Conclusion
The Age of Revolutions is today strongly associated with its contributions to the end of slavery. The narratives now hold that black people seized their freedom while planters were paralysed by fear of slave insurrection.
But if this is the measure by which the Age of Revolutions should be judged, then they can only be seen as a disappointment. Slavery became entrenched in the United States, making that country less an empire of liberty than an empire of servitude before the Civil War of the 1860s. In Latin America, through the nationalist leader Simon Bolivar, a committed abolitionist, only a few blows were struck against slavery. But with the Iberian governments largely indifferent to abolitionism before the mid-nineteenth century, the two areas with the largest and most dynamic slave systems, Cuba and Brazil, remained in their respective empire and profited from the breakdown of plantation slavery in Saint-Domingue. If planters grew afraid of slaves as a result of ‘liberty talk’ and an increased likelihood of insurrection, they did not show it. Only Spanish Louisiana (destined to be incorporated into the United States) suspended the importation of slaves as a security measure during the Age of Revolutions, and then only briefly.48 Slave-trading nations imported heavily during the Age of Revolutions.The one place where the Age of Revolutions provided an important trigger for attacking slavery was, ironically, Britain, a nation that never doubted its commitment to empire and which remained largely immune to politically inspired revolutionary change. The success of the Americans in the War of American Independence convinced an influential minority of conservative evangelicals in Britain that its defeat was a sign of God’s displeasure with its imperial devotion to plantations and African chattel slavery—a commitment that was increasing rather than decreasing just as abolitionism started, beginning with the acquisition of fresh new plantation lands in the West Indies, South America, Africa and Asia during the French Revolutionary Wars.49 Britain therefore needed to reform from within.
As Christopher Brown argues, ‘anti-slavery measures promised not only to redress moral wrongs; they promised as well to assist in the rehabilitation of metropolitan authority’, including the authority of Britons over millions of dependent subjects in its expanding tropical empires.50 Abolitionist opposition to planter arrogance and assertiveness in claiming ‘rights’ over slave property encouraged the state to make moral interventions into the plantation system and to imagine an empire that was not based upon slavery. The policymakers put that vision into place in developing a new empire, in Asia and especially in the South Pacific, which was to conform to emerging imperial ideas that slavery and empire were incompatible.51Notes
1 C.A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780-1914 (Oxford, 2004), pp. 27-41.
2 Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, 2010), p. 178.
3 See Trevor Burnard, ‘Slavery and the Causes of the American Revolution in Plantation British America’, in Andrew Shankman (ed.), The World of the Revolutionary American Republic: Expansion, Conflict and the Struggle for a Continent (New York, forthcoming).
4 Kenneth Morgan, ‘Mercantilism and the British Empire, 1688-1815’, in Donald Winch and Patrick K. O’Brien (eds), The Political Economy of British Historical Experience (Oxford, 2002), pp. 165-191; Nuala Zahedieh, The Capital and the Colonies: London and the Atlantic Economy, 1660-1700 (Cambridge, 2010).
5 See Rhys Isaac, Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom (New York, 2004); and Christer Petley, ‘“Home” and “This Country”: Britishness and Creole Identity in the Letters of a Transatlantic Slaveholder’, Atlantic Studies, Vol. 6 (2009), pp. 43-61.
6 Lester D. Langley, The Americas in the Age of Revolution, 1750-1850 (New Haven, 1996).
7 Jeremy Adelman, ‘The Age of Imperial Revolutions’, Americal Historical Review, Vol. 113 (2008), p. 320. See also Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton, 2005).
8 Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson, Empire of Liberty: The Statecraft of Thomas Jefferson (New York, 1990); Dominic C.B. Lieven, Empire: The Russian Empire and its Rivals (London, 2000).
9 Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the.New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 2004).
10 Adelman, ‘Age of Imperial Revolutions’, p. 320.
11 R.R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760--1800, 2 vols (Princeton, 1959-1964); David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (eds), The Age of Revolutions in Global Context (Basingstoke, 2010), p. xxiii.
12 Bayly, Birth of the Modern World, pp. 88-89; John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400-2000 (London, 2007), p. 162.
13 EJ. Hobsbawm, ‘The Crisis of the 17th Century’, Past & Present, Vol. 6, No. 1 (January 1954), pp. 33-53; and Hobsbawm, ‘The General Crisis of the European Economy in the 17th Century’, Past and Present, Vol. 5, No. 1 (November 1954), pp. 44-65; and Geoffrey Parker, ‘Crisis and Catastrophe: The Global Crisis of the Seventeenth Century Reconsidered’, American Historical Review, Vol. 113 (2008), pp. 1,053-1,079.
14 John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, ‘The Sugar Industry in the Seventeenth Century: A New Perspective on the Barbadian “Sugar Revolution”’, in Stuart B. Schwartz (ed.), Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450-1680 (Chapel Hill, 2004), pp. 289-330.
15 Bayly, Birth of the Modern World, pp. 40-41.
16 Cited in John Rule, The Vital Century: England's Developing Economy, 1714-1815 (Harlow, 1992), p. 276.
17 Bayly, Birth of the Modern World, 93.
18 Barbara L. Solow, Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System (Cambridge, 1991), p. 1.
19 Robin Blackburn, The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights (London, 2011), p. 99.
20 T.G. Burnard, ‘“Prodigious Riches”: the Wealth of Jamaica before the American Revolution’, Economic History Review, Vol.
54 (2001), pp. 506-524; B.W. Higman, Plantation Jamaica 1750-1850: Capital and Control in a Colonial Economy (Kingston, 2005), pp. 1-6.21 Among a large literature, see David B. Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Ithaca,
1975) ; and Seymour Drescher, ‘The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation’, History and Theory, Vol. 32 (1993), pp. 311-329.
22 Cited in Michael Duffy, Soldiers, Sugar and Seapower: The British Expeditions to the West Indies and the War with Revolutionary France (Oxford, 1987), p. 6.
23 Philip D. Morgan, ‘The Caribbean Islands in Atlantic Context, circa 1500-1800’, in Felicity A. Nussbaum (ed.), The Global Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, 2003), p. 64.
24 Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment Against Empire (Princeton, 2003).
25 James G. Basker, ‘“The Next Insurrection”: Johnson, Race, and Rebellion’, The Age of Johnson, Vol. 11 (2000), pp. 43-49.
26 Blackburn, American Crucible, p. 147; Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: The Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill, 2006), p. 129.
27 Trevor Burnard, ‘Powerless Masters: The Curious Decline of Jamaican Sugar Planters in the Foundational Period of British Abolition’, Slavery & Abolition, Vol. 32, No. 2 (2011), pp. 185-198; Brown, Moral Capital, p. 153.
28 For ‘seeds of its own destruction’, see Franklin Knight, ‘The Haitian Revolution: AHR Forum: Revolution in the Americas’, American Historical Review, Vol. 105 (2000), p. 107.
29 See, for example, Jack P. Greene, ‘Liberty, Slavery and the Transformation of British Identity in the Eighteenth-Century West Indies’, Slavery & Abolition, Vol. 21 (2000), pp. 1-31.
30 B.W. Higman, A Concise History of the Caribbean (Cambridge, 2011), p. 141.
31 Burnard, ‘Slavery and the Causes of the American Revolution’.
32 David Brion Davis, ‘Looking at Slavery from Broader Perspectives’, American Historical Review, Vol. 105 (2000), p. 465.
33 Sidney Mintz, ‘Slave Life on Caribbean Sugar Plantations: Some Unanswered Questions’, in Stephan Palmie (ed.), Slave Cultures and the Culture of Slavery (Knoxville, 1995), p.
13.34 Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and his Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Chapel Hill, 2004).
35 Emilia Viotta da Costa, Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood: The Demerara Slave Rebellion of 1823 (New York, 1994); Mary Turner, Slaves and Missionaries: The Disintegration of Jamaican Slave Society, 1787-1834 (Urbana, 1982).
36 The importance of the military successes by black soldiers in the Haitian Revolution was not that they freed slaves from slavery but that they preserved the freedoms granted to ex-slaves by the Jacobin government of revolutionary France that Napoleon wanted to rescind in order to return ex-slaves to slavery. David Geggus, ‘The Haitian Revolution in Atlantic Perspective', in Philip D. Morgan and Nicholas Canny (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, 1450--1850 (Oxford, 2011), pp. 533-549.
37 Mark Graber makes a powerful argument that a long-standing bisectional consensus that issues relating to slavery could only be decided by mutual consensus was upheld in the infamous Dred Scott decision of 1857, meaning that this consensus could be overturned not by recourse to law but only by political fiat by a political party committed to anti-slavery. Such a reading shows that Abraham Lincoln and his Republican Party acted in regard to the South from an imperial, rather than a republican, perspective, using imperial authority to overcome clear constitutional principles. Mark A. Graber, Dred Scott and the Problem of Constitutional Evil (New York, 2006).
38 Brown, Moral Capital; Pitts, A Turn to Empire; Jeremy D. Popkin, You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery (New York, 2010), p. 32; PJ. Marshall, Remaking the British Atlantic: The United States and the British Empire after American Independence (New York, 2012), chap. 10.
39 Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, in R.L. Meek, D.D. Raphael and P.G. Stein (eds), The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, Vol.
V (Oxford, 1978), pp. 181-182, 187.40 Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, p. 199.
41 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Books IV-V (New York, 1999), pp. 168-169.
42 Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, p. 181.
43 Popkin, You Are All Free.
44 David Geggus, ‘The Caribbean in the Age of Revolution', p. 97; David Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Colour and National Independence in Haiti (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 57-60.
45 Robert K. Lacerte, ‘The Evolution of Land and Labor in the Haitian Revolution', The Americas, Vol. 34 (1978), pp. 449-459.
46 Sibylle Fischer, Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Durham,
2004).
47 Mimi Sheller, Democracy afier Slavery: Black Politics and Peasant Radicalism in Haiti and Jamaica (Gainesville, 2000).
48 Paul Lachance, ‘The Politics of Fear: French Louisianians and the Slave Trade', Plantation Society in the Americas, Vol. 1 (1979), pp. 162-197.
49 C.A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780-1830 (London, 1989).
50 Brown, Moral Capital, p. 312.
51 Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous Peoples in America and Australia, 1788-1836 (Cambridge, MA, 2010).
Further reading
Adelman, Jeremy, ‘The Age of Imperial Revolutions', American Historical Review, Vol. 113 (2008), pp. 319-340.
Armitage, David and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (eds), The Age of Revolutions in Global Context (Basingstoke,
2010).
Blackburn, Robin, The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights (London, 2011).
Brown, Christopher Leslie, ‘The Problems of Slavery', in Edward Gray and Jane Kamensky (eds), The Oxford History of the American Revolution (Oxford, 2012), pp. 427-446.
Dubois, Laurent, ‘Slavery in the Age of Revolution', in Gad Heuman and Trevor Burnard (eds), The Routledge History of Slavery (Routledge, 2011), pp. 220-233.
Isaac, Rhys, Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom (New York, 2004).
Marshall, PJ., Remaking the British Atlantic: The United States and the British Empire After American Independence (New York, 2012).
Nash, Gary B., The Forgotten Fifth: African-Americans in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 2006).
Palmer, R.R., The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760-1800, 2 Vols (Princeton, 1959-1964).
Popkin, Jeremy D., You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery (New York, 2010).
Spieler, Miranda, ‘France and the Atlantic World', in Peter McPhee (ed.), A Companion to the French Revolution (Oxford, 2012), pp. 57-72.