Slavery – what a lot of fuss about nothing

Moral relativism should not guide our foreign policy

It is an occasional lament from dark places somewhere on the right of the political spectrum that we don’t teach history like what we used to. For example, black history months and all this PC stuff about slavery, when we need more kings and queens. Back in the 1960s and 70s history was my subject at school and we did the monarchs, but we hardly touched the fact that Great Britain was the second greatest slaving nation in post-Roman history (after Portugal). What we knew was that Elizabeth Fry freed the prisoners, Lord Shaftesbury freed the chimney sweeps and William Wilberforce freed the slaves.

So though I knew the date of the Act of Union, I wasn’t aware till recently that exactly 200 years ago, on May 1, 1807, the slave trade was banned in Britain. Or that, within eight years, the British Government was pursuing what the historian of the slave trade, Hugh Thomas, has described as “one of the most moral foreign policies in British history”. This partly consisted of coercing other nations, who still retained their enthusiasm for kidnapping black people and treating them as property, into desisting. These nations, Spain, France, Portugal and the US most prominent among them, were taken aback, says Thomas, by the “quasi-religious enthusiasm which had come to possess Britain”.

And resentful. After Waterloo 60,000 slaves a year were still being sent across the Atlantic, and squadrons of the British Navy, acting “often in dubious legal circumstances”, threatened the still substantial profits to be made from the trade. Throughout the 1820s, 30s and 40s, the British West Africa Squadron did its best to enforce Britain’s essentially unilateral decision that slave trafficking on the High Seas should stop. Navy captains built an illegal antislavery base on Spanish colonial soil on Fernando Po, and browbeat local African kings into allowing them to destroy slaving outposts.

To Chateaubriand this all amounted to an obsession: “It’s very singular”, the French statesman argued, that the British Government kept discussing this “remote . . . question of the abolition of the slave trade”. The great Goethe was cynical, believing that the English only did it because they wanted the blacks to stay where they were on the African coast and work for London. Brazilians saw a plot to destroy Brazilian agriculture. Some British MPs tended to agree. The cause of Spanish slavers was taken up by the Regius Professor of Civil Law at Oxford (an MP), and a Whig MP cautioned that, “it was not for us to teach Spain humanity”.

There were powerful arguments for leaving the slave trade alone. Slavery, a Cuban bishop or two would contend, could be seen as a stage in the necessary civilisation of Africans. The slaves, said some practical-minded folk, might be worse off thoughtlessly liberated than working on well-ordered plantations. Southerners and slaveholders in America were genuine in their beliefs that their way of life was threatened by outsiders telling them how to behave. Years after the American Civil War — in which 655,000 people died — leading Southerners could be found who would describe the Lincoln Emancipation as an act of “cultural genocide”.

A month ago I was invited to speak at an all-day event on “The Clash of Civilisations” organised by the eccentric half of Ken Livingstone’s personality. Its purpose, as far as I could work out, was to promote cultural relativism by suggesting that anything that looked like telling foreigners what to do was some kind of mad imperialism. So we shouldn’t seek to export democracy, because it wouldn’t work and maybe they didn’t want it anyway, and it would end in a bloodbath or profits for Western companies, whichever you thought was worse.

That this is a widely held view now, especially in the wake of the slaughter in Iraq, was emphasised by the arresting interview with the Prime Minister conducted by John Humphrys for the Today programme last Thursday.

In the first half of Thursday’s affair Humphrys was robust and deployed good quotes from important witnesses to suggest to the PM that he may have something to apologise for over Iraq. In the second part Humphrys did something that I really admired; he effectively took off the disguise of neutered interviewer and began to argue his own views. The Iraq invasion had, he asserted, come about purely because “Washington neocons were determined to get rid of Saddam, come what may”.

Tony Blair demurred. Then came this exchange. The PM referred to the “global struggle” in which “we need a policy based on democracy, on freedom and on justice . . .”

Humphrys: Our idea of democracy.

Blair: I don’t know that there is another idea of democracy.

JH: If I may say so, that’s naive . . . in the view of many people.

TB: The one basic fact about democracy, surely, is that you can get rid of your government if you don’t like them.

JH: The Iranians elected their own government, and we’re now telling them . . .

TB: Hold on John, something like 60 per cent of the candidates were excluded.

JH: They had a form of democracy, but let’s turn to . . .

Now we could see what the argument was about. Mr Blair could have pointed out that, in addition to Iran being ruled by an unelected supreme council, there is no Iranian John Humphrys. If there were, he’d be in prison or already have been sorted out by the Revolutionary Guards, and not as an accident but as an aspect of policy.

But Humphrys’s point surely was that the Iranians don’t want our kind of democracy. They might prefer one where most of the candidates can’t stand because they are too reformist. Others have argued, more extremely, that in some Islamist cultures women aren’t yearning for the right to education, or to be treated by (male) doctors. or to be anything except shut up in their father’s or husband’s houses. And what is bloody wrong with slavery anyway? Three meals a day. Basic security. The Western idea of freedom isn’t everything.

I am well aware that nothing of the above argument makes what has happened in Iraq the less appalling. Hating the occupiers I could cope with, but I didn’t remotely foresee the insanity — the bloody aimlessness — of blowing up students or day-labourers, with Allah knows what long-term objective in mind. And we in the West can take from that experience the lesson of being careful in the way we intervene, of course. But not — not — that you shouldn’t do it. Not that there shouldn’t be moral foreign policies. Not that we think that democracy, basic human rights or liberty are relative values. No John, no John, no.

Comments

[dan]

As so often I agree with you.

It is too easy to wash your hands , as either an individual or as a country and say - well its all relative, and complicated and difficult to intervene.

It does mean we should consider very carefully how we try to make a difference; but to not try to help the oppressed of other countries is an abdication of responsibility.
Anywhere that does not have democracy and freedom of expression is oppressing its citizens (or subjects), and the question for democrats should be how can we best end that oppression.

[beedlebaum]

May 1st, 1807 was exactly 200 years ago?

[Rob]

How you can write about slavery and not mention the participation of Islamic countries is a complete mystery.

[Rod Sanchez]

To discredit an argument by association is to discredit yourself. A crude parallel would be to say that because Hitler was a vegetarian and animal lover, that vegetarians and animal lovers are therefore suspect. Fair enough, its good to know who you’re going to bed with when you use certain arguments, especially when you end up the next day only to find out that they agree with David Aaronovitch (enough to end it there and then!); it forces you to look at the facts and logic of an analysis, however ugly, rather than the superficially attractive pundits (whether its Noam Chomsky or lets say, Niall Ferguson). But the association does not disprove an argument – anymore than it proves it (Cause Chomsky said it, it must be true).

The fact that some of the same arguments that have been used to support slavery are now being used to oppose what David calls a moral foreign policy (with all the qualifications and nuances he rightly acknowledges), is pause-giving, and a useful means of reigning in moralising and smugness (Mayor Ken for example), but nothing more than that. It does not discredit anti-imperialism/interventionism, nor even the anti-enlightenment view that democracy is good for us but not for them. That can only be done by analyses of real events.

If you disagree with John Humphrys’ view that democracy is a historically and culturally limited form of governance - incompatible with some people (in some vague way) then do so by looking at the facts, rather than by finger-pointing at his unbecoming bedfellows.

[John Gentle]

David, thank you. John Humphrys of the abysmal and biased BBC: I have long since switched him off and that pathetic line of questioning nicely supports my decision. Why do we get so few (no) contributions on the BBC expressing revulsion at the brutal intra-muslim (mass) assassinations in Iraq?

[Graeme Thompson]

John Humphrys would be in prison if he was Iranian? No. John Humphreys would be lead propagandist on their version of Pravda.

[Peter Joyce (Taiwan)]

You say that you could cope with hating the occupiers - presumaby the Americans and their allies. Maybe, but what makes them occupiers? Why aren't they liberators? With a different attitude from insurgents, coalition troops would have been liberators. In Iraq, there didn't have to be an extended occupation, and there didn't have to be a war.

Invasions can de defensible. I supported the Tanzanian invasion of Uganda to depose Amin, and the Vietnamese one to overthrow the Khmer Rouge. Why did Iraq have to be different? Perhaps because a dangerous minority in Iraq hates America so much that chaos is better that the success of the democratic heresy.

Calling the coalition role occupation leads us to call the bombers freedom fighters, which clearly they are not.

[Jim Miller]

Aaronovitch errs when he says that the US opposed British efforts to end the slave trade.

Here are the facts: In 1807, the US Congress banned the importation of slaves. The US navy, which was tiny then, patrolled the US coasts to enforce the ban, and later sent ships to Africa to assist Britain in suppressing the slave trade.

US ships played a minor part in Africa (not surprising considering the size of our navy then) but did capture some slave ships and did help protect Liberia.

In 1842, this British-American cooperation in suppressing the slave trade was formalized in the Webster-Ashburton treaty, in which each nation agreed to keep a force of ships off Africa.

There were, of course, Americans who disagreed with both the ban and the efforts to end the slave trade, just as there were Britons who did -- but they did not make official American policy.

Aaronovitch, and perhaps Hugh Thomas, should make a formal correction.

[LL]

Taken aback? no:

Portugal abolished slavery in its European and Indian territories in 1761...it was the first European country that did it. Slavery continued in Brazil and African ones until 1800s.