. 47

  But the old arguments were not well fitted to the scale of the Atlantic slave economy by the mid-eighteenth century. It was hard to claim the slaves were all prisoners from ‘just wars’. People knew they had been bought from merchants in Africa or born as the children of slaves. 48 And the slave traders and owners always needed arguments to use with those white people, the great majority, who did not own slaves. In the colonies the smaller farmers were often resentful at the way the slave owners grabbed the best land and, by using slaves at low cost, undercut them. In ports like London escaped slaves often found refuge in the poor slum areas. The traders and owners needed a way of making people despise, mistrust and fear the slaves. The ‘war prisoners’ doctrine hardly did this. By contrast, ideas that those of African descent were innately inferior to those of European descent fitted the needs of the traders and planters perfectly.

  Christian supporters of slavery claimed they had found a justification by references in the Bible to the fate of the descendants of one of Noah’s sons, Ham. But there were also attempts at allegedly ‘scientific’ justifications, in terms of the ‘subhuman savagery’ of Africans – for instance in Edward Long’s History of Jamaica , published in 1774. Such arguments enabled some thinkers influenced by the Enlightenment to continue to support slavery. 49 They could proclaim, ‘All men are created equal’, and add that non-whites were not men.

  Racism did not emerge at once as a fully formed ideology. It developed over some three centuries. So, for instance, the early attitude to the native inhabitants of North America tended to be that they differed from Europeans because they faced different conditions of life. Indeed, one problem facing the governors of Jamestown (Virginia) was that Indian life had a considerable attraction for white colonists, and ‘they prescribed the death penalty for running off to live with Indians’. 50 The preference of ‘thousands of Europeans’ for ‘the Indian way of life’ found a reflection in the positive view of the ‘state of nature’ presented by influential writings like Rousseau’s. 51 Even in the mid-eighteenth century ‘the distentions later created by the term “red men” were not to be found … Skin colour was not considered a particularly significant feature’. 52 Attitudes changed in the late eighteenth century as European settlers increasingly clashed with the Indian population over ownership and use of land. There was an increasing depiction of Indians as ‘bloodthirsty monsters’, and ‘they were increasingly referred to as tawny pagans, swarthy philistines, copper-coloured vermin and, by the end of the eighteenth century, as redskins’. 53 Racism developed from an apology for African slavery into a full-blown system of belief into which all peoples of the Earth could be fitted as ‘white’, ‘black’, ‘brown’, ‘red’ or ‘yellow’ – even though many Europeans are pinkish red, many Africans are brown, many people from south Asia are as fair skinned as many Europeans, Native Americans are certainly not red, and Chinese and Japanese people are certainly not yellow.

  Some 60 or more years ago the Marxist C L R James and the Caribbean nationalist Eric Williams drew attention to the importance of slavery both in creating racism and in developing the economies of western Europe. In doing so, they built on an argument put by Karl Marx about the link between chattel slavery in the New World and wage slavery in the Old.

  Their argument has often been attacked since. After all, say the critics, many of the profits from slavery were not invested in industry, but spent on luxury mansions where merchants and absentee plantation owners could mimic the lifestyles of the old aristocracy; and any gains to the economies of north west Europe would have been eaten up by the cost of the wars fought over control of the slave-based colonial trade. 54 As one economic history textbook from the 1960s puts it:

  Foreign trade profits do not constitute a significant contribution to saving destined for industrial investments … Attempts to measure slaving profits have produced quite insignificant values in relation to total trade and investment flows. 55

  But this is to abstract from the very real effects slave-based production had on the economic life of western Europe, and especially Britain, in the eighteenth century. What is usually called the ‘triangular trade’ provided outlets for its burgeoning handicraft and putting-out industries. Ironware, guns and textiles from Europe were sold in return for slaves to merchants on the African coast; the slaves were transported in appalling conditions (it was financially more remunerative to allow 10 per cent to die than to provide conditions in which all would survive the crossing) to be sold in the Americas; and the money obtained was used to buy tobacco, sugar – and later raw cot
ton – for sale in Europe. 56

  The sugar plantations required relatively advanced equipment for milling the cane and refining the juice and bought it from European manufacturers. The trade boosted the shipping and shipbuilding industries which were increasingly important employers of skilled and unskilled labour. Some of the profits which flowed through the trading ports of Liverpool, Bristol and Glasgow were invested in industrial processes connected to the colonial produce or financed new transport links (canals, turnpike roads) to the inland British market.

  Slavery did not produce the rise of capitalism, but was produced by it. English industry and agriculture were already displaying a dynamism in the late seventeenth century, at a time when plantation production in the West Indies and North America existed only in embryo. It was because of this dynamism that the slave trade took off. The demand for colonial produce existed precisely because a dynamic British economy led the consumption of tobacco and sugar to spread downwards from the upper classes to the urban and even rural masses. The looting of colonies and the enslavement of peoples could not alone create such a domestic dynamic – the Spanish and Portuguese economies stagnated despite their colonial empires. The British economy grew because the growing use of free labour at home enabled it to exploit slave labour in the Americas in a new way.

  It was also the dynamism of a domestic economy increasingly based on wage labour that enabled British (and to a lesser extent French) slavers to obtain their human cargoes in Africa. Most of the slaves were bought from the upper classes of African coastal states, since the slave traders themselves were too ignorant of the African interior simply to kidnap millions of inland people and transport them long distances to the coast. They got African merchants and rulers to do that, supplying them in return with better-quality goods than could be obtained in other ways. But the Africans were not ‘ignorant savages’, despite the racist mythology. They lived in relatively sophisticated, often literate societies, comparable in level to most of those of late medieval Europe. It was only because of the first advances of capitalism that the British economy had begun to surpass that level. A monstrous form of commerce was thus possible in the eighteenth century which could not have occurred at the time of Leo Africanus (in the early sixteenth century) when most African and west European states were at a similar level of economic development.

  Plantation slavery was a product of the fact that Holland and England had already embarked on capitalist expansion. But it also fed back into capitalism, providing it with a powerful boost.

  In doing so, slavery played an important role in shaping the world system in which capitalism matured. It helped provide England with the impetus it needed to absorb Scotland (after the Scottish ruling class’s own attempt to establish a colony in Panama, the Darien scheme, fell apart) and to begin, in the second half of the eighteenth century, to create a new empire in the east through the East India Company’s conquest of Bengal.

  The other side of the rise of Britain’s ruling class was the debilitation of much of Africa. The slave trade provided rulers and merchants in coastal regions with access to relatively advanced consumer goods and weapons without having to develop their own industries – indeed, imported goods ‘undercut African industry’. 57 A successful state was one which could wage war on others and enslave their peoples. Ruling classes inclined towards peace could only survive by becoming militaristic. When states like Jolof, Benin and Kongo tried to stop their merchants supplying slaves, they found the rulers of other states were gaining in wealth and power by doing so, 58 while pre-class societies faced destruction unless new military ruling classes emerged. Those on the coast gained by plundering those inland.

  Some historians have claimed the resulting growth of ‘centralised African states’ represented a form of ‘progress’. But this was accompanied by an underlying weakening of the material base of society. Population growth was stunted at precisely the time it surged ahead in Europe and North America. 59 In west Africa there was even a decline in population between 1750 and 1850. 60 This, in turn, left the African states ill-equipped to resist European colonial invasion at the end of the nineteenth century. While western Europe moved forward economically, Africa was held back.

  Chapter 6

  The economics of

  ‘free labour’

  In 1771 a former barber and wig maker, Richard Arkwright, opened the world’s first water-powered spinning mill at Cromford in Derbyshire. He employed 600 workers, mainly children, who could do the work of ten times that number of hand spinners. In 1775 a Scottish mathematical instrument maker, James Watt, joined forces with the Birmingham engineer Matthew Boulton to produce steam engines which could turn machinery, haul enormous loads and, eventually, propel ships and land vehicles at speeds previously undreamed of. In 1783–84 Henry Cort devised a superior ‘puddling’ method of smelting iron and a rolling mill for processing it.

  The way was open, through integrating these inventions and others, to develop a whole new way of producing, based upon steam-powered factories employing hundreds or even thousands of people. By the end of the century there were 50 such factories in the Manchester area alone. It was not long before entrepreneurs elsewhere in Europe and across the Atlantic were trying to imitate the new methods. The world of the urban artisans and the rural putting-out system was giving birth to the industrial city.

  Just as these changes were beginning to unfold, a Scots professor set out what he saw as the fundamental principles of the new economic system. Today Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations is usually treated as the bible of conservatism. But when it appeared, it represented a radical challenge to the prevailing order in Europe and to those who still hankered after that order in Britain.

  Smith was part of the ‘Scottish Enlightenment’, a group of thinkers which included Adam Ferguson and David Hume. They had been horrified by the attempts of the Stuarts to use the feudal Scottish Highlands to reimpose absolutist monarchy on England, and were determined to supplant what they saw as an old order based on prejudice. This led them to a much closer affinity with the European Enlightenment than most English thinkers of the time. Smith was an admirer of the Encyclopédie and friendly with Voltaire, d’Holbach, Helvetius and Rousseau. 61 The Wealth of Nations was part of the Enlightenment attempt to clean the world of feudal ‘irrationality’.

  It contrasted modern ways of creating goods to enhance people’s lives (‘the wealth of nations’) with old institutions and methods which prevented these being implemented – what characterised ‘the opulent countries of Europe’ and what prevailed ‘anciently, during the prevalency of the feudal government’. 62 It began with a description of a modern pin ‘manufactory’ where a huge increase in the productivity of labour resulted from an elaborate division of labour which had each worker carrying out one small task.

  Smith turned the traditional views of where wealth came from upside down. In the early medieval period wealth was seen as lying in land. From the 1500s onwards ‘mercantilist’ notions which focused on wealth in gold and silver were increasingly popular.

  Smith challenged both these notions and insisted human labour was the source of wealth. ‘The annual labour of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with the necessities and conveniences of life,’ he wrote. ‘Labour is the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities’. 63

  That labour could be used in two ways – ‘productively’ or ‘unproductively’. ‘Productive’ labour helped create durable products which could be sold, either to be consumed by those engaged in other labour or as ‘capital’ to be used in producing more goods. In either case its output helped to create more output, making ‘the wealth’ of ‘the nation’ expand.

  Labour was ‘unproductive’ when it was immediately consumed without helping to create some new commodity. Such was the labour of ‘menial servants’ who waited on people. Once performed, their labour simply disappeared. A man would grow rich by employing many productive labourers: ‘He grows poo
r by maintaining a multitude of menial servants.’ Just as ‘unproductive’, Smith added, was

  the labour of some of the most respectable orders in society … The sovereign, for example, with all the officers both of justice and war who serve under him, the whole army and navy, are unproductive labourers. They are … maintained out of the annual produce of other people … In the same class must be ranked some of the gravest and most important, and some of the most frivolous professions: churchmen, lawyers, physicians, men of letters, players, buffoons, musicians. 64

  States across Europe in the eighteenth century provided a host of sinecures – well-paid appointments involving no real duties – which allowed hangers-on at the courts and in governments to live in luxurious idleness. Smith’s doctrine was an onslaught on them. It was also an onslaught on landowners who lived off rents without investing in agriculture. It was a demand for the developing market system to be freed from the burdens that were holding it back. It was a programme for reform in Britain and one that could easily be interpreted as for revolution in Europe.

  Smith further argued against any attempts by the state to control trade or conquer other lands. Left to themselves, people would always exchange the goods produced by their own labour for a selection of the best and cheapest goods produced by other people’s labour, he said. Everyone would concentrate on the tasks they were best at, seeking to perform them as efficiently as possible, and no one would have an interest in producing things not wanted by others. The market would coordinate people’s activities in the best possible way.

  Attempts by governments to favour their own producers could only lead to people expending more labour than was necessary. Such controls might benefit certain interest groups, but Smith insisted they would reduce the ‘national wealth’. Free trade was the only rational way to proceed.