– An Act for the Abolition of Slavery throughout the British Colonies; for promoting the Industry of the manumitted Slaves; and for compensating the Persons hitherto entitled to the Services of such Slaves, 1833. 

3 & 4 Will. IV c. 73

              Abolition preserved the property established by slavery. This property is maintained in the market and the state. “The Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 encouraged a version of overseas empire based upon formal imperial institutions such as monopoly trading companies. . . . The Royal African Company was designed to be central to this system.”[1] In 1660, Charles II chartered the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa to dig for gold in the Gambia. In 1663, the company was re-chartered to include the trade of slaves and, in 1672, renamed the Royal African Company.[2] It was structured as a public-private company governed by Charles’s brother James, Duke of York.[3] Gold imported by the Royal African Company was minted into a new currency beginning in 1663. The coins were called guineas.[4] Between 1675 and 1688, the Company supplied gold for an average of 25,000 guineas per year.[5] “The Royal African Company of England shipped more enslaved African [people] to the Americas than any other single institution during the entire period of the transatlantic slave trade.”[6]

              Malachy Postlethwayt, director of the Royal African Company in the 1740s, described the importance and profitability of the slave trade in 1746:

Eric Williams describes the triangular trade as providing a “triple stimulus to British industry” through the export of British goods manufactured for the purchasing of slaves, the processing of raw materials grown by slaves, and the formation of new colonial markets for British-made goods. “By 1750 there was hardly a trading or a manufacturing town in England which was not in some way connected with the triangular or direct colonial trade.”[8] Pacotille was the name for the category of goods made for the trade of slaves, which carried nearly no value in Europe. Pacotille translates from French to English as “rubbish.”[9]

              The Royal African Company established numerous slave factories and forts along the West African coast. It competed with the Dutch West India Company, the French West India Company, the Danish West India Company, the Portuguese Cacheu and Cape Verde Company, and the Brandenburg African Company for the enslavement and export of black people.[10] The term “factory” described a structure of confinement managed by a resident English slave factor who negotiated the price of slaves.[11] The term “fort” described a fortified structure of confinement, built to protect the property it contained and the future rights to trade at the location.[12] The Royal African Company’s monopoly ended in 1698, allowing other British traders to enter the transatlantic slave trade. The Company maintained its slave factories and forts in West Africa through the 18th century, preserving this infrastructure of enslavement for the use of all British slave traders. The primary West African slave factories and forts operated by the Royal African Company in the 18th century included: Cape Coast, Anomabu, Dixcove, Succondee, Commendah, Tantumquerry, Winnebah, Accra, Whydah, James Island, Bunce Island, Appollonia, Gambia, Geregia, Gellifree, Yanamaree, Yam, Yamacunda, Cabata, Sherbro, Anashan, Egya, Shido, Prampram.[13]

              These structures were built for imprisonment. “[W]ith the rise of the slave trade, which entailed holding great numbers in custody for weeks or months till the arrival of a ship bound for America . . . special prisons were built for the men and women.”[14] The factory and the fort were part of a system that spanned the coffle, the barracoon, the ship, and the plantation. British enslavement intended for confinement to be intergenerational. A description of the slave prison inside Cape Coast Castle written in 1682 stated that “It will conveniently contain a thousand blacks. . . . The keeping of slaves thus underground is a good security to the garrison against any insurrection.”[15] Slave prisons preceded the existence of penitentiaries in Britain or its colonies. The first penitentiary in Britain was not built until 1816.[16]

              Confinement relied on enforcement. The production of “trade guns” for the Royal African Company, Hudson’s Bay Company, and private slave traders formed a substantial manufacturing interest in Birmingham and other British cities.[17] Guns were traded for slaves and used against the enslaved. Guns were used by slave traders, slave merchants operating the factories, crews operating the ships, and managers of the plantations. The extensive enforcement of slavery reflected the instability of slave-ownership. The refusal of slave-ownership always existed. Refusal existed in collectivity, escape, and the elimination of property.

              The slave patrol was legally formalized under the Barbados Slave Act of 1661, which stipulated that the entire white population was to share the responsibility for catching runaways.[18] Besides protecting against foreign invasion, the “principal duty [of the Barbadian militia] was to patrol slave gatherings to prevent revolts and incipient rebellions. . . . Whenever a slave plot was suspected [from the 1660s on], the militia was put on alert.”[19] The Barbadian code was replicated throughout the British Empire as the standard legal framework for managing enslaved people.[20]

Slave codes following this model were adopted in Georgia and Florida.[22] Similar codes were established in Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and North Carolina.[23] The slave patrol secured enslaved people as property through their criminalization. The slave patrol was distinct from existing European forms of enforcement as it was defined by its reliance on race.[24] The slave patrol preceded the existence of the police in Britain and its colonies. Professional police did not exist in Britain until 1800.[25]

              Colonization and slavery expanded the definition of property throughout the British Empire. Colonized land and enslaved labor were made interdependent.[26] In Barbados, by 1672, the enslaved were legally defined as chattel (moveable property) as well as real estate (immovable property).[27] This exceptional legal status meant that the enslaved existed both as part of the plantation’s value and as a fungible commodity. Similar laws were adopted by the Jamaican Assembly in the Jamaica Slave Act of 1684. This designation anticipated the mortgaging of slaves as part of the plantations they worked on:

The legal construction of the slave as part of the estate is implicit in the curfews stipulated by the slave codes.[29] Slaves were not meant to leave the plantation.[30] As real estate, people who were enslaved enhanced the value of the land they were legally rendered part of. The plantation’s value was determined in part by the efficacy of its confinement.

              The Bank of England was established through the Tonnage Act of 1694, which defined new import taxes on goods from Guinea, the East Indies, the West Indies, and Hudson Bay, among others.[31] These taxes were used to pay the 8% interest rate to the founding investors of the bank.[32] The centralized monetary policy of the Bank of England was formed in cooperation with the Royal Mint. In 1717, following the introduction of the guinea, Britain adopted a monetary policy based on the standard value of gold. The gold standard was made official in 1816.[33] The growing need for credit over the course of the 18th century is indicated by the number of banks formed during this time. As Williams writes, “Typical of the eighteenth century banker is the transition from tradesman to merchant and then the further progression from merchant to banker.” During this period families that had grown their wealth as slave merchants transitioned to the role of bankers, including Barclays of London, Barings of London, Heywood’s of Liverpool [now part of the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS)], and Leyland and Bullins of Liverpool [now part of HSBC].[34] Between 1750 and 1800, the number of banks in London grew from approximately 20 to 70.[35] Between 1750 and 1810, the number of country banks outside of London grew from 12 to 668.[36]

              The majority of Liverpool banks were founded by merchants.[37] Between 1739 and 1807, over twice as many slave ships sailed from Liverpool as from London and Bristol combined.[38]

Joseph Inikori indicates that until the mid-17th century, English commerce had not generated “a large enough credit market to call forth the establishment of credit institutions.”[40] Inikori cites the growth of the extra-European overseas trade as the driving force behind the formation of the credit markets that came to characterize 18th century financial practice.[41]

              These credit markets developed instruments that continue to define contemporary processes of accumulation. Mortgages operated through the collateralization of real estate and contributed to the increasing treatment of land as a transactable commodity. English colonial use of the mortgage ran contrary to the hereditary tradition of English land law. Describing its use in British North America, K-Sue Park writes:

Following its use in English colonization of North America, the mortgage became a central component of the British West Indian plantation system during the 18th century. To increase circulating capital, West Indian planters sought loans from British lenders, using their plantations as collateral.[43] Mortgage lenders included merchants such as John Gladstone, individual financiers such as the Lascelles, and banks such as Hankeys & Co. These loans were appealing to British lenders, in part, because colonial law allowed for higher interest rates.[44] Plantation mortgages became increasingly common as sugar production declined throughout the West Indies in the late 18th century. Planters could mortgage their land, their homes, and their slaves in any combination. Richard Pares writes that “[mortgages] became commoner and commoner until, by 1800, almost every large plantation debt was a mortgage debt.”[45] Plantation mortgages exemplify the ways in which the value of the enslaved, the land they were forced to labor on, and the houses they were forced to maintain were mutually constitutive. The enslaved simultaneously functioned as collateral for the debt of their masters while laboring intergenerationally under this debt.

              Black and indigenous people continuously refused the property rights of white owners across the Caribbean. This refusal manifested in every component of slavery: in suicide aboard the slave ship, in running away, in marronage, in working slowly, in abortion.[46] Rebellions against slave owners during 1760 in Jamaica, 1795–96 in Grenada, 1808 in Demerara, 1816 in Barbados, 1823 in Demerara, 1831 in Antigua, 1831–32 in Jamaica are all part of the continuous refusal. The Jamaican House of Assembly reported that the 1831–32 Baptist Rebellion incurred at least £1,154,589 of damages to plantations across the island.[47] The continuity of refusal contested the propertization of the enslaved, and limited the profitability of the plantation.

              Exhaustion-based monoculture practices degraded plantation soil, and contributed to the decreasing productivity of the West Indies. To support declining West Indian production, Parliament increased import taxes on comparable goods from other countries and colonies, forcing the British to pay more than the rest of Europe for the same raw materials.[48] The combination of the Navigation Acts and the Sugar Duties created a de facto “West Indian monopoly” on imports to the British Isles that was designed to disproportionately benefit the plantation owners.[49] The breaking of the West Indian monopoly became a primary objective for manufacturers, industrialists, and mercantilists throughout the metropole:

White abolitionists aligned with Adam Smith’s free market principles. Free marketists pursued abolition as a means of opening British markets to commodities produced by slavery outside the empire.[51]

              An Act for the Abolition of Slavery throughout the British Colonies; for promoting the Industry of the manumitted Slaves; and for compensating the Persons hitherto entitled to the Services of such Slaves was passed in 1833. A parliamentary commission for the loss of their enslaved property formed as part of the Act appraised the value of every slave held in the British West Indies.[52] It directly paid the white slave owners £20 million in compensation for the loss of their enslaved property, maintaining the validity of their property interest.[53] At least £3.76 million went to planters’ lenders, creditors, and banks.[54] Compensation funded banks as agents for slave owners, as trustees for the estates of slave owners, and as direct beneficiaries in repayment of outstanding slave mortgages: Bosanquet, Anderdon & Co. is now part of Lloyds Bank; Cocks, Biddulph and Co. is part of Barclays; Hankeys & Co. is part of RBS; Barclay, Bevan & Tritton is part of Barclays; Robarts, Curtis & Co. is part of RBS; Smith, Payne & Smiths is part of RBS; Coutts & Co. is part of RBS.[55] “Freeing the slaves and compensating their owners—whether planters or creditors—is one of the ways that colonial property could be given new life through liquidation.”[56]

              Abolition extended the systems and instruments of accumulation developed by the colonial economy of slavery, serving the British state as well as British commerce. The Slavery Abolition Act provided white abolitionists in England access to new markets—including Brazilian sugar and American cotton—the principal commodity of industrialization. The Act facilitated free trade, allowing the British to continue their engagement in the slave economy and shifting their reliance on slaves in the West Indies to slaves in America, Brazil, and elsewhere. This shift relocated the site of contestation and the material impact of resistance. The property constructed by slavery continues to accumulate within the Crown and the Treasury and under the ownership of the individuals and corporations that have inherited it. Saidiya Hartman’s description of emancipation in the United States in 1865 as a “nonevent” also describes abolition in the British Empire in 1833: