In a departure form my usual bumbling digressions and the odd bit of poetry, I’m going historical. You may like it, you may not. However, it’s unlikely you will have to read too many serious posts like this, so bear with me. It’s a complex area, and I have only lightly scratched the surface, but you might find something of interest in here.
William Beckford – medallet from the Sentimental magazine
William Beckford – A Man of Contrasts
This is a medallet from the Sentimental Magazine series of famous personalities, issued between March 1773 and March 1774. Some are well known, George III and Oliver Cromwell, for instance, others less well known, such as David Garrick and John Wilkes. And some are, in modern times, totally forgotten. Beckford falls into that category.
He he is both an interesting man and a monster. A champion of political liberty in England, a supporter of the Radical John Wilkes, and at one point, a man who publicly called on George III to dismiss his councillors and return to “our happy constitution as it was established in the Glorious and Necessary Revolution”. The Common Council of London erected a statue as a tribute to him and had these words engraved on the plinth. He represented three seats in parliament and was Lord Mayor of London twice (1762 and 1769).
William Beckford – medallet from the Sentimental magazine (Reverse)
However, he was probably the richest commoner in England, inheriting a large fortune in cash, Jamaican sugar plantations and 3,000 slaves.
He neatly encapsulates the difficulty in writing history – a champion of liberty and an owner of people – and how to understand that the two things could exist in one person. We are not helped in this by the one-sided and one-dimensional view of slavery that portrays it as a racist European crime against Africans.
The triangular trade, as it was known, was a comparatively short-lived part of the slave trade. British ships took manufactured goods to Africa, traded for slaves, shipped the slaves to the Americas and brought back the goods that slave labour produced, such as sugar, tobacco and cotton.
William Beckford – medallet from the Sentimental magazine – size comparison
Slavery actually has a history dating back around 11,000 years. At the time of the triangular trade it was already well established in Africa, with up to 30% of the population in some areas being slaves owned by Africans. As recently as the 11th century there were slave markets operating in England. The slaves were white – Irish, Welsh and English prisoners of war being sold as a result of capture by Vikings and in domestic rebellions. In 1086, around 10% of the population of England were slaves. Slavery in England was ended by statue in 1102, though serfdom, which was a less repressive form of forced labour, persisted until the Black Death (1348-9) broke the feudal system. Arab slave raiders continued raiding the UK and Europe until 1830, sometimes kidnapping entire villages. The Crimean Slave Trade, which took people from as far west as Finland at times, took millions of slaves from Europe to the Ottoman Empire, where slavery was finally abolished in 1922 when the Empire was dissolved.
Labourers on British Caribbean sugar plantations included white people -10,000 prisoners of war from the Civil Wars, and around 500,000 indentured labourers. These included a number of kidnap victims, with one agent said to have kidnapped over 800 people in a year. The indentured labour system was used again after slavery ended, concentrated on Indian and Chinese labourers and lasted until the 1920s.
In more modern times, the treatment of the domestic workforce was very little better than slavery, and in the case of the children purchased from workhouses by mill owners, was almost indistinguishable. In the 1790s it is reported that a third of the workers in the cotton industry were “pauper apprentices” as the children were known. Sold as young as seven, they were condemned to 14 years within the system. A local mill that took children was Lowdham, which closed in 1803 and sold the child apprentices to a mill in Derbyshire. This story reputedly inspired Dickens to write Oliver Twist.
So, although nothing can ever make slavery acceptable, you can start to see how people of the time were able to accept it as a concept, and how complex the slave trade really was.
As a final though, here’s something I just found out today. William Beckford had one legitimate child, a novelist, rake and libertine. But he also had an illegitimate son called Richard. Richard was a man of mixed race, his mother having been a Jamaican slave. Details about Richard are scarce, but he grew up to be a merchant and landowner (probably even owning slaves). In 1780, he was elected to parliament, where he stayed for 16 years, voting several times for parliamentary reforms, amongst other things. He is probably the second British MP of mixed race to be elected to the House of Commons, the first being James Townsend, elected in 1767. Townsend had a grandmother who was half African (and who owned slaves). He was also the first man of mixed race to be Lord Mayor of London.
