Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [13]
This system – opulence built on misery – could survive only by violence. Periodic rebellions proved that the spirit of resistance was not dead and the white population was greatly outnumbered by the slaves who made their way of life possible. Plantations could be very isolated from one another, each its own small tyranny, with orders enforced by the whip: the ingenious cruelty of some slave owners in devising ever more ghastly punishments was appalling. The most comprehensive account of white day-to-day plantation life comes from Thomas Thistlewood, who over thirty-nine years filled thousands of pages of diary with unreflective accounts of his doings each day. (‘On the 7th December 1761 I paid Mr John Hutt 112 for two men and 200 for one boy and three girls. The new Negroes were soon branded with my mark TT on the right shoulder.’) Thistlewood was neither a toff nor, it seems, especially badly behaved. In fact, he appears to have been less drunk less often than many of the grander estate owners. The son of a tenant farmer, he had arrived in Jamaica in April 1750 and within days had been offered a post as an overseer on one of the plantations. Unlike the slaves he supervised, Jamaica treated Thistlewood kindly and within a couple of decades this dull, brutal man had property of his own and had become a magistrate. His diaries make plain the extent to which the rape of slave women seems to have been commonplace. But what is most shocking is the malicious creativity involved in maintaining dominance. Within three months in 1756, for example, Thistlewood records that ‘[a slave named] Derby catched eating canes. Had him well flogged and pickled, then made Hector [another slave] shit in his mouth’, that he ‘rubbed Hazat with molasses and exposed him naked to the flies all day, and to the mosquitos all night’, and that he ‘flogged Punch well, and then washed and rubbed in salt pickle, lime juice and bird pepper; made Negro Joe piss in his eyes and mouth’.
The horrors of the Atlantic slave trade are now part of school history lessons, the cruelties the British inflicted on fellow human beings rightly taught as a cause of shame. The mechanics of the business, in which tribal chiefs collected captives from further and further into the interior of Africa for sale to the traders, the British creation of marshalling forts on the ‘slave coast’ between the Niger and Volta rivers, the disgusting conditions of the packed slaves on the ‘Middle Passage’ of the triangular trade and, at journey’s end, the presentation of men, women and children like beasts in a market, should all be engraved on the national conscience. It is one of the most disgraceful episodes in British history. From the distance of the twenty-first century, the baffling, troublesome anxiety about it – as about some other aspects of the imperial experience – is how it was that our own forebears could have behaved like this. It illuminates the central mystery of so much of the empire: how could British people do to others what they would not have accepted being done to themselves? In the case of slavery there are only two possible explanations. Either the business was carried out in secrecy. Or those who conducted, invested in or facilitated the trade did not consider black people to be fellow human beings. The country was either ignorant or racist.
We can dismiss the first possibility. Writers from Jane Austen to Dr Johnson showed themselves plenty aware of the injustice which made the plantations viable. The wealth generated by the business was apparent everywhere. In Bristol it was said in 1685 that there was scarcely a shopkeeper in the city who did not have a stake in trade to the Americas – ‘even the parsons talked of nothing but trade’. The entire British economy was transformed by slaving: traders needed credit to fund their voyages and insurance systems to protect their investment, which led to the rapid development of banking