Capitalism and the Rise of African Slavery in Barbados in the 17th Century
To what extent do market forces explain the rise of African slavery in Barbados during the early modern period?
One of the main problems with understanding slavery in the Americas, particularly during its rise and fall in the early modern period, is the question on whether or not it was precipitated by some notion of prejudice, often framed around the dyads of superior-inferior, master-servant, European-African, white-black; or by market forces, often framed around the notions of mercantilism and pre-industrial capitalism. In many ways, the ongoing debate between these two contentious ideas could be viewed as part of the larger discussion on the role of slavery, both within the scholarly world and the mainstream culture, in the prosperity of Europe, specifically England. The difficulty with advancing any new ideas on slavery, however, is generally rooted on the fact that it is incredibly contentious. Even the argument that the transatlantic slave trade was precipitated largely by market forces, as advanced by this and other essays, such as those by Eric Williams, could be viewed as either illuminating or simply obfuscating the undoubtedly brutal institution of slavery. Nevertheless, such a discussion is crucial to the understanding of slavery as an idea and as an institution. Based on this premise, this essay will argue, from the English perspective, that African slavery in the Americas was borne out of the personal economic desires of the English planters, the capitalists, as well as the geopolitical objectives of the British Empire vis-à-vis its economic and political rivals in Europe.
However, to form a coherent explanation on the role of market forces in the rise of slavery in the Americas, particularly in the 17th and 18th century, one has to first analyze the circumstances in which slavery could be argued as more competitive to free labour. One scholar argues that having a monoculture crop, such as sugar, and being able to take care of that crop through the use of gang work where the ratio of overseers to slaves is large are two major factors that would make slavery effective. In terms of profitability, slave labour is predicated on the fact that sugar production is essentially “’a factory in a field’” (Solow 118). Furthermore, so long as the value of the labour output the slave produces outweighs the value of his “maintenance costs”, slavery is profitable to the owners (Solow 112). The third factor is the high ratio of land to labour. As some scholars contend, an economy based on the export sector of cash crops requires an abundant supply of bonded labour on a limited tract of land. This is because, unlike the individual plots of farm land common in the vast expanse of much of British North America, cash crop cultivation requires huge labour investment and initial capital. In order for the capitalist to recoup his investment, he requires to have a stable supply of obedient labourers who are legally tied to the land. This is the main reason for the initial importation of European indentured labourers who were then succeeded by the importation of African slaves (Engerman, Drescher, and Paquette 59–60). The fourth factor is the continued availability of free land and the scarcity of free labour. Solow argues that “so long as free land is available — and a unit of land can be added with every unit of labor there is no tendency to diminishing returns and subsistence wages”; however, “once the free population becomes so dense that its wages are also driven to subsistence slavery will come to an end” (Solow 113). Similarly, slavery is likely to come to an end once the soil fertility declines and where there is increasing population density. This combination would eventually result to an inversion in which free labour becomes more competitive to slaves (Engerman, Drescher, and Paquette 60). In the end, what makes slave labour more profitable than free labour is that the capitalist has complete control of the slaves. Since the slaves have no rights whatsoever, except to the barest of essentials, the risks or possible inefficiencies associated with labour market flexibility could be quite small (Engerman, Drescher, and Paquette 105–113). Essentially, the slave could be forced to work to death if that is what his or her master desires.
In view of these factors, it is perhaps easier to imagine how English planters and their capitalist backers could profit (to some extent) from the use of a slave labour force. It is important to note, however, that African slavery, at least in Barbados, was not utilized as extensively during the first half of the 17th century, or prior to the cultivation of sugar. In fact, prior to the emergence of the sugar industry, Barbadians first cultivated tobacco. Tobacco became Barbados’s main export between 1624 and 1629 as its high market value led planters to cultivate it more. As with any capitalist economy, the supply exceeded the demand and, in 1631, this led to a precipitous drop in prices (Beckles 24). The British Government ordered a restriction in cultivation to prevent the overproduction of tobacco, but this was simply ignored by the planters in Barbados. Second was cotton. When the demand for cotton rose in England, the Barbadians simply switched to producing that cash crop. Just like the oversupply of tobacco almost a decade earlier, the price of cotton also collapsed in 1639 (Beckles 25–26). The third was indigo. In the early 1640s, Barbadian planters invested in the product due to its handsome return, but this too did not last long. Unsurprisingly, the same boom-bust cycle happened with indigo, an essential ingredient to make certain dyes for the booming textile industry in both Europe and North America. In 1643 the oversupply of indigo led to a collapse in prices (Beckles 27). Ultimately, it was the cultivation of sugar that so enriched Barbados that by the early 1650s, “Barbados was described as the richest spot in the New World” (Beckles 28). This was then followed by massive waves of slave arrivals.
From 1601–1650, there was an estimated 24,500 slave arrivals to Barbados. This number increased more than two-and-a-half times to 63,200 slaves for the period between 1651–1675. To put this into perspective, between 1654 and 1660, Barbados received a total of only 1808 white indentured servants of which 919 were skilled (Beckles 35). Evidently, the transition to sugar in the mid-seventeenth century demanded heavy capital investments on industrial machineries as well as the skilled personnel required to assemble and operate them (Beckles 34). The importation of this much manpower is obviously quite capital intensive. But what really made slavery attractive was the emergence of large scale plantations in England’s colonies in the Caribbean which created an “effective and profitable agrarian culture out of an unstable frontier environment…” (Beckles 22). In many ways, one could think of the large plantations as a form of anchor upon which English settlers could seek refuge in the thought that they would eventually profit from their hazardous enterprise. Once coupled with the cultivation of sugar in the mid-17th century, the plantation model of agricultural production eventually led towards the utilization of slaves rather than free labour.
In an intriguing discussion on capital formation through the exploitation of slave labour, Pires and Da Costa explain, from the Marxist perspective, that the main difference between modern colonial slavery, or industrial slavery (as witnessed in Barbados), and the ancient form of slavery is that the former is based on the capitalist mode of production and exports its products to world markets, thereby encouraging technological innovation, potentially lowering the cost of production due to market competition, and allows for the accumulation of capital — all the things that the ancient form of slavery could never achieve successfully due to the inherent limitation associated with a form of slavery whose potential for the acquisition of surplus-value, or capital value, is limited by the size of the domestic market (Pires and Da Costa 158–159).
Mercantilism, normally associated with protectionist policies, actually coexisted with the fact that European colonial powers traded with each other, creating a “de facto common market” (Pires and Da Costa 785–786). Inikori argues, however, that the key to overcoming the limitations of the domestic market, as described by Pires and Da Costa, is through the expansion of access to external markets. In the context of mercantilism, however, the market expansion was generally done through the colonies (which exported raw materials to Europe and the burgeoning English colonies in North America) and subsequently importing the finished products from Europe and, oftentimes, re-exporting those products to other prosperous colonies across the Americas.
The outcome of the slave-mercantile capital includes: slave owners who “took possession of a substantial part of the surplus value generated in the production process”, and slaves who “gained no power or wealth” (Pires and Da Costa 165). Pires and Da Costa emphasize, however, that slave-mercantile capital is completely dependent on the existence of the institution of slavery — an institution which is also dependent on the supply of slaves and the demand for their products whose return must be able to cover the acquisition and replacement of slaves. Pires and Da Costa argue that the mere existence of financial capital does not automatically lead to the purchase of slaves nor to the existence of slavery — an obvious but important reminder since slavery could take many forms and colonial slavery was only of them (Pires and Da Costa 165).
Britain’s rise to great power status was argued by some scholars as founded on mercantilism (in addition to the notion of an Atlantic-wide common market) and African slavery. William Darity’s analysis, which is primarily focused on how Britain had managed to rapidly accumulate so much surplus capital in the 17th and 18th century, analyzed Britain’s ability to transition from an agricultural society to an industrial one by arguing that the success of British imperialism and industrial development required “extensive British participation in the trade in Africans and in the maintenance and development of the West Indies” (Darity 118). Darity argues that the reason why many economic historians downplay the role of slavery in the industrial development of Britain is because they supposedly argue that the profits earned from the slave trade was relatively small during the 18th and 19th centuries as a ratio of the national income (Darity 120–121). He finds, however, that the historians he analyzed limited their calculation to “profits from the British slave trade alone” rather than “encompass the entire returns from the trade as well as the colonial plantation system in the British West Indies” (Darity 121). The omission of the larger economic contribution from Britain’s colonial possessions (such as the importance of raw materials) obviously skews the data by excluding other pertinent sources of profits (such as the value added to the processed or manufactured goods).
One scholar contends that despite the rapid growth of the English population from the 17th to the 18th century, which arguably could have been a potential source of slave labour, the growth of the external sector which has also led to the growth of the domestic market and the rise of non-agricultural sector had provided England further incentives to exploit its foreign colonies and for its foreign colonies to have a secured market for its agricultural products (Inikori 781). Moreover, Inikori echoed Darity’s argument that “the export slave trade from Africa and New World slavery were crucial to the capitalistic transformation of England in the seventeenth and eighteenth century” (Inikori 784).
In view of this rapid rise in England’s population, however, David Eltis asks the pertinent question as to why white slavery never occurred in the Americas. David Eltis went into some length in his article over the likelihood of white slavery, arguing that it is entirely possible had the market provided a better return on investment for the capitalists involved (Eltis 1399–1400). Using his insider-outsider thesis, Eltis’s article is based on his desire to determine “what separates outsiders — those who are eligible for enslavement — from insiders, who are not” (Eltis 1400). Eltis argues that the enslavement of Africans was both a market-led decision as well as a legally-led one. For the latter, he writes that the Europeans were supposedly unable to think of themselves as chattel slaves, adding that “If Europeans had been able to accord Africans the same rights as themselves in the early modern period, they would not have enslaved them and brought them to the plantation [in the] Americas” (Eltis 1422). If one considers Eltis’s argument and compare it to the historical record, there was indeed one example where a racial distinction was formally made between those condemned to be slaves for life and those put under indentured servitude, and it was in the former English colony of Barbados. Prior to the Barbados Slave Code of 1661, a precedent was already set in 1636 by the Barbados Council which clearly defined African slaves and enslaved Indians as slaves for life “‘unless a Contract was before made to the contrary’” (Rugemer 433). Unfortunately, Eltis’s argument about Europeans supposedly not enslaving their fellow Europeans due to some legal basis is based on the faulty assumption that indentured servants were not treated the same way as African slaves — something that was only true, at least in Barbados, after the brief transition to sugar cultivation in the mid-17th century. Indeed, one could even argue that such an assumption is based on a quite unrealistic and optimistic view of human nature — an assumption which is not reflected in the historical record.
Such an arguably unrealistic perspective is further demonstrated in Eltis’s other assumption that “if Africans or Indians instead of Europeans had initiated the plantation system” that “a trade in Europeans would not have been extensive” (Eltis 1409). Obviously, Eltis’s assumption is merely based on speculation; but one could easily refute this by putting Africans and Indians on the same situation as the Europeans. Given the same resources, technological knowhow, trade networks, colonies, and assuming the absence of any biological predilection to “saintliness”, then Africans and Indians are only limited by their imagination as their culture would undoubtedly change to accommodate this new social, political, and economic reality. Regardless, the trade in African slaves could be argued as a product of the unfortunate combination of mercantilist ideas and capitalism, in addition to the availability of abundant fertile land in need of an abundant supply of cheap labour. Arguably, it is entirely plausible that the use of African slaves would have never materialized to the extent that it had had any one of these factors been absent during the pre-industrial period of the 17th and 18th centuries. Furthermore, the possible reasons why some scholars would argue that Europeans did not enslave other Europeans, although technically they did, could therefore be argued as a matter of labeling (the scholars’ use of an arguably superfluous distinction between slaves and indentured servants), and timing (the scholars’ failure to consider the conditions experienced by African slaves and indentured servants prior to the cultivation of sugar).
Arguably, Eltis’s analysis does not seem to take into account the treatment of indentured servants prior to the cultivation of sugar, and their treatment during the expansion of the sugar industry in the Americas. Perhaps unbeknownst to him, the British political system in the 17th century essentially sanctioned the increasing exportation of even the pettiest of criminals to its colonies. This has created a system in which the trafficking of humans became both institutionalized and normalized. In other words, the inhumanity of the Middle Passage was not at all limited to African slaves as this was also shared by England’s poor and the downtrodden. There was even a collusion between the merchants and the justices as some did held interests in the West Indies and desired the additional labour. In fact, it was only with the rise of African slavery that the use of kidnapping and forcible transportation of alleged English criminals to the New World eventually subsided (Williams). Besides, many indentured servants from Europe were actually sold to Barbadian planters in the same manner that African slaves were sold in the ports of Jamaica — through major auctions after their arrival from Europe, with an indenture typically ranging from 3 to 10 years (Burnard and Morgan 1655–1788). Basically, the indentured servants were seen by Barbadian planters as a cheaper initial investment (Beckles 36). Later, as the planters acquire the necessary sum, the servants were then replaced with the more expensive African slaves whose services are not limited by contracts.
Upon closer inspection, what makes David Eltis’s analysis problematic is that he isolates the economic factors of slavery from its the political factors. Indeed, he fails to consider the political implications of employing outright slavery to the European elites. In the case of the English, the political and geographical proximity of the capitalists and the proletariat, or between the elite and the underclasses simply makes chattel slavery entirely unthinkable, especially in the context of mercantilism. Eltis also fails to consider the importance of population to the geopolitical ambitions of many European countries during the 17th century (Eltis 1404–7). Moreover, Eltis’s criticism of the economic basis of African slavery seems to be based on the assumption that economic considerations dictated the entirety of European policy.
Despite being less than convincing in his critique of the market-based explanation, his insider-outsider thesis seems to advance an interesting idea that connects the mercantilist idea of Europeans to African slavery. Indeed, his insider-outsider thesis seems to reflect the notion that is witnessed in some African tribal groups where strangers are often accepted into a group with the possibility of transforming their status from outsiders to being insiders. In these tribes, the group is seen as superior to the individual because it provides a modicum of safety (Miers and Kopytoff 27). In many ways, a mercantilism could also be argued as largely driven by the same social — rather than an individualistic — world view. Based on the idea that national strength is acquired through the limiting of imports and the maximization of exports, mercantilism is the anti-thesis to the notion of free trade. But in such a system, one could argue that the interest of an individual capitalist is less valued as the prosperity and wealth of the nation is seen as paramount. From this perspective, the idea of European capitalists enslaving their fellow Europeans is entirely tenable, as long as it is seen to contribute towards the prosperity and wealth of the nation. In fact, such an unsettling thought is actually reflected in some African tribes, especially in times of difficulties, as less important members of a tribe could be sent off to serve as a collateral to a creditor, basically voluntarily enslaving themselves in exchange for food and other essentials. If done at an unsustainable level, however, such an act would also undermine the stability of society (Miers and Kopytoff 108). Thus it was only much later, when Britain had finally become both a military and economic great power — when the implications of free-market capitalism had already established itself, thereby banishing the social-centric world view for a more individual-centric one — that African slavery was seen as less profitable or, at least, less desirable than free labour.
Before concluding, it is important to remember that slavery also has its drawbacks. By analyzing the 23 clauses of the Barbados Slave Code of 1661, one will easily see how plantation owners actually feared both their indentured servants and African slaves. In one account, plantation houses were said to be built with minor fortification in mind as plantation owners feared both their “‘Christian servants’” (white indentured servants) and “‘Negro slaves’” (Handler 7). Concern over runaways is also reflected in the Barbados Act of 1661. If viewed from the perspective of mercantilism, it is easy to see how runaway slaves were a great concern, not only to their masters, but also to the British Empire itself, since they threatened the whole institution of slavery and the supply of surplus capital necessary towards the funding of England’s transition from being an agrarian society to an industrial one. Put succinctly, runaways had the potential to empower both African slaves and indentured servants against their masters (Handler 10). In an attempt to counter this threat, the very first clause of the Barbados Slave Code actually outlines the government’s desire to restrict the movement of African slaves within Barbados which, for all intents and purposes, essentially imprisoned them within the confines of their master’s plantation (Engerman, Drescher, and Paquette 106). Moreover, the whole of Barbados was essentially made into a surveillance state where informants of runaway slaves were paid quite handsomely — for indentured servants, the reward for informing on runaway slaves is actually their immediate freedom (Engerman, Drescher, and Paquette 107–108).
In conclusion, this essay has shown that the market-based perspective on the institution of slavery explains satisfactorily the reason behind the emergence of African slavery in the Americas. The key is to analyze both the political and economic reasons behind the rise of slavery, the conditions of white indentured servants before the introduction of African slavery, the centrality of the sugar industry in fostering the institution of African slavery, and the variety of economic conditions that made African slaves preferable (or uncompetitive) to free labour. Altogether, it is clear that Britain has benefited greatly from African slavery since it was able to take full advantage of the political freedom accorded by the Glorious Revolution of 1688 which unleashed the entrepreneurial spirit of English merchants as they grew their enterprises, both in England and in Barbados, unimpeded by the monopolizing tendency of an absolutist monarchy. On the flipside, this also meant that English merchants/planters eventually had to resort to slavery — within the constraints of capitalism (slavery being briefly more profitable to free labour) and the unique factory-like nature of sugar cultivation — as the logical end to their constant pursuit for profits.
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