The Bicentennial of William Wilberforce's bill outlawing the slave trade in 1807 is leading to many reflections on the relationship between parliamentary and extra-parliamentary action, between the actions of the white ruling class driven by changing political conditions and the self-organisation of the slaves themselves. NORMAN TRAUB explores how other revolutionary movements influenced the later and then looks at some of the challenges facing the radical left in Africa today. IT IS TWO hundred years since the British Parliament passed the bill. But because the legislation decreed that abolition should be gradual it took another fifteen years for even the trade to stop.
It was not until between 1834 and 1838 that the actual emancipation of slaves in the British West Indies to took place, leaving thousands of children, women and men in barbaric conditions.
The emancipation of the slaves is interconnected with
series of revolutions between 1776 and 1825 that remade the Atlantic world. The American, French, Haitian and SpanishAmerican revolutions each in turn radicalised the next.
While the American Declaration of Independence decreed that "all men are created equal", liberty according to the newly independent state could only be realised in specific communities organised by the law of peoples.
As slaves lacked such a community, according to the new state, the slaves and Indians were excluded from the provisions of the constitution that accorded power and honour to white slaveholders in what was essentially a white man's republic.
A few states, including Pennsylvania, agreed partial measures towards abolition in 1780. By dealing a heavy blow to the legitimacy of the British Empire and the British monarchy, the American Revolution persuaded many Britons of the need for thoroughgoing national and imperial reform. It was in the aftermath of the defeat of British rule in America that the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in Britain was founded in 1787.
The first major breach in the systems of slavery in the Americas was opened by Jacobin revolutionaries in France and the black peasantry of Saint Domingue, part of the island of Hispaniola, which was later to become the state of Haiti.
The French Revolution first ignored slavery, then accorded civic rights to coloured proprietors. Saint Dominigue in 1791 torn apart by the struggles between supporters and opponents of extending citizenship to freecoloured proprietors became the focal point for a massive slave uprising in August of that year.
The declaration by the National Convention in France in 1794, striking down slave property, was spurred to action by delegates from Saint Dominigue and occurred at a time when the radical presThe declaration by the National Convention in France in 1794, striking down slave property, was spurred to action by delegates from Saint Dominigue and occurred at a time when the radical pressure of the sansculottes on that body was at its height. sure of the sansculottes on that body was at its height.
Added to that, the pressure of the slave revolt and war culminated in the revolutionary emancipation of 1794, which denounced privilege including that of the "aristocracy of the skin" and neutralised the claims of property and of intermediary bodies such as colonial assemblies.
Laurent Dubois in Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution, Emancipation by their own hands: the slave revolt in Saint Domingue that changed history (Cambridge University Press, 2005) declared that the insurrection in Saint Dominigue was the most concrete expression of the idea that the rights proclaimed in France's 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man were universa,l and that they could not be quarantined in Europe or prevented from landing in the ports of colonies.
The slave insurrection led to the expansion of citizenship beyond racial barriers and struck a mighty blow against slavery, where it was strongest - in the plantation zone. To quote Dubois:
"If we live in a world in which democracy is meant to exclude no one, it is in no small part because of the actions of those slaves in Saint Dominique who insisted that human rights were theirs too."
The failure of all attempts to crush the new black power encouraged the abolition movements in Britain and the US and supplied an urgent reason for their governments to end the slave trade in 1807.
In 1816 Haiti's President Alexandre Petion helped Simon Bolivar mount the invasion that ultimately defeated the Spanish Empire in the Americas by giving him arms and ammunition and allowing hundreds of Haitian fighters to sail with him.
In return Bolivar promised to adopt measures to extinguish slavery in the lands he was to tree
Former slaves and free men of colour were to comprise a high proportion of the main liberation armies, usually between one third and one half.
All the Spanish American republics decreed an end to the slave trade, and by 1853 slavery had been peacefully abolished there. Having motivated rebellions against slavery in Latin America and the US in this period, the Haitian revolution would later inspire those working for an end to colonialism in Africa in the 20th century.
The slave plantations established in the New became by the end of the 18th century the motor of the Atlantic trade, eventually supplying about a third of all European imports.
The wealth created by slave labour in the plantations was a crucial element in the accumulation of capital that made the industrial revolution possible and enabled British capitalism to establish global hegemony ahead of its rivals.
The gang slave labour system, notwithstanding its many destructive and inhuman features and the integration of agriculture and industry in the plantations embodied some principles of productive rational organisation. The plantations provided super-profits to the merchants in England, which enabled them to offer credit to early industrialists and manufacturers.
A market for goods from the metropolis was created by the demands from the slaveowning colonies. Britain's colonial markets absorbed 38% of her exports in 1770.
They also supplied raw materials like cotton, which