In 1750, the majority of the world’s population lived in the great agrarian empires of Eurasia, spanning the globe from China to Austria but also covering large swathes of Spanish America.
A smaller number of people, notably in Africa, Australia, the North American interior and in the Pacific, lived in stateless societies. These societies were often nomadic, with economies based on exploitation of agricultural, forest and animal products.
A growing number of people, however, lived in emerging commercial societies in northwestern Europe and in their oceanic empires overseas, especially in the Atlantic World. These Atlantic overseas empires were not just harbingers of new political formations. They constituted different types of imperial entities that preconfigured the world of the nineteenth century.1 By the late seventeenth century, the most important institution in these overseas empires was slavery. Indeed, in European overseas empires slavery made empire pay and empire made slavery possible. In particular, at least before 1807 and the abolition of the British slave trade, the Atlantic slave trade made the whole enterprise work. For Britain and France, the sugar colonies and the slave trade that supported them were the engine of eighteenth-century European empires. As Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper note for Britain,The growing number of laborers devoted to cane created a demand for provisions that stimulated the food-exporting economy of New England in the late seventeenth century. Meanwhile, sugar mixed with tea from China and India began to provide a significant portion of the calories of industrial workers in England, whose products went to North America and the Caribbean, as well as to markets beyond the empire, including Africa.2
Little of this would have happened without imperial force to protect planters. Imperial power was important in creating slave labour systems as well as stopping slaves from rebelling and preventing incursions into colonies from other European powers.
There existed on the surface, therefore, little reason either for metropolitan imperial centres to do anything against planter interests or for planters to rebel against imperial authority.
The process was symbiotic: what was good for planters was generally good for empire and vice versa. Yet during the Age of Revolutions, from approximately 1760 to 1840, planters led the way in mounting attacks upon the imperial system, often in the guise of gaining more authority to do as they pleased within the slave system. Imperial officials wrongly thought that the danger of slave revolt in colonies with large populations would prevent planters from taking up arms against the mother-country.3 They also presumed that planters, as the greatest beneficiaries of an increasingly integrated world of commerce run under mercantilist and imperialist rules, would naturally support imperial ambitions.4 In addition, the natural tendency towards conservatism that planters often exhibited in their attitudes towards hierarchy, order and ideology predisposed them towards disliking revolutionary change, especially revolutionary change based around ideologies of equality, liberty and fraternity.5Imperial officials were wrong. Although planters did not initiate revolution in any of the plantation systems that experienced dramatic change during the Age of Revolutions— British North America, French Saint-Domingue, Brazil and Spanish America—a considerable proportion of planters in each of these regions became both enthusiastic supporters of revolutionary change after it began and also highly effective opponents of imperial attempts to return to traditional relationships between metropoles and colonies. As a result of their opposition to imperial control, the plantation systems of the Atlantic World were disrupted by considerable strife and were significantly transformed during the sixty years either side of the start of the nineteenth century.
This chapter explores whether that majority of planters who supported revolutionary claims in the Atlantic were sensible in making such choices and what the results of radical change were on the plantation system. Why did significant numbers of planters oppose empire, given the extent to which imperial power was crucial to the creation of slave labour systems and vital to protecting emergent and mature slave systems from attack and depredation from other European empires? What did they hope to gain from challenging imperial authority in imperial settings?
The answers tell us something about the nature of the Age of Revolutions; a great deal about planters and their role in these conflicts; and something about the reconfiguration of empires around the turn of the nineteenth century.
Historians have started to move away from an older view that saw empires as a way-station towards the emergence of a nation- state.6 Empires did not disappear during the Age of Revolutions as people rebelled against their supposed rigidity and unresponsiveness to change and replaced them with more adaptable and dynamic political institutions. The Age of Revolutions is increasingly seen less as a crisis about empire than as a series of crises within empires, and what happened during revolutionary conflict was often not the demise of empire but rather, as in Cuba and Brazil, its revitalisation.7Empire was not on the road to terminal decline in the early nineteenth century. Outside the Atlantic World, empires prospered, notably in Russia. Inside the Atlantic World, while the French and Spanish overseas empires were diminished during the Age of Revolutions, the British overseas empire recovered remarkably well from the loss of the thirteen colonies that became the United States and embarked upon its greatest period of expansion after the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. Much of this expansion occurred outside the Atlantic, in Asia and the Pacific. But some expansion happened inside the Atlantic World, especially in Africa, which experienced a bout of intensive imperialism in the late nineteenth century. In the Americas, the British combined a continued commitment to empire in Canada and the West Indies with informal empire in Latin America. The plantation world, moreover, in both the British West Indies and in the ‘empire for slavery’ of the American South, continued to expand during and after the Age of Revolutions. It is too simple to see the Atlantic revolutions as incipient signs of imperial demise, even if they represented responses to various kinds of imperial sclerosis.8
Furthermore, instead of seeing the Age of Revolutions as a reaction against empire, it is best to see it as a response to empire. If there occurred some historical progression in respect to imperial conflict in the second half of the eighteenth century, it is that, at least in the Atlantic World, the conflict between empires that dominated the first part of the eighteenth century, culminating in the Seven Years’ War, was transformed into conflict within empires.
Civil wars within separate empires took the place of wars between empires as the source of disequilibrium. The most obvious manifestation of this took place in Saint- Domingue where Napoleon’s attempts to reinstate plantation slavery were met with both tacit and active encouragement from Britain, ostensibly its great European and imperial rival, as well as from the United States.9 As Jeremy Adelman notes, ‘Revolutions were imperial in nature’. Although it is probably best to regard the American Revolution as a colonial revolt against disliked imperial masters which turned into a rejection of monarchy and finally into a reassessment of aspects of imperialism, most Atlantic revolutions generally ‘did not begin as secessionist episodes; “nations” emerged as products of tension wrought by efforts to recast the institutional frameworks of imperial sovereignty’.10 Planters played a leading role in fostering this disequilibrium.