Ross Carroll (University of Exeter)
Edmund Burke, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, and the Two Faces of Abolition
3pm, 28th January , 2022
The publication of P.J. Marshall’s Edmund Burke and the British Empire in the West Indies (2019) has reignited controversy over Edmund Burke’s relationship to the transatlantic slave trade. This debate has centred on the Sketch for a Negro Code, a list of measures for reforming the slave trade that Burke drafted in 1780. For some, the Sketch not only demonstrates Burke’s sensitivity to slave suffering but also contains a plan for both abolition of the slave trade and of plantation slavery itself. More sceptical readers have drawn the opposite conclusion, suggesting that Burke aimed at perpetuating slavery by showing how it could be rendered more humane. In this paper I argue that making sense of Burke’s Sketch requires sharply distinguishing between abolition of the slave trade, on the one hand, and abolition of plantation slavery, on the other. Doing so allows us to see more clearly how Burke vacillated in relation to the former – retreating ultimately to gradualism and reform - while remaining more resolutely sceptical of the latter. Like other statesmen with abolitionist sympathies, it was critical for Burke that the termination of the slave trade did not have to bring an end to the use of slaves on plantations. To the extent that Burke was comfortable contemplating the end of the slave trade it was because he saw the trade’s abolition as compatible with the continued centrality of slavery to the West Indian plantation economy. Along with other trade abolitionists, Burke envisaged that slave populations could be reproduced without new imports from Africa through what William Wilberforce called “breeding and rearing,” or encouraging the already enslaved to have children. It is against the backdrop of these plans for the ‘natural’ reproduction of the slave population, I argue, that we should read Burke’s proposals for incentivizing slave marriage. I conclude by showing how attending to the two faces of abolition (abolition of the slave trade and abolition of plantation slavery) can guard against the teleological assumption that one form of abolition necessarily entailed the other.