Most of the Enlightened luminaries – from Diderot in Paris to Samuel Johnson in London – were horrified by slavery. Voltaire had a mixed record, deploring the institution, regarding Africans as cousins – ‘no one could treat their relative more horribly’ – and in his novel Candide asking, ‘At what price do we eat sugar?’ Yet he regarded Africans as having a different origin to Europeans.* Diderot and Guillaume Thomas Raynal denounced slavery in their Histoire philosophique des deux Indes and approved slave rebellion. Yet the German philosophe Kant opposed any ‘fusing of races’ and in his essay ‘On the Different Races of Man’ supported slavery, believing it reflected a hierarchy of races with the whites at the top, Asians and Africans in the middle (‘the Negro can be disciplined and cultivated, but is never genuinely civilized … he falls of his own accord into savagery’) and Native Americans ‘far below the Negro’. Kant’s racist ideology was unusual in these circles, yet Euro-American slavery required a theoretical justification for its unchristian dominance, the violence necessary to maintain it and the luxurious lifestyle and vast profits it delivered to its masters. Racialized ideas about Africans were not invented by European slave masters in the eighteenth century: medieval people were obsessed with heredity and breeding; Arab slave traders and intellectuals like Ibn Khaldun propagated racialized ideas about Africans not that different from those of European slave owners at a time when slavery was not based on racism at all since slaves were as likely to be white as black. But now, in a more scientific age, a more systematic approach was on the rise: in 1774, Edward Long, English judge and Jamaican planter, furnished a racist ideology in his History of Jamaica, suggesting that Africans were a separate ‘race of people’ who were ‘indistinguishable from the animal’, with ‘bestial manners, stupidity and vices’. This new strain of an old idea was designed to justify chattel slavery. ‘Slavery was not born of racism,’ wrote Eric Williams. ‘Racism was born of slavery.’
In London and Paris, slave-owning sugar barons now fused with the nexus of aristocrats, merchants and India nabobs: Henry Lascelles, scion of Yorkshire gentry, arrived in Barbados at twenty-two, collecting Caribbean plantations while maintaining a British life, becoming an EIC director and MP. By the time he committed suicide in 1753, he was the richest man in England, leaving half a million pounds, a fortune that funded the establishment of a classic British dynasty – the estates, mansions and earldom of Harewood.
Unlike the laws in the Americas, British common law did not recognize slavery. In 1729 slave owners petitioned the attorney-general, who backed them, giving his opinion that ‘a slave coming from the West Indies to Great Britain does not become free’. Slaves were openly advertised: ‘To be sold. A pretty little Negro boy about nine years old’ reads one in the Daily Advertiser. Yet, despite the 1729 opinion, while slavery was entirely legal on ships making the Atlantic crossing and in the colonies, its status was ambiguous in the metropolis. It was the same in France, where a slave could sue for freedom in the Admiralty court.
In both countries, there were many freed slaves and even more people of mixed race. We will look at Paris later, but there may have been 15,000 black Britons by mid-century. And there were rare exceptions to the horrors: in 1752, a slave owner, Colonel Bathurst, sold his Jamaican estates and returned with a seven-year-old slave called Francis Barber, probably his natural son, whom he freed in his will. After a short adventure in the navy, Barber became the much loved servant of Samuel Johnson, the closest British equivalent of Voltaire, rambunctious lion of the London Enlightenment, wit and lexicographer. An opponent of slavery, he educated Barber, making him a figure in literary London and, on his death, one of his heirs.*
But these were exceptional characters: most enslaved persons were not rescued by duchesses or scholars but died young on ships mid-Atlantic or on Caribbean plantations.
