It matters too because liberal democracy has been on the back foot in large
parts of the world for a decade. China is bidding for global leadership with
radically different claims – with allies in Moscow, and followers from
Bangkok to Caracas. It seizes eagerly on anything that punctures the moral
claims of the West.
Joshua Kurlantzick says in Democracy in Retreat that the “Washington
Consensus” we have known for so long is losing ground to an ascendant “Beijing
Consensus”, the greatest challenge to Western Liberal values since
fascism and communism in the 1920s and 1930s.
The banking crash of 2008-2009 has tempted some in China’s Politburo to
conclude that Leninist planning is superior to Anglo-Saxon markets, and
prompted many in Europe to ask whether Capitalisme Sauvage is worth saving
at all. They misread events of course. It was governments that caused the
crisis: the West by fixing the price of credit too low, the East by amassing
reserves and flooding the world with excess capital. But that is not the
narrative of the web, or political discourse.
So let us start to set the record straight on one point at least. The archives
demonstrate that the Stuart monarchs Charles II and James II systematically
drew up laws to enforce and spread hereditary slavery, mimicking the Spanish
practice of the day and the “divine right” absolutism of the
Habsburg empire.
They did so with relentless focus, stacking the courts to ensure favourable
rulings, and carrying out police state sedition trials against opponents,
not least because revenues from tobacco and sugar plantations became the
chief source of wealth for the crown.
Professor Holly Brewer from the University of Maryland says Charles II was so
enamoured with the Royal African Company that he engraved its symbols of
elephant and castle on one side of his golden Guinea. “The Stuarts
envisaged monarchy and slavery as, literally, two sides of the same coin,”
she said.
Slavery had not been hereditary in British possessions before. There were
African slaves, just as there were indentured white workers, but it was
fluid, in a legal grey zone, and judges could not be counted on to enforce
the recapture of runaways.
Prof Brewer said the findings she has uncovered in the archives show that
Locke fought tooth and nail to reverse this new hereditary structure while
on the Board of Trade in the 1690s under William of Orange.
Locke sought the stop linking land grants to the number of imported slaves –
50 acres per head – a “strangely perverted “practice, in his
words, intended to ensure a plantation aristocracy built on slaves. He urged
that the children of blacks should be “baptized, catechized and bred
Christians” so that they could not be denied their civil liberties so
lightly.
Locke had been compromised earlier in the 1660s as a young man working for the
Stuarts but later became an exile and rebel in Holland. “When he had a
position of real power, he tried to undercut the development of slavery in
comprehensive ways,” she said.
His was the outlook of most liberal thinkers who shaped the American
Revolution. It was the view too of Adam Smith, the free market theorist
writing later in the 18th Century, also accused of promoting slavery. Smith,
in fact, argued that slaverly stifled economic growth and innovation. “It
appears from the experience of all ages and nations, I believe, that the
work done by freemen comes cheaper in the end than that performed by slaves,”
he wrote in Wealth of Nations. William Wilberforce cited Smith
approvingly to buttress the abolition case.
Locke’s efforts to undo Stuart damage came too late. Vested interests were too
powerful. Hereditary slavery had become embedded in the economic system of
the American and Caribbean colonies. Britain would acquire the notorious “Asiento”
at the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, giving the South Sea Company the contract
to supply the Spanish Empire with slaves. The cancer then metastasized.
In my view, the British are a little too cavalier about this saga, thinking
the nation absolved because the practice was far away and not on island
soil.
We tend not to be aware that King George III actively perpetuated the slave
trade in the late 18th Century, vetoing laws by Virginia and other states
trying to deter the inflow by raising import taxes on slaves. It is why
Thomas Jefferson’s original draft of the US Declaration of Independence
contained a clause saying the king “has waged cruel war against human
nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the
persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying
them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their
transportation thither. Determined to keep open a market where men should be
bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every
legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce. And
that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he
is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us.”
And no, Jefferson was not a hyprocrite because he owned slaves. They were
mortgaged, due to his family’s crushing debts left from monetary deflation
after the Seven Years War. They could not legally be freed.
America puts its own gloss on events. Simon Scharma argues in Rough Crossing
that “theirs was a revolution, first and foremost, mobilized to protect
slavery”. His point is that the “Somerset” ruling of 1772 in
England – “the state of slavery is so odious, that nothing can be
suffered to support it: the black must be discharged” – set off ferment
in the colonies, and the Dunsmore Proclamation in 1775 offering freedom to
slaves who fought on the British side rallied planters to the revolution.
Yet this can be pushed too far. The intellectual leaders of the American
Revolution were Lockeans through and through, almost all tormented by
slavery.
As Britain prepares to defend itself against the Caricom suit – so soon after
settling torture claims from Mao Mao victims in Kenya – it is scarcely helps
perhaps to argue that the slave system was built by monarchical tyranny,
rather than by private citizens beyond control, as we like to think. It is
worse, in some ways, if it was a state endeavour.
Yet it should be some comfort that Parliament and liberal government may be
absolved, at least in part. Slavery was excresence of absolutism, not free
commerce. We cannot hold our own in the world’s bare-knuckled battle of
ideas if we concede this cardinal point of history.
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Article source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/10229570/Towards-a-radical-new-theory-of-Anglo-American-slavery-and-vindication-of-free-markets.html