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CONSERVATIVE POLITICAL ECONOMY AND THE PROBLEM OF COLONIAL SLAVERY, 1823–1833*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 November 2014

MICHAEL TAYLOR
MICHAEL TAYLOR*
Affiliation:
Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge
*
Gonville & Caius College, Trinity Street, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, CB2 1TA[email protected]
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Abstract

Anna Gambles's Protection and politics (1999) established the existence of a sophisticated and pervasive conservative economic discourse in Britain in the decades before Repeal. This article argues that the imperial aspect of that discourse – comprising ideals of imperial economic integration, imperial preference, and British navigational prowess – has been mistakenly understood as a response to ‘the imperialism of free trade'. In fact, these ideals were evolved primarily as the intellectual response of the West Indian lobby to the Anti-Slavery Society's campaign for the emancipation of British colonial slaves. Emancipation was regarded as a prospective economic disaster for the British plantation system and so the years after 1823 witnessed the vigorous and sophisticated defence of West Indian slavery by rhetorical and discursive means traditionally ascribed the label of ‘conservative economics'. This article argues that the imperial economic discourse hitherto considered ‘conservative’ should more properly be recognized as ‘pro-slavery’, something underscored by the pro-slavery sympathies of the writers credited with the articulation of this discourse, and by the almost exclusive relevance of its arguments to West Indian, as opposed to other colonial possessions.

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 57 , Issue 4 , December 2014 , pp. 973 - 995
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

*

The author, an AHRC-funded student, wishes to thank John Robertson, Boyd Hilton, Peter Mandler, David Lambert, Richard Huzzey, Keith McClelland, and his anonymous referees for their comments on previous drafts of this article.

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