the last time he took the child up and flogged it, and let it drop out of his hands, ‘Damn you (says he) I will make you eat, or I will be death of you;’ and in three quarters of an hour after that the child died. He would not suffer any of the people that were on the quarterdeck to heave the child overboard, but he called the mother of the child to heave it overboard. She was not willing to do so, and I think he flogged her; but I am sure that he beat her in some way for refusing to throw the child overboard; at last he made her take the child up, and she took it in her hand and went to the ship’s side, holding her head on one side, because she would not see the child go out of her hand and she dropped the child overboard. She seemed to be very sorry, and cried for several hours.32
There were many instances of the slaves fighting back and rising against their captors if the opportunity arose, particularly if they were still within sight of Africa. On rare occasions such mutinies were successful, and led to the murder of the entire crew; more usually they were brutally put down and the ringleaders treated with pitiless harshness. Newton recalled seeing rebellious slaves ‘sentenced to unmerciful whippings, continued till the poor creatures have not had power to groan under their misery’, and others ‘agonising for hours, I believe for days together, under the torture of the thumbscrews’.33
Those who survived the grotesque horrors of the middle passage were by no means at the end of their torment. They still had to experience the process of being sold in the markets of Jamaica, Barbados or Rio de Janeiro. A visitor to Rio described how ‘There are Shops full of these Wretches, who are exposed there stark naked, and bought like Cattle.’34 Others were sold by ‘scramble’, with several hundred of them placed in a yard together and available at an equal price to whoever could get to them first when the gates were opened. Falconbridge noted: ‘It is scarcely possible to describe the confusion of which this mode of selling is productive,’35 and Equiano, who was himself sold by this method in Barbados, recalled that ‘the noise and clamour with which this is attended, and the eagerness visible in the countenances of the buyers serve not a little to increase the apprehensions of the terrified Africans … In this manner, without scruple, are relations and friends separated, most of them never to see one another again.’36
This was the Atlantic slave trade: brutal, mercenary and inhumane from its beginning to its end. Yet in British politics the assumption had always been that its abolition was inconceivable. Even Edmund Burke, as he thundered out his denunciations of colonial misrule in India and called for the radical reform of the British state, concluded in 1780 that a rough plan for the immediate mitigation and ultimate suppression of the trade could not succeed, as the West Indian lobby would prove too powerful in Parliament. Three years earlier, another MP, Thomas Temple Luttrell, had given voice to the received wisdom of the times when he said, ‘Some gentleman may … object to the slave trade as inhuman and impious; let us consider that, if our colonies are to be maintained and cultivated, which can only be done by African Negroes, it is surely better to supply ourselves … in British bottoms.’37 This, until the mid-178os, was the general and settled presumption. But no MP of that time could fully perceive the power of the new ideas that were beginning to take hold in many minds, or that those ideas would shortly become the inspiration of some remarkable and brilliant individuals.
Even while the slaves were being forced into ships on the African coast in record numbers in the second half of the eighteenth century, a major shift was taking place in moral and political philosophy which would open the door to the slave trade being questioned and attacked. For the eighteenth century saw the arrival of what has subsequently been termed the ‘Age of Enlightenment’: a rapid growth in human knowledge and capabilities, accompanied by new beliefs concerning the relationship of individuals to the state and to each other, coming together to create a sense of progress and modernity which in turn allowed traditional views and hierarchies to be challenged. The scientific and mathematical revolution precipitated by Sir Isaac Newton earlier in the century gave huge momentum to the development of new thinking based on rational deductions and ‘natural law’. Soon, political philosophers would be arguing for a rational new basis to the understanding of ethics, aesthetics and knowledge, setting out the concept of a free individual, denouncing the alleged superstition and tyranny of medieval times, and paving the way for modern notions of liberalism, freedom and democracy. This gathering change in philosophical outlook came alongside a quickening pace of economic and social change: the dawn of the Industrial Revolution saw the arrival of new manufacturing techniques, such as the ‘spinning jenny’, which revolutionised the production of cotton goods in Britain from the 1760s onwards, and allowed newly prosperous merchants and industrialists to compete with the aristocracy for political power; a rapid growth in population in urban settings, comprising people who were less willing than their rural predecessors to accept old notions of class and authority; a huge expansion in the availability of newspapers and pamphlets, which allowed political ideas to be communicated to a vastly greater number of people than ever before; and a maturing of imperial possessions and conquests which brought greater debate about the appropriate treatment of native peoples who had become colonial subjects.
It was changes such as these that would release intellectual movements which would underpin some of the epoch-changing events of the late eighteenth century, including the French and American Revolutions and the independence movement in Latin America; but an important offshoot of Enlightenment thinking was the belief that in a rational world, institutionalised slavery could not be defended. In his celebrated L’Esprit des lois, published in 1748, Montesquieu brilliantly summed up what would become the Enlightenment case against slavery:
Slavery in its proper sense is the establishment of a right which makes one man so much the owner of another man that he is the absolute master of his life and of his goods. It is not good by its nature; it is useful neither to the master nor to the slave: not to the slave, because he can do nothing from virtue; not to the master, because he contracts all sorts of bad habits from his slaves, because he imperceptibly grows accustomed to failing in all the moral virtues, because he grows proud, curt, harsh, angry, voluptuous, and cruel.38
It was not long before other French thinkers, whose work would be fundamental to the upheavals of the subsequent Revolution, would go further, with Rousseau arguing in 1762 in Le Contrat social that men were born with the right to be free and equal, and that ‘The words slave and right contradict each other, and are mutually exclusive.’39 It was not only the view of radical and revolutionary writers that slavery stood condemned. The Scottish philosopher Adam Ferguson argued in 1769 that ‘No one is born a slave; because everyone is born with all his original rights … no one can become a slave; because no one, from being a person, can … become a thing or subject of property.’40 He was following in the tradition of a previous professor of philosophy in Scotland, the Irishman Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), who had argued in A System of Moral Philosophy that ‘All men … have strong desires of liberty and property,’ and that ‘No damage done or crime committed can change a rational creature into a piece of goods void of all right.’41 Yet another Glaswegian professor who would subsequently add massively to the intellectual case against slavery was Adam Smith, whose words carried all the more significance because they were part of his general justification for capitalism and market economics. He argued that slavery was inefficient economically because it was an artificial constraint on individuals acting in their own self-interest, and was thus an obstruction to maximum economic efficiency. In The Wealth of Nations (1776) he argued that
the experience of all ages and nations, I believe, demonstrates that the work done by slaves, though it appears to cost only their maintenance, is in the end the dearest of any. A person who can acquire no property, can have no other interest but to eat as much, and to labour as little as possible. Whatever work he does beyond what is sufficient to purchase his own maintenance can be squeezed out of