I

In histories of economic theory before the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, conservative political economy was often neglected. Until recently, most scholarship had focused on classical doctrine and its modifications, namely liberal ‘Peelite’ toryism and evangelical free trade.Footnote ¹ Only occasionally, as with Harold Perkin, Robert Stewart, Salim Rashid, and Angus Macintyre, was attention paid to the economic thought of ‘High Tories’.Footnote ² Yet, with the publication of Anna Gambles's Protection and politics (1999), the existence of a sophisticated conservative economic discourse was established. Using leading conservative journals – Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Fraser's Magazine, the Quarterly Review – as her main sources, Gambles argued that ‘a distinctly “Conservative” current of economic criticism consistently challenged the claim of free trade to intellectual hegemony’ and showed that ‘an alternative political economy was moulded and sustained through half a century’.Footnote ³ There were three distinctive features of this political economy: the defence of the Corn Laws as necessary to agricultural self-sufficiency; Scots- and Birmingham-led attacks on bullionism and currency theory; and promulgation of the economic value of the British Empire. Since 1999, these conclusions have been accepted almost wholesale; Gambles has been credited – rightly – with rescuing ‘the Conservative discourse on protection and the role of the state from caricature’, proving that ‘interventionists, sometimes loosely called High and Ultra Tories … proffered a powerful counter-weight to classical political economy’, and thereby demonstrating that ‘the victory of free trade was no foregone conclusion’.Footnote ⁴

The imperial aspect of that discourse is the focus of this article. Here, economic conservatives were also ‘economic nationalists’ in whose writings ‘the economic instruments of navigation laws, [imperial] preference, and protection were … presented as devices which … consolidated the political cohesion of empire’. This empire, in turn, was considered as ‘fundamental not only to the international power of the UK but also to the durability of her economic advance’. Empire was therefore ‘no optional extra but was rather an integral feature of Tory economic discourse in the first half of the nineteenth century’.Footnote ⁵ Consequently, it was established that economic theories of empire in nineteenth-century Britain were not monopolized by the paradigm of ‘free-trade imperialism’. As for the origins of this imperial discourse, it was supposedly evolved ‘in the pages of Conservative texts and journals’ as a direct response ‘to the ambiguities of free-trade liberalism’, but always cognizant of current issues such as colonial emigration, the monopoly of the East India Company, and Huskisson's tariff reforms. Real-world problems, then, and not just theory, were essential to the empirically and historically informed arguments deployed by conservatives against the abstractions of Ricardo, Mill, and McCulloch. As Gambles insisted, and others have agreed, this discourse was ‘forged in specific political contexts’.Footnote ⁶

Nonetheless, neither Gambles nor subsequent scholarship has considered the context which arguably was most influential on this political economy: the campaign to emancipate British colonial slaves. So far, only Martin Daunton and David Eastwood have even alluded to a connection between colonial slavery and conservative economics, but this does not reflect the strength of that relationship.Footnote ⁷ In fact, colonial slavery and its defence against plans for emancipation were integral to imperial economic thought in the 1820s and 1830s: the advocacy of slavery provided not only key texts but also critical ideas which scholarship has erroneously attributed to ‘conservative’ economics in general. This can be seen in three ways. First, assuming the importance of context, the foundation of the Anti-Slavery Society in 1823, its alliance with free-trade interests in the East Indies, and its subsequent campaign for the emancipation of British slaves provoked an argument for the economic and political protection of West Indian colonies. Second, the vast majority of authors whose works were foundational to this discourse actually wrote on matters of empire and economics in order to defend West Indian slavery. These were men connected to the West Indies, sympathetic to slaveholding, or who regarded emancipation as a threat to empire. Third, the defining principles of this political economy – historicism, imperial preference, the security of colonial demand, and naval prowess – were the intellectual toolkit of pro-slavery rhetoric before they belonged to ‘conservative’ thought. In origin, authorship, and argument, this was a pro-slavery more than a conservative discourse.

Recovering this reality may affect histories of British slavery as much as histories of political economy. Certainly, if much of the imperial economic argument labelled as ‘conservative’ should more properly be recognized as ‘pro-slavery’, it follows that the defence of slavery attained a level of sophistication which has often been overlooked, even by such eminent scholars of the subject as David Brion Davis and Seymour Drescher.Footnote ⁸ The relationship between slavery and political economy was not, therefore, restricted to anti-slavery marshalling of free-labour doctrine; likewise, the economic defence of slavery was not limited to refutation of certain interpretations of Smith, Malthus, Say, or Storch. In reality, the defence of slavery strongly encouraged the development of protectionist theory. Moreover, although Richard Huzzey and others have argued convincingly that Victorian Britain was an ‘anti-slavery nation’, the prevalence of pro-slavery discourse suggests that similar claims cannot be made for the period before emancipation.Footnote ⁹ Just as Srividhya Swaminathan has shown for the period before the abolition of the slave trade, the decade 1823–33 witnessed debate and not simply consensus.Footnote ¹⁰ Indeed, such was the vigour and volume of pro-slavery publication in the decade preceding 1833, and such was the influence of the journals in which the West Indian cause was advocated, that the defence of slavery was arguably central to contemporary economic and intellectual discourse.

II

If ‘conservative’ economic discourse in the 1820s and 1830s was ‘forged in specific political contexts’, it was unavoidable that such argument would take account of colonial slavery. From 1823, under the leadership of William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson, and ultimately Thomas Fowell Buxton, the association known colloquially as the Anti-Slavery Society had forced colonial slavery into the foreground of public and political debate. Characterized by mass petitioning, itinerant lecturing, and cheap pamphleteering, the anti-slavery movement pursued an ambition hitherto denied by abolitionists: the gradual emancipation of slaves throughout British colonies.Footnote ¹¹ Naturally, this was a powerful provocation of the West Indian interest; while the abolition of the slave trade had forced slaveholders to maintain a now-finite supply of labour, the campaign for emancipation presented even more serious problems. Three in particular caused extreme alarm and necessitated economic argument in defence of West Indian slavery.

First, and most important, belief prevailed among West Indians that, should emancipation occur, newly freed slaves would not readily cultivate sugar. ‘I know from their Habits’, Jamaican planter John Bailie told a select committee, ‘that they will not work without Compulsion.’Footnote ¹² ‘Unless guided and directed by the intelligence and capital of White men’, claimed one pamphleteer, ‘the Negroes never would produce anything.’Footnote ¹³ This was the governing principle of pro-slavery economic theory and it was informed by two assumptions: that the slave was insufficiently progressed along the stadial scale of civilization to have developed ‘artificial wants’, which is to say that a freed slave would not demand luxuries as a consumer; and that the fertile environment of the Caribbean would allow the freed slave, working as a field labourer, to afford his desired level of consumption with minimal effort. Pro-slavery advocates therefore predicted that emancipation would create a violently regressive labour supply curve, the consequence of which would be the failure of the plantation system. Certain ‘free-labour experiments’, namely the colony of Sierra Leone and the Haitian Revolution, were regarded as incontrovertible precedents. Seymour Drescher has noted how these ‘experiments’ were derided by antagonists of abolition on grounds of demography and expense, but the issue of labour was even more important.Footnote ¹⁴ ‘At Sierra Leone, at St Domingo, and in every other place where it has been tried’, railed the pseudonymous ‘Z’, ‘the negro will not work when he can do without it’.Footnote ¹⁵ So convinced were the West India committee by the universal relevance of those experiments, an edition of its circular, The West Indian Reporter, was devoted to ‘the total failure of the attempt to introduce Free Labour at Sierra Leone, in Hayti’.Footnote ¹⁶ As Alexander Barclay concluded, ‘in the agriculture of the West India colonies there is … no choice. It is slave labour, or none.’Footnote ¹⁷ Consequently, West Indian advocates developed an economic argument holding that Great Britain could not afford West Indian ruin and, therefore, that it could not afford emancipation.

Second, the prospect of emancipation created market conditions of crippling uncertainty. Unable to guarantee an adequate supply of labour in the event of emancipation, West Indians found the procurement of investment, loans, and mortgages increasingly difficult. And, as one of their supporters put it, ‘without credit, cultivation in the colonies could not be conducted’.Footnote ¹⁸ For them, there was no question that anti-slavery campaigning was responsible for these problems. ‘The causes of this distress’, claimed Samuel Turner, ‘may be traced … to the universal alarm excited by the motion [calling for emancipation] of mr buxton in Parliament, in the year 1823.’Footnote ¹⁹ Before a select committee appointed to investigate West Indian commercial distress, prospective emancipation was repeatedly cited as a cause of hardship. Simon Taylor, a resident of Jamaica, blamed ‘the distrust which is entertained … of the intentions of the British Government on the subject of emancipation’. Another witness argued that fault lay with

Emancipationist clamour, it was maintained, had caused ‘the loss of confidence with the merchant … and the great depreciation of property’.Footnote ²¹ Compounding prospective disaster, then, was the immediate commercial distress which anti-slavery agitation occasioned; pro-slavery writers were obliged to construct a political economy which combated both.

Anti-slavery's support of East Indian sugar provided a third stimulus to pro-slavery argument. While there had been conflict between Caribbean planters and East Indian merchants prior to 1823, the campaign for emancipation exacerbated this tension.Footnote ²² Not only would campaigners urge consumers to purchase ‘free-grown’ as opposed to slave-grown produce, they also lobbied for the removal of West Indian sugar's protective duty. The anti-slavery logic was clear: should demand for West Indian sugar dwindle, the plantation system would be weakened, imperial preference would shift eastward, and so Caribbean slavery would end. ‘Is it not obvious’, asked one campaigner, ‘that the more West Indian sugar and rum is consumed, the more West Indian Slavery is maintained, and the emancipation protracted?’Footnote ²³ The argument was appropriated by the Macaulays, James Stephen, and many other leading emancipationists, thereby making the conflation of anti-slavery and free-trade interests obvious to the West Indians.Footnote ²⁴ ‘The anti-slavery party uniformly advances the interests of the East India traders, in opposition to those of the West Indies’, warned the West Indian Reporter.Footnote ²⁵ In an open letter, the planter S. P. Hurd begged Lord Liverpool not to heed the ‘overcharged statements of the religious abolitionists, and the interested arguments of the East India trade’.Footnote ²⁶Blackwood's meanwhile chided those campaigners who feigned philanthropy, but who actually agitated ‘the public mind’

The division between East and West Indies, free trade and protection, and free labour and slavery was represented aptly when Joseph Marryat, defending the planters in the Commons, accused David Ricardo – who held East Indian stock – of having a material interest in West Indian distress.Footnote ²⁸ Within this context, against an increasingly popular strain of anti-slavery economics by which the protection and consumption of slave-grown sugar were anathematized, West Indians argued not only for the necessity of protection, but also for preference over East Indian sugar.

Already by 1823, the prosperity of the British Caribbean was diminishing. The acquisition of colonies such as Demerara and Trinidad had increased the supply of sugar admitted to Britain under preferential rates of duty, but the maintenance of ‘temporary’ war duties had crippled demand, while surplus sugar, re-exported to Europe, was undercut by Brazilian and Cuban growers whose continued participation in the Atlantic slave trade reduced their costs.Footnote ²⁹ Arguing for the economic protection of the British West Indies was not, therefore, unique to the decade after 1823. Nevertheless, the campaign for emancipation created economic circumstances – prospective ruin, immediate shortage of credit, and potential usurpation by eastern rivals – which combined to demand the defence of the West Indian system; this threat to West Indian slavery was the principal stimulus of imperial economic argument.

III

The centrality of slavery to this discourse is further seen by examining those responsible for its articulation. At the beginning of her chapters on empire, Gambles outlines the foundational principles of the discourse by surveying forty sources from the period 1803–32. These, she argues, exhibit the emergence of an alternative imperial political economy wherein ‘the fiscal instruments of imperial policy – navigations laws, protection and preference – were construed as fundamental components of the sustained and stable progress of the British economy and of the political cohesion of the empire itself’.Footnote ³⁰ Such ideas, she writes, were responsible for shaping conservatives' discussion of territorial expansion in India, colonial emigration, and the continuation of the ‘patriotic principle’ for decades to come. Nowhere, however, is the pro-slavery character of these writings noted. Yet, for the period between March 1823 and 1832, from which the significant majority (twenty-six) of (forty) sources are drawn, the influence of pro-slavery rhetoric is obvious. Indeed, of the fourteen known authors of those twenty-six sources, all but one – William Jacob – was sympathetic to West Indian slaveholding. As a prosopography will show, many of these men wrote only to defend Caribbean planters from the opprobrium of the anti-slavery lobby and their articulation of political economy was an intellectual means to that end.

Alexander McDonnell (1798–1835), for instance, was the leading West Indian propagandist of the period. Born to a Belfast physician, McDonnell conducted business at Demerara before appointment as secretary to the London association of West India Merchants. All of his publications were written to defend the West Indian interest. ‘The question of colonial slavery continuing to excite general interest’, he wrote in the preface to Considerations on negro slavery (1824), ‘I offer the following work to the consideration of the public to mitigate the feeling of hostility so generally entertained in this country against the West Indies.’Footnote ³¹ In Free trade (1826), McDonnell attacked ‘those persons who are systematically opposed to the colonies’ and whose ‘idea of free voluntary [negro] labour … was unphilosophical and preposterous’, all the while linking ‘the new light of the Free Trade doctrine’ to the ‘loss or ruin of the British colonies’.Footnote ³²Colonial commerce (1828), thought to exemplify conservative insistence upon ‘the qualitative superiority of colonial over foreign markets’, was dedicated to George Hibbert, chairman of the West India Planters and Merchants, while its distribution costs of £150 were paid by that organization's literary sub-committee.Footnote ³³ Moreover, McDonnell was in most political matters ‘a decided Whig’.Footnote ³⁴ Therefore, while he is supposed to have written some of the more sophisticated ‘conservative’ argument of the 1820s, it is clear that McDonnell wrote on economic matters for slaveholders, not for conservatives.

James MacQueen (1778–1870), geographer, journalist, and business partner of McDonnell, was another rewarded handsomely by the slaveholding interest.Footnote ³⁵ His West India colonies (1824), cited repeatedly by Gambles, was written to refute the charges levelled against West Indians by emancipationists. Dedicating his work to the chairman of the West India body, MacQueen aimed specifically to ‘oppose the rash, unjust, and dangerous measures now proposed for the abolition of personal Slavery in the West Indies’.Footnote ³⁶ In recognition of his service to ‘the cause con amore’, the West India committee awarded MacQueen one hundred guineas in March 1824 before covering his publishing expenses.Footnote ³⁷ Already the subject of several articles and a monograph by David Lambert, MacQueen was the most vituperative pro-slavery advocate of the period, acquiring the soubriquet ‘the Glasgow king of Billingsgate’.Footnote ³⁸ His other works cited by Gambles, open letters to the duke of Wellington, were likewise apologia for the Caribbean system: the first, from June 1828, defended slavery using stadial theory and biblical exegeses; the second argued that freed-slave labour was impossible and that enslavement in the West Indies was actually a comfortable existence.Footnote ³⁹ It is not wrong to suggest that MacQueen was typically conservative in emphasizing historical experience over theory, and colonial markets over the foreign, but these ideas were supplementary to the defence of slavery.Footnote ⁴⁰

The pro-slavery sympathies of several other ‘conservatives’ are equally unambiguous. Charles Rose Ellis (1774–1845), later Lord Seaford, co-authored the 1823 Quarterly article used by Gambles to show how ‘Tory imperialists commonly held up the historicist yardstick of experience against the prescriptions of abstract liberalism for British imperial practice’.Footnote ⁴¹ Yet, in fact Ellis employed historicism only to address the concern that slave emancipation would ruin West Indian planters, because ‘no precedent exists of free negroes having performed the duties necessarily required in the cultivation and manufacture of sugar, in such a manner as to afford profit to their employers’. Again, the examples of Sierra Leone and Haiti were cited as proof that it was ‘in the nature of the negro to be indolent’.Footnote ⁴² As the chairman of the West Indian body, the recipient of numerous dedications of pro-slavery publications, and a frequent parliamentary speaker on West Indian affairs, Ellis was a prominent and influential pro-slavery advocate.Footnote ⁴³

Likewise Joseph Marryat (1757–1824), the proprietor of extensive Caribbean estates and author of Reply to the arguments … recommending an equalization of the duties on East and West Indian sugar (1823).Footnote ⁴⁴ This Reply called for the economic protection of colonies because they provided a secure market for domestic manufacturing.Footnote ⁴⁵ Yet, for Marryat, the only deserving colonies were those in the Caribbean, colonies he believed would be ruined by emancipation. Recognizing his position on slavery, Marryat's obituary in the Gentleman's Magazine ran thus: ‘In the great question of Negro Emancipation he took a very prominent and decided part, and he was one of the first to denounce the alteration about to be introduced in the West Indies, as a scheme fraught, in his opinion, with the direst evils.’Footnote ⁴⁶ Indeed, his death in 1824 was regarded as a crippling blow to the pro-slavery lobby; in Marryat, wrote Fraser's Magazine, it ‘possessed an intrepid champion, and a man of great information and integrity … No man’, Fraser's regretted, ‘has been advanced by the Colonists to supply his place.’Footnote ⁴⁷

The attitude towards slavery of other noted economic writers may be more surprising. David Robinson (1787–1849), who published prolifically against Ricardian economics and the policies of liberal tory governments, has been the subject of considerable study, but his attitude to slavery has gone unnoticed.Footnote ⁴⁸ In an 1832 article for Blackwood's, Robinson denounced the dogmatism of economic theory, particularly with respect to the colonial system; but he also criticized the strain of anti-slavery enthusiasm which he perceived in this ‘new’ political economy. ‘You raise a tremendous clamour against slavery’, he challenged the ‘liberals’ he addressed; ‘[you] overwhelm Parliament with petitions for its abolition. In this you display not more madness than wickedness’,

John Barrow (1764–1848), the explorer, admiralty official, and author of Mutiny on the bounty, was another to equate anti-slavery zeal with free-trade liberalism. In March 1826 in the Quarterly Review, Barrow combined a review of James Carmichael Smyth's Reflections upon the value of the British West Indian colonies (1825) with an assault on the anti-colonialism of the Edinburgh Review.Footnote ⁵⁰ This, for Gambles, was evidence of how conservatives combated financial critiques of empire ‘with an alternative imperialist empiricism’.Footnote ⁵¹ But Barrow's article was also an assault on the anti-slavery lobby. ‘The exertions of the political economists’, he warned, ‘are by no means the most formidable at present at work for the ruin of our West India colonies’,

For Barrow, as for so many of these writers, anti-slavery campaigning was as much of a threat to the empire as Ricardian economics.

Pro-slavery sympathies are evident even among the principally literary figures who contributed to this discourse. Among them was William Maginn (1794–1842), whose criticism of Thomas Macaulay in 1825 indicated more than Gambles's ‘dilution of the Edinburgh Review's commitment to the empire in the transition from the intellectual dominance of Henry Brougham to that of J. R. McCulloch’.Footnote ⁵³ It also represented contempt of the Review's anti-slavery position, for Macaulay's celebration of free labour in Haiti was, wrote Maginn, ‘egregious and wilful misrepresentation from beginning to end’. He advised Macaulay and his own audience to read McDonnell's Considerations, to ‘see what view of the matter arises, when real facts are taken as data – when the pen is in the hand, not of a paragraph-monger, who knows nothing of the colonies, but of one who speaks from personal knowledge’.Footnote ⁵⁴ The Scottish novelist John Galt (1779–1839), whose father was in the West Indian marine, was another. Cited to evince conservative belief that preferential duties consolidated the political integrity of the empire, Galt's imperial writings were also informed by concern for the West Indian interest.Footnote ⁵⁵ From 1830, Galt published letters in Fraser's Magazine deriding ‘the rabble rout of noisy, stultified charlatans and boastful philanthropists, who throng the arena of the side of the factious abolitionists’.Footnote ⁵⁶ For Galt, emancipation was not liberation; it was the substitution, for comfortable servitude, of ‘the horrors of unregarded and untended poverty’.Footnote ⁵⁷ The consequences of freedom would be terrible:

In Galt's worldview, if colonial trade tied together the empire, colonial slavery was essential to the prosperity of that colonial trade; emancipation would undo everything.

Archibald Alison (1792–1867), the lawyer and historian, was yet another enlisted in the West Indian cause. His 1832 introduction to ‘the West India question’, employed by Gambles as further evidence of conservative historicism, is more striking for its condemnation of anti-slavery campaigning.Footnote ⁵⁹ ‘The great danger which has excited such extraordinary terror through all the West India Islands’, he wrote, ‘is the incessant efforts of Government, and ignorant individuals and societies, to interfere with the management of the slaves, with a view to their immediate or early emancipation.’ West Indian slavery, he argued, was ‘not only not an evil, but a positive advantage’ to the Africans in their civilizational progress.Footnote ⁶⁰ That Alison was pro-slavery in principle is clear. In his autobiography, he decried ‘the imprudent zeal of the English abolitionists’, judged the condition of American slaves as ‘greatly superior to that of any peasantry in Europe’, and, on African freedom, wrote that:

While, like so many pro-slavery advocates, Alison ‘abhorred’ slavery in the abstract, his version of pragmatism regarded the institution as necessary for African development.

Still, the most zealous within this literary cabal was John Gibson Lockhart (1794–1854), son-in-law of Walter Scott, editor of the Quarterly Review from 1825, and rarely noticed as an apologist for slavery. His essays in Blackwood's are used to demonstrate conservative belief in, among other things, ‘a nationalistic conception of trade’, ‘colonial trade [as] a fundamental mechanism for avoiding stasis’ and, again, the superiority of historical experience over economic theory.Footnote ⁶² However, these essays, published between October 1823 and December 1824, entitled the ‘West Indian controversy’, are in fact among the most wide-ranging and strident examples of pro-slavery apologia.Footnote ⁶³ Arguing that only slavery could elevate Africans out of barbarism, demanding that British labourers should be attended before Caribbean slaves, quoting Paley and Paul in theological defence of slavery, and always impugning the emancipationists, these articles established Lockhart as a leading pro-slavery polemicist. For Lockhart, British colonies immediately required defence, but not from the economics of Ricardo and McCulloch; rather, from

Three more figures require exposure as West Indian advocates. The first, Joseph Lowe, the author of the Quarterly's 1823 article on ‘The condition of the negroes in our colonies’, was an old hand.Footnote ⁶⁵ In 1807, in advance of abolition, his Inquiry into the state of the West Indies predicted the ruin and distress of the Caribbean colonies in the coming years.Footnote ⁶⁶ In 1823, his article, regarded as supplementary evidence of economic historicism, attacked Wilberforce and Clarkson while referring to Mosaic law, pagan antiquity, and the condition of European labourers to prove that West Indian slaves lived in relative comfort.Footnote ⁶⁷

The second is Robert Wilmot Horton (1784–1841), well known as an advocate of colonial emigration and a Colonial Office minister, but often ignored as a friend to the slaveholding interest. Co-author, with Ellis, of the Quarterly's 1824 article on the West Indies, Wilmot Horton wrote several other pro-slavery tracts. In The West India question practically considered (1826), published as a counterpoint to the work of Colonial Office colleague James Stephen, Wilmot Horton argued that enslavement of Africans actually accelerated their moral and intellectual development and that, in the event of emancipation, planters should be compensated for the loss of their slaves.Footnote ⁶⁸ These points were repeated in a parliamentary speech of 1828, thereafter reprinted by the West India committee, and in two letters to the freeholders of York.Footnote ⁶⁹ Throughout pro-slavery literature, too, handsome tribute was paid to Wilmot Horton: in 1826, McDonnell invoked him as an authority; the orator Peter Borthwick hailed him as a champion of the West Indies; in 1827, the planter John Dalzell praised him as a bulwark of sense in a government department over-run by abolitionists.Footnote ⁷⁰ Indeed, given the cordial relations which he enjoyed with Ricardo, Mill, and McCulloch, and his membership of the Political Economy club, Wilmot Horton's concern was clearly for West Indian planters, not economic conservatism per se.

The final subject of this prosopography is George Canning (1770–1827). His Commons speech on 16 March 1824 is cited by Gambles as final proof that British conservatives preferred experience over theory in determining imperial practice.Footnote ⁷¹ This is not wrong: Canning implored the House to ‘consider not only what may be right in theory, but what will be wise in practice’, referring to ‘the progress of improvement in nations of Europe’. But Canning was not talking about political economy; indeed, Canning scarcely can be considered an economic conservative. Instead, he spoke about slavery, about the introduction of an Order-in-Council providing for slave amelioration in Trinidad. Here, then, was the foreign secretary urging only very gradual change in the relationship between master and slave. ‘If I am asked’, he said, ‘which I would prefer, permanent slavery, or immediate abolition, I do not know whether … I must not say, I would prefer things remaining as they are.’ He also argued that emancipation would place the British legislature in the role of Shelley's Frankenstein:

More important, however, was Canning's reiteration of own resolutions of May 1823: that emancipation could occur only in conformity ‘with the safety of the colonies, and with a fair and equitable consideration of the interests of private property’.Footnote ⁷² This speech had become the pro-slavery charter. The West India body paid John Murray to reprint it as a separate publication, providing the very source used by Gambles.Footnote ⁷³ One of its passages, asserting that only the master should superintend changes to the condition of slaves, was the inaugural epigram of the West Indian Reporter.Footnote ⁷⁴ On several more occasions between March 1824 and his death, Canning rose in the Commons to question the propriety of emancipation; in consequence, there was scarcely a pro-slavery writer who did not exalt him.Footnote ⁷⁵

The overwhelming majority of figures who shaped the ‘conservative’ imperial economic discourse of the 1820s and 1830s were sympathetic to West Indian slavery, a reality which historians have often neglected and, in some cases, missed entirely. Moreover, many of their publications, cited as foundational to this discourse, were written specifically to address the problem of emancipation. While Gambles argues that conservative political economy was constructed ‘in response to the ambiguities of free-trade liberalism’, these writers were not in fact contesting the economic ideas of Ricardo, Mill, or McCulloch on theoretical terms, for none of these pro-slavery texts were formal treatises on political economy. Indeed, many of these writers refused to call their work ‘political economy’: McDonnell described political economy as ‘the prolific source of … such multiplied errors’; MacQueen argued that empire had ‘prospered until it became cursed with a swarm of political economists’, while Robinson called political economists ‘a set of literary pretenders’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Instead of engaging with classical political economy at an abstract level, pro-slavery advocates published issue-specific articles, pamphlets, and pièces d'occasion which entered into analysis of the relative costs of free and slave labour, the relative security of colonial and foreign markets, and the politics of protection with the practical intention of defending West Indian slavery. The register of these sources does not, therefore, lend to an interpretation of their economic ideas as simply an intellectual response to the preponderance of economic liberalism; rather, alongside scriptural literalism and racialized theories of civilization, historically-informed economic argument was an essential constituent of pro-slavery apologia.

IV

Having seen that political context encouraged the defence of slavery, and that many ‘conservatives’ wrote on matters of economics and empire primarily to defend the Caribbean system, the importance of the emancipation controversy is confirmed by looking at how many of the governing principles of this ‘conservative’ economic discourse, as outlined by Gambles in her chapters on empire, were defined not just with reference to the British West Indies, but often to the exclusion of rival possessions in the East.

For example, the belief that British economic policy should be informed by historical experience, as opposed to deductive theory, reflected a difference said to exist between the West and East Indies as well as between slave labour and theoretical free labour. On one hand, the strategic and economic value of the Caribbean islands had been proven repeatedly over centuries. More recently, during the French wars, the West Indies again had demonstrated their importance: ‘it was by the possession of these [colonies] alone’, claimed John Barrow, ‘that our little island was enabled to resist … the gigantic power, which, in the sequel, her perseverance subdued’.Footnote ⁷⁷ Conversely, the prospects of empire in India were uncertain, for the subcontinent was regarded as politically and militarily vulnerable. ‘Dominion seized by force over a conquered people must always be precarious’, warned McDonnell.Footnote ⁷⁸ The British yoke, argued the Colonial Register, ‘cannot but be disagreeable to the natives, whatever care may be taken to conciliate their prejudices’.Footnote ⁷⁹ The British presence in India was rendered less secure even by the means of its own preservation: ‘India contains the germs of her own destruction’, McDonnell asserted; ‘arms have been put into the hands of the natives’. ‘What, except the utter loss of our dominion’, agreed the Register, ‘would be the effect of discontent in their battalions?’ In addition to predicting mutiny, pro-slavery advocates also foreshadowed the ‘Great Game’. The pseudonymous ‘West India Proprietor’ warned that, via Astrakhan, Kiev, and Persia, ‘the Emperor Nicholas would perhaps find less difficulty than some persons imagine in making his way into Hindostan’.Footnote ⁸⁰ ‘When we contemplate the power of the vast empire of Russia’, agreed West India committee member Simon Houghton Clarke, ‘we must consider that it is as natural India should become dependent upon [it], as Scotland and Ireland … have become parts of the English nation.’ Against the Russian threat, Clarke claimed, ‘our navy, all powerful as it is, can give no protection’.Footnote ⁸¹ The economic advocacy of empire generally placed heavy emphasis upon the certainty of colonial as opposed to foreign trade; within empire, that argument was reshaped to favour the West Indies, ‘a certain source of wealth and power’, over Eastern possessions ‘liable to a thousand vicissitudes, and liable by a hundred accidents to be lost to us every hour’.Footnote ⁸²

Second, ‘economic nationalism’ was explicit in the distinction made between ‘British’ colonies in the West Indies and the alien nature of the British presence in India. ‘Our plantations in the West grew up, and have become an integral part of this empire’, claimed one pamphleteer, ‘the soil being owned, occupied, and cultivated by our fellow countrymen; ‘The [West Indian] planters’, claimed another, ‘are essentially British land-owners’ whose education, often in England, bred ‘tastes and habits purely English’.Footnote ⁸³ Such a claim for consanguinity was repeated throughout pro-slavery works. ‘The same blood flows in the veins of the colonist’, wrote J. F. Barham, ‘as in those of the people of England.’Footnote ⁸⁴ Pro-slavery logic therefore maintained that, as Englishmen and subjects of the crown, West Indian planters were ‘entitled to the same protection in their persons and fortunes, as our brethren in Great Britain and Ireland’.Footnote ⁸⁵ ‘There can be no difference whatever’, argued McDonnell, ‘in the encouragement given to the various artificers, between a gentleman of Yorkshire … and a West India proprietor.’Footnote ⁸⁶ That ‘encouragement’, was, of course the succour of the Corn Laws; why should it not be extended to the Caribbean planter? One pamphleteer found no reason for discrimination:

Tellingly, this argument was never extended to the East Indies; in fact, ‘British India’ was thought a misnomer. While McDonnell had described the West Indies as colonies ‘peopled by Great Britain, which are essentially identified with the home territory’, the East Indies were ‘possessions peopled by foreigners’, an ‘excrescence of the body politic’. The principal difference derived from ownership of land. ‘Cultivation of tropical produce is conducted in the West Indies by Britons’, explained McDonnell; ‘in the East by Hindoos.’Footnote ⁸⁸ It was ‘this conquered people of Hindoostan’, wrote Houghton Clarke, ‘who exclusively own the soil of India’, yet who were ‘of a different religion and language … in all respects a conquered people, and not British’.Footnote ⁸⁹ Trade with India, then, was ultimately a foreign trade; British East Indian merchants were simply couriers for a foreign people. These traders could not therefore be considered

‘Economic nationalism’ and imperial preference were not, patently, universal principles; perhaps foreshadowing ideas of ‘imperial federation’, which always saw India as an Achilles' heel, and which emphasized the ‘British-ness’ of settler colonies, they were promulgated only in reference to landowners in the Caribbean slave colonies.

The British character of the West Indies and the ‘dissemination of [British] manners’ among the colonists gave the Caribbean a third advantage over other possessions: a ‘predilection for commodities produced by British industry’.Footnote ⁹¹ ‘Every shop in the Colonies’, British manufacturers were told, ‘is stored with your goods.’Footnote ⁹² ‘Almost everything which the West India Planters eats, drinks, wears, or consumes’, it was claimed, ‘is imported from the Mother Country.’Footnote ⁹³Marly, a pro-slavery novel published anonymously, even claimed that West Indians were

In contrast to this mutually beneficial commerce, pro-slavery advocates derided the ‘small intercourse which takes place between so mighty a territory [as India] and Great Britain’.Footnote ⁹⁵ ‘The people who are employed in growing sugar in the East Indies’, it was argued, ‘do not use British clothing, or fish, or mill-work, or the various English tools and utensils made of copper and iron.’Footnote ⁹⁶ Moreover, such patterns of demand would not change even if the sugar trade were switched to the East. ‘The hereditary customs to which the Hindoos adhere with religious pertinacity’, McDonnell explained, ‘will prevent, for a long time, the extensive consumption of articles made after the English fashion.’Footnote ⁹⁷ Only the West Indies, then, constituted an essential colonial market for British produce, ‘an encouragement to industry, which is not equalled by any other market’.Footnote ⁹⁸ Yet, this certain demand was threatened by the ruin which emancipation would entail. ‘England must make up its mind’, proclaimed Alison, ‘if it will insist, by rash and absurd legislation, upon losing these flourishing colonies, to look elsewhere for one-third of its manufacturing exports.’Footnote ⁹⁹ Emancipation, charged Peter Borthwick, would wreak havoc on the British economy: ‘Then what is your Bristol, your Liverpool your Manchester, your Glasgow … if you take from them the West India Colonies? – Nothing – worse than nothing; one universal scene of beggary and starvation.’Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The natural consequence of emancipation and West Indian ruin, supposedly, was the distress of British manufacturing.

Equally vulnerable to emancipation was the transfer of profit from colony to metropole. That colonies were a vent for Britain's surplus capital was a standard argument of classical political economy, yet the return on that capital – colonial profit – became central to pro-slavery argument. In collusion with the nationalistic aspect of the rhetoric, it was argued that ‘emigrants to our West India islands never lose sight of the intention to return to their native country’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Because of this, their profit came with them: ‘We are enriched by the fortunes of West India proprietors’, claimed one advocate; ‘the wealth annually accruing to Britain in these fortunes is not less than £3,000,000.’Footnote ¹⁰² Inevitably, this wealth was most obvious in the Atlantic ports: ‘Are not these places’, asked Lockhart, ‘crammed with West Indians?’Footnote ¹⁰³ Alexander Barclay made this a key point of his assessment of British colonial policy. More capital, he argued, had been taken ‘from the colonies, and laid out upon the soil of the mother country, than has moved in the contrary direction’. Upon what other basis, he asked, had the great merchant families – ‘the Marants, Dawkins, Pennants, Beckfords, and Lascelles’ – been established?Footnote ¹⁰⁴ In this way, the mother country benefited from ‘the profits of cultivation of every acre of land in the British West Indies’, which could easily be represented as ‘a source of wealth perennially flowing into the very heart of the parent state.’ It was an argument given additional purchase by the collapse of the South American market and the banking crisis of 1825. With respect to India, however, it was apparent that profit stayed in the East. If the cultivation of sugar moved eastward, McDonnell explained, ‘Indian zemindars only will be benefited’; their ‘ill-acquired prosperity [would] never animate commercial enterprise in England’; ‘the profits arising from the cultivation of [Indian] lands’ would never ‘directly benefit the mother country’; and so India, in this respect, was ‘no better … than a foreign country’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Finally, the argument that colonial trade fostered British navigation was a natural harbour for pro-slavery rhetoric. First, emancipation would sunder countless thousand tonnes of shipping to the West Indies.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ More important, though, was the trade's formative influence on the British navy. Free-trade and anti-slavery interests made their position clear: ‘the navy of Great Britain’, argued the Edinburgh Review, ‘might be as formidable as it now is, or, if that was desirable, infinitely more so, though we had not a single merchant ship’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Yet, for pro-slavery advocates, the West Indian route was the nursery of British naval supremacy. ‘Ask any naval officer of your acquaintance’, demanded a committee pamphlet, ‘whether it is not the long voyage … that makes the thorough seaman? – men who can be depended on to man our navy … and whether the West India trade, above all others, is not the best nursery for such seamen?’Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The point was made commonly. Borthwick, the committee agent who in 1833 toured Britain debating with the abolitionist George Thompson, asked his audience at Edinburgh if the sailor's ‘best nursery has not been West India seamanship – whether the sailors that have best supported the glory of our naval wars, have not been educated on the salt seas, and in that particular line of trade?’Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Rodney, Nelson, and all the great British naval heroes were invoked to reinforce this point.Footnote ¹¹⁰ The prospective loss of the West Indian trade, just as the loss of St Domingue was ‘a blow from which [the French] navy would never recover’, was depicted as a potential disaster for national security: ‘the right arm of the British navy [would] be lopped off the moment that the West India Islands’ were lost themselves.Footnote ¹¹¹ Even if the trade shifted to the East, there would be little consolation; while the ships involved in the West Indian trade were ‘exclusively British, and navigated solely by British seamen’, East Indian vessels had ‘Lascars and Chinese sailors, as a part of their crews, who are unfit for our navy’.Footnote ¹¹² Such people, scorned the Gentleman's Magazine, were ‘an enfeebled set of men’ to whom ‘the honour of maintaining the British flag, and the power of wielding the British naval thunder’ should never be confided.Footnote ¹¹³ ‘The Bombay marine is a useless and incompetent service’, concluded Frederick Marryat, the sailor and son of Joseph.Footnote ¹¹⁴ With East Indian shipping thus incapable of maintaining the British navy, John Barrow declared that emancipation would be ‘the death-blow of our shipping interest’ and so he begged that ‘whatever party may direct the government of this country the great principles, by an adherence to which our naval power and superiority have been established, will never be abandoned for wild and visionary theories’.Footnote ¹¹⁵

V

‘Little observation is required’, wrote Alexander McDonnell in Free Trade, ‘to decide that some colonies must be much more advantageous to us than others’.Footnote ¹¹⁶ From 1823, the case was made – in public journals, in specialized pamphlets, in parliament – that West Indian colonies were the most advantageous of all, and therefore most deserving of protection. The pro-slavery cause was defeated eventually, but it had been taken up by leading intellectuals, journalists, and statesmen, and so contributed to a vigorous debate over the practice and character of British government, empire, and trade. The Britain of these years, then, was far from an ‘anti-slavery’ nation; there was debate, not consensus, and so the dearth of studies of pro-slavery interests remains bewildering, although the work of, among others, David Lambert, Christer Petley, and the Legacies of British Slave-ownership project at UCL may do much to correct this.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The provocation of this debate was obvious: anti-slavery campaigners pursued the emancipation of slaves in British colonies, so pro-slavery rhetoric held that emancipation would be an economic disaster; the anti-slavery campaign paralysed the flow of capital from the metropole to the colonies, so pro-slavery rhetoric held that West Indian colonies remained worthy of investment; and the anti-slavery campaign advanced the cause of ‘free-grown’ East Indian sugar, so pro-slavery rhetoric held that Britain would suffer from the aggrandizement of Eastern over Western possessions. Together, these arguments formed the core of a sophisticated and pervasive economic discourse, which historians – hitherto – have subsumed into a ‘conservative political economy’. Yet, even if the majority of these advocates were politically conservative, ascribing that label to their arguments has been misleading. It was the defence of slavery, not conservatism or imperialism, which bound these men; slavery, not protectionism or imperialism, was at the heart of their economics.

Recognizing the pro-slavery nature of this discourse may have three further consequences for scholarship. First, given the centrality of slavery to these arguments, one may question how far there was a truly ‘conservative’ imperial political economy during the period 1823–33. Consequently, the relevance of what were slavery-specific arguments to imperial political economy after emancipation becomes equally questionable. By ending the debate, the Emancipation Act of 1833 had removed the need for the defence of slavery, so how far can one relate pre-1833 arguments to later imperial contexts in which West Indians had less and perhaps no interest? Moreover, very few of these writers contributed substantially to economic discourse after emancipation, and many contributed nothing: Marryat died in 1824, Canning in 1827, and McDonnell in 1835; MacQueen was ruined by a libel writ in 1831; Wilmot Horton was sent to Ceylon, while Lockhart wrote little on the West Indies after he took over the Quarterly in 1825. The idea of continuity in ‘conservative’ political economy in this era may therefore require revision. Second, the existence of a powerful pro-slavery economic discourse may strengthen the case against rigidly economic interpretations of emancipation, as propounded since the publication of Eric Williams's Capitalism and slavery (1944).Footnote ¹¹⁸ Instead, the pervasive nature of this discourse may have been an intellectual, qualitative victim of what Seymour Drescher called ‘econocide’. Drescher himself demonstrated that ‘the secular decline of the slave colonies within the imperial political economy prior to abolitionist successes [was] a statistical illusion created by ignoring the period 1783–1815’.Footnote ¹¹⁹ The importance and sophistication of pro-slavery economic discourse suggests that slavery was still regarded as a valid system intellectually, as well as financially. Emancipation may have represented the conscious repudiation of that discourse, an ‘intellectual econocide’. Third, the extent and influence of pro-slavery publications between 1823 and 1833, all of which promulgated the essentiality of the Caribbean colonies to national prosperity, belies the notion that British imperial attention had moved permanently towards India by this time. Indeed, the newspapers, journals, and pamphlets sympathetic to the West Indian interest were almost invariably hostile to Indian empire, and many such writers simply could not conceive that subcontinental possessions might replace the West Indies as the jewel in the imperial crown. Before emancipation, perhaps, British imperialists had not reached their meridian.