Reviewed Work: Seymour Drescher, The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor Versus Slavery in British Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 307, $31.81
Seymour Drescher’s The Mighty Experiment provides an insightful study on British abolitionism and free labor. Following suit with his previous works (Econocide and Capitalism and Anti-Slavery), he maintains that slavery was abolished in the British Empire through “mass abolitionism” (7). In this examination, however, he focuses on how social science shaped the politics of slavery from the late-eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century. He argues that the rise of the “cultural status of science” during the Enlightenment Era brought many opportunities to “bring new methods and findings to bear on the increasingly politicized discussion of slavery” (6). He identifies three main areas of social science, which influenced the political debates over slavery: political economy, demography, and racial/epidemiological science.
Drescher’s narrative arc starts with Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Smith’s study provided three important legacies for subsequent discussions over slavery and emancipation. First, Wealth of Nations was the initial scientific exploration into differences between slavery and free labor, where Smith posited that contractual labor was more efficient than coerced labor. Second, he attacked slavery as an economic institution in this work. Finally, Smith presented a “bifurcation of labor relations in the Americas”: laborers were either slaves or free workers (32).
Drescher illuminates how abolitionists did not immediately engage with Smith’s “free labor” thesis until after the abolition of the slave trade. This most likely happened because Smith’s assessment worked for northwestern Europe, but quickly fell apart when applied to the Americas—a region he mostly ignored in his writings. Instead, abolitionists focused on demography. Anti-slavery politicians and activists such as Thomas Fowell Buxton argued that the failure of African natural reproduction in the post-slave trade British Caribbean demonstrated the inhumanness of this labor system (first espoused by Malthus’ 1806 study Essay on Population). Moreover, abolitionists linked the “reproduction argument” with the “civilizing principle” (the idea of civil, cultural, and economic improvement). In other words, the “backwardness of Africans,” highlighted by their deficiencies in technology, art, education, and manners—was only aggravated by the European slave trade and slavery (84). This line of argument was the most difficult to resolve for the British “slave interest.”
By 1807, abolitionists started searching for evidence of free labor’s success in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Sierra Leon and Haiti are two examples that Drescher draws from. These experiments were not successful, or controversial at best, but abolitionists protected their “free labor ideology” by dismissing such failures as the result of the local populations not being “truly free” (104). This raises an interesting question about how the early “free labor” failures in Sierra Leon, Haiti, Trinidad, and Berbice might have influenced the argument made by reformers such as George Thompson. Did he argue for East Indian emancipation, but not independence, because he was fearful of India reverting barbarism, as was the case in Haiti (in their view)? Or did such beliefs protect his imperialistic ambitions?
Nevertheless, the abolition of African chattel slavery in the British West Indies provided the perfect opportunity for the British government to test the free labor superiority thesis. The “Might Experiment,” coined by Colonial Secretary Edward George Stanley in the House of Commons, was Britain’s attempt to prove that liberated slaves could “produce tropical staples, as abundantly, more cheaply, and more efficiently” than slaves (144). Drescher does a wonderful job of showing how decades of scientific research and analyses led up to this one experimental moment in history.
Initially, the Might Experiment appeared success. The British government abolished chattel slavery peacefully, unlike the cases of France and Spanish America. Reproduction of African populations also started increasing naturally. The standard of living for ex-slaves improved. Antigua, who forwent apprenticeship, even maintained the same rates of production in sugar. Abolitionists used this success to launch their global anti-slavery crusade. Although Drescher mentions that slavery in the British East Indies was not abolished until 1843, he surprisingly leaves out this important topic in his discussion of the 1840 General Anti-Slavery Convention.
Drescher shows that British abolitionists belief in free labor started to ebb in the 1840s, following the failure of Buxton’s Niger Expedition in 1841. Moreover, fluctuating sugar prices and the rise of racism also led to a decline in the faith for free labor. Thomas Carlyle’s essay is one example Drescher uses to prove this decline. Soon land values plummeted, creditors stopped supporting planters, and new forms of labor coercion (Indian indentured servitude) arose. The British West Indian failure, moreover, led the government to adopt indentured servitude and a “slow death of slavery” approach in its eastern colonies (235). Drescher attempts to end of high note by arguing that the British emancipation kick-started the human rights movement of the twentieth century, but the reader is left with an dreadful notion of the failures in free labor experimentation.
Drescher places political economic scientists at the heart of his study, and shows how social sciences were used for and against instituting free labor into the British West Indies. He continually reminds his readers, however, that the “true root of antislavery lay in its successful mass political mobilization around a fundamentally uneconomic proposition” (237). This assessment aligns with Drescher’s previous assessment of British abolitionism (expressed in all his works). He shows that despite political economists’ arguments against free labor (think about the Parliamentary debates over slavery during 1832-33), anti-slavery activists somehow found a way to mobilize massive public support for emancipation (more 1.3 million signatures in the last petition campaign).
While reading Drescher’s study, I could not help but think about my own dissertation idea. Could I argue that free labor experimentation in postemancipation India was Britain’s “Second Mighty Experiment?” Did the failure in the British West Indies lead anti-slavery activists to explore free labor in India? I think there is something to this.
I also contemplated how Richard Huzzey asserts that many reform groups during this period claimed to be the heirs of their anti-slavery predecessors. But if we follow Drescher’s argument, that legacy was not very positive: abolitionists failed in their Mighty Experiment, they practically bankrupted the West Indian sugar colonies, and opened the door for a new forms of “near slavery.” Men like Thomas Carlyle, moreover, attacked abolitionists for their misguided views of Africans as hard working and industrious citizens. What value did abolitionists offer reform groups in the 1840s and 1850s? Is Drescher’s assessment of their failures too critical? Or maybe the better question is how did abolitionists maintain their preeminent standing in public opinion, even after these failures?
Seymour Drescher’s The Mighty Experiment provides an important window into understanding the role of free labor in the postemancipation Empire. This is work that I will continually return to throughout my career.