Scotland and the Caribbean, c.1740-1833 by Michael Morris

Author:Michael Morris [Morris, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Great Britain, General, Caribbean & West Indies, Social History
ISBN: 9781317675853
Google: TtQqBwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-03-12T16:08:50+00:00

The state should similarly intervene to improve ‘the gross ignorance and stupidity which … seem so frequently to benumb the understandings of all the inferior ranks of people’.131 This ‘stupidity’ was especially prevalent amongst urban manual labourers following the modern division of labour. A process that Marx would later define as ‘alienation’ was understood at the time as ‘torpor’—anathema to the free labour ideology of both Smith and Burns. Smith argued that the danger of ‘cowardice’ was less prevalent in agricultural labourers, especially ploughmen, who were exposed to a lower level of division of labour than workers in manufacturing: ‘How much the lower ranks of people in the country are really superior to those of the town, is well known to every man whom either business or curiosity has led to converse much with both.’132 However, according to Burns’ free labour ideology, the enslaved agricultural labourer is not considered to accrue the moral benefits of honest toil. Rather, the slave, deprived of personal liberty and the opportunity to ‘reap the fruits of his own industry’ sinks into moral degradation. There is no evidence to suggest that Burns was thinking of African chattel slaves in the Caribbean in this song; that is, however, the puzzle. In a song that alludes cryptically to the poetics of the abolitionist campaign that had shifted the terms of ‘freedom’ and ‘slavery’, Burns rehabilitates an older rhetoric that does not denounce the institution of slavery but continues to view the condition of enthrallment as ‘a qualitative judgement on the enslaved’.133

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