The Bitter-Sweet History of Fair Trade Labelling

Abstract

12 | International Union Rights | 23/4 FOCUS | CERTIFICATION AND LABELLING The Bitter-Sweet History of Fair Trade Labelling Voluntary approaches to transnational business and human rights have often been understood as part of a process that begins in the 1970s with the ILO and OECD’s adoption of non-binding ‘guidelines’ for transnationals, and which evolved through the corporate codes of conduct and consumer activism of the 1990s to the United Nations Guiding Principles, adopted by the Human Rights Council in 2011. This edition of IUR cast a wider net, and looks back to the use of ‘union labels’ to denote union made goods from the late 19th Century. But looking back for even earlier examples of certification and labelling we can find - in the early 19th Century - a major transnational business attempting to ‘brand’ its products as socially acceptable in the middle of a major global transformation of labour practices as part of the campaign to halt the transatlantic slave trade. The East India Company (‘EIC’, ‘the Company’) was a private trading operation on a global scale that participated at the forefront of the British imperialist project, and which used armed force to achieve its objectives. It also ran significant slave trading operations, transporting enslaved peoples from Africa via its staging post, Saint Helena, in the South Atlantic. It acquired a reputation for brutal and disastrous mismanagement in India, and its administration of local taxes and rents were blamed for the onset of a famine that killed millions within 15 years of its violent acquisition of territory in Bengal. It was something of an irony, therefore, that just a few decades later the EIC became involved with a major global rights promoting initiative: the British-led campaign that sought to end the transatlantic slave trade. The Company had a keen motivation for its about-turn. Great economic interests were at stake. The campaigners called for a boycott of West Indian sugar, which was grown under conditions of slavery. The EIC’s sugar from the ‘East Indies’ was produced, the EIC and its advocates claimed, by ‘free labour’. The EIC enthusiastically supported the boycott of West Indian produce, and in order to promote awareness of its own ‘brand’ as a fairer alternative, the EIC produced thousands of sugar bowls and items of memorabilia that labelled East Indian sugar as a fair product made by ‘free labour’. The EIC position was of course tenuous at best, the EIC’s imperialist occupation of India had a dreadful legacy of exploitation. Nonetheless, the EIC was successful in positioning itself as the ‘free labour’ producer. It is crucial to understanding the complex role played here by the EIC: at the same time as the Company supported the abolition of West Indian slavery, it also sought to deflect attention from forms of slavery that persisted in territories it controlled (notably in India, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), and Saint Helena). The Duke of Wellington, who had governed one of the Company’s Indian territories (and whose brother was Governor-General of India, also a Company position) advocated exemption of its territories from the Anti-Slavery Acts. Wellington (who served as Prime Minister both prior to and subsequent to his intervention on behalf of the EIC) ‘insisted’ that there was ‘no necessity for framing any laws or regulations with regard to slavery in the East Indies’. He continued ‘I never knew an instance of cruelty being practised towards the slaves, if slaves they ought to be called’. Parliament had been presented with ‘voluminous’ papers on Slavery in India in 1828 by campaigner James Peggs, but Wellington dismissed Peggs’ work, and the 1833 East India Charter required only that the Company should ‘take into consideration’ strategies for ‘mitigating’ slavery, while the 1833 Abolition of Slavery Act exempted the territories of the East India Company from its ambit1. In After Abolition Marika Sherwood asserts that even ten years on from Wellington’s intervention some five to ten million people remained enslaved in the EIC’s territory in India. But joining the moral crusade of the abolitionists had successfully deflected attention from slavery in India. The EIC’s products came to be seen as morally superior to those of West Indian...