Ethical Capitalism?

All economic activity is bounded by ethical considerations. The Ancient Greeks pondered the question of how prices should be determined; Aquinas endeavoured to arrive at the concept of a just price; the labour theory of value attempted to devise a means of ensuring that prices reflected the input of the worker. In small-scale societies dominated by household production, it may be feasible to set the terms of exchange by the moral rules that give the community coherence. In larger, more diffuse societies characterised by widespread international trade, it is either hard or impossible to sustain a self-regulating moral community. In these circumstances, rules that influence transactions beyond the price mechanism have usually been supplied by religion, state governments, and international organisations.

Some readers might suppose that it is anomalous to apply the word ‘ethical’ to capitalism, if the term is taken to mean moral approval. It could be argued that any system judged to be inherently exploitative, whether the slave trade or industrialisation, cannot be considered moral. A more benign view of market economies would have less difficulty using the term, though few would suppose that it could pass without qualification. Whatever position is taken, the central point is that, viewed historically, the concept of ethical economic behaviour is relative to the society concerned and has evolved with that society and its successors. This is the case with slavery, which we now find abhorrent, but had its own widely accepted justifications that continued to be advertised well into the nineteenth century. The Ancient Greeks regarded slavery as a ‘natural’ state occupied by those whose inferiority was determined by their social standing and perceived abilities. Their concept of slave status was broad enough to include members of the local community as well as war captives who had been deprived of whatever rights they once had. In the eighteenth century, before the rise of abolitionism, the Atlantic slave trade was considered to be patriotic: it strengthened the economy, increased naval power, and was endorsed by the Church of England. An emerging racial bias classed Africans as being inferior. Conversion to Christianity, by saving souls, would deliver spiritual improvement; hard work would be an improving experience.

Today, we are in the middle of an ideological revolution, initiated after World War II, which has formulated and promoted a set of human rights with universal appeal. The principles may be bypassed more than they are honoured, but they have provided, for the first time, a moral code that has global reach and increasing influence. The origins of this movement can be found in the radical and rational revisionism of the Enlightenment, which elevated individual rights and had a profound influence not only on abolitionist thinking but also on attitudes towards other practices, such as torture, that we now regard as repellent. Postmodernists misunderstood the Enlightenment by identifying it with the emergence of racial prejudice. A broader view shows that the Philosophes and their associates were reaching for a set of universal rights that included powerful arguments against the inequalities imposed by imperialism.

These general considerations underlie Bronwen Everill’s new book. Her specific concern is with the ways in which ethical justifications for the slave trade were overturned by counter arguments favouring abolition. It was a long struggle. Everill covers the crucial period from the late eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, by which time the abolitionist position had become the new orthodoxy. The story, of course, does not end there. As the century advanced, abolitionism merged with the revitalised ‘civilising mission’ to justify the assertive imperialism that led to the partition of Africa and the occupation of many other parts of the world. By the close of the century, notions of racial superiority had replaced ideas of universalism and equality and had become the principal validation of colonial rule. The Church, having swung behind the abolitionist cause, embraced the new ideology, which underpinned the revitalised mission to convert and civilise the heathen.

Everill’s contribution adds a novel dimension to the immense literature on abolition, which centres on the long-running contest between Eric Williams, his critics, and his defenders. Her book focusses on the ways in which consumers contributed to the eventual outcome by shifting from products tainted by slavery to those supplied by free labour. The transformation was far from being spontaneous. It required an immense effort by successive generations of abolitionists who wrote, lobbied, and directed practical experiments in what eventually became known as ‘legitimate’ commerce. In following this line of enquiry, Everill connects her work to the substantial research on the rise of a consumer society and the related discovery that abolitionist sentiment was not confined to a handful of notable figures but appealed more widely to the ‘common sort’, including women. This is a history ‘from below’ that adds another layer to the original story of how a few great men brought about a moral revolution. They played their part, but the revolution was the work of many hands in different continents.

Existing research on this theme tends to focus on one country, typically Britain and its imperial extensions, or the United States and its overseas connections. Everill sets out to unite and extend the existing literature with the aim of creating a trans-Atlantic history of abolition. She does so by assembling a formidable array of sources drawn from private and public archives in the United States, Britain, and West Africa and integrating them with a set of secondary materials that would satisfy even the most dedicated ultra-specialist. The key novelty, however, lies in Everill’s perspective. Instead of viewing the world from one centre, she deals with each region as a centre in its own right. Africa, for example, becomes a source of abolitionist sentiment and action instead of being treated, as is usually the case, as the recipient of influences transmitted by greater powers. In moving away from the centre-periphery model, Everill’s approach opens the prospect of identifying common causes that extend beyond the conventional limits of comparative studies. This achievement needs emphasising. It is one thing to use a region to illustrate the influence of an external power but quite another to look at that region from the inside. To do so requires a command of history that extends beyond standard one-nation studies. Bronwen Everill is one of the few historians who can move with facility between all the regions she has studied.

The problem for abolitionists and their commercial allies was how to persuade consumers and indeed governments to exchange slave-grown products for those supplied by free labour. It was an uphill task. In the early days of the abolitionist movement, advocates argued, with the confidence of those who expected their hopes to be proved right, that free labour was more efficient than the work of slaves, as well as being morally superior. The claim, however, receded when it became apparent that slave labour was more competitive than had been thought. At this point, stronger action was needed to advance the cause of morality. Consumers were exposed to a novel and sustained advertising campaign promoting free-grown products; governments were petitioned to provide economic support for experimental ventures aimed at developing new, ethical products.

Everill explores these almost limitless issues in seven neatly controlled chapters that interweave analysis and illustration. Zachary Macaulay, the Governor of Sierra Leone and an innovative businessman, provides an example of the close relationship between policy and private enterprise; George W. Taylor, a Quaker with connections in Congress, was a pioneer of the free-produce movement in the United States who also conducted business with Liberia. In the late eighteenth century, the growth of international (and imperial) trade and the concomitant expansion of a consumer society provided reformers with both the opportunity and the need to devise an alternative form of ethical commerce. By elevating consumer choice, they hoped to create opinion leaders (‘influencers’ in today’s language), who would raise the status of free products and spread moral improvement to society as a whole.

The idea seemed clear; implanting it, however, raised contentious issues. One debate took place over identifying products that could justly be labelled ethical. Should guns, a leading export to West Africa, be banned because they encouraged the slave trade or allowed because they enabled communities to defend themselves? A similar, and equally long-running, discussion arose over the role of credit, which was essential for promoting ethical commerce but could also be applied to expand slavery. These were among the many questions to which there was no satisfactory answer. As far as exports were concerned, long and independent supply chains contained a varied labour force whose status on the continuum from slave to free could not be determined easily, just as the term ‘organic’ covers a range of possibilities today. Purity escaped the reformers, not because they were ill-equipped for the task, but because the task was irredeemably complex. The alternative to the unsatisfactory compromises the reformers reached was far worse: the abandonment of reform. Such uncertainties became more evident after the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833, when unfree labour was replaced by indentured labour and apprenticeships. Paradoxically, abolition allowed other forms of exploitation to thrive.

As it became clear that ethical trade would not succeed unaided, despite the use of boycotts and petitions to advertise and condemn slave-grown products, the question arose as to what form government intervention ought to take in a world of mercantilist regulations but also rising free-trade sentiment. Some businesses that were experimenting with free-grown products sought tariff protection or subsidies; others wanted to abolish tariffs that protected slave-grown exports. Britain’s adoption of free trade in 1846 boosted free-grown exports, but often needed political and military intervention to protect them. Tariff protection in the United States, coupled with the abolition of slavery in 1863, had the effect of encouraging the expansion of free household labour in the Midwest. Different approaches had similar consequences: the growth of small-scale household labour. In both cases, too, the abolitionist cause required forceful support. In the United States it led to the unification of North and South but also to the perpetuation of discrimination and inequality. In West Africa, it led to colonial rule, the subordination of the free, and the extension into the twentieth century of various forms of domestic slavery.

Once formal abolition had been achieved, political and economic imperatives diluted the claims of purity. At the same time, a new concept, ‘wage slavery’, came into use to describe the conditions experienced by many free-born Britons who worked in the factories of Victorian England. Politicians approached the problem through legislation designed to ameliorate the worst excesses of unregulated capitalism. In a well-judged Epilogue, Everill draws attention to the voluntary codes of practice adopted by William Lever and the Cadburys, who established model villages for their workers. In these instances, the reforming spirit of the abolitionists was applied at home in schemes of improvement that gave capitalism an appealing face and suggested a way of transforming a sense of alienation into a moral community.

Everill’s treatment of West Africa is one of the most interesting contributions made by her book. She shows not only that the Atlantic slave trade created a series of militarised coastal states that were fully part of the consumer revolution, but also that their expanding power challenged Muslim states in the interior. These states had their own dynamic driven by the Muslim revival that began in the late eighteenth century. This movement, which was led by a consortium of itinerant missionaries and armed representatives of Islam, carried the Word into the southern forest zone and towards the coast of Senegal. The aim was to bring order to regions unsettled by insecurity, and discipline to their inhabitants by installing rules that would curb excess and provide a guide to appropriate behaviour. These states opposed the sale of Muslims into slavery and objected to imports such as alcohol, which transgressed the approved code of conduct. These policies can be seen as defining an ethical market, one that conformed to the principles laid down in the Koran. To this extent, a parallel can be drawn with the Evangelical revival in Britain, which aimed to return to assumed fundamentals by purifying both individuals and institutions.

The comparison is striking and certainly makes a case for relating developments in tropical Africa to the Age of Revolutions, which traditionally has been confined to Europe and North America. There are limits, however, to the extent of the similarities. The Muslim states were not opposed to all forms of slavery. Indeed, their advance was accompanied by the expansion of internal slaving and the use of non-Muslim slaves in the local economy. It could also be said that these states were not modernising in the conventional sense. Admittedly, the Caliphate of Sokoto, the largest Muslim state in West Africa, established large plantations worked by slave labour and supported a thriving market economy. The Caliphate, however, was not adjusting to the early stages of a domestic industrial revolution and its consequences: increasing urbanisation, an expanding wage-earning class, and growing claims for a reformed franchise. Nor did it produce idealistic nationalists who could be compared to Byron, Mazzini, and William Lloyd Garrison. These qualifications lose their force if it is held that abolition and the wider reform movements associated with it bore little or no relation to the economic and political changes that were taking place in Britain and the Northern states of the United States. This thought, in turn, takes us back to the origins of the controversy over abolition and the original contest between idealism and materialism.

Everill does not engage directly with the debate started by Eric Williams over the relationship between the growth of industrial capitalism and the movement to abolish slavery. This is probably wise. She has enough to do covering three regions and more than half a century. Moreover, the literature on abolition is now so complex that an adequate assessment would require considerable space. A reviewer, however, is free from the constraints imposed on an author and can speculate without being held to account.

Everill’s main theme, which combines moral and material considerations, fits at least one interpretation of the consequences of the great revolutions of the late eighteenth century. By 1815, war had caused devastation and created insecurity and political instability. The formula needed to establish order in greatly changed circumstances was contested by three groups: conservatives, liberals and  – a new term – radicals. In continental Europe, the struggle between monarchists seeking to restore the pre-revolutionary world and radical republicans who wanted to install constitutional government and a broad franchise was punctuated by a series of revolutions that ran on through the nineteenth century. By 1914, few of the old military-fiscal states remained; the survivors were destroyed in the Great War. In the United States, the unexpected emergence of cotton as a major export reinforced slavery in the Southern States and handed political power to the landed interest there. The balance of interest between the regions, however, was a compromise that became increasingly unstable, partly as a result of the development of manufacturing in the north, but more so following increased immigration, which led to the colonisation of land by free households. The outcome was the Civil War, which destroyed the power exercised by the planters at the federal level and emancipated slaves, though without making their freedom effective.

Each solution had its justificatory ideology. The reforming element was present in all parties seeking some form of change. It is important to note, however, that the original meaning of reform was ‘renew’. Some abolitionists considered the term inappropriate and preferred to cast their programme as being one of ‘improvement.’ ‘Reform’, however, gained support after 1815 among those alarmed by the growth of radical and revolutionary doctrines. It became the cause of moderates who sought a middle way between absolutist military-fiscal states and the revolutionary ardour that would destroy established institutions.

The British case illustrates the purpose of reform particularly clearly. Initially, the focus on slavery directed attention abroad to a seemingly well-defined evil that did not present a fundamental challenge to British institutions. After 1815, the expansion of industry and the rise of political radicalism compelled reformers to redefine their programme to avert the possibility of wholesale change to the franchise and a challenge existing property rights. The outcome, along with the continuing campaign to abolish the institution of slavery, was a series of moderate reforms that averted any threat of revolution. Reformers ended the patronage system known as ‘Old Corruption’, achieved a modest, controlled extension of the franchise, and initiated a series of legislative changes to ameliorate conditions of work. The limits to reform were apparent in the teachings associated with the evangelical revival, which sanctified legitimate economic activities associated with the ‘gospel of free trade’ but, like the clerics in Sokoto, frowned on frivolity and excess. Established religion confirmed its place as a bulwark of order. Numerous churches were built throughout the country in pseudo-medieval style to accentuate the sanctity of traditional institutions. Britain became an actively religious society policed by Victorian values.

The upshot was that the monarchy was preserved, the landed order survived, and radicalism held at bay. When slavery was abolished in the British Empire, the slave-owners, not the slaves, received compensation. Given the aims of the moderates, and the turbulent experience of continental Europe and the United States, the outcome was an undoubted success for the cause of evolutionary change.

These reflections are prompted by Everill’s thoroughly researched and stimulating book, which deserves a prominent place in the literature on abolition. Today, when we read of continuing instances of slavery, of wage-slaves in distant sweatshops, and the difficulties of ensuring that the products of fair trade really are fair, we can appreciate both the origins of the movement for ethical trade and the problems the reformers faced. World conditions have changed, but as Everill reminds us, the moral dilemmas attached to commerce are seemingly eternal.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).