A History of Britain, Volume 2

by Simon Schama

  Rites of passage figure heavily in this new-old culture, none more important than funerals. From the beginning of the slave experience, cool observers like Thomas Phillips noticed that the Africans invariably treated death as freedom, and, in extremis, even shackled, did their utmost to swim to it (on the journey) or run away to it (on the islands). Was this not the ultimate irony of slave culture – that the masters would do what they could to keep their property alive, and the slaves would pay them back by seeking the liberation of death? To die in the Caribbean was to go home, and, to the bewilderment of clergymen like the Reverend Griffith Hughes, in Jamaica in the 1730s burials were occasions for outbursts of joy as well as solemnity. The bodies were laid out in fresh white cloths and were borne to the grave in a slow procession, the women walking in pairs and dressed in white, the West African colour of mourning; ‘both men and women which accompanying the corpse sing and howle in a sorrowful manner’, as another observer, John Taylor, noted in Jamaica. Once the body was interred, along with it went provisions: cassava-bread loaves, roasted fowl, rum, tobacco ‘with fier to light his pipe withal . . . and this they doe . . . in order to sustain him in his journey beyond those pleasant hills in their own country wither they say he is now going to live at rest’. Once the grave was filled up with dirt, the mood of the moment changed to singing, clapping and dancing, using gourd rattles, drums and baffalo, many of the mourners ‘desiring the corpse [by kissing the grave] to acquaint their mother, father, husband and other relations of their present condition and slavery as he passeth through their country towards the pleasant mountains’. It was, in effect, a letter home, and the dead would be their courier.

  Also deposited in the graves (and recovered now from excavations in slave cemeteries on Barbados) were ornaments appropriate to a happy and ceremonious homecoming. From humble materials – dog teeth, copper wire and pieces of brass, as well as other objects familiar in African jewellery such as cowrie shells and glass beads – amulets and charms were lovingly fashioned. Slaves, who had been dispossessed of virtually everything, not least their humanity, managed somehow to create works of art and then gave them away to the dead so that they might arrive back home in dignity. It was the ultimate retort to the mindless cliché that they were no better than insentient beasts of burden.

  By the middle of the eighteenth century, the mercantile ‘empire of liberty’ was critically dependent for its fortune on the economic universe made from slavery. The sugar produced by three-quarters of a million slaves in the Caribbean had become the single most valuable import to Great Britain, and it would not be displaced from that rank until the 1820s. Huge fortunes had been made, which translated themselves into grandiose country estates and houses in Britain, or the kind of institutional bequest that, from the money of the Codringtons in Barbados and Antigua, created the great library at All Souls College, Oxford, which bears their name. The profits from sugar may not have been a necessary condition of Britain’s industrial revolution (as some historians of slavery have always maintained), since the amounts available for reinvestment probably did not exceed something like 2 per cent of the capital ploughed into purely industrial undertakings. But equally it’s indisputable that the sugar–slave economy had spun off enterprises of immense importance to Britain’s dizzying growth. The elegance of eighteenth-century Bristol was paid for by the trade; and the port of Liverpool, which in the 1740s had sent three times as many triangular trade ships to Africa and the Caribbean as London, owed its expansion entirely to it. The great banking houses of Barclays and Lloyds were equally the creation of the Atlantic trade, but were afterwards able to provide capital to the manufacturers of England and Scotland. While Indian calicoes had once been among the exports shipped from Britain to Africa in exchange for slaves, the huge demand there for brilliant printed cottons was now supplied almost entirely by more cheaply produced British textiles. And the demand for the ancillary products of the sugar industry – molasses, rum and treacle – worked to tie together not just the West Indies and Britain but the continental American colonies and the Caribbean as well.

  In the 1750s the swaggering plutocrats who embodied the West India fortunes – William Beckford and Christopher Codrington (the Governor of the Leeward Islands), the Pinneys and the Lascelles – began to throw their weight around back home at Westminster and in the corporation of the City of London. But although the older grandees of the counties may have looked down their noses at the pushy vulgarity of these nouveaux riches, they could not have denied their critical importance to the fate of the empire of the three oceans.

  Yet despite what, to most jealous outsiders, seemed its outrageous share of good fortune, at that time the West India lobby did nothing but grumble about the difficulties it faced in preserving the sugar empire. The price of sugar was going down, it asserted, while the price of slaves was going up. Neither was precisely true. Sugar prices had indeed halved between 1713 and 1733 (the low point), but had recovered again by the end of the 1740s. If it was hard to work up sympathy for their purported plight as they bought yet another country house and raked in over 10 per cent annual profits on their investments, there was one item in their litany of complaints that did touch a raw nerve in Britain: fear of the French. For the British attitude towards the impertinence of French imperial competition managed to be arrogant and paranoid at the same time. For many of the apologists and tub-thumpers of Britannia’s dominion of the seas, the mere idea of a French commercial empire was a comical oxymoron, for how could a nation so notoriously constituted from craven slaves of papist absolutism be taken seriously as entrepreneurial colonizers? (Never mind the fact that when Malachy Postlethwayt wanted to find a ‘Dictionary of Commerce’ to plagiarize for his own English version, The Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce (1751), he went to a French original.) Mysteriously, the evidence in the 1730s and 1740s pointed ominously to the rapid creation of a French empire in India and America but, especially in the Caribbean, that was becoming so successful so quickly that it seemed to the alarmists like a dagger pointed at the heart of the British imperial future.

  They were right to worry. For although the French were late-comers at the colonial table, at least in the boom sector of the West Indies, they more than compensated by the concentrated energy they brought to profit-making. As the British planters never failed to remind the home government, they had the advantage of being able, through the dynastic alliance of the Bourbon monarchs in France and Spain, to piggy-back their settlements in the Caribbean on older Spanish naval bases and colonies. No guarda costas were going to board French slavers or sugar ships to damage the property and persons of their cargo or crew.

  By the 1740s, in fact, there were signs that the productivity of the French Caribbean sugar empire was beginning to outstrip that of the British. The French had their own slaver fleets built and fitted out at the dynamically growing port of Nantes at the mouth of the Loire; and they possessed their own locked-up sources of supply on the Gambia and in Senegal, pushing the British traders east into the Bight of Benin. In St Domingue, the western half of Spanish Hispaniola, they had a land area incomparably bigger than any of the British islands, even Jamaica; it was cut with rivers, which made the freight of goods easier and cheaper, and boasted both flat coastal plains and cooler uplands. The French plantations seem from the beginning to have been more productive than the British. At any rate they grew and shipped enough sugar to undercut prices in Europe, virtually taking that market away from Britain. And the French Caribbean was also more diversified, exporting coffee, cotton and indigo back home for profitable re-export.

  As if this were not bad enough, there was also evidence that the French were being insolent enough to make inroads into the British colonial system of trade, encouraging British American ships to smuggle their own rum and molasses into British America and undercutting exports from Barbados and the Leeward Islands. So when the makers and keepers of British macro-economic policy looked at a map of the world, they could see on
ly serious trouble coming from France. On the coast of southeast India, it’s true, the erstwhile juvenile delinquent and disgruntled clerk turned military adventurer Robert Clive, together with Stringer Lawrence commanding the tiny army of the East India Company, had managed to thwart a French attempt to lock up the Carnatic as their own exclusive commercial satellite state. But the lesson in that vicious little war had been that a commercial edge was not protected by trade alone. The French were prepared, indeed they shrewdly assumed, the need to play politics with Indians (whether they were the Native Americans in North America or the Nawabs in the Carnatic), to offer their ‘protection’ in return for the ejection of the British. If that cost money and lives, so be it. What, then, were the British to do? Flinch from the challenge on grounds of expense and dangerous entanglements and concede the territory to the ambitious French? Or respond, as the gung-ho commanders of the East India Company had done, in kind, give the enemy a bloody nose and post the Keep Out sign on the Indian Ocean? Needless to say, the government at home, presided over by the judicious Pelhams – Henry in the Commons, the Duke of Newcastle in the Lords – were more mindful of oceans of red ink than of blue-water imperialism. What they wanted was damage limitation. The treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, which returned Madras to the British and the fort of Louisbourg, commanding the mouth of the St Lawrence north of Nova Scotia, to the French, seemed like just such a rational accommodation – a sensible division of spheres of influence. But no one who was thinking with any honesty or seriousness about global economic strategy could have been fooled. This was a breathing space, not a peace.

  No one recognized with more pessimistic clarity that this was a moment of truth in the history of British power than William Pitt. It’s easy enough to suppose that he had been born to imperial vision, being the grandson of Thomas ‘Diamond’ Pitt, the commercial interloper turned Governor of Madras who had become famous for hawking his 410-carat uncut rock for a mere £20,400, a price he described as ‘cheap as neck beef’. (By a sublime irony it wound up at Versailles.) But the Pitts were not, despite the give-’em-hell career of the magpie governor, classic imperialist adventurers. They were, rather, country gentry from Dorset and Hampshire who numbered Elizabethan and Jacobean exchequer officials in their lineage. And they played politics by the rules. The rotten borough of Old Sarum, once the site of the Norman palace where William the Conqueror had been presented with the Domesday Book, but now just so much rubble in a field, was their very own pocket constituency. And though ‘Diamond’ Pitt had been a furious Whig, his son Robert, to his blustering father’s outrage, turned Tory. Young William, by contrast, became a Whig and was to prove himself in politics by being a noisy nuisance to the Walpole interest.

  William Pitt was not made for a quiet life. Even during his political apprenticeship friends and adversaries alike noticed that his moods alternated between elated bursts of hyperactive, hyper-articulate energy and deep troughs of paralysing gloom and despair. Contemporaries put this emotional oscillation down to the early signs of gout. And Pitt was certainly a sufferer from a disease that caused him a lot of joint pain. But the description of his switchback alterations of temper also corresponds very closely to the classic symptoms of manic depression, a behavioural disorder that seems to have afflicted an extraordinary number of those pantheonized as the builders of the British Empire, among them James Wolfe and Richard Wellesley.

  Pitt’s chosen form of neurotic release was the spoken word, delivered in the ‘torrents’ that so unnerved those who got in its way. It so happened that Pitt’s fame as an orator occurred precisely at a time when an interest in Latin rhetoric, in particular in Longinus’ treatise On the Sublime, with its self-conscious manipulation of the effects of terror and rapture, was much in vogue. No one was more conscious than Pitt that rhetoric was not just an academic art but a potent weapon too in contemporary politics. ‘Arm yourself,’ he wrote to his undergraduate nephew, Thomas, ‘with all the variety of manner, copiousness and beauty of diction, nobleness and magnificence of ideas of the great Roman consuls; and render the powers of eloquence complete by the irresistible torrent of vehement argumentation, the close and forcible reasoning and the depth and fortitude of mind of the Grecian statesman.’ Though no one disputed Pitt’s often frightening vehemence, he was at his strongest when dropping into an otherwise orotund turn of phrase a pearl or two of perfectly calculated malice. Carteret, once his ally in the anti-Walpole coalition, was now the Hanoverian troop minister ‘who had renounced the British nation and seemed to have drunk of the potion described in poetic fictions which made men forget their country’. Listening to him, the Commons became the Colosseum as much as the Forum, and the benches full of overgrown schoolboys watched gleefully as Pitt, tall and statuesque in posture (despite the gout), pointed his beaky nose at some unfortunate time-server, trapped him in the net of his irony and then jabbed away with Britannia’s trident.

  Even Seneca took a job, though. Conscious of this reputation for Roman uprightness, but hungry for advancement, in 1746 Pitt did something guaranteed to put him in a league of his own. He accepted a government office from the Pelhams, but refused its most lucrative perks. It was not just any office, but the Paymaster-Generalship of the army, one of the juiciest jobs that could possibly have come his way. Through the Paymaster’s office went payments for military contracts. Into the Paymaster’s pocket went the odd percentage or two for favouring this or that supplier. So turning his nose up at the customary rewards was a flamboyant way to disarm accusations that the patriot had sold out to the hacks. Drawing on the Bolingbroke playbook, Pitt ostentatiously deposited the Pay Office balance (from which Paymasters had been known to siphon the occasional thousand or two) in the Bank of England and declined the usual commission owed to him on arranging a military subsidy for the duchy of Savoy.

  Pitt’s cultivated pose as the lonely patriot may actually have been more solitary than he would have ideally liked. If he had been betting that he could forgo the windfalls of office because, with George II in his seventies, the bountiful reign of Frederick and his trusted ministers was about to dawn, Pitt was in for a brutal disappointment. His patrons were vanishing. Cobham died in 1749 and Frederick two years later, while the king, who made no secret of his dislike for Pitt, dismayingly soldiered on. In the end it didn’t matter. For Pitt’s sense of himself as a man meant to steer the course of British history was not, in fact, a sham. He was not a fake Cicero in a bad perruque but, for better or worse, a genuine visionary. And what he saw in his visions – obsessively – was America. Though his grandfather evidently had seen something irresistible (all those glinting carats) about Asia, and though Pitt himself was close to West Indian sugar plutocrats like Beckford, he was convinced that it was America that would be the proving-ground of the empire of liberty. What happened in America would demonstrate whether the British Empire were to be not much more than an amusement for the tourists at Stowe or a dominion that would change the world.

  Like everyone else who cared about naval power, Pitt subscribed to the conventional wisdom that, unless Britain controlled its home waters, its ‘liberties’ and security would never be truly assured. But unlike more conservative strategists, he also believed that the battle for commercial supremacy (which in the end would determine whether Catholic absolutism or parliamentary government would dominate the world) had to be taken to the French in America if it were to be decisively won. And like the West-Indian planters and the American colonists, Pitt did not think that time was on Britain’s side. St Domingue, Martinique and Guadeloupe had already robbed Britain of its European re-export market, and now the massive fortress on Cape Breton Island at the mouth of the St Lawrence threatened the security of the priceless New England fishing industry. (Salt cod, sent to the West Indies, was about the only protein, other than beans, in the slave diet, and in return New England imported rum and molasses.) Pitt entirely subscribed to the view, coming out of America itself, that the French were engaged in a slow but syste
matic strangulation of British economic and political power in the New World. Native Americans were being suborned to deny New England trappers their share of the fur trade. Today it was beaver, tomorrow America.

  So he was happy when a largely volunteer army under Governor William Shirley of Massachusetts, together with a small naval squadron, actually succeeded in taking the major fort of Louisbourg in 1745 – one of the few undisputed successes of ‘King George’s War’. A year later he supported the Duke of Bedford’s memorandum urging a more general attack on Canada, to destroy the French fur trade with the Indians and rob it of mast timber for its navy. But not only was the attack shelved – too fraught with danger, too expensive; in the peace negotiations in 1748 Louisbourg was returned to France.

  The problem of French America, as Pitt would come to recognize, was in fact much more serious than the battle over the St Lawrence and the eastern seaboard. It was, in essence, the battle for living space. The man who saw most clearly how high the stakes were was the scientist and practical man of letters Benjamin Franklin. His Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind were written in 1751 (though not published until 1755) and went to the heart of what British America was to be. There were already upwards of 1.2 million people living in its several colonies, and that number, through natural increase, could be expected to double within a generation; so British America had to be expansive or it would atrophy in self-destructive claustrophobia. In other words, Franklin shared with the boosters of empire in Britain a conviction that it was an empire of liberty. But Franklin’s American liberty was not just so much Whig hot air; it was material and territorial. He could see with a precision rivalled only by the French philosopher de Montesquieu the relationship between geography, demography and freedom; that in America (unlike crowded England) the availability of land gave material meaning to the ideal of self-sufficiency. And in his Britophil innocence Franklin, at least the Franklin of 1751, assumed that these sunny horizons would be shared by the guardians of the imperial future at home. When, in a century, the population of America actually surpassed that of the metropolis, a population dispersed over who knew how much of the continental landmass, such a moment, he supposed, could only be an occasion for shared celebration: ‘What an accession of power to the British Empire by sea as well as land! What increase of trade and navigation! What numbers of ships and seamen.’