Antislavery and Political Economy in the Early Victorian House of Commons: A Research Note on "Capitalist Hegemony"

Abstract

Half a century ago Eric Williams argued that a close connection existed between capitalism and slavery. According to Williams, slave trade profits provided a capital base for Western Europe's economic expansion; ultimately a more mature industrial capitalism tumed upon West Indian slavery when it became a liability to the imperial economy. Subsequent studies now refute much of this thesis. Recent literature argues that slavery remained profitable into the 1830s. Scholarly debate therefore has shifted to address the problem of why the British tampered with the sanctity of property rights if West Indian slavery continued to remain a source of national profits.1 Some historians continue to argue that class interests were somehow involved. David B. Davis, in particular, frequently has been understood to suggest that abo litionism diverted attention from metropolitan grievances and that opposition to slavery was not an innovation justified by [the] Rights of Man. His writings indicate that this diversion reinforced capitalist hegemony through a diminished sensitivity toward class exploitation; local evils became blurred by familiarity. According tO Davis, domestic reform energies perhaps were channeled outward toward a symbol of unparalleled oppression. David Eltis, another proponent of the hegemony thesis, writes that anti-slavery was simply a facet of the predominating view of social relations, property, and morality which emerged with the industrialization process; a laissez faire, individualistic and localistic definition of freedom that defined slavery as antithetical to civilized society. While he acknowledges some nice distinctions, Eltis sees the same solution being applied to the West Indian and British labor problems.2 Both Davis and Eltis recognize the importance of state acceptance of and buttress their arguments with analysis of Parliamentary behavior. Eltis concludes that none of the leading figures in Parliament opposed the New Poor Law and by 1833 antislavery appeared entirely consistent with laissez-faire principles. Davis is less extravagant in his claims. He emphasizes that both emancipation and the New Poor Law passed the newly reformed Parliament by overwhelming majorities but also notes a group of thirty MPs who opposed the harshest provisions of the new poor relief legislation.3 The hegemony thesis has not gone unchallenged. Thomas Haskell, for instance, suggests that arguments need firmer grounding in the historical record. He argues that Davis's evidence for thinking that the abolitionists unconsciously intended to legitimate free labor by confining their attack to slavery consists essentially of two classes offacts: . . . (1 ) critics advanced this interpretation . . . [and] (2) the abolitionists did not take the trouble to disavow in writing the intention to legitimate free labor. Another critic, Seymour Drescher, explicitly rejects the notion that was the preserve of a group of evangelicals, operating in the interest of nascent capitalists; nor did displace social tensions by removing focus from evils at home to evils abroad. He concedes that