Introduction
Edmund Burke was well aware that he was living through a time when Britain’s empire was both undergoing great expansion and becoming increasingly diverse. Members of the British House of Commons were now, he told the electors of Bristol in 1774, ‘Members for that great Nation, which however is but part of a great Empire, extended by our Virtue and our Fortune to the farthest limits of the East and of the West’.1 Modern Burke scholarship amply recognizes his preoccupation with empire. Richard Bourke called his magnum opus of 2015 Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke.2 Of the seventeen essays in the recent Cambridge Companion to Edmund Burke, four explicitly focus on empire.3 The increasing concern of literary scholars and historians of political thought with imperial themes has produced a spate of recent studies in which Burke features prominently in discussions of such topics as whether there was an imperialist or an anti-imperialist agenda to the Enlightenment. Much has been written on Burke and Ireland, on Burke and the North American colonies, and on Burke and India. The West Indies have, however, generally received little attention in Burke studies. I too must plead guilty: the West Indies only feature in a perfunctory way in my attempts to survey Burke’s view of empire.4
To neglect the West Indies is, however, to neglect what contemporaries generally conceived to be the most important of all Britain’s imperial possessions. Sugar produced in the so-called Sugar Islands was in the later eighteenth century the most valuable British import. Before the growth of imports from Brazil and later from the southern United States, the West Indies were a crucial source of raw cotton for the British textile industry. Beyond their direct trade with the British Isles, the West Indies had a dominant position in the Atlantic trading system that served Britain so well. Payment for the huge consumption of British manufactured goods in North America depended to a considerable degree on the earnings that the mainland colonies gained from selling their foodstuffs and timber in the West Indies. A great volume of British exports to Spanish America passed through the British Caribbean. The West Indian demand for slave labour created lucrative opportunities for British African merchants and it fuelled the export of British manufactured goods and Indian cloth to West Africa. Many in Britain, most
1 Speech at the Conclusion of the Poll, 3 November 1774, Writings and Speeches, iii, p. 70.
2 Princeton, NJ, 2015. 3 D. Dwan and C. J. Insole, eds, Cambridge, 2012.
4 e.g., ‘Burke and Empire’, S. Taylor, R. Connors, C. Jones, eds, Hanoverian Britain and Empire, Woodbridge, 1998, pp. 288–98.
Edmund Burke and the British Empire in the West Indies
obviously absentee planters and mercantile interests in the City of London and in Bristol and Liverpool, were enriched, often on a conspicuous scale, by the West Indian trades. Wealth generated by the West Indies was relatively accessible to the British state through taxation and borrowing. Duties on imported sugar, an important element in Treasury budgets, rose steeply during the period, while rich West Indians in Britain were heavy investors in government stocks. In recognition of their perceived importance, priority was accorded to the West Indies in the deployment of national resources during the wars of the later eighteenth century. Once the French threatened the British West Indies, the defence of the islands became a more important objective in the American War than further attempts to subjugate the Thirteen Colonies. For most of the French Revolutionary War, greater resources were committed to the West Indies than to continental Europe. British governments regarded West Indian wealth as crucial to Britain’s capacity to hold its own, in spite of its limited territorial base, with the great powers of Europe. This book will show that Edmund Burke fully endorsed that view for nearly all of his active political life.
There are indications that the recent increasing interest being given to Burke’s views on slavery and the slave trade, which will be discussed below, is doing something to remedy lack of attention to his concerns with the West Indies. Slavery is of course fundamental to the history of the eighteenth-century West Indies (Map 0.1). The large-scale production of sugar, the main source of the islands’ wealth that made them the centrepiece of empire, and the production of other tropical staples, such as coffee and cotton, depended on the ready availability and on the ruthless exploitation of a labour force of some half a million enslaved Africans and their constant replenishment by new imports. Burke’s wrestling with the problems of slavery and the slave trade will therefore be central to this book. But, for what seem to be good reasons, this is intended to be a book about Burke and the British Empire in the West Indies in a wide sense, rather than being a book exclusively about Burke and slavery.
In the first place, it is a central proposition of the book that Burke’s views on what could be done practically, as opposed to what morally ought be done, about slavery and the trade in slaves cannot be understood outside the context of his sense of the role of the West Indies in the British Atlantic empire, which he saw as underpinning Britain’s national wealth and power. Secondly, Burke’s ideas about how the British Empire should be managed are incomplete without some consideration of what he thought about the West Indian component of that empire. The West Indies raised acute problems about the extent to which the imperial economy could continue to be ordered within the long established system of trade regulation embodied in the Navigation Acts. Here Burke was a reformer. He was closely involved in the passing in 1766 of the Free Ports Act that legalized some trade between the British and foreign colonies around the Caribbean,5 and he strongly supported the attempts made by British merchants to maintain their West Indian trade through neutral
5 See Ch. 4 in this volume.
Map 0.1. The West Indies in the Eighteenth Century.
New Granada Cartagena
Porto Bello
Mosqulto Shore
Antigua
Martinlque
Barbados
Tobago
Curacao
Caracas
Grenada
Edmund Burke and the British Empire in the West Indies channels during the American War.6 During Burke’s political career, established modes of governance within the empire were also coming under pressure as representative bodies in both North America and the West Indies demonstrated their capacity to regulate their societies in practical terms as well as asserting their right to do so, if need be in defiance of imperial authority. On the basis of a close study of Jamaica, a recent study concludes that ‘Politics in the West Indies had reached much the same state of maturity as in North America.’7 Burke, however, seems to have had little regard for the claims of the West Indian white communities to the constitutional rights that he so readily conceded to the North Americans. He supported the efforts of his brother Richard to enforce the crown’s right to revenues in Grenada that did not depend on the assent of the colonial assembly,8 he opposed the Jamaican assembly’s assertion of its capacity to lay duties on slave imports,9 and, perhaps most significantly, he insisted that the colonial legislatures must submit to reforms of their slave laws imposed on them by the authority of the British Parliament.10 Problems of imperial governance, in which Burke took a keen interest, were also being raised by the incorporation of new peoples into the British Empire by conquests made in the Seven Years War, notably in the East India Company’s Indian provinces and in formerly French Canada. Although Burke seems not to have been much concerned with them, the British Empire also acquired new French subjects in the West Indian islands of Grenada, Dominica and St Vincent. He did, however, pay very close attention to the situation of other peoples brought under British rule in the Caribbean, the so-called Caribs of St Vincent, showing a more positive concern for their situation than he seems to have shown towards the Native peoples of North America who came under British authority after 1763.11 Finally, if it is indeed the case that the neglect of the West Indies in assessments of Burke’s views of empire is characteristic of the limited attention given to the Caribbean by comparison with North America or India in the historiography of the eighteenth-century British Empire as a whole, an attempt to show the depth of one leading politician’s involvement with the islands may be a small step towards remedying that imbalance.
Burke had high ideals of the potential of what that empire, now extending ‘to the farthest limits of the East and of the West’, might become, under judicious supervision from Britain itself. Empire could legitimately bestow great benefits on Britain, but it also entailed high responsibilities. What was at stake in the governance of the British Empire was certainly the profit and power of the mother country, but also ‘the Honour of the Crown of these Kingdoms, and the Character of the British Nation’.12 The British empire should, in Burke’s view, emulate the ideals of
6 See Ch. 5 in this volume.
7 A. Graham, ‘Jamaican Legislation and the Transatlantic Constitution, 1664–1839’, Historical Journal, lxi, 2018, p. 329.
8 See pp. 56–8 in this volume.
10 See pp. 192–3 in this volume.
9 See pp. 160–1 in this volume.
11 See Ch. 3 in this volume. For Burke and the Native peoples of North America, see his speeches and petitions on the ‘use of Indians’ in the American War, Writings and Speeches, iii, pp. 179–81, 281–2, 354–67.
12 Articles of Charge against Warren Hastings, ibid., vi, pp. 133–4.
the empire of the Roman Republic as expounded by Cicero. It should be an order of just rule, taking different forms shaped by the individual needs of its diverse peoples. The constituent members of the empire should retain their traditions and customs, and preserve their immunities and privileges, subject to the sympathetic supervision of the British Parliament.
Burke was, however, all too conscious of the vulnerability of imperial systems to corruption and oppression, 13 and that the recent management of much of the British Empire had fallen far below his ideals for it. He was bitterly critical of the failures of British rule, notably in Ireland, in the North American colonies, and in India. His indictment of these failures in his published letters on Ireland and his speeches on America and India can properly be characterized as ‘a defense of a universal justice against the abuse of power by the governors of empire’.14 In a climate of opinion that is generally unsympathetic to European imperial projects, most recent interpretations of Burke and the British Empire tend to focus on his critique of imperial misrule, rather than on his ideals for a just order spanning the world, or, still less, on his close personal involvement in the detailed practical working of the empire, such as that which will be described in this book. Study of Burke as a critic of imperial abuses needs, however, to be balanced by study of Burke’s vision of the possibilities of empire and of his engagement with the business of running the empire as it was in order to achieve a full understanding of his complex views about the British Empire of his time.
Words like ‘imperialism’ or ‘colonialism’ did not of course feature in eighteenthcentury vocabularies, but, on the assumption that the imperial practices of the European powers can realistically be described in these terms,15 there is a lively scholarly debate as to whether Burke condoned or condemned them. Most commentators interpret him as an enemy of imperialism or colonialism, but to at least one, ‘he prefigured the two basic theoretical rationales for British imperialism in its heyday’.16 Be that as it may, one way or the other, what is not open to debate is that, while Burke was a fierce critic of imperial abuses, he was by no means hostile to a British Empire based, as he envisaged it, on the principle of just rule of its diverse peoples. He was indeed ‘a critic not of either empire or of colonial settlement but of the exercise of forms of power that disregarded the welfare of subjects’.17
A well-governed empire could, Burke believed, be an entirely legitimate source of profit to Britain and to individual British people involved in it. As this book will show, he regarded the British Caribbean colonies in this light. At the end of the Seven Years War he joined in campaigns to expand Britain’s West Indian holdings as a most valuable addition to the nation’s resources. He fully supported his brother,
13 J. Pitts, ‘Burke and the Ends of Empire’, Dwan and Insole, eds, Edmund Burke, pp. 145–55.
14 D. Bromwich, The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke from the Sublime and the Beautiful to American Independence, Cambridge, MA, 2014, p. 415.
15 For discussion of this, see D. Armitage, ‘John Locke: Theorist of Empire?’, S. Muthu, ed., Empire and Modern Political Thought, Cambridge, 2012, pp. 84–111.
16 D. O’Neill, Edmund Burke and the Conservative Logic of Empire, Oakland, CA, 2016, p. 1.
17 Bourke, Empire and Revolution, p. 642.
Edmund Burke and the British Empire in the West Indies
Richard Burke, and his closest friend, William Burke, in their unsuccessful quests for fortunes there. Once he himself was established as a politician, Burke immersed himself in the problems of managing a great imperial asset for Britain’s benefit. In 1766 he had an important role in enacting significant reforms of the regulations governing West Indian trade. Out of office from 1766 to 1782, he continued to take a close interest in the affairs of the islands and to champion their calls for protection during the American War. Although he denounced the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland and feared the influence of returned Indian nabobs, he evidently considered West Indian wealth to be relatively untainted; he spent much time and effort in cultivating the formidable West Indian lobby in Britain. He castigated the excesses that he believed had been committed, against British West Indian interests among others, following Admiral Rodney’s capture of the Dutch island of St Eustatius in 1781.18 In general, however, in his dealings with the West Indies, Burke was an upholder of empire as he found it and a would-be manager of imperial assets rather than a critic of imperial abuses.
Little that Burke said or wrote about the West Indies has reached the accepted canon of his published oeuvre. There is an interesting but relatively brief section on the British West Indies in An Account of the European Settlements in America of 1757, attributable to Edmund and William Burke.19 The Sketch of a Negro Code, to which a chapter in this book will be devoted,20 is the only item of obvious West Indian relevance to be included in the first edition of Burke’s Works that appeared between 1792 and 1827, or in subsequent editions. By comparison with his writings and speeches on America, India, or Ireland, there is not much material with high intellectual content in what he wrote or is recorded as having said about the West Indies. Burke’s involvement with them has therefore of necessity to be traced, not by the analysis of major texts, but by trying to reconstruct his activities through his personal correspondence and the records of British administrative bodies or those in the islands with which he was concerned.
On West Indian matters, Burke generally acted as what contemporaries called a ‘man of business’.21 He performed this role primarily for his party—the Rockingham connection, but also for his constituents in the port of Bristol, which he represented in Parliament from 1774 to 1780, and as agent for the colony of New York from 1771 to 1775. A man of business had to acquire a mastery of specialized knowledge on administrative and political matters. He lobbied government departments, drafted petitions and material for the press, and negotiated with interest groups, rather than delivering great set-piece speeches in the House of Commons. On imperial and other issues, Burke, however, quickly showed that he could combine the role both of an adept man of business and that of a much admired speaker and formidable debater in the Commons. In his speeches for the Rockinghams, he tried to fasten what he considered to be the abuses of
18 See pp. 146–54 in this volume.
20 See Ch. 7 in this volume.
19 See pp. 18–24 in this volume.
21 Th is term was specifically applied to men of administrative capacity, comparable to that of government officials, such as under-secretaries, who served political connections out of office (L. Namier, England in the Age of the American Revolution, 2nd edn, London, 1961, p. 5).
empire on the turpitude of the ministers he held responsible for them, but as a man of business seeking to make the imperial system work for his clients, he operated within the system and across political divides. In taking up the role of agent for the colony of New York, Burke explained that, ‘knowing something of the Temper, the disposition and the Politicks of the people here’ in office, he would use such knowledge to negotiate with them on behalf of the colony.22 He adopted a similar attitude in seeking to promote the interests of his Bristol constituents. Good relations, the leading scholar of his role in Bristol has explained, had ‘to be maintained with Whitehall. Burke rather prided himself on his influence in that quarter.’23 He carefully kept lines open in private to men like Lord North and Henry Dundas, whom on many occasions he publicly excoriated for their mismanagement of America or India.
Assessing the work of a man of business concerned with the empire inevitably involves close study both of the minutiae of day-to-day political dealing and of the routine business of colonial administration. While Burke scholars fully accept that his political thought has to be drawn out from the practical contexts in which he wrote or spoke, this sort of activity, now largely associated with a past generation of historians of the eighteenth century, has few current devotees. The works of historians, notably of Sir Lewis Namier, on whom we still largely depend for our understanding of the world of mundane practical politics in which Burke acted, are now not much in fashion. Furthermore, the writings of Namier and some scholars associated with him have come to be thought of, not entirely without justification in some cases, as having been actually hostile to a proper appreciation of Burke. They are alleged to have ignored or belittled the intellectual content of what Burke said or wrote by their obsession with the mechanics of politics rather than with political ideas.24 Expressions of Burke’s towering intellect rather than accounts of his mundane political manoeuvrings now very properly dominate modern scholarship concerned with him. Even so, some acquaintance with the arcana of the ‘structure of politics’ and of colonial administrative history still has its uses in trying to attain a rounded understanding of Burke’s political career.
To see Burke as a practical politician and man of business in no way belittles him or diminishes his importance in the history of political thought. Only by making himself useful for potential patrons could an intellectual without means or social standing have a chance of establishing himself in public life, and thus, as Burke undoubtedly wished to do, of being able to inject moral concerns into political debate. The role of a man of business was a clearly recognized and respected one. Burke took an evident pride in the expertise with which he filled that role as well
22 Letter to J. De Lancey, 9 June 1771, Corr. ii, p. 215.
23 P. T. Underdown, ‘Edmund Burke, the Commissary of his Bristol Constituents’, English Historical Review, lxxiii, 1958, p. 269.
24 The case for the prosecution in Conor Cruise O’Brien’s Introduction to The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography and Commented Anthology of Edmund Burke, London, 1991, is a tirade worthy of Burke’s broadsides against the Jacobins or Warren Hastings. O’Brien took entirely justifiable exception to Namier’s assertion that Burke worked at the bidding of ‘the men whose livery he happened to have taken’ (p. xlvi).
Edmund Burke and the British Empire in the West Indies as in the reputation he quickly won for himself as a debater. ‘I value myself upon nothing but my industry—to know the details and the principles to govern those details’, Burke told the Commons in 1773.25 In 1782 he was reported to have said that ‘he believed that every man that knew him, would say, that he was fond of business’.26 ‘It would ill become me’, he told the aristocratic critics of the award of a pension to him at the end of his life, for him ‘to deprecate the value of a long life, with unexampled toil spent in the service of my country’, such as he had lived. His pampered critics could ‘hardly know any thing of publick industry in it’s exertions’ as he did.27
Through his assiduity, an accomplished man of business might also achieve what contemporaries regarded as the ‘legitimate ambition’ of both winning ‘a comfortable fortune in the public service’ for himself, and establishing ‘those dependent on him in situations of profit’.28 Burke made no secret that he aimed to establish himself as a minor Buckinghamshire landowner and to provide for his family. His sense of family obligation was intense, extending, as this book will show, not only to his brother, but to men whose degree of kinship to him is uncertain, William Burke and John Bourke.29 As he freely admitted during his brief period in office as Paymaster General in 1782,
Ever since he had held his office, he had been examining how, and in what manner the publick might be best advantaged. At the same time, he begged leave to say, that he made no pretensions to extraordinary disinterestedness, or meant not to reap the fair emoluments of his situation. Not to do that, would violate the first law of God and Nature, by abandoning the interest of his family for no purpose whatsoever.30
A rapidly expanding empire was opening up new opportunities for profitable public employment. Edmund Burke hoped to become London agent for the new Ceded Islands of the West Indies. He later became New York’s agent, and he was offered but declined a lucrative appointment in Bengal. His brother, Richard, and his closest friend, William Burke, tried, with Edmund’s full support, to exploit advantageous posts in the new colonies of the West Indies. Edmund later provided for William by securing for him the appointment of paymaster in India. Later sensitivities have long been uneasy at what seemed to be profiteering from public office in the eighteenth century. Such unease is now compounded if the profits were being sought in what is increasingly coming to be regarded as a morally suspect empire. To most contemporaries, however, there was nothing discreditable about individuals enjoying what Burke called ‘the fair emoluments’ of public office, either at home or overseas, where rewards were naturally expected to be higher to compensate for hazards to health and the hardships of separation from
25 Cited in Introduction, Writings and Speeches, v, p. 1.
26 Speech of 9 July 1782, ibid., iv, p. 154.
27 Letter to a Noble Lord, ibid., ix, pp. 148, 150.
28 L. S. Sutherland, The East India Company in Eighteenth-Century Politics, Oxford, 1952, p. 51. Pages 50–4 of this book are still the most illuminating account of the interplay of private interest and duty to the public in this period, as well as of contemporary views on the margins between propriety and impropriety in the pursuit of private gain by men holding public stations.
29 For whom, see p. 169 in this volume.
30 Speech of 12 June 1782, Writings and Speeches, iv, p. 145.
family and friends, provided that they observed what is in retrospect not always an easily discernible ‘conventional balance between private and public interests’.31 In his programme for economical reform, Burke tried to curb the prodigal misuse of public funds, above all of expenditure whose aim was political corruption, but he insisted that there must still be ‘means of rewarding public service’ which went beyond ‘the daily wages it receives during the pleasure of the crown’. The ‘reward of public service’ could legitimately, he argued, be ‘the origin of families’.32 ‘No persons were more deserving of rewards than labourers for the public.’33 He applied the same principles to office in the colonies. He exposed much extravagance and corruption, as well as oppressive conduct, in the East India Company’s service, but did not doubt that men could return from India ‘Rich and innocent’.34 Adam Smith, who uncompromisingly denounced the abuses of empire, seems to have thought much the same. He evidently did not think that the distribution of imperial patronage was a matter unworthy of his attention.35
Even if West Indian matters, at least until the debates on the abolition of the slave trade, provided few opportunities for high oratory, important issues were at stake. Regulating the trade and governance of the islands was managing a great national asset. The American conflict, and the inability of the North government, until Rodney’s last throw in 1782, adequately to defend the islands in the American War, inflicted very serious damage on the British West Indies. Burke and his political colleagues railed against the government on behalf of the islands with good cause. The British West Indies and with them Britain’s capacity to contain Revolutionary France again seemed to be at risk in the 1790s. To present-day opinion and, at least by the 1780s, to that of many contemporaries, the eighteenthcentury British Caribbean was above all characterized by slavery. Large populations of enslaved Africans lived on the islands, their numbers being constantly augmented by fresh imports from West Africa, in order to counter an appalling rate of mortality and to meet the needs of expanding cultivation. Some 240,000 were disembarked in the British Caribbean from 1766 to 1775.36 Was this an unavoidable price for the indispensable wealth that flowed from the Caribbean to Britain, or were slavery and the slave trade such unconscionable evils that they must be brought to an end, whatever the cost? Was compromise possible? Might reforms be devised that would maintain the prosperity of the islands, while significantly improving the lot of those who laboured on them and mitigating the horrors of transporting new slaves? Burke wrestled with these alternatives over many years.
31 Sutherland, East India Company, p. 53.
32 Speech on Economical Reform, 11 February 1780, Writings and Speeches, iii, pp. 527–8.
33 Speech of 8 April 1794, ibid., iv, p. 604.
34 Letter to M. Palmer, 19 January 1786, Corr. v, pp. 256–7.
35 E. Rothschild, The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century History, Princeton, NJ, 2011, pp. 215–16. ‘[T]he East and West Indies were at the edge of the horizon, or the field of vision, of the Scottish philosophes’, ibid., p. 215.
36 See table in D. Richardson, ‘The British Empire and the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1660–1807’, in P. J. Marshall, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. ii, The Eighteenth Century, Oxford, 1998, p. 456.
Edmund Burke and the British Empire in the West Indies
Burke’s views on West Indian slavery and the slave trade are an issue that has begun to attract increasing scholarly attention. Although Burke was pilloried in the press for all sorts of reasons throughout his public life, his attitude to the slave trade and slavery was not one of them. The common view then appears to have been the not unreasonable one that Burke was a lifelong enemy to both slavery and the trade, even if, for easily explicable reasons, such as his heavy commitment to the prosecution of Indian abuses, on which he was well embarked before abolition became a great public issue, he did not play a prominent part in the campaign for the ending of the slave trade. His admirers believed that Burke was keenly sensitive to all forms of human suffering, and that those of enslaved Africans were certainly included in his concerns. In a poem dated 1789, the Quaker Mary Leadbeater wrote of Burke’s contributions to the opening abolition debates: ‘Great Burke! Whose voice when wretchedness complains / Humanity’s invaded rights maintains’. He could not nor did he remain silent, she concluded, when ‘Nature speaks in injured Africk’s right’.37 In 1808 Thomas Clarkson felt able to include Burke as a tributary in his representation of the great river that eventually swept away the slave trade.38 James Prior, ‘the most fact-minded and reliable of the nineteenth-century biographers’ of Burke,39 believed that abolition was ‘scarcely less dear to [Burke’s] reason and his feelings’ than was establishing the case against Warren Hastings.40
The view that Burke was an avowed hater of slavery throughout his life and that further questions do not therefore need to be asked, has persisted until recent times. Now, however, in a climate of increasing concern about the role of slavery in British history, investigations into the extent to which the prosperity of eighteenthcentury Britain was founded on the wealth generated by slave labour or into the assumptions permeating British culture which made it possible for so many British people to avert their eyes from slavery for so long, have acquired a new urgency. Eric Williams was the precursor. He believed that a speech by Burke in 1772 showed that ‘The champion of conciliation with America was an accessory to the crucifixion of Africa.’41 In 1972 Michel Fuchs asked why, if Burke was the Christian thinker that we suppose him to be, he did not put his literary talents to the cause of divine justice for the enslaved? In Fuchs’s view, all that Burke did for Africans was to devise his Negro Code of reforms, which was intended to try to civilize a degrading commerce. Fuchs concludes that no denunciation of slavery or of the slave trade, comparable to that of Montesquieu in his Spirit of the Laws, can be found in Burke.42 Attention was drawn in an article of 1976 to Burke’s active
37 Poems, London, 1808, p. 87; see also p. 208 in this volume.
38 See p. 23 in this volume.
39 T. W. Copeland, Edmund Burke: Six Essays, London, 1950, p. 149.
40 Memoir of the Life and Character of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, 3rd edn, London, 1839, pp. 316–17. John Morley dissented from the common view. He believed that Burke was moved to take up the cause of India by ‘a noble philosophic conservatism rather than philanthropy’; ‘direct moral or philanthropic apostleship was not his function’. In Morley’s view, Burke was ‘not at all a philanthropist’ in the sense that Wilberforce or Clarkson were (Burke, London, 1879, pp. 129–31).
41 Capitalism and Slavery, Chapel Hill, NC, 1944, p. 41.
42 ‘Edmund Burke et l’esclavage’, Réseaux, xviii–xix, 1972, pp. 6–7.
involvement in the affairs of the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa, a body that existed largely to further the slave trade, and to the apparent conflict between Burke’s designs for a reform of slavery and the trade and his support for outright abolition.43 In the second volume of his biography of Burke, published in 2006, F. P. Lock wrote that, in his Negro Code, ‘Modern readers may feel that Burke deferred too readily to the economic interests of the West Indian planters’, and that the abolition of the slave trade ‘while enjoying his support’ was not one of the causes dearest to his heart.44 In an article, also published in 2006, whose conclusions have been elaborated in his Edmund Burke and the Conservative Logic of Empire of 2016, Daniel O’Neill argues that Burke envisaged Africans to be in a state of barbarism so degraded that they could only be lifted from it by British imperial intervention. Burke, in his view, saw the slave trade and slavery in the West Indies as stages through which Africans might be brought to civilization. ‘Did Burke develop a clear opposition to slavery in his later writings?’ O’Neill asks. The answer, he suggests, ‘is not nearly as simple as some have declared’.45 What follows will try to take the debate further.
This book tries to reconstruct Burke’s deep involvement with the Caribbean from his earliest interest in it, as evidenced by the chapters in the Account of the European Settlements in 1757, to his interventions in the controversies over the place of campaigns in the West Indies in the war against Revolutionary France in the last years of his life. Its division into two parts—the first dealing with the private pursuit of wealth, the second with the making of public policy—mirrors the trajectory from private to public of Burke’s concerns with the islands. The first section deals with the struggles of those close to Burke to make fortunes in islands acquired by Britain during and after the Seven Years War that ended in 1763. Well before he had any position in public life as a Member of Parliament, Burke was drawn into taking an interest in the West Indies by the efforts of his close connections to make their fortunes in the climate of fevered speculation prevailing there. The acquisition of new territories by conquest seemed to be opening up golden opportunities not only for expanding the British sugar economy, but also for lucrative state employment, which was a prospect particularly attractive to Burke’s brother Richard and to William Burke, his closest friend. Neither man, for whom the West Indies were a place of unconscionable exile from the social and literary delights of London, was well suited to the rigours of life in the acquisitive frontier societies of the newly conquered islands. Both failed to realize any significant gains. Edmund Burke, however, gave his full support to their ambitions. His efforts on their behalf gave Burke an informed interest in the West Indies on which he was later to build in his public career.
43 R. W. Smith, ‘Edmund Burke’s Negro Code’, History Today, xxvi, 1976, pp. 715–23.
44 Edmund Burke, 2 vols, Oxford, 1998–2006, ii, p. 414.
45 O’ Neill, Burke and the Conservative Logic of Empire, p. 78. See also M. Kohn and D. O’Neill, ‘A Tale of Two Indias: Burke and Mill on Empire and Slavery in the West Indies and America’, Political Theory, xxxiv, 2006, pp. 192–228.
