Early in 1901 when visiting Trinidad, William Adlington Cadbury, nephew and business associate of the revered Quaker and cocoa manufacturer George Cadbury, heard the rumor that one of their main sources of cocoa, the island of Sao Tome off the coast of Africa, used slaves. To William Cadbury and the rest of the owners of the family firm the possibility was nightmarish. For 150 years and more the Quakers (Society of Friends) had spearheaded the struggle against slavery, succeeding in 1833 with its abolition throughout the British Empire. Sharing the religious and moral imperatives that drove their forefathers, to the Cadburys the slightest connivance with slavery was anathema. Besides personal conviction and moral repute there was the family firm's commercial reputation. The firm was among the largest 130 businesses in the United Kingdom. Its high-quality cocoa products had displaced the adulterated food and drink products of many of its rivals in Victorian England. Most of its 4,500 workforce was concentrated in a model industrial community on the outskirts of the city of Birmingham at Bournville where working and living conditions were optimal. Anything likely to blemish their immaculate reputation as producers and employers, and certainly anything as vile as slavery, had market implications and so, in opting for a boycott, would the loss of a supply of cocoa beans.
The situation was further complicated by the fact that Portugal, to whom the islands of Sao Tome and Principe and their mainland source of labor Angola belonged, was Britain's traditional ally. Gunboat diplomacy was not an immediate option. Yet this was what the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society and its allies, including many Quakers and other Nonconformists, would immediately demand. Already their crusade against slavery in Leopold II's Belgian Congo was looming. Whatever the truth of the Sao Tome situation, any publicity could only threaten to unleash public outrage. Publicity would surely be fanned by the Standard, a Conservative mouthpiece and bitter rival of the Daily News, a Liberal newspaper owned by George Cadbury. Nor was Cadbury's alone in this fiendish dilemma. Fry's and Rowntree’s, their rivals and model Quaker firms of comparable size, were similarly supplied by the plantations of Sao Tome and Principe. What should the English cocoa manufacturers do? What they actually did, culminating in a sensational libel trial in November 1909, is the subject of this absorbing book.
Although we cannot read every twist and turn in the thoughts of William Cadbury, the key player in this episode who acted for his own and the other cocoa manufacturers’ firms, Lowell Satre has pieced together a splendid empirical study. The Portuguese authorities claimed that Africans shipped (nearly a thousand miles) from Angola to Sao Tome and Principe were contract labor, servicais, who by law could return of their own free will after five years. Missionaries had reported since the 1880s that no such freedom existed. William Cadbury's task was to discover the truth. Then the cocoa manufacturers could decide an appropriate course of action—negotiation, threat, or a boycott of the islands’ cocoa beans.
Satre believes that the cocoa manufacturers took too long, from 1902 until 1909, to decide on a boycott. This was the view of most supporters of the Anti-Slavery Society, as well as of Henry W. Nevinson, traveler, journalist, and war correspondent who, in 1904, accepted a £1,000 offer from Harper's Monthly Magazine to investigate. He returned to England in summer 1905, wrote his articles for Harper’s, and a year later published them in book form as A Modern Slavery. Questions were asked in Parliament. From a radical point of view, there was enough evidence in the public domain for a boycott to be declared in summer 1906.
On the other hand, William Cadbury's stance was defensible, at first anyway. He believed that the evidence was not yet strong enough—Nevinson spoke no Portuguese, was in West Africa no longer than six months, and being a well-known radical journalist would expectedly cite the most sensational cases. Taking a more deliberative and thorough approach to the problem of imperfect knowledge, late in 1904 Cadbury recruited Joseph Burtt, an idealistic forty-one-year-old Quaker, to spend six months in Portugal learning the language before visiting the islands and Angola. Burtt returned in spring 1907. His report was a damning one. Surely at this point the cocoa manufacturers would declare a boycott.
They did not. This time matters of statecraft supervened. The British Foreign Secretary Edward Grey, mindful that South Africa's gold and diamond mines depended on native labor recruited from (Portuguese) Mozambique, persuaded the Cadburys to suppress Burtt's report for a year. William Cadbury, ever optimistic that a gradualist, negotiated approach outranked a radical termination of commercial relations, continued to believe the Portuguese would reform their colonial administration. As far as slavery and enforced labor was concerned, they never did. The hopelessness of Cadbury's gradualist reformist approach became clear in 1908 when government chaos followed the assassination of the Portuguese king and when William Cadbury visited Angola and the islands and saw slavery firsthand. At last in March 1909, the firms of Cadbury, Fry, and Rowntree, soon joined by the German firm of Stollwerck, declared a boycott of cocoa beans grown on Sao Tome and Principe. Meantime, the years of restraint advantaged Bournville employees at the cost of additional enslaved Africans, reserve cocoa tree plantations having been established in the Gold Coast, a British West African colony.
In defense of their reputation, Cadbury Brothers Ltd sued the Standard Newspaper Ltd for libel, the Standard in September 1908 having accused Cadbury's of promoting slavery on the islands in order to feed the mills and presses of Bournville. In the trial that followed, two of the most brilliant barristers of their day were pitted against each other: Rufus Isaacs, a Liberal, on behalf of Cadbury’s, and Edward Carson, a leading Conservative politician, on behalf of the Standard. At the end of a seven-day trial the jurors found in favor of Cadbury Brothers but awarded them contemptuous damages of a mere farthing. As Satre comments, “the Standard was guilty of libel, but Cadbury fell far short of defending its humanitarian image” (181).
I was left wondering why the Society of Friends, in its local Birmingham meeting, did not appoint a panel to investigate the moral dimension of the Cadbury's Sao Tome trade. A contemporary parallel, of much less enormity, existed. In 1902 Sir Joseph Whitwell Pease, a prominent northeastern industrialist and Quaker, was bankrupted, thereby collapsing his family's bank. That disaster was investigated by his local Friends’ Monthly Meeting. Presumably the Cadburys were too much respected.
This is a widely researched, detailed, and readable study that will interest those wishing to illustrate problems in business and imperial ethics. Whenever slavery confronts humanitarians, Kantian absolutes must always override utilitarian considerations of commerce or statecraft. George and William Cadbury should have obeyed their Quaker consciences in 1906 and resisted the politicians in London and Lisbon. That they did not arguably cost the lives of three years’ supply of slaves to the Portuguese cocoa islands. The cocoa manufacturers’ reputation soon recovered.
