Parron 2018

The British Empire and the Suppression of the Slave Trade to
Brazil: A Global History Analysis
Tâmis Parron
Journal of World History, Volume 29, Number 1, March 2018, pp. 1-36 (Article)
Published by University of Hawai'i Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jwh.2018.0000
For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/687049
Access provided by UMass Amherst Libraries (4 Jul 2018 13:38 GMT)

The British Empire and the Suppression
of the Slave Trade to Brazil: A Global
History Analysis*
TÂMIS PARRON
Universidade Federal Fluminense
INTRODUCTION: STATE, AGENCY, AND CAPITALISM
Melcher Todd was a West Indian planter who had just married when he
produced 290 metric tons of brown sugar in 1847. To bring his sugar to
market in Great Britain, Todd paid 145 pounds sterling (£) for colonial
customs, £1,000 for insurance, £1,150 for freight, and £4,030 in
metropolitan customs for a sum total of US$30,000, a fortune at the
time. The new husband thought his produce would sell for prices high
enough to pay off his expenses. But he was wrong. A year earlier, Great
Britain had opened its sugar market for international competition, and
the ensuing influx of foreign supplies knocked sugar prices down,
leaving Todd with a loss of £720 (US$3,500). Todd lamented: “I have
simply labored to pay customs’ duties.” “Not one farthing reverts to me
or my family,” and “I am now [. . .] obliged to mortgage my property.”
*I wrote this article during my fellowship at the Weatherhead Initiative on Global

History, Harvard University, for the academic year 2016–2017, co-funded by FAPESP and
The Volkswagen Foundation. My thanks to the faculty members, colleagues, and students
who discussed an earlier version of this article at the intellectually stimulating Approaches to
Global History: Seminar at Harvard University: Sven Beckert, Charles Maier, Walter
Johnson, Sugata Bose, Jake Richards, Casey Primel, Shubhankita Ojha, Samantha Payne,
Mareike-Christin Bues, Sara Lorenzini, Liliana Obregón, Aniket De, Jacob Anbinder, and
Aden Knaap. I am also thankful to Alejandro de La Fuente for allowing me to present an
earlier version of this text at a meeting organized by the Center for the Study of Slavery and
Justice (Brown University) and the Afro Latin America Research Institute (Harvard) in
October 2016. Finally, my special thanks to Joseph Miller, Nick Draper, Keila Grinberg, José
Juan Pérez Meléndez, and Fernanda Luciani for their insightful comments.
Journal of World History, Vol. 29, No. 1

© 2018 by University of Hawai‘i Press
1
2 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, MARCH 2018
“With what force,” he went on, “do the lines of the great Latin poet
commencing ‘Sic vos non vobis’ apply here.” The poet Todd had in
mind was Virgil, to whom medieval tradition had attributed a poem on
the expropriation of labor. “I wrote these lines,” said the poem,
“another takes the praise; so you, birds, make your nests, but you do not
do this for yourselves; so do you, sheep, bear wool, but not for
yourselves.” In fact, the great Latin poet may have never crafted these
lines, but accuracy in attribution didn’t seem to bother the planter.
Todd was used to taking the fruits of others’ labor and, proud of his sugar
mountain, he selectively forgot that his workers had made it all, but not
for themselves.1
The phrase sic vos non vobis, which an idiomatic translation would
render as “you do, but you do not benefit from it,” may also encompass
the idea of unequal distribution of wealth. Put this way, the phrase
sheds light not only on Todd’s ledger books; on a more general level, it
also illuminates the great impact that the recasting of the British
Empire from mercantilist protectionism to free trade had across
different spaces of the world during the mid-nineteenth century. While
promising gains for all, free trade was in fact a zero-sum game, with a
clear line between those who would reap the rewards and the others
who would bear the costs of its practices. In effect, the metaphor Todd
used suggests even more than met the planter’s eye: free trade not only
affected the relations of government and citizens within the British
Empire but also changed factor and sector returns in several continents,
striking workers and capitalists in different countries across the globe.
The impact of the British tariff reforms was so spectacular that it
displaced the social bases of national and imperial compacts within the
British Empire and beyond, inducing planters and politicians to
painstakingly rebuild local political consensuses to better protect their
interests. The common thread of global free trade political economy
around midcentury thus linked apparently unconnected events—from
the geographical reconfiguration of world wheat markets to the U.S.
Compromise of 1850 over slavery, from British high imperialism in the
East to American annexationism in the Caribbean. In this essay, I argue
that one of these remote systemic linkages can be established between
the end of sugar protectionism in Great Britain and the suppression of
the contraband slave trade to Brazil in 1850. At the time, Brazil’s
1 Melcher Todd, Castries, January 27, 1848, in Colonel Reid (Governor’s Dispatches),
St. Lucia, January 28, 1848. United Kingdom National Archives (UKNA), CO 253/91.
Todd’s marriage was announced in Colburn’s United State Service and Naval and Military
Journal (London: Colburn, part III), 638.
Parron: Global History and Slave Trade 3
infamous commerce was the world’s most voluminous trafficking in

enslaved human beings. It supported endogenous capital accumulation in
imperial Brazil, connected Brazilian capitalists with global financial
webs from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, and fed the reproduction of
Brazilian slave society over time and space.2
Historians have attributed the suppression of the Brazilian slave
trade to different causes. Early interpretations dwelt on international
diplomatic relations. They suggest that decision-makers in Rio de
Janeiro cracked down on the notorious commerce because the British
state forced them to do so out of unproblematized pure altruism. More
recent analyses focused less on interstate actions, instead turning their
attention to subaltern agency. Some scholars argued that culturally
shaped social practices of Bantu-speaking African slaves in the Paraíba
Valley allowed for a slave conspiracy in 1848, pushing Brazilian
slaveholders to discontinue the importation of enslaved Africans; or
that the microbiological side effects of Afro-Brazilian commerce,
mainly the yellow fever outbreak of 1850, drove public opinion against
the contraband trade in slaves.3 Lately, other scholars have concluded
that the Royal Navy’s raids against Rio de Janeiro were ultimately the
main factor in the final suppression of the Brazilian slave trade.4 This
most recent historiographical shift has brought Britain back into the
explanation, enabling new consideration of a classic global question
largely ignored in the last decades by scholars engaged with the internal
2 See, among others, R. A. Ferreira, Cross-Cultural Exchange in the Atlantic World: Angola
and Brazil during the Era of the Slave Trade (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012);
L. F. de Alencastro, O trato dos viventes: formação do Brasil no Atlântico Sul (São Paulo: Cia.
das Letras, 2000); M. Florentino, Em costas negras: uma história do tráfico de escravos entre a
África e o Rio de Janeiro (São Paulo: Cia. das Letras, 1997); and J. C. Miller, Way of Death:
Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830 (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1998).
3 See, respectively, L. Bethell, The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade, 1807–1869
(Cambridge: CUP, 1970); R. Slenes, “A árvore de Nsanda Transplantada: cultos kongo de

aflição e identidade escrava no sudeste brasileiro (século XIX),” in Trabalho livre, trabalho
escravo: Brasil e Europa, séculos XVIII e XIX, ed. D. Libby and J. Furtado (São Paulo:
Annablume, 2007), 273–314; S. Chalhoub, Cidade febril (São Paulo: Cia. das Letras, 2004);
and D. T. Graden, “An Act ‘Even of Public Security’: Slave Resistance, Social Tensions, and
the End of the International Slave Trade to Brazil, 1835–1856,” Hispanic American Historical
Review 76, no. 2 (1996): 249–282.
4 J. D. Needell, The Party of Order: The Conservatives, the State, and Slavery in the
Brazilian Monarchy, 1831–1871 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 138–155;

T. Parron, A política da escravidão no Império do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira,
2011), 230–266; and, recognizing the centrality of the British attacks while also adding the
weight of subaltern actions into their explanation, D. Graden, Disease, Resistance, and Lies:
The Demise of the Transatlantic Slave Trade to Brazil and Cuba (Louisiana: Louisiana State
University Press, 2014); and B. G. Mamigonian, Africanos livres: a abolição do tráfico de
escravos no Brasil (São Paulo: Cia. das Letras, 2017), 209–284.
dynamics of Brazilian history: what were, after all, the broader systemic
conditions that placed Britain on a collision course with the largest
transatlantic slave trade at the time?
British historians have already put forward interpretations of the
motives guiding Britain in its quasi-war with Brazil. Leslie Bethell
suggested that altruistic abolitionism was London’s driving force in the
campaign against the transatlantic slave trade. In his account, the need
to protect Britain’s West Indian sugar economy after slave emancipa-
tion or British pent-up frustration with the calculated pro-slave trade
inaction of the Brazilian government was of secondary importance.
David Eltis similarly defined abolitionism as a social movement
devoted to a system of British liberal beliefs that held up uncoerced
labor as the social engine best designed for human progress. He argued
that this faith in freedom galvanized Britain against the slave trade,
inducing it even to contradict its immediate material interests—which
would have been fostered by investments in both the slave trade and
slavery within and beyond the British imperial framework. Finally,
Seymour Drescher proposed that abolitionism became a successful
political force in Britain as a result of an Anglo-Saxon political culture
based on responsive government, and that antislavery triumphed
internationally because of the influential position Britain occupied
within the world system.
These readings (focused respectively on abolitionism; contra-
dictions between abolitionism and economic interests; and the
political triumph of abolitionism) share a critical approach to Eric
Williams’s classic Capitalism and Slavery. According to a widespread
reading of Williams’ work, the Industrial Revolution turned both
slavery and the slave trade into obsolete, contradictory, and unwelcome
intrusions on a growing British Empire. Targeting William’s focus on
material causality, Bethell, Eltis, and Drescher propose that British
economy and geopolitics—which they understand to have remained
relatively unchanged throughout the first half of the nineteenth
century—were compatible with black bondage, setting up an
unfavorable scenario that abolitionism rose against. Not coinciden-
tally, all three historians celebrate the abolition of the Brazilian slave
trade as “the last important stand of humanitarian politics.”5
5 Bethell, The Abolition, 296–327; D. Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the
Transatlantic Slave Trade (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 3–30, 102–123, 207–222;
and S. Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (Cambridge: CUP, 2009),
205–241, 267–293 (“the last important. . .” is on p. 288); and The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor
versus Slavery in British Emancipation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 179–201; and
E. Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).
In the following pages, I adopt the perspective of a changing world

system to offer an alternative interpretation that moves beyond the
dichotomous treatment of moral and economic factors.6 My argument is
threefold. First, I suggest that the direct encounter of two opposing
material forces—the British Industrial Revolution and the protectionist
political economy of the post-Napoleonic world order—intensified
social contradictions and class conflicts within Great Britain, leading
Westminster to adopt a new imperial political economy between 1839
and 1846 (“Breaking Through the World Order: Imperialism and Free
Trade” section). I then argue that, in the wake of these changes, both
metropole and colonies entered into a process of profound imperial
renegotiation that inextricably linked abolitionism, class conflict,
lobbying, and imperial geopolitics—that is, structural constraints,
pressure of social groups, and state action (“Free Trade and Negotiating
Empire” section). Finally, I propose that the rewriting of the British
imperial compact in the late 1840s transformed the traditional restrained
British antislavery diplomacy into unprecedented military aggression
against Brazil by 1850 (“Imperial Reorganizing: British Anti-Slave Trade
Geopolitics Redefined” section). This analytical framework reveals
morally-inflected British antislavery state actions emerging out of a
plurality of social contradictions and material interests, the origins of
which can be located in the emerging frictions between the
industrializing British economy and an evolving world system.
Although the story I tell in the following pages approaches a
particular event (the suppression of the slave trade to Brazil) in its
relation to the largest political unit of nineteenth-century capitalism
(the British Empire), the analysis may also help explain the mechanics
of capitalism in the nineteenth century. As the nineteenth-century
world economy promoted a gradual series of international market
integrations, each of which unleashed new combinations of labor, land,
and capital across distinct jurisdictions, some powerful tariff reforms
such as the British unilateral adoption of free trade in 1846 may be seen
not only as national or imperial phenomena, but rather as global events
that affected national agreements, imperial administration, diplomacy,
and warfare throughout the world. In this sense, the story that follows
gestures toward the interface of forced labor in the Americas and
imperialism in other continents, being also a prelude of how, on a wider
scale, black bondage in the New World and labor management within
6 For a similar statement, see D. W. Tomich, “Civilizing America’s Shore: British World-
Economic Hegemony and the Abolition of the International Slave Trade (1814–1867),” in
The Politics of the Second Slavery (Albany: SUNY Press, 2016), 1–25.
European empires elsewhere became inextricably interwoven in the

second half of the nineteenth century.7
BREAKING THROUGH THE WORLD ORDER: IMPERIALISM AND

FREE TRADE
The Industrial Revolution redefined the geographical horizon of the

British economy between 1780 and 1860. As the mechanization of
spinning and weaving took off in Britain, the West Indies, which had
been the core of the imperial economy in the eighteenth century, failed
to perform their role as reliable suppliers of raw materials and consumer
markets for manufactures, inducing Britain to turn more and more to
foreign jurisdictions to close its main industrial commodity chains. On
one end Britain came to depend upon the United States for the
provision of short-staple cotton and, on the other, it counted on the
European continent, the United States, and Latin America as dynamic
consumer markets for its textiles. Although the British domestic
economy had never been self-sufficient, it reached an increasingly
systemic level of dependence during the first half of the nineteenth
century. In political terms, this industrial economic geography, creating
a new relation between capital, labor, and markets across the world,
exposed Britain to the influence of other countries’ domestic economic
policies that London fell well short of controlling. Among those
policies was protectionism.8
In the post-Napoleonic world order, key Atlantic states
implemented protectionist measures strategically selected for sectorial
7 For a methodologically similar analysis, see Tâmis Parron, “World Prices and National
Politics: The Shaping of Slave Systems in the Americas,” Review (Fernand Braudel Center)
36, no. 2 (2013): 191–230, and “Oikoumenê de la Segunda Esclavitud: Crisis de la
Nulificación e integración de mercados entre Estados Unidos, Cuba y Brasil,” in Plantación,
espacios agrarios y esclavitud en la Cuba colonial, ed. J. A. Piqueras (Castelló de la Plana: Jaume
I/Havana: Casa de las Americas, 2017), 217–248. I believe—as Sebastian Conrad does in his
What is Global History (Princeton: PUP, 2016)—that global historians could benefit more
intensively from the methodological insights of those who turned the world-system
perspective into a complex, dynamic, and historicized way to look at the combined,
relational makings of global and local processes of capitalism, such as Philip McMichael,
Dale Tomich, and Giovanni Arrighi.
8 R. Davis, The Industrial Revolution and British Overseas Trade (Atlantic Highlands:
Humanities Press, 1979); “English Foreign Trade, 1660–1700,” EHR 7, no. 2 (1954):
150–166; “English Foreign Trade, 1700–1774,” EHR 15, no. 2 (1962): 285–303; and P. J.
Cain and A. G. Hopkins, “The Political Economy of British Expansion Overseas,
1750–1914,” EHR 33, no. 4 (1980): 463–490. See also R. C. Allen, The British Industrial
Revolution in Global Perspective (Cambridge: CUP, 2009), 1–23.
protection of their national economies. Old colonial powers such as

France and Spain, having lost colonies that had balanced their foreign
trade, restricted imports for their own financial stability. Urban
regions with capital and manufacturing traditions such as New York,
Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Mulhouse (French Alsace), Barcelona
(Spain), Ghent (Belgium), Wiesenthal (Baden), and Chemnitz
(Saxony), which had thrived during the system of reciprocal
blockades (Continental Blockade, Orders in Council, U.S. embar-
gos), asked for high taxes after 1815 to keep British textiles out. Lastly,
virtually all countries suffered deep deficits incurred during the
revolutionary conflicts and resorted to tariff increases to pay them off.
Tariff changes generally affect prices, volume of trade, scale of
production, distribution of gains from trade, marginal propensity to
consume, consumption patterns, employment levels, fiscal revenues,
and trade balance. Over time, this Atlantic protectionist political
economy helped depress prices of British manufactures and shrank the
industrialists’ profit margin, which made working conditions in
factories in the U.K. more precarious than they already were. The
post-Napoleonic world order, managed by London, also shaped the
power that managed it.9
Protectionism built up systemic pressures on Britain, increasing the
domestic appeal of two policies that could potentially offset the
industrial sector’s combination of expanding output and diminishing
returns. On the one hand, private investors and policy makers pushed
for a more thorough colonization of India through international
marketing of Indian crops to generate local income to import British
goods. Throughout the first half of the century, opium occupied a
prominent position in this colonial arrangement: traded in China for
tea, the drug became so crucial that its value reached US$15 million in
1828 (for comparison, U.S. raw cotton exports totaled US$22 million
in the same year). Indigo, sold in Britain, was the second most
important Indian commodity until the 1830s. With the abolition of
slavery in the British West Indies in that decade, investors redirected
capital to the sugar and coffee trades in the East, allowing Indian sugar
to eventually replace indigo as a major means of payment for
metropolitan manufactures. Pulled by opium, indigo, and sugar, India
rose briskly as a thriving consumer market. The seventh most
important global buyer of British cotton goods in 1820, India surpassed
the West Indies a few years later, caught up with the United States by
9 S. Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2014),
136–174.
the mid-thirties and took first place at the turn of 1840s.10 The growth
of the Indian consumer market as support for domestic British
prosperity, and political tranquility, explains why Britain castigated
China during the First Opium War (1839–1842), when Beijing
suspended opium imports. As an English pamphlet stated, opium profits
“have not only tended to turn the balance of trade between Great
Britain and China in favour of the former.” Together with sugar and
indigo, opium enabled India “to increase ten-fold its consumption of
British manufactures.”11 In a protectionist world order, British capital
in the Indo-Pacific had become too big to fail, as suggested in Figure 1.
The Indian safety valve, important as it was, did not prevent
Atlantic protectionism from intensifying class conflicts in Britain. By
inducing wage cuts, protectionism helped bring Chartism to life, a
vertical social movement composed of workers and middle classes in
favor of radically opening both the economy and state of Britain to
broader participation and benefits. Whitehall faced the social crisis of
the British industrial setbacks not only by favoring high imperialism in
the East but also by unilaterally adopting free trade in the Atlantic.12
Richard Cobden, a Lancashire industrialist and head of the
powerful Anti-Corn Law League, didactically summed up the free trade
solutions for class conflicts in Great Britain. Slashing tariffs on imports
such as meat, sugar, and wheat, he argued, would cheapen workers’
basic diet items. (Statistics indicate that British workers, two and a half
times more costly to their employers than their German counterparts,
spent two-thirds of their income on daily food.) By balancing the
workers’ budget, free trade would satisfy poor classes and weaken the
popular appeal of Chartism. In addition, Cobden suggested, free trade
10 On metropolitan tensions and British imperialism, see J. Gallagher and R. Robinson,
“The Imperialism of Free Trade,” EHR 6, no. 1 (1953): 1–15; P. G. Cain and A. G. Hopkins,
“Gentlemanly Capitalism and British Expansion Overseas I. The Old Colonial System,
1688–1850,” EHR 39, no. 4 (1986): 501–525; “Gentlemanly Capitalism and British
Expansion Overseas II: New Imperialism, 1850–1945,” EHR 40, no. 1 (1987): 1–26; and
British Imperialism, 1688–2000 (London: Routledge, 2002). Opium and cotton export data
are, respectively, in Parliamentary Papers Relating to the Opium Trade (London: Harrison,
1840), 148; and Letter from the Secretary of the Treasury of the Commerce and Navigation of the
United States for 1828 (Washington: Gales and Seaton, 1829), 122–123. For India’s exports,
see J. Eacott, Selling Empire: India in the Making of Britain and America, 1600–1830
(Williamsburg: Omohundro, 2016), 333–381.
11 S. Warren, The Opium Question (London: James Ridgway, 1840), 125; M. Greenberg,
British Trade and the Opening of China, 1800–42 (Cambridge: CUP, 1969); and Ralph Davis,
The Industrial Revolution.
12 P. Gurney, Wanting and Having: Popular Politics and Liberal Consumerism in England,
1830–70 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015); C. Schonhardt-Bailey, From the

Corn Laws to Free Trade: Interests, Ideas, and Institutions in Historical Perspective (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 2006).
FIGURE 1. Re-Orient: British exports of cotton goods, 1820–1839 (£).

Sources: For the years 1820–1831, Tables of the Revenue, Population, Commerce
of the United Kingdom and its Dependencies (London: Clowes, 1833), 65–70; for
1832–1834, Tables of the Revenue (London: Clowes, 1835), 194–197; for 1834,
idem (published in 1835), 197; for 1835, idem (1836), 96–97; for 1836, idem
(1838), 96–97; for 1837, idem (1839), 102–103; for 1838, idem (1840),
124–125; for 1839, idem (1841), 116–117.
would turn Britain into the most coveted food court of the world
economy, and thus induce protectionist countries to relocate their
scarce resources (labor, land, and capital) from industry to agriculture.
This political economy would act as a powerful drill to pierce through
the tariff walls that several states had put up against Britain. In terms of
the interplay of domestic and global dynamics, free trade would realign
class conflict in Britain by reorganizing the international division of
labor in the world economy.13
13 P. Pickering and A. Tyrell, The People’s Bread: A History of the Anti-Corn Law League
(London: Leicester University Press, 2000); A. Morrison, ed., Free Trade and its Reception
1815–1960. Freedom and Trade: vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 1998), 1–206; John Saville, The
Consolidation of the Capitalist State, 1800–1850 (London: Pluto Press, 1994); R. F. Spall Jr., “Free
FIGURE 2. Invasion of slave-made sugar, 1841–1849 (cwt).

Sources: Tables of the Revenue, Population, Commerce etc. of the United Kingdom
and its Dependencies (London: Clowes, 1843), 61; for 1842, idem (1844), 57; for
1843, idem (1845), 60; for 1844, idem (1846), 53; for 1845, idem (1847), 51;
for 1846, idem (1848), 59; for 1847, idem (1849), 59; for 1848, idem (1850),
59; for 1849, idem (1851), 64.
From 1842 on, the British Parliament passed a series of acts for
opening the metropolitan domestic market to global producers of food
commodities. The Repeal of the Corn Laws and the Sugar Act, both of
1846 and the main landmarks of the tariff reforms, turned Britain into a
zone of commodity market integration for food produced in core
countries or areas under their direct control. By freeing up the world
system’s greatest marketplace for sugar and wheat, British tariff reforms
changed factor returns (according to available capital, land, and labor)
and sector returns (mining, food, clothing) across the Atlantic. Among
the American countries most affected were the slaveholding regions. In
regard to sugar specifically, slaveholders responded to the new
commodity market integration in Britain, which allowed for increasing
Trade, Foreign Relations, and the Anti-Corn Law League,” The International History Review 10,
no. 3 (1988): 405–432; and N. McCord, The Anti-Corn Law League (London: George Allen,
1958).
sugar demand and consumption, with much greater elasticity than

traditional British West Indian suppliers, as shown in Figure 2.
Although all the Atlantic’s major sugar economies increased their
sales in the British market after 1846, Brazil and Cuba broke into it
more successfully as they offered slave-made products at prices lower
than their rivals reliant on wage labor. This failure of Britain’s colonies
to respond lowered expectations on future returns on investments in
food commodities among British subjects and, eventually, redefined the
British imperial compact.
FREE TRADE AND NEGOTIATING EMPIRE
Britain’s 1846 bread and sugar policy struck hard against colonial
exporters who had been enjoying a monopoly over the metropolitan
market: merchants and wheat growers in Canada, potential farmers in
Australia, and merchants and planters across sugar enclaves not only in
the West Indies, but also in Mauritius (in the Indian Ocean), and India.
To mollify them, decision makers in Whitehall instituted the principle
of trade reciprocity between metropole and colonies with the Colonial
Possessions Act (1846). This law dictated that if London had abolished
the metropolitan tariff protection for colonial products (wheat and
sugar), overseas possessions were allowed to abolish colonial tariff
protections for metropolitan products (manufactures). The act
encompassed all colonies except for India.14
Contrary to expectations, the Colonial Possessions Act did not
dispel colonial anxieties. Canadians and Australians required addi-
tional concessions as broad as self-government, and Caribbean sugar
planters drew up a long list of demands to the British Crown. Their
claims varied in size and importance. Minor demands aimed at boosting
the metropolitan market for sugar (as, for example, the request for
admitting sugar and colonial rum into British distilleries and breweries
on an equal footing with malt). Major demands touched the most
sensitive nerves of the British Empire. One of them was ending the
Navigation Acts, the set of laws, fiercely defended by British
shipbuilding lobbyists that raised foreign freights in Britain’s colonial
trade. Another called for deregulating the recruitment of African and
Asian indentured workers in order to increase labor supply and
14 Darwin, Unfinished Empire, 144–179; G. Stewart, The Origins of Canadian Politics:
A Comparative Approach (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1986); E. Shann,

An Economic History of Australia (Cambridge: CUP, 1930).
correspondingly reduce production costs, a measure that abolitionists

repudiated for prompting practices uncomfortably close to enslave-
ment. All in all, the sugar lobby intended to distribute the costs of free
competition among a range of social actors. Admitting sugarcane
derivatives in breweries and distilleries would push up sugar prices for
metropolitan consumers. Suppressing Navigation Acts would narrow
profit margins of ship owners. Massive immigration schemes would
shrink workers’ wages in the colonies.15
Initially, the transatlantic slave trade operating in Brazil and Cuba
was not a topic of concern for the producers of sugar in the colonies.
However, a deep economic crisis in Britain after 1847 transformed the
nature, strength, and scope of their lobbying. The economic crisis was
born out of a series of reasons, from which speculation stood out.
Businessmen imported huge quantities of low-tariff wheat and sugar in
1846 and 1847, hoping to catch the high monopoly prices still in effect
before free trade would bring them down. Their scheme was thwarted
in the second half of 1847 when cereal and sugar prices plummeted
respectively 50 percent and 30 percent due to the oversupply they had
created. Forty-three firms, many of which were involved with wheat
and sugar trade, went bankrupt. The Royal Bank of Liverpool, the
Liverpool Banking Company, the North and South Wales Banking
Company, and the Union Bank of Newcastle fell into insolvency.
Companies “connected with India, particularly those engaged in the
export of British manufacturing,” operated at a huge loss. And colonial
planters were forced to mortgage “everything they had,” when prices for
their commodities dropped.16
15 For rum, see Governor of Barbados to Colonial Office, September 14, 1846, UKNA,
CO 28/165, fo. 14–16; resolutions of Trinidad, September 18, 1846, in the Governor’s
dispatch to Colonial Office, October 3, 1846, UNKA, CO 295/152, fo. 11–15; and report of
the Committee of Privy Council for Trade. Whitehall, February 12, 1847, CO 28/167, fo.
251–252. On Navigation Acts, Sugar Duties, Confidential (London: Foreign Office, 1848),
UKNA, CO 884/1, 3; a petition by the Assembly of Jamaica, April 1, 1847, attached to the
governor’s dispatch to Colonial Office, April 6, 1847, UKNA, CO 137/291, fo. 214–245;
and a petition by the House of Assembly of the Island of Antigua, in the governor’s dispatch
to Colonial Office, December 26, 1847, UKNA, CO 7/87 (no folios). On immigration, see
resolutions of Trinidad, 18 de set. de 1846; and memorial of the Government Council of
Trinidad, April 2, 1849, in the governor’s dispatch to Colonial Office, April 6, 1849,
UKNA, CO 295/167, fo. 52–62. Such claims were summed up in the Report of the Acting
Committee to the Standing Committee of West India Planters and Merchants (London: Maurice,
1847).
16 D. Morier Evans, The Commercial Crisis 1847–1848 (London: Letts, 1849); Ward-
Perkins, “The Commercial Crisis of 1847,” Oxford Economic Papers 2, no. 1 (1950): 75–94;
and Report from the Select Committee of the House of the Lords appointed to enquire into the
Causes of the Distress which has for sometime Prevailed among the Commercial Classes (London:
Commons, 1848), vol. 1, v–vi.
With metropolitan and overseas economies both in distress, the

British state started a process of imperial renegotiation. Besides
granting Canadians responsible government (1849) and passing the
Australian Government Colonies Act (1850), the British Parliament
set up a series of Select Committees to put out the flames that free trade
was fueling everywhere: the Select Committee on the British
commercial crisis, the Select Committee on general public expendi-
tures, the Select Committee on the Navigation Acts, the Select
Committee on sugar and coffee planting in the British Empire, the
Select Committee on the illegal transatlantic slave trade, and the
Select Committee on Ceylon and British Guiana. These parliamentary
investigations branched out of the same trunk: they examined the new
positions Britain and its colonies occupied within an imperial economy
dramatically refashioned by free trade. By doing so, they sought to
define who would pay for losses inflicted by the new political economy.
To understand the origins of the Royal Navy’s violent actions against
Rio de Janeiro to suppress the Brazilian slave trade by 1850 not only as
the result of longstanding pervasive antislavery orientation in Britain,
but also as a result of more urgent British concerns about imperial
political stability, it is necessary to read the volumes of the Select
Committee on Sugar and Coffee Planting.17
From February to April of 1848 the Select Committee gathered
testimonies of 86 witnesses through 2,317 pages and 16,833 questions,
totaling the most comprehensive documentary record of parliamentary
investigations in that year. Witnesses comprised a full catalogue of the
colonial bestiary: directors, president, and bureaucrats of the East India
Company (EIC); the undersecretary of the Ministry of Colonies, the
inspector general of customs in Britain, the colonial secretary of
Ceylon; importers and brokers of sugars from India, the British
Caribbean, Cuba, and Brazil; metropolitan distillers; coffee importers
17 Report from the Select Committee on Sugar and Coffee Planting, 8 vols. (London: House
of Commons, 1848); Report from the Select Committee of the House of the Lords Appointed to
Enquire into the Causes of the Distress which Has for Sometime Prevailed among the Commercial
Classes, 2 vols. (London: House of Commons, 1848); Report from the Select Committee on
Slave Trade, 4 vols. (London: House of Commons, 1848); Report from the Select Committee on
Slave Trade, 2 vols. (London: House of Commons, 1849); and Report from the Select
Committee of the House of Lords appointed to consider the best means which Great Britain can
adopt for the Final Extinction of the African Slave Trade, 2 vols. (London: House of Commons,
1849–1850); First, Second, Third and Fourth Reports from the Select Committee on Navigation
Laws (London: House of Commons, 1847); Report from the Select Committee of the House of
Lords appointed to enquire into the Policy and Operation of the Navigation Laws and to Report
Thereon to the House, 4 vols. (London: House of Commons: 1848); Report from the Select
Committee on Ceylon and British Guiana, 3 vols. (London: House of Commons, 1849); and
Report from the Select Committee on Ceylon, 3 vols. (London: House of Commons, 1850).
connected to Brazil, Ceylon, and the Caribbean; Royal Navy officers

experienced in fighting slave trading; shipmasters involved in
transporting free Africans; and owners or administrators of sugar mills
in Indochina, India (Madras and Calcutta), Mauritius, Jamaica,
Barbados, Demerara, British Guiana, St. Kitts, Antigua, Grenada,
Trinidad, and St. Lucia. This Select Committee was instrumental in
generalizing West Indian demands for tariff protection for colonial
sugar. According to George Bentinck, the committee chair, lower tariffs
would sink the nearly shipwrecked Caribbean economy as much as
emergent imperial sugar interests in the East. Slave-made sugar in Cuba
and Brazil would outpace Indian sugar and thus impair India’s capacity
to import manufactures, affecting the very metropolitan interests free
traders meant to safeguard. This outlook gave the Select Committee a
significant external buttress. In July 1848, the British magazine The
Economist reported that “130 major bankers, merchants and trading
houses in the City” held a meeting chaired by Thomas Baring to express
support for the conclusions of the Select Committee. In other words,
the economic crisis of 1848 universalized West Indian claims, spreading
a local calamity around the globe.18
In-bond prices in London for brown sugar coming from different
parts of the world between 1840 and 1853 confirm the committee
findings. In-bond prices leave off the value of import tariffs, but they
take in the remaining costs of commodity trading (prices in colonial
port, export taxes, freight, insurance, and commissions), thus
describing the value of colonial goods when coming out of a vessel
and before clearing customs as imports. The 1840–1853 in-bond sugar
prices are as shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3 presents clear-cut phases that mirror the process of
international sugar market integration in Britain. After slavery’s
abolition in 1834–1838 cut back sugar production in the West Indies,
the value of the Caribbean brown sugar hit its peak in the post-
Napoleonic world order. Its high prices, coupled by a tariff reform
suppressing differential duties on West and East Indian sugars, signaled
hefty profits for entrepreneurs willing to invest in sugar production in
the Indian Ocean. Indeed, India and Mauritius emerged as the two
main sugar suppliers for Britain in the following five years, and their rise
explains the market value decline of a hundredweight brown sugar to
18 Report from the Select Committee on Sugar and Coffee Planting; for the City meeting, The
Economist, June 3, 1848, 631. On City’s financiers sometimes turning against free trade,
M. Daunton, “Gentlemanly Capitalism and British Industry, 1820–1914,” Past and Present
122 (1989): 119–158.
FIGURE 3. Brown sugar prices in London, 1840–1853 (decimalized £).

Sources: Return of the Quantities of Unrefined and Refined Sugar, of Molasses, and
Rum, Imported and Cleared for Consumption, in each Year ending 5 July from 1842
to 1854 (London: House of Commons, 1854) (Parliamentary Papers, 1854, vol.
LXV, doc. n. 429, 9); and West Indies. Correspondence on the Subject of West
India (London: Foreign Office, 1854), 4. UNKA, CO 884/1.
£1.7 from £2.5 (1840–1843). Between abolition and the early 1840s,
protectionism created a bubble in the British imperial economy, within
which the interplay of metropolitan demand and colonial supply
almost exclusively commanded sugar prices, as foreign slave-made sugar
had to pay tariffs equivalent to 300 percent of its in-bond prices. In
1846, the Sugar Act pricked the bubble, slave-made sugar broke into
the British market, and the gap between free and slave sugar prices
nearly closed (1847–1853).19
19 Eltis and Drescher suggest that abolitionism produced “a profound change in the
distribution of sugar production toward the slave importing economies [Cuba and Brazil].”
See Eltis, “The Slave Economies of the Caribbean: Structure, Performance, Evolution and
Significance,” in General History of the Caribbean, III The Slave Societies of the Caribbean, ed.
F. Knight (London: UNESCO, 1997), 121; and Drescher, Mighty Experiment, 189–190, and
Abolition, 287–288. Their analysis underplays the reorganization of sugar trade within the
British Empire in the 1830s and 1840s. On the sugar economy in the Indian Ocean, Select
In 1848, the British average colonial sugar price was as low as in

1831. In both years, a hundredweight of brown sugar was worth only
£1.18. But prices have distinct social meanings across space and time.
They can hide deep social differences behind their equivalent face
value, and, indeed, the years 1831 and 1848 were worlds apart. In 1831,
planters of the British Empire were concentrated in the Caribbean
region and had slaves to whom they could transfer the pressure of
competitive markets. By 1848, British sugar producers were spread out
in the Caribbean, Mauritius, Madras, and Bengal, and they employed
uncoerced labor. Colonial producers and metropolitan politicians still
needed to assess whether they could socialize losses inflicted by free
market practices among free local subordinate actors. Their ability to
socialize losses varied according to how local economic conditions and
larger economic processes interacted.
The export sugar economy built in Bengal Presidency, the main
British supplier in India, was based upon what British governors knew
as the zamindari system. In this system, native merchants advanced
resources to peasants (ryots), who returned in exchange a half-
processed, juicy sugar that was then resold to European-owned sugar
mills in the hinterlands of Calcutta and other cities for refining.
Technology was not a decisive limiting factor for Europeans, since sugar
mill plants accommodated steam machines, vacuum boilers, and
carbon filters, the cutting-edge technologies at the time, but labor was
so, since it was performed by ryots, who were beyond the direct reach of
European labor management. With no control over a crucial part of the
production costs, their profitability varied according to the ability to
dictate purchase prices of half-processed sugar. “It all depends upon the
price at which they can buy the raw material from the natives,” said a
witness before the Select Committee on Sugar and Coffee. If Europeans
bought it cheap, they had sufficient profit margins to face Cuban and
Brazilian slaveholders in Britain. If not, they sustained losses. An
efficient way to drive down prices in India was to become a heavy buyer
in local marketplaces, but the British fell short of becoming one. When
Europeans offered prices the natives deemed too low, the natives shifted
their slushy sugar to Indian domestic markets or Eastern foreign outlets
(Central Asia, Persia, Russia, and the Pakistani Punjab). “India has
markets for sugar independently of England” and “below a certain price
Committee on Sugar and Coffee, vol. 1, 25–26, 31–32, 37, 89, 119–121, 132, 210, 292–293;
idem, vol. 2, 42–43, 45; and U. Bosma, The Sugar Plantation in India and Indonesia: Industrial
Production, 1770–2010 (Cambridge: CUP, 2013), 1–163. Prices of Cuban sugar rose before
free trade because hurricanes devastated Cuban plantations in 1844 and 1846.
she will not permit her sugar to leave India to come here [Britain];
unless we can get it a certain price, we cannot bring it.” The British
were halfway in the process of incorporating India into the Atlantic
world economy. Despite the military apparatus of the EIC, control over
labor and marketing practices in large swaths of India still remained
with independent actors who could reallocate resources to more
promising markets. When the British colonialists tried to socialize the
costs of free trade with Indians, the colonized easily made their way out
of the squeeze.20
The Indian sugar trade mattered for London, as it was driving the
British imperial swing to the East. Not only did sugar compose a quarter
(US$7.2 million) of total Indian annual exports to Britain in the 1840s,
but its production in Mauritius created a dynamic intercolonial market
for Indian rice worth US$1 million a year. This happened because the
manpower recruited to the island’s plantations came from India (the so-
called “coolies”) and followed a rice-based diet. Together, sugar and rice
exports from India made up the bulk of cargo in vessels returning to
Britain and provided means of payment for British manufactures.
Outselling imperial Indian sugar with slave-grown produce hit at the
core of this system. “If they will not take the produce of India in
payment,” an EIC chairman explained referring to British importers,
“India cannot purchase their manufactures.” Slaveholders could
replace Indians as sugar suppliers, but they would do poorly as
consumers of textiles. “And what are Cuba and Brazil as markets,” he
went on, “compared with the magnificent territory of British India,
containing many millions of consumers, who will, I trust, in time
become opulent consumers if their industry be fairly encouraged?” The
illegal transatlantic slave trade, to this point mainly a subject of
abolitionist philanthropy, now crossed into the domain of London
imperial geopolitics.21
Other sugar colonies, where the plantation system prevailed, had
their own challenges. In Mauritius and the Caribbean Islands the
British exercised such control over land, capital, and debt that planters
20 Select Committee on Sugar and Coffee, vol. 1, 20 (“It all depends”), 169–171
(alternative Eastern markets), 181 (“India has markets”). For similar challenges regarding
sugar and cotton, see Bosma, The Sugar Plantation; Beckert, Empire of Cotton; and C. Florio,
“From Poverty to Slavery: Abolitionists, Overseers, and the Global Struggle for Labor in
India,” Journal of American History 102 (2016): 1005–1024.
21 Select Committee on Sugar and Coffee, vol. 1, 82, 115 (value of sugar exports), 117, 172,
240, 282; vol. 2, 51, 69–70 (intercolonial rice trade); vol. 1, 121, 181 (sugar and rice as
shiploads); and vol. 1, 206 (“And what are Cuba and Brazil”). The coffee economy in Ceylon
was also linked to Indian rice exports (Select Committee on Sugar and Coffee, vol. 6, 58).
confronted with money-losing prices had no alternative outlets and

had to pass on part of the competitive burdens to fieldworkers. The cost
of labor (without neglecting factors such as soil and climate) turned out
to be crucial for their success in the new free trade era: “the whole
question regarding the existence of Mauritius and all our sugar-
producing colonies in the present state of affairs,” said a witness before
the Select Committee, “is that of labour.” “Six-twelfths is; fully half
goes in wages and provisions,” another stated. Output data of twenty
British sugar colonies show that Barbados had the most consistent
expansion of production capacity after 1846. A key to its success
appears in the comparative pay scale for fieldworkers in the late
1840s—an index that suggests only approximate costs of colonial labor,
as it does not consider labor productivity.22
Barbados presented the wage floor in the post-emancipation West
Indies due to its particular geo-historical conditions. Small in size for
the number of its inhabitants, “with a population more dense than that
of China,” Barbados had ubiquitous and rich limestone soils, which
induced planters to devote almost all its agrarian landscape to
sugarcane. As a result, ex-slaves lacked plots for their produce and
depended on international markets for food. Trapped in a monocultural
land pattern that ruled out self-sufficiency, workers were forced to
accept reduced wages. In the remaining sugar colonies, the scenario
changed. Thanks to marginal, available, and still uncultivated lands,
former slaves preferred subsistence to meagre wages, a peasant life to
rural proletarization, pushing up wages. Sugar prices in colonial ports
followed the level of their respective workers’ resistance and the
consequent cost of labor pointed out in Table 1: Barbados planters
could offer the ton of brown sugar for £15.5 (US$74.4), Mauritius
planters for £20 (US$96), and the Jamaicans for £22.75 (US$109.2).23
Before the 1847–1848 financial crisis and the virtual equalization of
sugar prices in Britain (Figure 3), the West Indian lobby expected from
Colonial Office actions to drown workers’ resistance by raising the
water level in the labor pool. Sugar businessmen wanted to open the
22 Select Committee on Sugar and Coffee, vol. 1, 220 (“The whole question”). See
operating variables other than labor in D. Tomich, “Commodity Frontiers, Spatial Economy
and Technological Innovation in the Caribbean Sugar Industry, 1783–1878,” in The
Caribbean and the Atlantic World Economy, ed. A. Leonard and D. Pretel (London: Palgrave-
Macmillan, 2015), 184–216.
23 On Barbados, see State of the West Indies in 1855. S.l. [London]: s.d. [1856], 10–11, and
State of the West Indies in 1862. S.l. [London]: s.d. [1862], UKNA, CO 884/1. Committee on
Sugar and Coffee, vol. 8, xvi (“with a population”) and xiii (“Free on Board” prices, which
include local commissions and export tariffs, but not freight nor insurance).
TABLE 1. Fieldworkers’ average wage in British sugar colonies, 1845–1847

Wage per day 24-day monthly costs 24-day monthly costs
Colonies (pence) (shilling) (decimalized £)
Sta. Lucia 15 30 1.5
Trinidad 13 26 1.3
Jamaica 12 24 1.2
Grenada 12 24 1.2
St. Vincent 8 16 0.8
Mauritius 6–8 12–16 0.6–0.8
Barbados 6 12 0.6
Sources: for Jamaica, Sta. Lucia, Grenada, and Barbados, see Memoranda on the Charges brought
before the Committee [of the House of Commons] on Sugar [and Coffee Planting] Duties etc. 1848.
UKNA, CO 38/179, fo. 138–140; for Mauritius, Parliamentary Papers, 1849, vol. XXXVII, doc. n.
280, 94, 120, 139; for Trinidad, governor’s dispatch, April 6, 1849, CO 295/167, fo. 53 (rounded
figures). Values are approximate and vary in time.
faucet on one hand (“immigration on a most extensive scale,” “not

fettered by any unnecessary restrictions”) and close the outflow on the
other (“laws to prevent vagrancy and informal possession of lands”).
Eventually, the invisible hand of the market would weaken labor’s
resolve and knock wages down. The Standing Committee of West India
Planters and Merchants filed a claim along these lines just before the
1847–1848 storm: “the West India colonies possess the necessary works
and machineries and cleared lands and means of transport for a much
larger production than they can at present accomplish. To render their
cultivation again profitable, they only require enjoyment of freedom in
procuring labour.” Right after this optimistic note, however, the
Caribbean lobby was taken aback by the brutal sugar price equalization.
Teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, colonial planters, instead of
waiting for the invisible hand to strike at workers, decided to slash
wages with their own hands.24
British sugar producers delayed paying wages owed for months.
They canceled the customary provision of free health assistance to
workers. Worse, they made a 30 percent to 50 percent reduction in
wages in Santa Lucia, Montserrat, Antigua, Saint Vincent, British
Guiana, and Trinidad, apparently taking the Barbadian 6-pence wage
bottom line as the new normal. Stung by such attacks, the emancipated
24 Petition of Trinidad, September 18, 1846, in governor’s dispatch, October 3, 1846,
UKNA, CO 295/152, fo. 11–15; Report of the Acting Committee, 15 (“the West India
colonies”).
workers broke out in revolt and made their own People’s Spring in
1848. Montserrat laborers prevented sugar from leaving plantations
and rose up against taxes levied on their livestock and lands. In British
Guiana (Berbice and Demerara) workers held strikes, uttered
“threatening speeches” and burned dozens of cane fields. Trinidadian
fieldworkers rushed into public buildings, beat police forces, swore
death to the whites, torched cane fields, and surrounded the governor’s
carriage armed with machetes and hoes. In Jamaica, an island full of
marginal lands allocated for subsistence, the sheer attempt to cut wages
caused mass desertion into the hinterlands, and the colony went into a
tailspin. “1,848 sugar plantations have been abandoned so far,” reported
the Spanish consul in Kingston. A British observer looked into its
future: “as a sugar-growing country, she is never likely again to hold a
very high rank.” Free trade damaged an already debilitated Jamaica
beyond repair, paving the way for the traumatic Morant Bay Rebellion
(1865) and the subsequent suppression of the representative
government in the colony.25
Pay cuts turned out to be a delicate, if not foolhardy, social
operation, a mistake planters quickly recognized. Heretofore, the sugar
lobby had sought to supply the British Antilles with free (indentured)
Asian and African labor. Thenceforth, they strove to deprive their
competitors in Cuba and Brazil of enslaved Africans. This externaliza-
tion of costs and geopolitical inversion was an important move: for the
first time, they placed ending others’ illegal transatlantic slave trade
high on their list of demands, hoping not so much to reduce their own
production costs but instead to increase slaveholders’ and, thus, relieve
the social tensions in the West Indies. This change in the geopolitical
views of the sugar lobby is apparent in a chronological breakdown of
Caribbean petitions sent to Parliament for suppressing the slave trade:
before 1846 no anti-slave trade petition had ever been delivered;
between 1846 and 1850, twenty-four made their way to London. Out of
25 State of the West Indies in 1855. S.l. [London]: n.d. [1856], UKNA, CO 884/1, 10–11;
governor’s dispatch, Montserrat, May 23, 1848, UKNA, CO 7/91 (no folio); idem, Trinidad,
April 6, 1849, UKNA, CO 295/167, fo. 52–57; idem, Barbados, October 26, 1848, UKNA,
CO 260/69, fo. 39–47; idem, Trinidad, October 6, 1849, UKNA, CO 265/168, fo. 230–231;
idem, British Guiana, December 31, 1847, January 18 and 31, August 31, September 16 and
November 1, 1848, UKNA, CO, 112/29; Select Committee on Sugar and Coffee, vols. 5, 7
(“threatening speeches”); and Juan de Castillo to Captain General of Cuba, Kingston,
August 14, 1848 (Castillo was referring to sugar mills closed since the 1830s), in Trabajadores
negros libres, Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid, fo. 45–47. See also W. A. Green, British
Slave Emancipation: The Sugar Colonies and the Great Experiment 1830–1865 (Oxford: OUP,
1976); and A. Adamson, Sugar Without Slaves: The Political Economy of British Guiana,
1838–1904 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972).
these, only one was from 1846. All others dated from the second half of
1847 onward, when the commodity market integration in Britain
slashed sugar prices, forced down wages, and sent a wave of social unrest
through the colonies. If plotted on a chart, the curve of anti-slave trade
petitions would be inversely proportional to the curve of sugar prices on
Figure 3. One fed the other.26
Both the collective efforts for drawing up anti-slave trade petitions
and the wording of the petitions themselves confirm that social unrest
pushed Caribbean elites for an explicit campaign against the slave
trade. Only 38 percent of the petitions were signed within the dignified
halls of colonial legislatures. The rest (62 percent) came up in feverish
public meetings open to rich and poor, white and black, former masters
and ex-slaves, workers and planters alike. Witnessed by dozens,
hundreds, and even thousands of people, the ritual of writing open
petitions restrengthened social ties and solidarity across class divisions
among those dismayed by plummeting prices that Cuban and Brazilian
slave drivers were bringing about in the metropolitan market. The
content of the texts also suggests this. “We,” the 1,658 signatories of
26 For this and the following paragraphs, see “Memorial on the Subject of the Foreign
Slave Trade,” Saint George, Jamaica, September 18, 1847, UKNA, CO 137/293, fo. 87–88;
memorial of the Assembly of Jamaica, December 24, 1847, in Select Committee on Sugar and
Coffee, vol. 3, 374–376; memorial of inhabitants of Portland, Jamaica, January 31, 1848, in
Select Committee on Sugar and Coffee, vol. 7, 237–238; memorial of the Council of Jamaica,
September 19, 1848, Journals of the Legislature Council, UKNA, CO 140/139; memorial of the
Assembly of Jamaica, November 16, 1848, CO 137/301, fo. 58–72; memorial of inhabitants,
Spanish Town, May 24, 1849, UKNA, CO 137/302, fo. 369–377; idem, Clarendon, June 16,
1849, CO 137/303, fo. 3–7; idem, Kingston, Jamaica, June 25, 1849, CO 137/303, fo. 20–24;
memorial of settlers and labourers of St. David, Jamaica, July 13, 1849, UKNA, CO 137/303,
fo. 75–82; memorial of Labourers of Trelawny, Jamaica, August 2, 1849, UKNA, CO 137/
303, fo. 122–125; petition of the Council and Assembly of Barbados, November 7, 1848, CO
28/169, fo. 94–102; petition of inhabitants, Barbados, n.d., in the dispatch of February 20,
1849, UKNA, CO 28/170, fo. 121–133; memorandum, Trinidad, 6 de ago. de 1850, UKNA,
28/172, fo. 317–320; petition of Council and House of Assembly, Grenada, in the dispatch of
March 27, 1849, CO 28/170, fo. 131; petition of the Board of Council and House of
Assembly, Antigua, in the dispatch of December 26, 1847, UKNA, CO 7/87 (no folio);
petition of inhabitant of Roseau, August 8, 1849, reproduced in Parliamentary Papers, 1850,
LV (doc. n. 149), Slave Trade: Copies of All Memorials Transmitted to Her Majesty’s
Government from the West Indies, 8; petition of Trinidad, September 18, 1846, CO 295/152,
fo. 11–15; petition of inhabitants, Trinidad, in the dispatch of September 18, 1847, UKNA,
CO 295/157, fo. 356–365; petition of planters, Trinidad, January 17, 1848, UKNA, CO 295/
160; petition of the inhabitants, Trinidad, June 5, 1848, in Slave Trade: Copies (1850), 9;
petition of inhabitants, Saint Lucia, in the dispatch of April 19, 1848, UKNA, CO 253/92
(no folio); memorial of planters, British Guiana, November 29, 1848, CO 72/843; and Report
of The Acting Committee to the Standing Committee of West India Planters and Merchants
(London: Nichols, 1850), 15–16. Some Jamaican petitions were reproduced in The Jamaica
Movement for Promoting the Enforcement of Slave-Trade Treaties (London: Charles Gilpin,
1850). Slave Trade: Copies includes fifteen petitions.
Barbados stated, “numbers of whom were once slaves, and besides are of
African descent,” meeting with those “who were themselves owners of
slaves,” “solicit your Majesty not to discontinue or relax, but graciously
to double your Royal exertions for the suppression of this remorseless
system of wholesale oppression and murder” (the slave trade), because
“whatever claims to compete with your Majesty’s free colonial subjects
other nations may be considered to possess, such claims cannot be
otherwise than forfeited by those who support their competition by
wrong and robbery.” Other subjects were just as explicit in their
complaints. The Sugar Act, they said, “placed [Britain’s] sugar-
producing colonies in a disastrous competition with slave-labour
countries.” For this reason, the colonial order mirrored less the
“comparative tranquility” of Britain than the “commotion and discord
[that] have so generally prevailed in the other kingdoms of Europe” (the
Peoples’ Spring of 1848). They also argued that the slave trade
menaced “British interests at stake in the East and West Indies.”
Jamaican politicians summed all up: “the permanent happiness of the
rural population is inseparably interwoven with the prosperity of the
agricultural interests.”27
Initially making a non-specific condemnation of the slave trade, the
colonists called for more aggressive measures as they were battered by
falling prices, social turmoil, property damage, and strikes. In a public
meeting in Trinidad in September 1847, they demanded the
emancipation of all Africans smuggled into Cuba (since 1820) and
Brazil (since 1831): “new and vigorous measures [should] be adopted for
the detection and liberation of such slaves as have heretofore been
feloniously introduced into foreign countries.” In June 1848 they
quoted Palmerston’s testimony before the Select Committee on Sugar
and Coffee Plantation and required the “speedy liberation of those
unfortunate Africans now brought under your Majesty’s special notice
as being illegally and unjustifiably held in the most cruel slavery.”
Others followed the Trinidadians. In Jamaica, where abolitionist David
Turnbull had been living since he was kicked out of Cuba for
antislavery activities, colonists unearthed his project for liberating
enslaved Africans illegally imported into Cuba: if Turnbull’s proposal
were “now urged on the Spanish and Brazilian Governments with
27 Barbados, UKNA, CO 28/170, fo. 121–133. References to the Sugar Act are in Slave
Trade. Copies, 8; memorial of inhabitants, Jamaica, May 24, 1849, in The Jamaica Movement,
89–90; memorial, Jamaica, June 25, 1849, Memorial, Jamaica, July 13, 1849, both in UKNA,
CO 137/303. See also petition of the Council and House of Assembly, Grenada, UKNA, CO
28/170 (references to Spring’s People); and memorial of the Council of Jamaica, September
19, 1848 (“the permanent happiness”).
suitable energy, it would prove beneficial and effective in enabling the

emancipated colonies of Great Britain to withstand and outlive the
competition with the slave grown produce.” The issue made its way
into three more colonial petitions (Dominica, British Guiana, Jamaica
again) and the agenda of a committee representing planters in the
metropole. These colonial petitions filed past the Colonial Office,
signaling that their true interlocutor was Lord Palmerston, then the
head of British international relations.28
When free trade plunged the Empire into turmoil and spurred a
series of investigative committees in Parliament, the government came
under attack not only from overseas and the City but also from Richard
Cobden’s artillery. Lancashire free traders believed they could have
both Indian and Brazilian markets. In their opinion, India had the
capacity to buy British manufactures even without sugar; and London
could extract a commercial treaty from Rio de Janeiro to open the
Brazilian market for British textiles in exchange for relaxing its naval
campaign to suppress the slave trade. They did not stop there. Like
current neoliberals, they envisioned a state with low taxes and
restricted spending; a state that would cut its budget after giving up tax
revenues on wheat and sugar. To pursue this they manned in 1848 two
apparently disconnected, but essentially united Select Committees:
one on Miscellaneous Expenditure and another on the Slave Trade.
While the former tracked budget overspending across the state, the
latter focused on the specific outlay for the Royal Navy. The Navy had
recently increased operations in the River Plate and off the African
coast, accounting for 66 percent of the increase in public spending in
the years 1845–1848 (when compared to 1841–1844). Free traders such
as Richard Cobden and the editors of The Economist wanted a cheap
Navy, which implied giving free rein to slave dealers. “The Brazilian or
the Cuban planter is not singular in desiring that others should work for
him,” taught The Economist. “To prohibit the transport of Africans as
laborers to the Brazils will only make what might be a decent, well-
regulated emigration, a smuggling trade, pregnant with horrors.” The
ethics of the free traders were selective. They pointed out that the
28 Historians of the Caribbean (note 22) know the colonial popular revolts of 1848, but
they do not relate them to the sugar lobbying against the transatlantic slave trade. Historians
who study the slave trade (notes 3 and 4) know the Jamaican pressure to end the slave trade,
but they do not relate it to the Caribbean popular revolts. For quotes, see petition, Trinidad,
September 18, 1847 (“new and vigorous”); idem, Trinidad, June 5, 1848 (“speedy
liberation”); “To the Queen’s Most Excellent Majesty” Jamaica, November 16, 1848 (“now
urged on””). See also British Guiana, December 19, 1848; memorial of labourers of Trelawny,
Jamaica, August 2, 1849; and petition, Dominica, August 8, 1849.
struggle against the slave trade had cost the British state a cumulative
value of £21 million (roughly $100 million) since 1815. But they
neglected to mention that interest payments on the British national
debt were draining at least £24 million each year between 1830 and
1848, almost half of the British annual income. Their priorities were
crystal clear even if undeclared. Disabling the West Africa Squadron—
and sacrificing thousands of African lives—would help the British state
to generate primary surplus and guarantee bondholders’ profits.29
IMPERIAL REORGANIZING: BRITISH ANTI-SLAVE TRADE GEOPOLITICS

REDEFINED
Cornered by both Lancashire free traders and the colonial sugar lobby
in 1848, Westminster signaled it would foster a new imperial compact, a
compromise that would protect interests common to the West Indies,
the financial center of London, and the East Indies and that, although
different from Lancashire’s expectations, would nevertheless also
protect industrialists’ investments. Westminster would enact the
compromise on two fronts. On the one hand, the government would
postpone the complete tariff equalization on sugar, scheduled for 1851,
by three years, a demand set forth by the Select Committee on Sugar
and Coffee. On the other hand, it would address the high cost of free
labor by forcing slaveholding competitors to give up the transatlantic
slave trade. Testifying before the Select Committee on Sugar and
Coffee, Palmerston indicated the British state’s new geopolitical
orientation. “I believe,” he said, “that a comparatively small force
around Cuba and on the coast of Brazil would be sufficient, and the
Admiralty are taking measures to place cruisers on both those
stations.”30
Personally, Palmerston made no distinction between Brazil and
Cuba, targeting both with the same energy. After reading four anti-
slave trade petitions from Jamaica, one from Antigua, one from St.
Lucia, and four from Trinidad (two of which requested a “quick release”
29 Hansard Debates, House of Commons, March 20, 1848, 844–845, 996–997; and
February 22, 1848, 1091 (£21 millions); and The Economist, July 15, 1848, 789. The Board of
Trade of Manchester sent a petition to Parliament for the repeal of the Aberdeen Act, the
1845 British statute that subjected Brazilian vessels suspected of slave-trading to British
courts (Hansard Debates, Commons, April 20, 1849, 533). For British yearly spending on
interest rates, see Tables of the Revenue, Population and Commerce of the United Kingdom
(London: 1834–1850, 24 vols.).
30 Select Committee on Sugar and Coffee, vols. 1, 5.
of the African enslaved by their opponents), he wrote to Prime

Minister Lord John Russell: “I have received these from the Colonial
Office.” “What I would propose to you,” he went on, “is as follows: [. . .]
we should instruct Dundonald [Navy Commander] to go to the
Havana.” Once there, Dundonald would announce Britain’s desire to
“demand the immediate and entire freedom of all the negroes now in
Cuba who have been landed therein since the date mentioned in the
law above mentioned [1820].” Dundonald would further promise that,
if the slave trade was to continue, “a naval force [would] interrupt
effectually the commercial intercourse of the ports of Cuba with other
ports of the world.” Struck by such a brazen proposal, Russell hemmed
in his minister. “My Dear Palmerston: This is much too large a question
to be decided without consulting the Cabinet.” Russell knew the recent
American annexation of Texas and California had transformed the
geopolitical frame of the Atlantic; that a unilateral British blockade of
Cuba would push the colony into the hands of the U.S.; and that such a
change of sovereignty in Cuba would have deep implications for the
European balance of power, affecting Britain’s diplomatic position
within Europe. Moreover, the Cuban slave trade had dramatically
diminished after the Conspiracy of La Escalera (1844), falling to 8
percent of its size ten years earlier and representing only 3 percent of
the numbers that Brazilian dealers were delivering since 1845 (8,000 vs.
272,000). “The export trade from Africa to America,” Palmerston gave
in, “is now almost exclusively confined [. . .] to the supply of Brazil.”
Cuba had all its flanks protected. The Royal Navy therefore set its
sights on South America.31
The Royal Navy first attacked Brazil in May 1848, when the man-
of-war Grecian seized a slaver off Salvador (Bahia) and anchored in the
city, refusing to hand its prize over to Brazilian naval authorities. “Such
an event, Sir Minister,” said a lawmaker of the Brazilian Parliament and
owner of hundreds of slaves in a town close to Salvador (Cachoeira), “if
reiterated, if repeated again in Bahia, may jeopardize both the domestic
31 For contraband estimates, see slavevoyages.com. North-American vessels and capital
became engaged in the slave trade to Brazil more heavily in the 1840s, after the Palmerston
Act (1839) and La Esclaera Conspiracy (1844), as one can see in L. Marques, The United
States and the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the Americas, 1776–1867 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2016). For why Britain singled out Brazil as target for naval actions, see
R. Marquese, T. Parron and M. Berbel, Slavery and Politics: Brazil and Cuba, 1790–1850
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2016). Quotes taken from Palmerston to
Russell, [London], November 14, 1848; Russell to Palmerston, [London], November 18,
1848. Hartley Library, Southampton (HLS), The Palmerston Papers, GV/RU/230; and
Palmerston to the Admiralty, August 5, 1848, UKNA, FO 84/745, fo. 59–62 (“O comércio
de exportação”).
peace of the province and our foreign relations.” Seeing the British
reorganizing their Empire, the Brazilian coast attacked by a British
man-of-war, and Brazilian dealers isolated in the international
geography of the slave trade, the Brazilian government made a realistic
analysis of the new international settings and decided to move. In
August 1848, Foreign Minister Bernardo de Souza Franco sought out
James Hudson, the British diplomat in Rio, to preempt new attacks. “I
hope that the measures we are considering,” he said, “will show Lord
Palmerston we mean it seriously and that he will no longer need
cruisers.” The measures Souza Franco mentioned were two bills the
Imperial Executive had just come up with, one to promote migration
from Europe and another ending the transatlantic slave trade. Whereas
he spoke to Hudson in Rio, his diplomat in London spread the same
news throughout Whitehall.32
The anti-slave trade project that the Brazilian Executive put forth
was an old proposal the Senate had passed in 1837 and that had been
waiting for a vote in the House of Representatives ever since. The bill
was meant to suppress the slave trade, but its Article 13 was tricky: it
repealed the important law of November 7, 1831, which had declared
all Africans smuggled into the country after its passage (roughly
600,000 people by 1848) free and whose enforcement had been
suspended through informal political compromises. The imperial
Executive feared that further raids by the Royal Navy, coupled with the
illegal status of hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans, threatened
the security of the country—a specter the Bahian lawmaker had in
mind when alluding to “both the domestic peace of the province and
our foreign relations.” To complicate matters, while the Grecian was
attacking off Salvador, police authorities in the coffee-growing town of
Vassouras in the Paraíba Valley River (Rio de Janeiro) uncovered plans
for a slave rebellion. They found out that a secret society had plotted to
poison masters and to subsequently crown an African king. In the
government’s view, the anti-slave trade bill, with its Article 13, would
32 The Grecian operations resonated in both opposition and government newspapers
(O Brasil, RJ, May 13, 1848, 2; O Correio Mercantil, RJ, May, 1848, 1), as well as in the
Parliament (ACD, May 17, 1848, 93). The parliamentary speech (“Such an event”), by
Manuel Vieira Tosta, Baron of Muritiba, is abridged in the ACD, but came out complete in
Correio Mercantil, May 19, 1848, 2. See also Palmerston to Hudson, London, July 15, 1848;
Palmerston to Lisboa, London, September 18, 1848, UKNA, FO 84/726, fo. 6–8 and
345–354; and Palmerston to the Admiralty, London, August 5, 1848, UKNA, FO 84/745, fo.
59–62. For Souza Franco’s comments, see Hudson to Palmerston, Rio de Janeiro, August 5,
FO 84/726, fo. 47–58. Although the Grecian attack on Brazil was not the first of the sort,
London’s unconditional endorsement of it was new.
legalize the slave status of all these rebellious people and prevent
subsequent British raids on the Brazilian coast.33
When introducing the bill to the House of Representatives,
the Brazilian Cabinet did not anticipate that several antislavery
members—coming from the ranks of its own Liberal Party—would bar
Article 13 for abolishing the right Africans illegally reduced to bondage
since 1831 had to their freedom. The Executive tried to win them over
by playing the slave revolt card. In a secret parliamentary session in
September 1848, a Cabinet member read notes the British diplomat
James Hudson had written against Article 13, suggesting that “the
British Legation arrogated to itself the right of trusteeship over all
Africans brought into Brazil since 1831.” Hudson lamented this
intentional misreading by the Cabinet, explaining to Palmerston that
he had not meant to wield power over enslaved Africans when
addressing the imperial government. It particularly annoyed him that
Foreign Secretary Souza Franco, “though present in the Chamber, was
at no pains to set the member right.” It is easy to explain the benevolent
lapse of Souza Franco. He and his colleagues tried to inject a healthy
dose of terror in the lawmakers in order to have Article 13 passed.
Despite this maneuver, the antislavery phalanx resisted the Executive
and scrapped Article 13 at the end of the secret session.34
The rejection of Article 13 brought down the Liberal Cabinet. The
new ministry, of the Conservative Party, showed no fear of a correlation
between British raids and general subaltern actions like the slave revolt
conspiracy in Vassouras, completely reversing the former Cabinet’s
agenda. Bernardo Pereira de Vasconcelos, the powerful proslavery mind
of the Conservatives from the province of Minas Gerais who had
famously argued that Africa civilized the Americas thanks to the
transatlantic slave trade, took the floor in the Senate to say that the
anti-slave trade bill “was birthed eleven years ago” and “should not
enter into debate” again. His message turned into action. New foreign
minister Viscount of Olinda, a sugar planter from the province of
Pernambuco, buried both the slave trade and the European
colonization bills. Meanwhile, the Cabinet’s semiofficial mouthpiece
newspaper (O Brasil) publicized the major pro-slave trade book
published in Brazil (Inglaterra e Brasil, by J. M. Pereira da Silva, lawyer
of slave traders in Rio de Janeiro) and stated that the government
33 See also B. G. Mamigonian, Africanos livres; T. Parron. A política da escravidão. On the
planned slave rebellion, see Slenes, “A árvore de Nsanda Transplantada.”

34 Hudson to Palmerston, Rio de Janeiro, October 15, 1848, UKNA, FO 84/726, fo.
220–231.
should deal with “more serious issues.” At the same time, the provincial
legislature of Rio de Janeiro set up a Select Committee of its own to
investigate the 1848 slave conspiracy; the Committee members denied
that slave trading jeopardized public safety, concluding instead that
public safety would be ensured by a new police system. Moreover,
evidence suggests that pro-slave trade politicians underestimated the
geopolitical implications of the British imperial reorganizing. In June,
the Jornal do Commercio (Rio de Janeiro) happily reported that
“discontent reigned in Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow because of
the delay in making a treaty of trade with Brazil.” In November, the
newspaper also announced that the British Select Committee on the
Slave Trade had decided to present a bill for “the suppression of the
squadron that the British government employs off the African coast to
restrain the slave trade. France entertains a similar opinion now.” Later,
the Viscount of Olinda confided to the Spanish diplomat in Rio de
Janeiro that experiments with free labor in Brazil had been failing and
only enslaved Africans met the demands of tropical agriculture. The
true challenge for Rio de Janeiro was to have London “give up the
commitment with which it pursued the trade in African slaves.”
Contrary to what some historians suggest, the 1848 slave conspiracy did
not determine the suppression of the slave trade in 1850.35
Upon learning that pro-slave trade politicians had taken the upper
hand in Brazil, Palmerston pushed harder in the South Atlantic. In
April 1849, he ordered the Board of Trade to prepare the commercial
balance between Brazil and Britain from 1840 to 1848 to show the
industrial lobby that Brazilian imports of British manufactures
remained stable since (and in spite of) the end of the Anglo-Brazilian
commercial treaty in 1844. Until that moment, Palmerston had backed
renewal of the treaty; now, he gave it up to assail Brazil freely.
Palmerston designed an aggression scheme against Rio de Janeiro with
the Admiralty. According to the new strategy, diplomat James Hudson
35 AS, September 27, 1848, 384 (Vasconcelos); dispatch of November 16, 1848 (on the
1837 bill being put aside), UKNA, FO 84/726, fo. 265–266; and Hudson to Palmerston, Rio
de Janeiro, January 8, 1849 (on the emigration bill), UKNA, FO 84/726, fo. 36–37. O Brasil
(RJ), March 14, 1848, 2 (“serious questions”). The advertising of the pro-slave trade book
lasted all year long in 1849: January 4, 9, 19 and 30, February 5, April 19, May 23, June 8 and
11, July 6, 23, 28, 30 and 31, August 2, 3, 10, 11, 20, 27 and 31, September 3, 14 and 22,
October 23 and 26, November 3, 6 and 17, December 1 and 6. Report of Comissão Especial
da Assembleia Legislativa Provincial do Rio de Janeiro on the 1848 slave conspiracy, July 8,
1849, included in Hudson to Palmerston, Rio de Janeiro, February 20, 1850, UKNA, FO 84/
802, fo. 325–340. Jornal do Commercio, June 19, 1849, 1 and November 10, 1849, 1; and José
Delavat y Rincón to D. Fco. Martinez de Rosa (conversation with Olinda), Rio de Janeiro,
May 22, 1850. AHM, H1413.
and Commodore Thomas Herbert, Navy Commander for South

America, would employ their knowledge of local conditions to devise
attacks against slavers in Brazil’s territorial waters. In July, the Navy
invaded the Bay of All Saints and seized two ships off Salvador. A pro-
government and pro-slave trade newspaper cried out in Rio de Janeiro:
“our ports are blockaded in a time of complete peace; ships that depart
or enter are persecuted, seized under our batteries or on the beaches of
our coast!”36
By late 1849 two correspondences encouraged Palmerston to go
further. One of them came from Hudson in Rio. Brazilian antislavery
deputies who had opposed Article 13 were outvoted when trying
reelection for the Parliament and they had lost faith in a domestic
solution for the slave trade. They then sought out Hudson to appeal for
British military intervention against the Empire of Brazil. This
desperate plea might be one of the few examples in which major
national politicians have ever asked a foreign power to occupy their
own country. Hudson dispatched the news to the Foreign Office:
the Brazilian Anti-Slave Trade Party are of opinion that if England

would insist upon [. . .] the suppression of slave trade and, in case of
refusal on the part of the Brazilian Government, would support their
demand by the strict blockade of Bahia and Rio Janeiro, that no
Brazilian Government would run the risk of refusing their consent [. . .],
because obstinacy on their part would infallibly lead to the
dismemberment of the Brazilian Empire. [. . .] they recommended
that England should hold some place or places on the Brazilian coast
which should be retained by England until the Brazilian slave trade is
effectually suppressed.37
The second correspondence that held sway over Palmerston was

drafted 6,000 miles away from Rio de Janeiro. In Britain, Lord John
Russell, who was growing concerned about the domestic backlash
36 April 24, 1849, UKNA, FO 96/22/32, fo. 49 (Palmerston asking for trade data). For
the scheme against Brazil, Lorde Eddisbury to Palmerston, 3 de abril de 1849, UKNA, FO 84/
783, part I, fo. 6; and Palmerston to the Admiralty, April 23 and May 3, 1849. UKNA, FO
84/284, fo. 23–24 and 56–60. O Correio da Tarde (Rio de Janeiro), August 13, 1849, 2, signed
by “Brasilicus” (“our ports are blocked”). Brazilian Government’s complaints are in Hudson,
September 3, 1849, UKNA, FO 84/766, fo. 36–39.
37 Hudson to Palmerston, Confidential, n. 38, Rio de Janeiro, November 13, 1849,
UKNA, FO 84/766, fo. 174–193. Hudson did not name the representatives he met. They
are, probably, the same who would later seek him promising to combat the slave trade when
returning to power: Manuel Alves Branco, Bernardo de Souza Franco, Teófilo Ottoni,
Cristiano Ottoni, Jose Antonio Martin, Ernesto Ferreira France, plus two unidentified:
Barreto and Ramos. Hudson to Palmerston, May 12, 1850, FO 84/801, fo. 178–182.
against anti-slave trade policies, gave in to the idea that Britain’s

integration of the sugar international market was incompatible with
the transatlantic slave trade and that the time had come for London to
take a harder line. He listed as alternatives for action the three worst
nightmares Brazilian and Cuban slaveholders could conjure up: “I am
inclined to propose: 1. That you should enter into communications
with the government of Spain and Brazil founded on your former
overtures of 1840,” that is, Turnbull’s project to emancipate illegal
Africans; “2. That until the slave trade is really suppressed by these two
powers, we should suspend the operation of the Sugar Act”; “3. The
alternative is to blockade Brazil and Cuba—but this is an alternative so
violent that, although I should be prepared to adopt it, I do not think
the Cabinet or the House of Commons would do so.” Hudson’s dispatch
and Russell’s letter prescribed similar courses of action: Britain should
either use military violence against the trade or force emancipation of
the illegally enslaved. This time, however, it was Palmerston who
tempered Russell. He would rather apply both measures against Brazil
and neither against Cuba.38
In January 1850, Palmerston endorsed new raids on Brazilian
territorial waters and, following the lines of colonial petitions, drafted a
long dispatch to James Hudson in which, for the first time ever in
Anglo-Brazilian relations, he demanded from Rio de Janeiro the
emancipation of all Africans illegally enslaved in Brazil. At the time,
they were probably 40 percent of the country’s total slave population:
By the law of Nov. 1831 [. . .] it was decreed that all slaves [. . ..] who
should thenceforward enter the territory of Brazil coming from abroad
were free. Eighteen years have elapsed since the date of that law [. . .]
H. M. Government would be glad to know what steps the Brazilian
Government are prepared to take in order to restore this large number
of much injured individuals to the full and complete enjoyment of their
freedom, to which they have so long been entitled, and H. M.
Government would propose as an arrangement well adapted to the
attainment of this end the appointment of a mixed Brazilian and
British Commission.
The dispatch was about to leave Downing Street when Russell and
Palmerston switched roles again. “In considering your purposed draft,”
Russell said, “I think the latter part should be modified. I do not think
38 Russell to Palmerston [London], November 24, 1849, HLS, The Palmerston Papers,
GC/RU/306.
the Brazilian Government can be expected to agree bona fide to a

proposal which would set free the greater part of their slaves and make a
revolution.” Russell struck out the entire passage on the illegal slaves,
and the final version of the dispatch to Rio de Janeiro ignored the fate
of 600,000 Africans.39
On the other side of the Atlantic, the Brazilian Cabinet started
following a carrot-and-stick policy for slave traders. In his report to the
Parliament in January of 1850 the Foreign Minister suggested that only
after European colonization schemes took off “the slave trade would
disappear on its own” (the carrot). At the same time, he promised a
future law against the slave trade (the stick). The carrot-and-stick
approach is understandable. The government was intent on preempt-
ing further blows by the Royal Navy on the Brazilian coast, which
would indeed happen: on January 2, the man-of-war Cormorant seized
the steamer Santa Cruz right in front of São Sebastião (São Paulo),
landed its crew on the beach, and set fire to the vessel; on the 8th, the
Rifleman took the Paquete de Santos and repeated the procedure (crew
out, fire in); two days later the Cormorant seized another ship. Such
warlike raids received unexpected support in Brazil. Anti-slavery
Liberals rushed to Hudson’s house (again) and pledged to fight the
contraband trade to the end. Hudson bribed local newspapers,
including the important Correio Mercantil, to cheer the Navy. The
Philantropo, a newspaper managed by local antislavery voices and also
run with pounds sterling from the Foreign Office, published explicitly
what Palmerston had proposed and Russell had vetoed: “All Africans
younger than 20 years old that live now in Brazil as slaves are free,” said
the newspaper repeating ideas it was circulating for a couple of months,
“and as such they are entitled to demand from the imperial authorities
their freedom and the enforcement of penalties that the law allows
against their oppressors.” Lastly, a yellow fever outbreak flowing from
the slave trade struck Salvador and Rio de Janeiro, killing prominent
people such as the proslavery Conservative Vasconcelos and the
Emperor’s son. However, the Cabinet resisted everyone and everything
(Navy’s raids, domestic press opposition, politicizing of the freedom of
illegal Africans, and yellow fever). Its members withheld the 1837 anti-
slave trade bill, as they expected diplomatic support from France or
39 Palmerston to Hudson, December 26, 1849 UKNA, FO 84/766, fo. 18–19. For
Palmerston’s original draft and its revision by Russell, see Palmerston, January 31, 1850,
HLS, The Palmerston Papers, GC/RU/317. Expurgated version of the note, as passed to the
imperial government, is in Hudson to Palmerston, Rio de Janeiro, April 26, 1850, UKNA,
FO 84/803, fo. 71–78.
the United States and hoped for a triumph of free traders in

London.40
The British Select Committee on the slave trade was the Brazilian
Cabinet’s main hope, given that its chair, William Hutt, had proposed a
motion to the House of Commons calling for suppression of the West
Africa Squadron. The Brazilian representative in London understood
the implications of Hutt’s motion, reporting to Rio de Janeiro that “its
extinction would nearly imply the virtual repeal of the Bill of Lord
Aberdeen: it would perhaps induce the Parliament to formally repeal
it.” Indeed, Hutt’s motion tormented Russell and Palmerston. The
Prime Minister and his Foreign Secretary took pains to build enough
support among lawmakers to table the motion. To do so, Russell turned
the issue into a question of confidence in the Cabinet and summoned a
meeting with Whig representatives a couple of hours before the vote
took place. No one (even Russell and Palmerston) knew for sure what
would come of Hutt’s motion.41
The geopolitical conditions sustaining Brazil’s pro-slave trade policy
melted away in May 1850. The imperial diplomat in Washington sent
home a graphic account of the clash between the South and the North
over the admission of California into the Republic as a free state,
suggesting that the issue had become the all-consuming focus of the
White House. Moreover, Russell voted down Hutt’s motion in the
Commons, an outcome that the Brazilian diplomat in London sensed
would make cessation of British raids against Brazil “highly
improbable.” Now, he went on, a coalition between Britain and
France against the Brazilian slave trade loomed ahead. The news that
the British Select Committee on the Slave Trade had been defeated led
the semiofficial newspaper O Brasil to stop advertising Inglaterra e Brasil
40 Paulino Soares de Souza, Relatório da repartição dos negócios estrangeiros (Rio de
Janeiro: Villeneuve, 1850), 14. For naval attacks, see Correspondence between the Brazilian
Government and the British Legation at Rio de Janeiro. No local: no printer, 1850, 2–3,
attached to Sérgio Teixeira de Macedo to Paulino José Soares de Souza, October 25, 1850,
AHI, 233/3/3. For the Brazilian press, see Hudson to Palmerston, Rio de Janeiro,
September 9, 1848, UKNA, FO 84/726, fo. 73–75; Palmerston to Hudson, London,
October 29, 1849, FO 84/766, fo. 10–11; and Hudson to Palmerston, Rio de Janeiro, May
12, 1850, FO 84/801, fo. 178–182. O Philantropo, February 22, 1850, 1. On the yellow fever
outbreak, see Chalhoub, Cidade febril, 68–78, and D. Graden, Disease, Resistance, and Lies,
120–149. On the domestic antislavery opposition, B. Mamigonian, Africanos livres,
230–268; and Kaori Kodama, “O fim do tráfico no periódico O Philantropo (1849–1852) e a
formação do povo: doenças, raça e escravidão,” Revista Brasileira de História, São Paulo 28,
no. 56 (2008): 407–430.
41 Joaquim do Amaral a Paulino José Soares de Souza, April 26, 1850, and March 30,
1850, AHI, 217/3/6.

(the pro-slave trade book by J. M. Pereira da Silva) and encouraged

Palmerston to embrace an even harder line.42
Following the suggestion of Brazilian Liberals, Palmerston warned
Rio de Janeiro that Britain considered occupying Brazilian territory if
the contraband went on. At the same time, he allowed the Royal Navy
to carry out new raids on Brazil. In June, the Navy invaded Macaé
(Province of Rio de Janeiro) and seized the Polka, anchored in the
harbor, under cross-fire. The Navy took away another ship from Cabo
Frio (also in Rio de Janeiro) and arrested three more ships in Paranaguá
(Province of Paraná) under fire from a local fortress. The latter was
“one of the most serious events for relations between both countries,”
the imperial diplomat in London stated. Decades later, Brazil would
enter the First World War because of a single ship attacked in Europe. It
officially joined the Second World War in response to having five ships
assailed on the high seas. By June 1850, Great Britain had seized or
destroyed at least ten Brazilian vessels, all located on national territorial
waters and some even anchored in the country’s ports. The Brazilian
government then declared war—against the slave trade.43
On July 11, the Cabinet took the advice of the State Council on the
best course of action to deal with the outright British attacks on Brazil.
The Foreign Minister defined Anglo-Brazilian relations as an
undeclared state of war. The Royal Navy was “visiting, seizing and
condemning our vessels, getting into our ports, burning our ships and
destroying whatever resistance we can mount against it.” One of the
councillors agreed that the scenario was “more than enough for us to
consider ourselves under the pressure of force and in this state of war.”
Against such a backdrop the government had limited options. It could:
(a) resist militarily; (b) negotiate directly with Britain; (c) seek
international mediation; (d) issue a official protest; or (e) find
alternative means to end the drama. The councillors realistically ruled
42 Sérgio Teixeira de Macedo to Paulino Soares de Souza, Washington, February 23,
1850, AHI, 233/3/5 (political crisis in the United States); O Correio da Tarde (Rio de
Janeiro), May 29, 1850, 1 (defeat of Hutt’s motion); Joaquim Thomaz do Amaral to Paulino
José Soares de Souza, March 30 and April 26, 1850, AHI, 217/3/6 (“highly improbable”)
UKNA, FO 84/801, fo. 234–235. Many protectionist MPs voted for Hutt’s motion,
apparently contradicting West Indian interests. In fact, they were mostly Tories trying to
bring down Russell’s Whig Cabinet. On this 1850 British parliamentary vote, see R. Huzzey,
“The Politics of the Slave Trade Suppression,” in The Suppression of the Atlantic Slave Trade:
British Policies, Practices and Representations of Naval Coercion, ed. R. Burroughs and R.
Huzzey (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 17–45.
43 Joaquim do Amaral to Paulino J. Soares de Souza, March 30 and April 26, 1850,
UKNA, FO 84/801, fo. 234–235; Palmerston to Amaral, November 11 1850 (Polka affaire),
UKNA, FO 84/801, fo. 234–235; and Amaral to Palmerston (“one of the most serious”),
October 30, 1850, UKNA, FO 84/101, fo. 251–254.
out military retaliation and deemed a national protest insufficient to

change the global order Britain was shaping against the slave trade in
the South Atlantic. They then considered their further options
(bilateral settlement, international mediation, and unilateral suppres-
sion of the slave trade), concluding that the latter action would make
the first possible and the second superfluous. After this meeting, Justice
Minister Eusébio de Queirós—a former police chief and politician who
had conspicuously connived at the contraband slave trade—brought
the State Council’s report to the House of Representatives, where in a
secret session he disclosed the substance of the future law designed
against the slave trade. It is important to notice that the act, eventually
passed in September of 1850, did not repeal the 1831 law. This omission
suggests that the lawmakers did not fear the theoretical right of
Africans to their freedom, a danger that a large proslavery political
consensus could counter, but rather the combined threats of British
raids and illegal slave property to the domestic social order. In keeping
the 1831 law, the lawmakers assigned the massive illegal bondage of
Africans to an informal compact. If they knew that no law would
support the status of a large part of captives in Brazil, they also trusted
the Brazilian state would be on the slaveholders’ side.44
FINAL REMARKS
Historians frequently establish a direct connection between the

Aberdeen Act (1846), which subjected vessels sailing under Brazilian
flag to British Admiralty Courts, and the violent patrolling of the
Brazilian coast four years later, interpreting both as the direct outcome
of British ideological commitment to abolitionism. Moral factors
certainly played a role in the 1850 suppression of the infamous Brazilian
trade. As a longstanding cause, it shepherded British decision-makers
away from indifference to Africans. Abolitionist rational, however,
failed to be a sufficient cause to make the British state follow a
heterodoxal hard line against Rio de Janeiro by midcentury. As the
preceding pages suggest, one way of overcoming the apparent antinomy
of moral and economic factors so pervasively present in the
historiography on the slave trade is to understand London’s 1848–1850
attacks on Brazil within a broader analytical framework that takes into
44 J. H. Rodrigues, ed., Atas do Conselho de Estado, vol. III (Brasília: Senado Federal,
1978), 247–267.
account not only industrial Britain, but its whole Empire and the world
economy it was part of. In this sense, abolitionism, free trade, imperial
politics and state violence turn out to be inseparable factors in the
reorganizing of the slave-trading South Atlantic.
Indeed, when the British state embraced free trade in 1846 to solve
its domestic conflicts, it embarked upon a process of imperial
reorganization that brought it back onto an interventionist track.
After 1846, London intervened, providing planters across its colonies
with loans at subsidized interest rates, changing the rules for admission
of colonial sugar in metropolitan distilleries, devising schemes for
massive recruitment of African and Indian colonial labor, and
suppressing the Navigation Laws. The Royal Navy shelled African
factories and slave-trading ports (Solyman River in Sierra Leone,
Lagos, Mozambique) and militarily violated Brazilian sovereignty, not
only destroying vessels in Brazilian ports, but also sailing up national
rivers (as in the Guarapari River, Espírito Santo) and landing mariners
on national territory (as on Tijucas Grandes River banks, Santa
Catarina, and Moela Island, São Paulo). How can these coercive and
interventionist repeated actions of free trade Britain be explained? As
usually happens in historical capitalism, creating a market regulated by
supply and demand required state violence to recast the institutional
environment of exchange. In other words, free trade depended (and
depends) on different types of institutionalized violence. In regard to
sugar, this challenge materialized through the relations between social
unrest in an industrial metropolitan economy, a changing British
Empire, and the interstate system, which ultimately meant ramming
head-on into the problem of black slavery.
When London integrated the international sugar market in Britain,
slavery in Cuba and Brazil set the standard for the experiment with free
labor at the periphery of the British Empire. Black bondage shaped the
minimum wage of fieldworkers (Caribbean Islands), the organization of
labor recruitment (Caribbean and Mauritius), and the commercializa-
tion of sugar and rice (Mauritius and India). Indeed, free trade, thought
of as a means of averting class conflict in industrial Britain, worsened
labor relations, intensified class conflict, and affected expected future
returns on investments in the rest of the Empire. These multilinear,
complex contradictions ultimately transformed self-contained British
antislavery diplomacy in the Americas into unprecedented military
aggression against the transatlantic slave trade of the economically
competitive, but geopolitically unprotected and militarily vulnerable
Empire of Brazil.
But what, in the end, did Westminster achieve in 1850? A

comparison helps illuminate what it wanted to achieve. Whereas a
present-day central bank may raise interest rates to reduce aggregate
demand and curb inflation, the Foreign Office attacked the slave trade
by 1850 to reduce the supply of foreign sugar and increase sugar prices,
thus protecting planters in the Atlantic, fostering intercolonial trade in
the Indian Ocean and preserving the export capacity of India. That
said, it was clear that the British state did not achieve this goal. Total
control of slave-made sugar supply would have required the complete
abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, an impossibility due to the
unassailable relations between Cuba and the United States. What,
then, did Britain achieve? By successfully checking the expansion of
sugar output in Brazil, which could affect sugar prices to some extent,
Westminster acquired moral capital to conduct on the imperial level its
controversial midcentury experiment with free trade.
Britain’s aggressive policy against Brazil also clarifies the centrality
of tropical commodities for the British Empire at midcentury.
Historically crucial for the West Indies, sugar had also become
important in the imperial swing to the East, helping relieve the British
industrial economy from social unrest aggravated by post-Napoleonic
protectionism. From this standpoint, British interests in sugar and
opium linked the full-fledged war with China in 1839–1842 and the
quasi-war with Brazil in 1848–1850. Both cases suggest that free trade
rules and state-led violence went hand in hand as industrial Britain,
operating as it was within a broader system of pressures and constraints,
moved from protectionism to free trade. The conjoined march of free
trade and state violence continued beyond midcentury, developing into
a durable historical pattern as international market integrations
progressed throughout the world, simultaneously expanding the zones
of freedom and zones of empire during the second half of the
nineteenth-century.

Parron 2018

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Parron 2018

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The British Empire and the Suppression of the Slave Trade to

Brazil: A Global History Analysis

Published by University of Hawai'i Press

For additional information about this article

Access provided by UMass Amherst Libraries (4 Jul 2018 13:38 GMT)

INTRODUCTION: STATE, AGENCY, AND CAPITALISM

*I wrote this article during my fellowship at the Weatherhead Initiative on Global

Journal of World History, Vol. 29, No. 1

infamous commerce was the world’s most voluminous trafficking in

(Cambridge: CUP, 1970); R. Slenes, “A árvore de Nsanda Transplantada: cultos kongo de

Brazilian Monarchy, 1831–1871 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 138–155;

In the following pages, I adopt the perspective of a changing world

European empires elsewhere became inextricably interwoven in the

BREAKING THROUGH THE WORLD ORDER: IMPERIALISM AND

The Industrial Revolution redefined the geographical horizon of the

protection of their national economies. Old colonial powers such as

10 On metropolitan tensions and British imperialism, see J. Gallagher and R. Robinson,

1830–70 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015); C. Schonhardt-Bailey, From the

FIGURE 1. Re-Orient: British exports of cotton goods, 1820–1839 (£).

FIGURE 2. Invasion of slave-made sugar, 1841–1849 (cwt).

sugar demand and consumption, with much greater elasticity than

FREE TRADE AND NEGOTIATING EMPIRE

14 Darwin, Unfinished Empire, 144–179; G. Stewart, The Origins of Canadian Politics:

A Comparative Approach (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1986); E. Shann,

correspondingly reduce production costs, a measure that abolitionists

With metropolitan and overseas economies both in distress, the

connected to Brazil, Ceylon, and the Caribbean; Royal Navy officers

FIGURE 3. Brown sugar prices in London, 1840–1853 (decimalized £).

In 1848, the British average colonial sugar price was as low as in

confronted with money-losing prices had no alternative outlets and

TABLE 1. Fieldworkers’ average wage in British sugar colonies, 1845–1847

faucet on one hand (“immigration on a most extensive scale,” “not

24 Petition of Trinidad, September 18, 1846, in governor’s dispatch, October 3, 1846,

suitable energy, it would prove beneficial and effective in enabling the

IMPERIAL REORGANIZING: BRITISH ANTI-SLAVE TRADE GEOPOLITICS

of the African enslaved by their opponents), he wrote to Prime

31 For contraband estimates, see slavevoyages.com. North-American vessels and capital

32 The Grecian operations resonated in both opposition and government newspapers

33 See also B. G. Mamigonian, Africanos livres; T. Parron. A política da escravidão. On the

planned slave rebellion, see Slenes, “A árvore de Nsanda Transplantada.”

and Commodore Thomas Herbert, Navy Commander for South

the Brazilian Anti-Slave Trade Party are of opinion that if England

The second correspondence that held sway over Palmerston was

against anti-slave trade policies, gave in to the idea that Britain’s

the Brazilian Government can be expected to agree bona fide to a

the United States and hoped for a triumph of free traders in

40 Paulino Soares de Souza, Relatório da repartição dos negócios estrangeiros (Rio de

1850, AHI, 217/3/6.

(the pro-slave trade book by J. M. Pereira da Silva) and encouraged

42 Sérgio Teixeira de Macedo to Paulino Soares de Souza, Washington, February 23,

out military retaliation and deemed a national protest insufficient to

Historians frequently establish a direct connection between the

But what, in the end, did Westminster achieve in 1850? A

You might also like