The First Modern Campaign

In 1787 twelve men met at a printing shop in London and formed the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade. What they invented over the following twenty years is, in its structure, the template for every advocacy organisation since.

They ran national petition campaigns, gathering hundreds of thousands of signatures: in 1792 the House of Commons received petitions carrying more names than had ever been submitted on any subject. They organised a consumer boycott of West Indian sugar which perhaps 300,000 households joined, and published lists of grocers selling East India sugar instead. They commissioned Josiah Wedgwood to produce a medallion of the kneeling figure with the line "Am I not a man and a brother?" It was worn as jewellery and set into snuffboxes, making it possibly the first campaign logo. They collected testimony from sailors and surgeons, published the plan of the slave ship Brookes showing bodies packed into a hold, and ran speaking tours through local committees.

Single issue, national organisation, mass petition, boycott, emblem, atrocity evidence, local chapters. Almost all of it assembled here, for this, first.

Thomas Clarkson rode something like 35,000 miles collecting evidence. Olaudah Equiano's narrative, written by a man who had been enslaved, sold through nine editions in his lifetime and was one of the most effective documents the campaign had. It is a genuinely remarkable achievement and it is regularly told in a way that makes it the whole story, which it is not.

Because the enslaved were not waiting.

The Haitian revolution destroyed the most profitable colony in the world and demonstrated, to every planter and every government in the Atlantic, exactly what the alternative to negotiation looked like. Revolts in Barbados in 1816 and Demerara in 1823 preceded the amelioration debates. The Baptist War in Jamaica over Christmas 1831, involving perhaps 60,000 people and put down with considerable brutality, was followed by emancipation legislation within two years.

Maroon communities, sabotage, work slowdowns, flight, legal petitions and revolt were continuous throughout. The timing of the decisive British measures tracks these events closely, and an account that makes abolition a gift bestowed by British reformers erases the party with by far the greatest interest in the outcome.

And then there is what emancipation actually was, which is less than the word suggests.

The Act of 1833 did not free people. From 1834 it converted most of them into "apprentices", bound to work unpaid for their former owners for a set number of hours each week, forty and a half in most cases, for a further six years, enforced by stipendiary magistrates and by the whip. It was the compensation to planters in labour form, on top of the £20 million in cash. Resistance and public disgust were such that it was abandoned early, in 1838.

Which sets up the final and most uncomfortable point. The legal category of slavery was abolished. The extraction of labour under coercion adapted and continued.

Over a million indentured labourers were shipped from India, and hundreds of thousands from China, to the Caribbean, Mauritius, Fiji, Natal and Peru, under contracts that bound them for years, restricted their movement, and made breach a criminal rather than a civil matter. Vagrancy laws in the post-emancipation Caribbean and the post-war American South criminalised being without a contract. Debt peonage, sharecropping, convict leasing, and in the Congo Free State a system of hostage-taking and quotas that killed on a scale comparable to anything that preceded it.

None of this makes abolition worthless. A legal regime that treats people as heritable property is different in kind from one that does not, and the people who fought for that difference were right. But the useful question to ask after any reform is what the abolished arrangement was actually doing for whoever benefited from it, and whether that function has found another vehicle.

Here it did, immediately, repeatedly, and under names that were not slavery. The International Labour Organization's current estimate for people in forced labour worldwide runs to about 28 million, which is more than were carried across the Atlantic in three centuries.

That is not an argument for despair about reform. It is an argument for judging reforms by the relation of coercion underneath, rather than by the category that got struck from the statute book.