Slavery in the British Caribbean was closely connected to the agricultural cultivation of sugar-cane and cotton crops in which Africans were imported to work the land in order that the goods could be exported to Europe thereby providing the plantation-owners a net return on their investment. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, the bondage economy of the West Indies would collapse as a result of the Abolition and Emancipation movements instigated by intellectuals, politicians, Protestant religious figures, and localized slave revolts. On 1 August, 1834, the House of Commons would pass the Emancipation Act as a response to nearly fifty-years of debate on the morality and profitability of slavery. Theoretically, the Act outlawed and ended the practice of bondage or forced labor; in practice, it transformed Caribbean slaves into ‘Apprentices' who were required to complete four to six additional years of indentured labor before they were truly liberated from bondage to their masters. The purpose of this essay is to explore the conditions which provided for the Emancipation of slaves in the British Caribbean, and to analyze the contribution of Protestant humanitarian ideals upon their ‘amelioration' and liberation.
In the history of ideas,” Liberty” arose from the Protestant Reformation instigated by Martin Luther in 1517 which would result in subsequent Peasants' Rebellions, civil and imperial wars, and an intellectual divide between northern and southern Europeans traced between continued loyalty to the intellectual history and traditions of the Holy Roman Catholic Church, and the promotion and encouragement of the individual spirit advanced by the various sects of Protestant Christianity.
[...] While slavery had certainly not ceased to be a financially viable economic system in the British Caribbean colonies, its cultural capital had since collapsed and became an intellectually intenable position for British political and moral thought. Tracing similarities between the British Caribbean and its relationship to England with another geographically proximate slave-based economy, the American South and its New England counterpart, both movements toward abolition originate from the location which is not directly and principally involved in agricultural output and proportionate slave ownership. [...]
[...] It would do well to remark that the abolition of slavery was preceded by the amelioration movement in the British Caribbean. In 1823, Reckord observes that plans were underway in the House of Commons to reform slavery and prepare the path to an eventual emancipation and freedom [Reckord, 1971]. By this point, the intellectual climate in Western Europe—sufficiently tempered by the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the Enlightenment and its denouement into the Romantic Period—could no longer tolerate the reduction to poverty and bondage which was transgressed against African slaves within the West Indian colonies. [...]
[...] What is clear in the literature on abolition and the emancipation of African slaves from the British Caribbean colonies is that the intellectual climate surrounding the decision to liberate them from their masters was not the idea or the desire of the planters. Marshall describes the situation immediately following the Abolition of Slavery Act of 1833 as a period of disappointment for black slaves as they had not received their promised emancipation, but were instead continually embroiled in disputes with their ‘former masters' attempted by various legal and illegal contrivances to reduce that small portion of ‘free time' which the Abolition Act had decreed” [Marshall, 1996]. [...]
[...] Debates on the abolition of slavery in the Caribbean include the notion that slavery itself had no longer proven to be a viable and profitable economic model. The historical situation surrounding this argument fails to take into account the reluctance of planters to abandon slavery out of fears of open revolts or violence from their former bondsmen, and the detrimental economic impact abolition would cause their plantation enterprises. Aufhauser confronts the notion that the political decline in which the agrarian planters exercised in parliament was in fact related to the opening of trade restrictions, and the promotion of a style of free trade within the British Empire which allowed for the East Indian colonies to out perform the West Indies in sugar supplies and competition [Aufhauser, 1974]. [...]
[...] In fact, it seems that the cultural and religious sentiments of humanitarians in Britain played a greater role in the encouragement of emancipation for Caribbean slaves. Addressing this concern, Levy writes: “British abolitionists often pointed out the economic differences of the planters and the slaves by comparing the former's mansions with the latter's huts” [Levy, 1970]. Visiting Protestant clergymen were outraged at the economic and personal injustices slavery afforded to the Black laborers, and their missionary work in the New World received celebrity attention by well- intentioned parishioners in England. [...]
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