6 The Direction and Scope of the Attack on the Slave Trade (p. 81-82)

Attempts to suppress the slave trade could have focused on any part of the international network that took men, women and children from Africa and delivered sugar and coffee and cotton to Europe. Consuming countries could have imposed taxes on tropical produce equal to the extra cost of producing without newly imported Africans or even without any form of slave labor. At the other end of the network, suppressive action might have aimed at raising costs of slave trading within Africa until it was no longer worthwhile to capture slaves and supply them to the Atlantic dealers. The British government, the Niger expedition notwithstanding, attempted neither of these options. The first required an improbable degree of cooperation among consuming nations at a time when each suspected the abolitionist motives of the other. Action by one nation alone, even a country as important as Great Britain, would have simply raised prices within that country while having little impact on the income of plantation owners. Such a policy would also have been an obvious contradiction of the drive for cheaper foodstuffs that was increasingly preoccupying industrializing countries. It would have constituted as well an overt recognition of the superior efficiency of slave over free labor—no mean ideological feat in the early years of the nineteenth century at least. Thus it was that the British actually reduced duties on plantation produce from Cuba and Brazil at a critical juncture in the fight against the traffic. The second option demanded an ability to interfere in the affairs of African politics in the interior; this was not attained until near the end of the century. Instead of targeting the beginning or the end of the network, Great Britain and (later) other countries attempted to sever the labor-supply link at its center. Naval action was aimed at raising the costs of shipping slaves across the Atlantic and thereby increasing the spread between the price paid by the plantation owner and the price received by the African dealer. The success of this strategy hinged on raising the former to a point where noncoerced labor would have been a cheaper sub stitute. Alternatively the strategy would have achieved its goal if it had forced down the price on the African coast to the point where the dealer's costs were no longer covered. Neither of these effects appeared to be within the power of the British Navy.

In 1850 after almost half a century's effort against the slave trade, the British Admiralty surveyed a group of senior officers, all with experience in the South Atlantic, on the navy's attempts to end the traffic. This internal review came at the end of fifteen years in which the traffic in Africans had come to rival that of the eighteenth century in both volume and the scale of British capital involved. Supplies of coerced labor and the denial of these supplies to other parts of the Americas formed the basis of the unprecedented prosperity attained by Brazil and Cuba. The conclusions of the survey, reached just a few months before the sudden and rather unexpected demise of the traffic's major branch, was unequivocably pessimistic. Much of it indeed would have been acceptable to the pacifist executive of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. The traffic would continue as long as slavery survived in the importing countries or at least until the local and national governments of those countries decided to suppress it. The naval cruisers moreover exacerbated the trade's cruelties. The naval officers believed that the squadron should not be withdrawn (although some implied even this), but operations should be scaled down until such time as penalties against slaver captains and crews could be exacted.

Naval despondency and the better-known efforts of free traders and some abolitionists to call off the squadron are not explained just by the resilience of the traffic. Not even the escalating African mortality, which accompanied efforts to eradicate the trade, and the vast reserves of unoccupied land in major plantation regions can account wholly for the pessimism. More important from the viewpoint of those inside the government and directly involved in suppression was the scale of the resources unavailingly committed to the struggle. On the one side there were the near-record volumes of slaves traded and the involvement of British merchants in facilitating that trade, on the other there were masses of domestic legislation, treaties with almost every power whose flag or ports could be used by slave ships and a very expensive superstructure of courts, ships and payments to foreign governments. It is hardly surprising to find that when the government defended its policy it stressed what would happen without the cruisers rather than more tangible facts such as ships and slaves actually captured. The relevant question, argued Palmerston, was not how many slaves were shipped but how many would have been shipped in the absence of British efforts.2 Here we will address the issue of the scale of these efforts, their effectiveness in terms of captured ships and freed Africans as well as the related matters of British involvement in the traffic and the broader implications of the treaty network.