The Rise and Demise of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Atlantic World by Philip Misevich

Author:Philip Misevich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: African Studies, Early Modern History, Modern History
ISBN: 9781782048060
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Group Ltd
Published: 2016-01-06T05:00:00+00:00

Postwar

By the end of the Napoleonic Wars Britain had established an identity as the principal global agent against the transatlantic slave trade. The British government began to wage postwar naval, diplomatic, and ideological confrontations to constrict the trade. Three times before Napoleon’s defeat, the British unsuccessfully attempted to use preliminary peace negotiations (1801, 1806, 1814) to open talks on a joint termination of the Anglo-French slave trades. Negotiations were immediately reopened with the restored Bourbon monarchy in 1814. Lord Castlereagh, the British foreign secretary, believed that he had overcome a major hurdle to international abolition when Louis XVIII agreed to continue the slave trade for only five more years. News of this extension, however, produced yet another wave of national petitions in British society. Once more the campaign produced the largest turnout of signatures in British history. Newspapers reported subscribers in the hundreds of thousands. Ultimately, 1,370 petitions reached Parliament. In a nation with no more than four million eligible signers, between a fifth and a third of them signified their disapproval of the offending slave trade agreement with France. For Britain’s foreign minister, the final total (1,370 petitions against and none in favor of the article) signaled only one thing: “The nation was bent upon this object. . . . Ministers must make it the basis of their policy.”23

Britain’s first postwar achievement was an international declaration against the slave trade at the Congress of Vienna. The article did not specifically declare the slave trade to be a violation of human rights or refer to past national declarations. Rather, it stated that “the slave trade has been considered by just and enlightened men in all ages, as repugnant to the principles of humanity and universal morality.” This formulation allowed supporters of even the most traditional institutions to retrospectively invent a tradition of long-term consensual opposition to the slave trade and slavery. The article appealed in the mode of British abolitionist rhetoric to the principle of humanity, rather than to human rights.24

With an oblique glance at and beyond British civil society, the assembled congress credited “the public voice, in all civilized countries” for “calling aloud” for suppression. The public mobilization of one civil society was thus seamlessly grafted onto all “civilized countries.” The congress could remain silent about mainland Europe’s silence before and during the gestation of the article. The negotiators also hedged the declaration with the observation that long-ingrained prejudices required patience to allow due time for all nations to come into conformity with universal compliance.

The condemnation of the slave trade was the only article in the treaty that offered any recognition whatsoever that a “world” beyond Europe had claims on those at Vienna. Still more significantly, the article allowed the time for the French, in particular, to become reconciled to a cause now imbricated with national humiliation and defeat, both by ex-slaves across the Atlantic and by victorious enemies in France. The British nation had passed through the Age of Revolution without enduring a major revolution, civil war, or foreign conquest.

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