Capitalism and Slavery by Palmer Colin A. Williams Eric

Author:Palmer, Colin A., Williams, Eric
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 1994-04-11T04:00:00+00:00

B. THE GROWTH OF ANTI-IMPERIALISM

The colonial system was the spinal cord of the commercial capitalism of the mercantile epoch. In the era of free trade the industrial capitalists wanted no colonies at all, least of all the West Indies.

The trend dated back, as we have seen, to the early years of the Industrial Revolution. Its development paralleled the development of the free trade movement. The whole world row became a British colony and the West Indies were doomed. The leader of the movement was Cobden. Cobden referred approvingly to Adam Smith’s chapters in his “immortal work” on the expense of colonies.51 To him the colonial question was a pecuniary question.52 The colonies were expensive encumbrances, making dazzling appeals to the passions of the people, serving only as “gorgeous and ponderous appendages to swell our ostensible grandeur, but, in reality, to complicate and magnify our government expenditure, without improving our balance of trade.” He could see nothing but a “monstrous impolicy” in “sacrificing our trade with a new continent, of almost boundless extent of rich territory, in favour of a few small islands, with comparatively exhausted soils.”53 In 1852 the British declared war on Burma and annexed Lower Burma. Cobden protested. He wrote an article entitled “How wars are got up in India,” suggesting that Britain ought “to advertise in the Times for a governor-general who can collect a debt of a thousand pounds without annexing a territory which will be ruinous to our finances.”54

To Molesworth, one of the outstanding colonial reformers, Britain’s colonial policy was motivated by “an insane desire of worthless empire,” as on the frontier of the Cape Colony in South Africa, where “the loss of one axe and two goats . . . has cost this country a couple of millions sterling.” Australia was a collection of “communities, the offspring of convict emigration.” New Zealand was a constant headache with its “imbecile governors, discreditable functionaries, and unnecessary ‘wars with the natives.” South Africa was “a huge worthless and costly empire, extending over nearly 300,000 square miles, chiefly rugged mountains, and arid deserts, and barren plains, without water, without herbage, without navigable rivers, without harbours, in short, without everything except the elements of great and increasing expense to this country.” In charge of this diverse and heterogeneous collection of colonies was the Colonial Secretary, “traversing and retraversing, in his imagination, the terraqueous globe—flying from the Arctic to the Antarctic pole—hurrying from the snows of North America to the burning regions of the Tropics—rushing across from the fertile islands of the West Indies to the arid deserts of South Africa and Australia—like nothing on earth, or in romance, save the Wandering Jew.”55 The cost of protecting this empire was one-third of Britain’s export trade to the colonies. Colonial independence was cheaper. The colonies should be freed from the “ever-changing, frequently well-intentioned, but invariably weak and ignorant despotism” of the Colonial Office.56

Hume, another radical politician, joined in the attack on “Mr. Mother Country.” Remove the iron chains which fettered the

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