Slavery and the Culture of Taste

by Gikandi, Simon;

  What the captains of the slave trade seem to have understood more than their abolitionist opponents was the extent to which slavery permeated the fabric of English life. Coming from Liverpool, Golightly and his associates walked in the streets of a city where wet docks were full of slave clippers, warehouses were proudly named after slave ports such as Goree, and the iconography of the slave trade was to be found on emblems of daily life, including deft bowls, plates, and vases. It is this everyday aspect of slavery that was to be lost in the intellectual debates surrounding the culture of taste and the contaminants it sought to exclude from the domain of beauty.

  Moreover, the urgency of tone in the petition reflected the slave interests' fear that the British parliament and public might have forgotten that the slave trade—which was increasingly facing opposition at home and was indeed prohibited from English soil—was still an important fabric of social life. Hence, the petitioners were keen to remind their representatives that far from being an aberration, investments in the slave trade had been undertaken under Acts of Parliament; that slavery had been the engine driving the train of progress; that although the vigor and pitch of the trade was located in Liverpool, the business of selling African bodies had led to the creation of wealth and prosperity in the whole of the United Kingdom. The petitioners also called attention to what was then considered to be the unthinkable consequence of slavery, focusing not on the morality of the debates surrounding enslavement, but the financial aspects of abolition, including its effect on public revenues and the impairment of British naval power.

  Facing the challenge of abolitionism at home, the tactic of the slave interest was to recover slavery from the unconscious and mark its manifest presence in the shaping of British public life. In this sense, their attitude was different from that of the intellectual class, which, as I argued in the first chapter, was constantly agonizing over the relationship between art and commerce. The commercial class did not shy away from mapping out the connection between the slave trade and British life; their insistence on the nation's common interest in enslavement was a significant departure from the theories of disinterest that sought to construct the aesthetic subject as what Elizabeth A. Bohls has described as “a process of exclusion” and “a special mode of attention defined as excluding any practical stake in the existence of the object.”55

  Interestingly, colonial planters who on the surface might not have been expected to be troubled by the contradiction between the theory and practice of taste were the first to confront the difficulties of reconciling commerce to an ethics predicated on an ordered moral life. As subjects located on the margins of the British social system, for example, West Indian planters pegged their modern identity on their capacity to consume English goods. From the second half of the seventeenth century onward, ships from England were bringing in luxury goods for the West Indian master class—“silks, furniture, expensive groceries, and wines.”56 There was a clear understanding that the consumption of luxury was essential to the maintenance of an English identity in the tropics. Luxury goods, a Port Royal merchant noted in 1674, had to be “fresh and good and fashionable, for there is a proud generation in this Countrey, although people in England thinke any thing will serve here.”57 But living in close proximity to slaves, West Indian planters were also attuned to how conspicuous consumption continuously called the ethical imperative of modern life into question. Planters aspired for a modern identity that depended on active participation in commercial activities, yet they lived in a period when subjective identity depended on one's capacity to examine or interrogate the basis of selfhood itself.58

  How could planters extol the virtues of commerce without questioning their own participation in the violence attendant to slavery? There were two possible ways around this problem. The first and easiest one was for West Indian planters to “absent” themselves from the complex of sugar and slavery in order to enjoy the luxuries of modern life without the taint of this crass commerce. By the end of the eighteenth century, many West Indian planters were leaving their plantations to “enjoy their wealth in more polished surroundings.”59 But absentation did not in itself resolve the problem of consumption within colonial society. Indeed, while conspicuous consumption was the fulcrum around which theories and practices of taste in Britain revolved, it was often conceived as the major threat to the identity of West Indian planters as modern subjects. A second approach to the problem of reconciling commerce and virtue was for the planter class to transpose the most visible elements of what was conceived as a modern culture over the scarred landscape of enslavement. In both cases, a measure of engagement with slavery would lead to a transformation of the vocabulary of taste.

  4

  In the West Indian plantation, the tension between virtue and commerce discussed in the previous chapters would become vivid and inescapable. For what often struck observers most about the lives of white planters in the new world was their inability to control the excesses of commerce, to regulate luxury or simply to enable an ordered culture of consumption. While at home a culture of taste was supposed to harmonize commerce and virtue, in the slave colonies the British tended to lead lives at odds with this dictum. Slave masters often seemed caught between the demands of the new polite culture that had evolved in Europe, one that depended on self-restraint and the management of passions as well as the materiality of the plantation system, often driven by greed and opulence and manifested in moral disorder. Observing a typical planter meal during her trip to Antigua and St. Christopher between 1774 and 1776, the Scot Janet Schaw was astounded by its “great extravagance”:

  They have various breads, ham, eggs, and indeed what you please, but the best breakfast bread is the Casada cakes, which they send up buttered. These are made from a root which is said to be poison. Before it goes thro' the various operations of drying, pounding and baking, you would think one would not be very clear as to a food that had so lately been of so pernicious a nature, yet such are the effects of Example, that I eat it, not only without fear, but with pleasure. They drink only green Tea and that remarkably fine; their Coffee and chocolate too are uncommonly good; their sugar is monstrously dear, never under three shillings per pound. At this you will not wonder when you are told, they use none but what returns from England double refined, and has gone thro' all the duties. I believe this they are forced to by act of parliament, but am not certain. This however is a piece of great extravagance, because the sugar here can be refined into the most transparent sirup and tastes fully as well as the double refined Sugar and is certainly much more wholesome.60

  For most of the eighteenth century, planters in the West Indies struggled to construct a new cultural order based on the blueprints of domestic Englishness as if to remind themselves that they were actually English in spite of their distance from the cultural centers of the motherland. In architecture, for example, the planter class was attuned to developments in England, and they often went out of their way to match the designs that were dominant in Britain. Irrespective of their local and peculiar circumstances, planters built houses to reflect what was vaguely described as an “English style” or “English manner.”61 Thus it is not unusual to see houses built by Barbadian planters in the middle of the seventeenth century echoing the Jacobean style that was prominent in England in the second half of the seventeenth century. For example, in its front façade, its ornamental style, and the loggia that defines its entryway, the Principal's Lodge at Codrington College in Barbados (fig. 3.5), built around 1670, echoed, on a smaller scale, the Jacobean house built by Lord Zouche in Bramshill, Northumberland, between 1605 and 1612 (fig. 3.6).62 These buildings also reflected the planters' deep anxiety about their English identity. Indeed what struck most commentators about the English houses in Jamaica and Barbados was how often their strict emulation of English style negated climatic needs such as cooling and ventilation. The English style “was geared to the English climate, not to the Caribbean.”63

  The association betw
een opulence and excess in the conception and execution of the “English” buildings in the colonies was not incidental. As an icon of Englishness and money, the great house in the tropics represented what Ragatz aptly describes as “an imposing structure”: “Whenever possible, it stood in a commanding position, frequently facing the sea. Almost invariably it was set some distance back from the road and was approached by an avenue of cedars, palmettos, or cocoanut trees.”64 Edward Long's description of the house built by his patron Sir Charles Price in St. Mary, Jamaica, captures well the symbolic grandness of the great house:

  The house is of wood but, well finished, and has in front a very fine piece of water, which in winter is commonly flocked with wild-duck and teal. Behind it is a very elegant garden disposed in walks, which are shaded with the cocoanut, cabbage, and sand-box trees. The flower and kitchen-garden are filled with the most beautiful and useful variety which Europe, or this climate, produces. It is decorated, besides, with some pretty buildings; of which the principal is an octagonal saloon, richly ornamented on the inside with lustres, and mirrors empaneled. At the termination of another walk is a grand triumphal arch, from which the prospect extends over the fine cultivated vale of Bagnals quite to the Northside Sea.65

  In its best form, the Caribbean great house was as distinguished in its appearance on the West Indian landscape as its English counterpart. The owners and builders of these houses had set out to construct monuments for Englishness in the tropics, and the similarity between the West Indian big house and its English counterparts was often startling. For example, the front and portico of Rose Hall, built on the North Coast of Jamaica in the 1770s (fig. 3.7) has a striking resemblance to Parkstead House, Roehampton, designed by Sir William Chambers for Lord Bessborough around 1758 (fig. 3.8).66

  3.5 A View of Codrington College Barbados looking from the Sea (1830). From F.W.N. Bayley, Four Years' Residence in the West Indies, 1833.

  3.6 Old Bramshill, Hampshire. Photograph by Geoff Cheshire, 2005.

  3.7 Rose Hall, Jamaica. Courtesy of Urban Walnut / Wikimedia Commons.

  3.8 Sir William Chambers, Parkstead House, Roehampton.

  In spite of their grandeur, however, the West Indian great houses often struck observers as out of place in the tropics. There were two reasons for their anomalousness. First, these houses were out of place in a physical sense because even their most appealing designs seemed to defeat the logic of the tropical climate of the colonies. Second, they were out of place in a cultural and moral sense; existing in a social or cultural vacuum (even when they were rehearsing the culture of taste) and surrounded by slaves and sugar, these houses were constant reminders of the unhallowed ground in which wealthy planters were trying to plant the seeds of their imagined Englishness. So, in the end, the alliance between money and taste, or attempts to bring consumption and virtue into some kind of equilibrium, seemed to fail in the face of the materiality of slavery. And there was perhaps no better illustration of this failure than the association in the English mind of the colonial landscape with the very excesses that the culture of taste at home was trying to control or exorcise.

  But houses built in the “English manner” in the colonies were not simply representations of imaginary and phantasmal homelands, and it is limiting to suggest that the cultural traffic in art, design, and taste moved in only one direction, from the metropolitan center to the colonial margin. Some of the most significant developments in English architecture, such as the emergence of the Palladian style at the beginning of the seventeenth century, were enabled by the patronage of colonial planters. Indeed, the implosion of Palladianism depended on the convergence of the interests of a new generation of master builders, such as Colen Campbell, and what John Summerson has called “an ascending phase of building activity,” a housing boom fueled by colonial money.67 An example of the creative relationship between colonial money and architectural design can be seen in Wanstead House, Essex, designed by Campbell for Sir Richard Child, the heir to an East Indian fortune. The design of Wanstead House, especially its “size and the lavish splendor of its grounds,” was to influence the construction of country houses in Britain for half a century.68

  The lavish exteriors and opulent interiors of these houses could not have been possible without colonial largesse; their designs fused the aggressiveness of new money with a sense of power and thus called attention to the control and self-fashioning of the nouveau riche who had made it into the aristocracy through the combination of sugar and slavery. In Britain itself, away from the culture and geography of slavery, West Indian planters would turn to the culture of taste and the aesthetic ideology to inscribe their often tenuous English identity and to mediate their deep anxieties brought on by the tar brush of colonial identity. Here, art would become an important conduit for laundering a self produced by slave money into a civic, virtuous subject. It would also provide a site for displacing or repressing the culture of slavery.

  5

  Consider, for example, the case of Christopher Codrington. The public image we have of him represents the best of the culture of taste as it emerged in Britain in the eighteenth century. As Vincent Harlow noted in a 1928 biography, by the age of thirty, Codrington had it all—“a brilliant record, a high position, vast wealth, and an engaging personality”—and on account of his immense wealth, he was also “one of the most courted men in the literary society of the capital.”69 Codrington was a distinguished statesman and soldier, the man who had commanded the troops that pushed back the French from the Leeward Islands and consolidated the English hold on the eastern Caribbean. He was one of the leading philanthropists of his generation: his bequests include All Souls College, Oxford, which he endowed with books worth six thousand pounds and ten thousand pounds, and the Codrington Library at the college, one of the finest law libraries in the world. More significantly, Codrington was a powerful figure in the shaping of the culture of taste in England. As a scholar he was closely associated with the high culture of All Souls College. He was a close friend of John Locke and Lord Blackstone, an associate of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, a poet, a dramatist, a wit, and a great patron of the arts.

  Codrington assiduously cultivated the image of the well-rounded subject of taste. His public persona was heavily mediated by the idiom of the culture and the aura of classicism. This is evident in existing portraits of him. A statue of him located at Codrington Library, Oxford (fig. 3.9), represents him as a Roman senator; Sir James Thornhill's painting of him on the entry hall of All Souls College presents a rarified posthumous portrait of the philanthropist as a young scholar and lawyer. Other portraits and engravings, including a stipple engraving by R. Clamp at the National Portrait Gallery in London, capture the aura of the classical gentleman scholar.

  What is not clear from these representations, however, is whether the image Codrington presented to the English public was intended to enhance his social standing or to camouflage the sources of the wealth that enabled him to befriend and patronize the key architects of taste in his time. For although Codrington's pedigree was beyond reproach, his family fortune was made in Barbados, where he was born and owned sugar estates and many slaves. By the time he succeeded his father as the governor of the Leeward Islands in 1698, Codrington was “the wealthiest English landowner in the West Indies, with holdings on Barbados, Nevis and Antigua.”70 How did this wealth, derived from African bondage, enable Codrington's self-fashioning as a person of taste?

  On the surface, Codrington's intimate connection to the complex of sugar and slavery was not repressed. He was proud of his family's involvement in the politics of the Leeward Islands, especially Barbados. When he died in 1710, one of his last gestures, apart from the endowment to All Souls, was the establishment of Codrington College in Barbados, which has been the major center of educating the island's black elite. But the Codrington plantation was a typical West Indian plantation, not a liberal enterprise; it was a place where slaves were driven hard, and some hanged themselves i
n despair; the cultivation of sugar was as brutal as in any other plantation on the island of Barbados; slaves were put to work at an early age; and good money was paid for runaway slaves.71 There were hence two sides to the narrative of Codrington's life: on one side, there was the distinguished English gentleman, the quintessential man of taste; on the other side, there was the seasoned West Indian slave master. These two narratives have not been disputed. What is puzzling and invites further reflection is why cultural historians and biographers have found it difficult to reconcile Codrington's standing as the eighteenth century's ideal man of culture and taste with his role as a slave owner and to discuss the two sides of his personality in the same register. Why has it been necessary to separate Codrington the man of culture and taste from Codrington the slave owner and to treat the two sides of his life as disjunctive?

  3.9 Sir Henry Cheere, Statue of Christopher Codrington. 1734. Codrington Library, All Souls College, Oxford. Photograph by Miguel Bernas. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license and the permission of the photographer.

  Two forms of separation or repression are involved here: one is the repression of slavery in the biography of the man of taste; the other is the expurgation of art from the slaveholder's life. In his authoritative biography of Codrington, for example, Harlow solidly locates the man of taste in his milieu but seems unwilling to make an explicit connection between his subject's unmatched ability to sponsor the culture of taste with his control of a West Indian fortune. Any references to West Indian fortunes—the control of slaves and the production of sugar—are attributed to the father, and the moral responsibility of slavery is transferred from successors to progenitors. Thus, in his discussion of Codrington's role as a planter after his return to Barbados in 1700, Harlow would fall back on the now familiar post-abolition claim that although Codrington was “a firm believer in the wisdom and rightness of slavery,” he was indeed a reformer of the system.72 But the claim that Codrington was humane in his treatment of slaves appears tautological given the fact that all planters believed, as their most distinguished historian Edward Long asserted, that slave masters were incapable of cruelty and barbarity, because as gentlemen they were “possessed of more-disinterested charity, philanthropy, and clemency.”73 In contrast to the ostensible repression of the culture of slavery from the man of taste, historians who have undertaken the minutest studies of the Codrington plantations in Barbados barely make any connection between the everyday world of the slave-owning planter and the culture of taste in England. Even those who acknowledge the connection find it more convenient to describe Codrington's philanthropy as “aberrancy” rather than to locate it in the logic of the slave master trying to refashion his identity within the culture of taste.74