Not Made by Slaves by Bronwen Everill

Author:Bronwen Everill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press

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THE DESIRE TO CREATE DEMAND for legitimate commerce drove businessmen like Zachary Macaulay and James Cropper into contradictory positions. Using their government connections and their public profiles—gained through participation in the abolition movement—they both supported government intervention and subsidy, and supported tariff-free trade. Government monopolies—whether British or West African—were unpopular, but as a frustrated Macaulay grumbled, it didn’t seem fair that legitimate production of goods like rice in West Africa had to go without the support that slave traders from the region had been granted for over a century. In order to level the playing field, promoters of legitimate commerce hoped both to benefit from government largesse and to lobby those same governments to cut back on the preferential tariffs that supported production of colonial goods in some colonies but not in others. Moral commerce could be profitable in the same ways ordinary trade could be: by taking advantage of information asymmetries and network advantages.

Tariffs were controversial because they undermined the ability of consumers to determine what the most efficient form of labor was, making it seem like the self-interested consumer should support slavery. But free labor, Adam Smith and the abolitionists misguidedly argued, was more efficient than enslaved labor. This meant that they believed plantations run with slave labor would naturally cease production once free labor demonstrated its commercial superiority. But with tariffs, the whole market was distorted. Tariffs created a government-sanctioned monopoly for the West Indies and empowered slave-trading states in West Africa. If the market was skewed by colonial preference and government support of the institution of slavery, though, then surely abolitionist businessmen should take as much advantage as they could of those same policies to favor their own businesses. If there wasn’t equal footing in the free market, then the only way to find it was to create as much of a lobby for their legitimate produce as there was for the West Indian planters’. In particular, Macaulay built on his firm’s experience of attempting to create a (debt-based) monopsony for rice in Sierra Leone to create a plan for cheap, free-labor sugar production in India.

But the businesses that pushed back against the West Indian sugar lobby also experienced public skepticism regarding their true motives. Were they just using the antislavery movement to whitewash their own business practices, as Cruikshank’s cartoon suggested? Or were they showing that God favored moral commerce by bestowing long-term profitability? Macaulay and Cropper argued that the West India sugar monopoly unfairly taxed consumers to support an unethical form of labor. But in formulating their argument, and coming up with alternative business proposals, they drew attention to some of the inconsistencies in the arguments of ethical businesses. As long as making a profit was an acceptable part of the ethical capitalism model, there would be concerns about the nature of that profit and at whose expense it was made, especially once it became clear there would be new winners and losers as abolition took effect, and that choices would need to be made about whom ethical commerce was meant to benefit.

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