Brycchan Carey—
How can reading about the eighteenth-century abolitionist movement help environmental and social justice activists today? This is a question I kept always in mind while writing The Unnatural Trade, in which I show how naturalists visiting Africa and the Caribbean in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries amassed an archive of representations of plantation slavery and the slave trade on which the system depended. This archive was assiduously mined by antislavery activists in the late eighteenth century for evidence that the European enslavement of captive Africans was not only manifestly cruel and unjust but also a “dread perversion of nature.” Antislavery discourse was constructed from the natural histories, travelers’ tales, and agricultural manuals that made up eighteenth-century environmental literature.
This environmental reading of abolitionist literature resonates with the social and environmental challenges we face today. Although slavery has now been outlawed throughout the world, unlawful forms of exploitative labor remain widespread and common. The attitudes that perpetuate contemporary slavery are correlated with those that ignore impacts on climate, wildlife, or habitats, while exploitation of people often goes hand in hand with exploitation of the environment. Very often, modern slavery is associated with the most hazardous and destructive types of environmental damage, such as illegal logging, overfishing, unlicensed mining, and the trade in endangered wildlife. The international criminal gangs responsible for trafficking people, arms, and drugs are also clearing rainforests and exterminating endangered species.
In recent years, public opinion has forced governments and corporations in many nations to tackle illegal slavery. The Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act became law in the United States in 2000, for example, while the United Kingdom enacted the Modern Slavery Act in 2015. Other countries have adopted similar legislation. Critics say, and with good reason, that these laws are neither strong enough nor well-enough funded to protect the tens of millions of people currently trapped in forms of contemporary slavery. Nevertheless, while far from perfect, contemporary slavery legislation is making a positive difference to the lives of many.
Recent public pressure to bring in this legislation can in many ways be seen as the modern continuation of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century abolition movement. At the same time, the painfully slow progress of measures to tackle climate change and biodiversity loss continues a long history of both exploitation and protection of the natural environment. Customs and laws to protect irrigation and drinking water date back to antiquity, although the need to protect animals and create nature reserves was not widely recognized until the start of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, throughout history people have been aware of the damage that economic activity inflicts on landscapes. Nowhere was this more evident than in European colonies. As well as the incalculable human costs, forests were cleared, invasive species were introduced, and entire populations of animals were driven to extinction. Across North and South America, and throughout the Caribbean, the landscape was indelibly changed to support non-native crops such as sugar and cotton.
One seventeenth-century colonist in Barbados, Richard Ligon, witnessed the cutting down of the island’s rainforest, a process that took only a few years, to make way for sugar grown by enslaved laborers. Ligon found the process of colonization and clearance to make way for non-native species new and remarkable. It quickly spread and would have disastrous impacts on biodiversity in islands and forests around the world. Ligon was witnessing one of the first instances in history of the clearance of tropical forest to create a cash-crop monoculture farmed by exploited workers for the profit of transnational agribusiness. The business model he saw being introduced in the seventeenth century is today not only common throughout the world but is rapidly expanding into what remains of the world’s tropical forests. Ligon returned to England in the 1650s, but visitors in the following decades were appalled by the damage that had been done. In The Country-man’s instructor, published in 1684 and often reprinted, Thomas Tryon noted the spread of invasive species, which he called “a great multitude of new and unknown Vegetables, called Weeds” and he lamented the loss of the forests, declaring that “the whole Island is become a kind of a rock.” The following decade, the naturalist Hans Sloane also noted the dramatic deforestation and decline in fertility when he visited the island. “They at Barbados want Wood very much,” he later wrote in his monumental Voyage to Jamaica (1707). Barbados “has had so great a fruitfulness, though it be fallen off from what it was, through the great labouring and perpetual working of it out, so that they are now forc’d to dung extremely what before was of it self too Rank.” Both Tryon and Sloane offer powerful evidence that what historians call “the sugar-slave complex” had destroyed an irreplaceable ecosystem within just a few decades.
Accounts by visitors such as Ligon, Tryon, and Sloane offer ecologists today an invaluable resource for understanding the environmental change that has taken place over the past centuries. For eighteenth-century abolitionists they offered powerful evidence that Caribbean plantations and the system of forced labor on which they depended were unnatural. But there was a sting in the tail of antislavery discourse. Abolitionists called for the slave trade and plantation slavery to be replaced by free trade in African and American natural resources, which they understood to be the natural form of trade between nations. While arguably well-intentioned, these calls supported new forms of resource exploitation in the nineteenth century and beyond that became the business model of expanding European empires in Africa and Asia as well as the Americas. Often inadvertently, but sometimes all too enthusiastically, nineteenth-century abolitionism was increasingly used in the service of new forms of imperialism.
Today’s antislavery and environmental activists have much in common with the late eighteenth-century abolitionists from whom they are politically descended. They have identified a serious and urgent global problem, and they are pressing for political change to tackle it. Eighteenth-century abolitionists faced, and twenty-first-century environmentalists continue to face, the difficulties inherent in challenging well-resourced transnational corporations and governments reluctant to change long-established and often lucrative ways of working. Both abolitionists and environmentalists were, or are, told by opponents that the solutions they are proposing are ineffective, expensive, or address non-existent problems—despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Studying the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century abolitionist movement reminds us that the arguments made by vested interests can be successfully challenged, and that real change can be brought about through public pressure. But it also reminds us of the danger of unintended consequences. European abolitionists achieved much, but they ultimately failed to work with the communities in Africa and the Caribbean that they originally aimed to protect. Environmentalists from wealthy nations today should learn from this and guard against the impulse to impose external solutions or fund only conservation or development that meets Western cultural norms. Working together with the communities in the developing world most affected by climate change and biodiversity loss, rather than simply imposing external solutions, will be the most effective way of ensuring an equitable and sustainable future for all—not just for those in the affluent global north.
Brycchan Carey is professor of literature, culture, and history at Northumbria University in Newcastle upon Tyne. He has published numerous books and articles on the cultural history of slavery and abolition.