Make Them Dance - Lessons from history for the online future - Part Two

A long fight for change

Up until 1807, when the British slave trade was abolished, and through to emancipation in 1834, the practice had attracted little concern, let alone criticism. In fact, it was rarely thought about in terms other than the brutally practical.

The abolitionists’ challenge was - consciously or otherwise - to surface and challenge the underlying narratives: the shared, largely hidden logic of assumptions that had nourished the slave trade for so long.

The lengthy and frustrating debate that played out over the decades following Wilberforce’s speech of 1789 demanded that, for the first time, multiple hidden narratives be surfaced, then articulated and passionately argued, for and against. The outcome would be a profound and long-standing reshaping of the public discourse, impacting and integrating the philosophical, the ethical, the spiritual, the social, the political and of course, the economical.?

While it still took a stupendous bribe to conclusively prise the plantation owners away from slavery, the British government’s decision to take out that unprecedented loan was a direct consequence of far more than a mere winning over of powerful business interests. The collective mind of the establishment - first unwilling to acknowledge, then reluctant to address, then obliged to dig its heels in hard to hold onto, the abomination of human slavery - had been changed.

This, alongside the bitter and unwholesome struggle for money and power, was about the patient and dedicated unpicking of a robust and highly resistant fabric of interwoven narratives, favouring the supporters of slavery. Perhaps inevitably, circumstantial distractions - among them the long and complicated war with France that followed the upheaval of the revolution in 1789 - contributed substantially to the success of the anti-abolitionists core strategy of delay. Indeed, the fundamental untenability of their position dictated that, from the earliest days of the struggle, abolition was privately admitted to be, and after a while, publicly discussed as, a “when” rather than an “if”.

Nonetheless, that it took eighteen years for abolition to register its first significant direct hit in 1807, gives us a sense of the staying power of the establishment’s belief in its cause.

A war of narratives

The full range and number of the arguments invoked against abolition are thoroughly documented and better explored elsewhere. The “happy dancing slaves” stories, despite their sinister mendacity, were rapidly sent on their way, as we have seen. Although it is worth pausing, momentarily, to consider the deeper narratives that would have made such cynical nonsense worthy of consideration at all.?

Early in the campaign, the pro-slavery campaign benefitted from widespread public ignorance of and, sadly, indifference towards the realities of slavery. Wilberforce and his supporters made important initial inroads - especially in polite society - by educating friends, acquaintances and colleagues about the systemic cruelty of the trade.?

We need to remember here that the first battle was to end the trade in slaves. To take on slavery itself before that would have meant almost certain failure. So conditions onboard the ships were a critical focus. A wider appreciation of the shocking inhumanity of conditions on board, quite understandably, garnered immediate support for the cause.

Underpinning the absurd “happy dancing slaves” stories - as well as, more broadly, a lack of concern for the overall well-being of slaves - was the all-too-familiar “otherising” narrative, representing Africans as, for example, less than human, barbarous and incapable of managing themselves.?

So we move from “look how happy they are!” to “you see, they’re not really human”. This view - and note by the way how difficult and unpleasant such narratives are when they are deliberately surfaced and discussed - aligns slaves with beasts of burden.?

We can, not without a certain relish, imagine the impact of society’s - and eventually the wider public’s - encounters with the very few freed slaves - perhaps well-dressed and articulate, but undeniably very human beings - to be found in London at the time.

The pro-slavers, inevitably, ran out of road with these and comparable dissimulations. It became obvious that the days of slave trading were numbered. The question was, how large could that number of days be made to be?

The power of class and money

We should pause here to register the influence of the aristocracy in holding back abolition. As we have noted, the tide for many cherished British institutions was increasingly turning in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. And as Wilberforce entered and re-entered the political ring to fight his cause, a deep abhorrence of any symptom of social change - no matter the moral or spiritual contradictions - unsurprisingly enabled his opponents to rely on the House of Lords to repeatedly dismiss the idea of abolition.?

The narrative of class and its unchallengeable privileges - still very much in evidence in Britain today, at the time utterly definitive of the status quo - provided its own form of suffocating resistance.

But the narratives that proved hardest to challenge from the pro-slavery camp - many of whom, increasingly over time, openly acknowledged the moral bind of the business - rested on rather more solid economic ground. While it was understandably hard to rely upon an argument for the financial hardships posed to wealthy plantation owners overseas, the threat to local businesses and workers, notably in and around British slaving ports such as Bristol and Liverpool, was repeatedly and passionately evoked.

The practical possibilities that African slaves could in the future either be freed to become paid employees, or be replaced by European workers, were easily dismissed. Here, for example, is Stephen Fuller, the London-based agent for Jamaica, who gave evidence against abolition on a remarkable fifty-three issues:

“We think it impossible with Europeans: So far as Experience can determine we find that the same Exposure to the Sun, which cheers the African, is mortal to the European; One in Ten of them would die in Three Years.

As to free Negroes: - in Jamaica no Free Negro has ever yet known to hire himself, or be employed in Agriculture upon the Sugar Plantations: The Men are averse to labour the Ground even for themselves; and whenever they do it, it is only to supply their immediate Wants: They have all the Vices of Slaves, and no Planter could controul them.” William Hague, William Wilberforce

We get, therefore, a sense of not only the surface arguments and associated trade-offs that the abolitionists were up against in the course of their long journey, but also the underlying narratives that these arguments relied on, and the corresponding, typically dark, hidden trade-offs that were, over time, to be uncomfortably excavated and exposed to the light.