An essay in universal history from an Orthodox Christian Point ofView part the age of revolution

35. THE GEOPOLITICS OF SLAVERY

As the nineteenth century progressed, one issue threatened to divide the Great Powers between and within themselves: slavery. At the Vienna Congress in 1815, they had agreed “a common statement that the slave trade was repugnant to the principles of humanity and universal morality. For the moment this was mere aspiration, but the potentially huge international ramifications of the issue were already clear…”¹⁹

These ramifications revolved around the fact that while the victors of 1815 had declared themselves against slavery, in the eyes of many liberals and revolutionaries the monarchical regimes of Russia, Prussia and Austria kept the peasants and subject nations of their empires in virtual slavery, or at any rate serfdom. This gave a propaganda advantage to the only victor nation that had – officially, if not yet de facto in all her dominions - abolished slavery and serfdom, Britain, and it allowed the British, while formally belonging to the monarchical, anti-revolutionary Holy Alliance, to interfere on the side of liberals and revolutionaries in such places as Spain and Italy. Of course, it may plausibly be argued that the condition of industrial workers in Britain, as of many millions of subjects in the British empire, was little short of slavery; but the propaganda advantage remained, and was used vigorously by the British.
Let us see how Britain played the slavery card by looking briefly at the development of the abolitionist movement…
In the early modern period, writes Henry Kissinger, “the West expanded with the familiar hallmarks of colonialism – avariciousness, cultural chauvinism, lust for glory. But it is also true that its better elements tried to lead a kind of global tutorial in an intellectual method that encouraged skepticism and a body of political and diplomatic practices including democracy. It all but ensured that, after long periods of subjugation, the colonized peoples would eventually demand – and achieve self-determination. Even during their most brutal depradations, the expansionist powers put forth, especially in Britain, a vision that at some point conquered peoples would begin to participate in the fruits of a common global system…”²⁰
Since the anti-slavery movement was all about freedom and equality, one would have expected the revolutionary French to take the lead in it. But it was anti-revolutionary British who initiated this most liberal of causes rather than the revolutionary French. “Gradually in the 18^th century an anti-slavery lobby built up in Europe, notably in Britain, the superpower of the seas. In 1772 Lord Mansfield, a judge, ruled that a runaway slave there could not be forced back by his master to the West Indies. The ruling was interpreted (questionably, but this was the effect) as confirming that there could be no slavery in Britain.” ²¹
Then, “in later May 1787, a group of parliamentarians, doctors, clergymen and others met in London to form the ‘Committee of the Society for the purpose of effecting the abolition of the Slave Trade’. Its supporters were driven by an often religiously inspired sense of humanitarian outrage at the whole concept of slavery, and especially the horrors of the ‘middle passage’, the transportation across the Atlantic. In mid-April 1791, William Wilberforce’s parliamentary bill demanding the abolition of the slave trade failed, but put the issue firmly on the political agenda. The slaves, of course, were not passive recipients of western benevolence. In August 1791 a major counter-revolutionary revolt broke out in the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue led by plantation slaves outraged not only by the Revolution’s continued toleration of slavery and its failure to extend the rights of man to gens de couleur but also by its treatment of the king and revealed religion. Their leaders regarded themselves as African tribal chiefs rather than representatives of the people. Left to their own devices the revolting slaves would probably have set up a political system similar to the traditional slave-owning African kingdoms from they had originally come; they regularly sold black captives to the Spanish and British. The revolt was a major headache for the European powers, especially Britain and Spain, who drew much of their revenue, and thus their European leverage, from slave plantations in the Caribbean, and the Americans, who feared that the example of Haiti would inflame the black population of the Southern states. The relationship between slavery and the international balance was thus very close…”²²
Thus James Walvin writes: “The emergence of the independent black republic of Haiti from the wreckage of plantation slavery in St. Domingue sent shock waves throughout the Americas. It also sent refugees (white and black) fleeing to other islands, especially to neighbouring Jamaica, and to North America, with terrifying tales of what had happened. Defenders of the slave trade (and slavery) felt vindicated. Here was living proof of all their warnings: if you tamper with the slave system, catastrophe would inevitably follow. It was a powerful blow against British abolition [the movement for which had been building up for over fifty years] and it was reinforced by subsequent military disasters.
“St. Domingue was a temptation to the British. It was a fruitful colony whose sugar and coffee threatened to displace British Caribbean produce on world markets. For William Pitt, the opportunity to seize St. Domingue, and to add it to Britain’s necklace of Caribbean possessions, proved too good to resist. But Pitt’s plans took little notice of Haitian leader and former slave Toussaint L’Ouverture’s rebellious slaves on the island or of tropical disease, and the British invading force was soon overwhelmed. The loss of life was horrendous and the whole endeavour proved a military debacle whose significance was camouflaged by being so distant from the metropolis. Pitt’s aims of augmenting Britain’s slave possessions ended in the deaths of more than 40,000 men…”²³
In 1799, the French under Napoleon tried to take back the colony. According to Claude Ribbe, more than 100,000 slaves died in many barbarous ways.²⁴ In 1802 Napoleon was proclaiming: “Never will the French Nation give chains to men whom it has once recognized as free.”²⁵ And yet in the same year his forces tried to reintroduce slavery, only to be defeated by black soldiers singing the Marseillaise...²⁶ “In 1804,” writes Joanna Bourke, “Haitians waged the first successful anti-colonial revolution, to found the first black republic. Their armed struggle won them a nation to call their own at colossal cost. The fury of the entire Western world turned against the new nation, ostracizing them and even insisting that former slaves pay compensation to their owners. Well into the twentieth century, the poorest country in the Western hemisphere was paying this financial debt to one of the world’s strongest economies, France.”²⁷
In 1807 the British parliament banned the slave trade, although slavery itself was not banned in the British Empire until 1833, and did not end in the British Caribbean until 1838. ²⁸ “The United States followed suit that same year, in accordance with the constitutional agreement of 1787 to end the trade after twenty years, and banned the carriage of slaves under its own flag. This marked the beginning of a subversive new abolitionist geopolitics, based on the coercive power of the Royal Navy…”²⁹
The hub of the geopolitical confrontation after 1815 was between Britain and Russia. The British saw themselves, somewhat pompously and hypocritically, as the champions of liberty everywhere, and did not care much if their interventions on behalf of what they considered to be liberty, whether in Spain, Italy, Poland or outside Europe, offended their monarchical allies, Russia, Prussia and Austria. “The Russians, for their part,” writes Simms, “saw Austria and Prussia as a counter-revolutionary dam or breakwater which would halt, or at least slow down, subversive currents before they reached Poland, and ultimately Russia itself. It was with this in mind that the tsar exerted pressure on Berlin to disavow ministers who wanted to cooperate with liberal nationalism. He got his way after the death of Motz and the replacement of Bernstorff by the conservative Friedrich Ancillon as foreign minister in the early 1830s. In 1833, the three eastern powers came together at Münchengrätz, to agree a joint policy of stability on conservative principles in central Europe and the Ottoman Empire. Two years later, Berlin and St. Petersburg advertised their solidarity by holding joint manoeuvres in Poland. The counter-revolution was closing ranks across Europe.
“In the west, liberal and constitutionalist powers were quick to pick up the gauntlet. British foreign policy, in particular, manifested an emancipatory and at times almost messianic streak. This reflected a strong sense that European peace and Britain’s own security depended, as the Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, put it, on the ‘maint[enance] of the liberties and independence of all other nations’. On his reading, the survival of freedom in Britain required its defence throughout Europe: constitutional states were thus her ‘natural allies’. There was also a broader feeling that Britain should, as Palmerston argued in August 1832, ‘interfer[e] by friendly counsel and advice’, in order to ‘maintain the liberties and independence of all other nations’ and thus to ‘throw her moral weight into the scale of any people who are spontaneously striving for… rational gov[ernmen]t, and to extend as far and as fast as possible civilization all over the world’. In other words, Britain would not ‘interfere’ in the internal affairs of other countries, or impose her values on unwilling populations, but she pledged her support to those who were willing to take the initiative – who were ‘spontaneously striving’ – to claim their liberal birthright.
“Globally, the main battlefront was the international slave trade, and, increasingly, the institution of slavery itself. In 1833, slavery was finally abolished throughout the British Empire, which led a year later to the establishment of a French abolitionist society. A cross-Channel Franco-British agitation against the slave trade now began, and a joint governmental programme for its eradication became a real possibility. This cleared the way for a more robust policy against the international slave trade, which the Royal Navy had been battling with varying success since 1807. The newly independent Central and South American states had just abolished slavery, while Britain forced Madrid to give up the legal importation of slaves in 1820, and was increasing the pressure on Spain to abolish slavery altogether in her only remaining large colony of Cuba. In 1835, London and Madrid concluded a treaty to limit the slave trade; for the moment this agreement was honoured on the Spanish side, but it was a further step in the international de-legitimation of the trade. The British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society was founded in 1838, and two years later the World Anti-Slavery Convention took place in London. Tensions with Portugal, whose ships still carried the lucrative human cargo to Brazil, rose.
“In the United States, on the other hand, the issue of slavery became increasingly contentious in domestic and foreign policy, at the very moment when the new cotton economy was taking off in the South. In January 1820, the Missouri Compromise determined that – with the exception of the state of Missouri itself – there should be no slavery north of the 36˚30‘ parallel, but this agreement was under attack from both sides of the divide. William Lloyd Garrison founded his abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, in 1831. Public opinion in the Northern states became more and more radical in opposition if not to slavery in the South, then at least to its extension to the west. Southerners, for their part, eyed not only the domestic but also the international scene with misgivings. Further west, French influence in Mexico was on the rise, reflected in their temporary occupation of Veracruz, ostensibly in order to enforce the payment of Mexico’s international debt; they were also active in California. It was clear that if the United States did not move into the vacuum to her west and south, another power would. And yet, so long as slavery divided North and South, no domestic consensus on expansion was possible. The inexorable westwards march of the United States therefore ground to a twenty-year halt.
“The main focus of the new geopolitics, however, was Europe. With liberal – but not radical – governments in Paris after 1830, and in London from 1832, France and Britain were now ideologically aligned. In 1834, both powers responded to Münchengrätz by coming together with liberal-constitutionalist Spain and Portugal to form the Quadruple Alliance. ‘The Triple League of despotic governments,’ Palmerston exulted, ‘will now be counter-balanced by a Quadruple Alliance in the west.’ The continent was now split into two ideologically divided camps. Once hopeful of Alexander’s intentions, liberal opinion saw the Tsarist Empire of Nicholas I as the bulwark of reaction across Europe. The British writer Robert Bremner noted at the end of the decade that the European press was teeming with books painting Russia as the ‘most boundless, irresistible… most formidable, and best consolidated [power] that every threatened the liberties and rights of man’.”³⁰