Exploitation
EXPLOITATION: BLACK & WHITE: Dr Clifford Hill.
The infamous Atlantic Trade Triangle was probably the greatest act of human exploitation in the history of the world. The produce of plantation slavery was carried across to Europe providing sugar, rum, molasses, cotton and other goods required to stimulate and maintain the Industrial Revolution. Manufactured goods produced by the working poor in Britain were taken from Liverpool, Bristol and London to be sold or bartered in Africa in exchange for the human cargo held in the slave castles along the West Coast of Africa. The cruelty and inhumanity of the Middle Passage from Africa to the Americas and the Caribbean islands was notorious for its almost indescribable violence.
The infamous Atlantic Trade Triangle was probably the greatest act of human exploitation in the history of the world. The produce of plantation slavery was carried across to Europe providing sugar, rum, molasses, cotton and other goods required to stimulate and maintain the Industrial Revolution. Manufactured goods produced by the working poor in Britain were taken from Liverpool, Bristol and London to be sold or bartered in Africa in exchange for the human cargo held in the slave castles along the West Coast of Africa. The cruelty and inhumanity of the Middle Passage from Africa to the Americas and the Caribbean islands was notorious for its almost indescribable violence.
Each leg of the triangle was profitable, and provided an essential part of European capitalist expansion so that by the end of the 18th century two-thirds of the British economy was in some way linked with colonial slavery. It was an institution supported by the State – the Monarchy, the Aristocracy, the bankers, the industrialists and the politicians were all involved. It was this massive economic factor that had to be overcome by the Abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic who fought to abolish slavery.
The transatlantic slave trade lasted nearly 400 years and was responsible for over 30 million men, women and children being violently removed from the African continent to provide the human capital to finance the Industrial Revolution in Britain and other parts of Europe and America. They provided the cheap Labour essential for the rapid expansion of industry in Europe which has led historians like Eric Williams to conclude that African slavery “was economic, not racial; it had to do not with the colour of the labourer, but the cheapness of the labour.” [1]
This conclusion is borne out by what was happening in 18th and 19th century Britain as the nation changed from a rural agrarian economy to an urban industrial institution. The process was aided by revolutionary changes in agricultural production responding to the demand to feed the burgeoning urban population which triggered the enclosure of common land, denying access to peasants which had been their right for centuries. Without the ability to graze their animals the rural peasants became the urban landless labourers in the cotton mills, the factories and mines of the Industrial Revolution.
The new industrial poor were ripe for exploitation as they had no voice in Parliament and no organisation to defend them or to insist on their rights. Children as young as nine worked up to 18 hours a day in unhealthy, unsafe and cruel conditions, subject to abuse and beatings, without access to education or health services. It took over 40 years to persuade Parliament to pass the “10 hour Bill” which restricted the number of hours a child could work in one day. It is small wonder that critics such as William Cobbett compared colonial slavery favourably to the exploitation of the poor in Britain. Both black and white were powerless in the face of the mighty power of the planters and the industrialists who cared only for maximising their profits.
[1] Capitalism and Slavery, London, 1964, p19.