II. ABOLITIONISM AS A LIBERAL PROJECT

Since British abolitionism began in the eighteenth century, “[t]he rhetoric of liberalism, in fact, simultaneously structured thinking about economic policy and the framework through which the end of slavery was debated and anticipated throughout the slave-owning West” (Andrews Reference Andrews2013, p. 491). Free labor and free trade were the vernacular of British abolitionists who successfully argued for and implemented emancipation under these guises (Andrews Reference Andrews2013, p. 499).

Anthony Hopkins (Reference Hopkins and Law2002, p. 246) argues that, in a similar fashion to how the United States developed an economic vision to sustain lasting global peace after the Second World War, “[w]ith the end of the French Wars in 1815, Britain turned her energies to the task of creating a lasting peace.” Within this new order, the material basis was to be international commerce, “financed and managed by Britain” (Hopkins Reference Hopkins and Law2002, p. 247). Hopkins calls this “the world’s first comprehensive development plan” (Hopkins Reference Hopkins and Law2002, p. 258). While the British “development plan” was similar to the US situation in that it occurred after a major war, its form and content are more akin to early twentieth-century US open door policy, which “represented the external projection of domestic liberalism, pluralism, and division between private and public domains” (Drake Reference Drake1989, p. 20).

However, liberal abolitionism did not cater adequately to the post-emancipation welfare of freed slaves. When the British implemented the emancipation of slaves in its Caribbean colonies in 1834, it attached a seven-year “apprenticeship” for the newly freed, during which they would work unpaid for their former masters for a number of hours per week, and during which they were expected to be tutored in religious and educational studies to prepare them for full independence. Not only were there measures of implicit re-enslavement, and reparation requests were often rejected for freed slaves, but freed slaves often suffered economic and other forms of marginalization or subjugation.

Destitution was, therefore, generally the immediate legacy of liberal abolitionism. It was the presence of Black loyalist immigrants from the American War of Independence that “tested Britons’ self-perception as a humane and charitable people, since there was little opportunity for them to find work,” and that spurred a committee of London philanthropists to launch a colonial expedition to Sierra Leone (Hanley Reference Hanley2019, p. 15). It was due to the social tensions in the US and the opposition to Black economic, political, and social improvement within the country that the colonization movement emerged in the US to produce the Liberian colonization project. In nineteenth-century North Africa, there were “so many destitute liberated slaves in Tripoli that the extraordinary travelling Dutch heiress, Alexandrina Tinne, set up a refuge for them when she was there in 1868–69” (Wright Reference Wright2007, p. 159). In the Americas, although all societies abolished slavery between 1804 (when Haiti did so) and 1888 (when Brazil did so), “[w]ageless and very often without access to basic education, freedmen and freedwomen could hardly improve their social and economic position” (Araujo Reference Araujo2017, p. 45).

On the supply side, the approach to cutting off slave supply in Africa was also liberal. While, previously, abolitionists had sought to end the slave trade mainly through a system of laws, treaties, and naval suppression, Buxton’s (Reference Buxton1839) The African Slave Trade and Its Remedy emphasized that naval suppression was failing and there was therefore a need to additionally promote legitimate commerce and “civilization” in Africa. This would, it was argued, incentivize slave raiders and merchants to turn away from the trade in slaves. Buxton urged the British government to provide “all natural and even some artificial stimulants to agricultural industry,” with the additional benefits to Britain being cheaper raw materials and expanding markets for its own finished goods (Buxton Reference Buxton1839, p. 316). This approach was also present in North Africa (Collier Reference Collier2014).

Several attempts have been made to chart the history of modern African economic thought. For the nineteenth century, they tend to focus on the early West African pan-Africanists, especially James Africanus Beale Horton in Sierra Leone and Edward Blyden in Liberia—a tendency observed in the earliest attempt by a professional historian of economic thought to engage with the writings of such pan-Africanists (Goodwin Reference Goodwin1967). As recently as 2015, in Gareth Austin and Gerardo Serra’s (Reference Austin, Serra and Barnett2015) chapter on “West Africa” in the Routledge Handbook of the History of Global Economic Thought, despite the progress in going beyond Horton and Blyden, there is no mention of neomercantilist writers for the nineteenth century. Indeed, Ian Collier (Reference Collier2014, p. 531) even asserts that for the earliest modern African thought located between the Caribbean and West Africa, when emancipated slaves founded new polities such as Liberia, “[t]he liberal discourse of these black settlers, derived largely from European abolitionism, had little to offer for African societies,” as they favored European imperial annexation of the African interior.

The Black liberal authors are more popular, since the narratives of Quobna Ottobah Cugoano and Olaudah Equiano “sit on the cusp of the first wave of the abolition movement that focused on dismantling the slave trade” (Gunn Reference Gunn2008, p. 1); Equiano was even, in his time, “the most accomplished author of African descent” who wrote in English (Carretta Reference Carretta2006), publishing “the single best-known work published by a black author in pre-abolition Britain” (Hanley Reference Hanley2019, p. 16). And the writings of Edward Blyden and James Horton “did much to establish the notion of West African nationalism that was to become extremely influential among many West African intellectuals during the twentieth century” (Adi Reference Adi2000, p. 72). The result is that by focusing on the most popular Black abolitionists and writers, the historiography appears to present abolitionism as almost wholly economically liberal among Black thinkers.

It is true that Equiano, Cugoano, Horton, and Blyden argued for African capitalism, specialization in agricultural exports, and/or free trade. This is congruous with the liberal abolitionists’ conventional dictum of “Civilization, Christianity, and Commerce” (CCC) as an antidote to slavery in Africa and a way of encouraging transition to “legitimate” trade. Under such an approach, free trade was sufficient to facilitate this, supported by treaties and military measures against the trade.

However, this was not the only approach to abolitionism. Whereas Charles Dickens criticized the moral hypocrisy of abolitionists who neglected humanitarian work at home, and early French romantic socialists were skeptical of free labor, free trade, market forces, and liberalism as solutions to any version of servitude (Andrews Reference Andrews2013, p. 491), some Atlantic thinkers advocated non-socialist and non-agrarian forms of interventionist abolitionism. Thus, the approach to abolitionism characterized by the CCC triad was not monolithic, and each of its components had some ideological variation. The strategies for promotion of legitimate commerce to substitute for the slave trade, the cultivation of “civilized” manners and arts, and the development of Christian sensibilities and maturity were contested.

There has been a less popular and more developmentally interventionist and economic nationalist approach to abolitionism, which may be called “developmental abolitionism,” advocated by actors such as Delany and Payne. “Developmental abolitionism” here refers to the approach to universal slave emancipation that involved economic reforms aimed at not only making slavery economically less attractive but also building up the material power of Black nations and communities for long-run prosperity. Put simply, there has been limited examination of nineteenth-century African or Africanist non-economically liberal thought, and more so of its relationship with abolitionism. A similar problem is detectable in European Enlightenment historiography where liberal approaches have been overemphasized (Reinert Reference Reinert2010, p. 1396).

This is, perhaps, a problem generally with the state of economic analysis on the West African coast in the nineteenth century. Fourah Bay College (FBC) in Freetown, Sierra Leone, was founded in 1827 as “the only institution of higher education in British West Africa” (Goodwin Reference Goodwin1967, p. 439), and was an Anglican missionary school founded by the Church Missionary Society. It is therefore the oldest Western-styled college in Africa (Paracka Reference Paracka2003). Fourah Bay College produced early African development thinkers of the nineteenth century, but they “were not trained scientists, economists or agriculturists … but products of the grammar School and literary type of missionary education” (Wyse Reference Wyse1983, p. 29). The college itself only occasionally taught principles of political economy, “at least nominally,” and social science in general “had only a small place in this scheme” of a British-created educational system created primarily to train natives for junior positions in administration and as schoolteachers and ministers of religion (Goodwin Reference Goodwin1967, p. 439).

Moreover, in contrast to European abolitionists who more frequently mentioned economic rationales such as the shift in commercial attention from the West Indies to the East Indies, and the rise of legitimate commerce in Africa to discourage the odious commerce of slavery, “[o]wing to its missionary abolitionist roots, FBC faculty, students, and alumni often argued from a moral standpoint … the College’s arguments did not always carry sufficient economic or political force to persuade those with power to support its educational mission” (Paracka Reference Paracka2003, p. 31).

Therefore, by the mid-nineteenth century, discussion on economics in West Africa “had not approached the quantity or quality present in other British colonies in North America and Australia” (Goodwin Reference Goodwin1967, p. 439). This means that this debate about liberal or developmental abolitionism was likely conducted among a tiny minority of educated abolitionists.

Although there may have been “vernacular” or oral developmental abolitionists, given that economic ideas are not always embedded in written texts (Peel Reference Peel1978; Stephen Reference Stephen2018), Payne noted how the American Francis Wayland’s The Elements of Political Economy was not “in the hand of every Liberian” because Liberians were “an intelligent but uncultivated people,” making his own Prize Essay an “attempt to bring the subject before the Liberian communities” (Payne Reference Payne1860, p. 9). This would also help cultivate intelligence on “how to proceed” rather than the “disposition to engage in industrial pursuits” (Payne Reference Payne1860, p. 10). It seems that Payne’s efforts did not yield as much fruit as he desired, given the lack of subsequent editions of his Prize Essay and the fact that Edward Blyden and other writers of the post-1860 period seemed not to have cited the work.

In fact, 111 years after FBC was established, the National Congress of British West Africa had to present a memo to the director of education in Sierra Leone in 1938 to ask that “economics, commerce, technical, industrial and sanitary sciences be included in the curriculum of Fourah Bay” (Wyse Reference Wyse1985, p. 698). It was only in 1948 that the University College of the Gold Coast established the first Department of Economics in West Africa (Austin and Serra Reference Austin, Serra and Barnett2015, p. 248).

Nonetheless, for late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Cugoano and Equiano, there was a belief that the “encouragement” of legitimate commerce would automatically serve as a valve for absorbing labor and surplus investment arising from the suppression of the slave trade and slavery through naval blockades and treaties. Yet all through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Africans and other non-Europeans expressed their concerns that slave emancipation without economic assistance would result in destitution, idleness, crime, and vagrancy among freed slaves.

In Europe and its American colonies, administrators’ concern for post-emancipation conditions also involved fears of a drop in productivity, a decline in production, and slave revolts. In Africa an additional concern was with political instability associated with redistribution and cutting off African chiefs’ and ruling-class dependence on slave labor (Austin Reference Austin2009). African chiefs, merchant classes, landed elites, and even some Creole elites held similar fears.

Perhaps these fears were not unfounded, in the sense that their concerns reflected the realpolitik of the process of primitive accumulation attending the transition to capitalism. Contrary to the assertions of liberal classical and many subsequent economists, the expansion of labor supply from the non-capitalist or subsistence sector to the capitalist sector is not only driven by higher wages in the capitalist or “modern” sector to attract labor (Khan Reference Khan2009). Due to the prevalence of transaction costs, it has involved compulsions placed upon peasants and household producers to sell their labor. Compulsions include state taxation on individuals and families that necessitates the latter to acquire cash through wage labor, dispossession of peasants’ lands and/or enclosing common lands and resources (such as forests for hunting), or even, in the case of labor scarcity especially in low population-dense environments, enslavement to meet market demand.

These compulsions occur because the pace of wage-incentivized proletarianization away from extra-market sectors (such as subsistence agriculture) is often slower than the requirements of capital in emerging productive sectors, while the wage rates at which more rapid wage-incentivized proletarianization may be facilitated are too high for capitalists to entirely internalize and maintain profitability simultaneously. The transition to capitalism has therefore often involved various forms of compulsion. Modern scholars who recognize this have proposed several forms of assistance to “smooth” this process, such as foreign aid to fund compensation paid to small landholders for their land (Khan Reference Khan2009, p. 76) and social policy and stronger labor regulations to cushion the negative and exploitative effects of a transition to wage labor.

There were two issues to contend with. Liberal and developmental abolitionists were right in fearing that destitution among freed slaves would be an outcome in the absence of growth in legitimate commerce to absorb ex-slave labor. However, even if legitimate commerce expanded, the use of slave and coerced labor could be involved in such commerce for the reasons given above.

There are two more “progressive” ways that the latter issue could have been approached. As Gareth Austin (Reference Austin2009, p. 16) observes, “the reason why slavery paid in nineteenth-century pre-colonial West Africa was that, with land abundant (physically and institutionally) and labor scarce, free wage rates would have been relatively high. … Thus, the economic alternative to slavery and slave trading would have been the absence of any market for labor at all, beyond casual employment.”

This means that, as one option, the transition to free wage labor would have had to be substantially subsidized to enable a high enough wage rate that freed slaves could accept and that employers could offer, given the provision of a subsidy. Indeed, a petition to the governor of the Gold Coast from an Asante chief and elders in 1906 argued that “they said they depended on the labor of slaves and the descendants of slaves ‘as we have no money like white men to hire men to do necessaries for us’” (quoted in Austin Reference Austin2005, p. 165). This method would have favored larger farms, enabling a narrower set of beneficiaries (which reduces the monitoring and disciplining costs for an African cadre of organized abolitionists) and a smaller number of competing employers for a limited labor pool.

Additionally, diasporic emigration into West Africa could have been subsidized, thereby amplifying the efforts of Edward Blyden, Martin Delany, and other emigrationists who promoted such emigration, while subsidies could also have been applied to the transfer of labor-saving technology to the continent. In contrast, natives in colonies were often paid paltry sums for even public works projects such as railway construction directed by the colonial state, and generally by the 1930s, “European colonial powers allowed salaries so low that natives worked in conditions that resembled those of slavery” (Ferreras Reference Ferreras, McPherson and Wehrli2015, p. 87). Moreover, because of the belief that “Africa holds forth inducements whereby the colored man may be elevated, without money and without price,” as Abraham Cauldwell, writing in the New York Tribune in 1852, believed (Stockwell Reference Stockwell1868, p. 221), substantial economic assistance to emigrants to West Africa was not envisioned.

The other option was for a rationalization of the economic system to produce a situation whereby freed slaves could engage in subsistence production and to reorganize the economic system in a way that was compatible with this and a slower growth of cash crop production, exports, and colonial government revenues than was historically the case. Such non-capitalist, quasi-capitalist, or “post-development” forms of economic organization would have been more likely to be proposed by socialists, communalists, collectivists, and conservative advocates of agrarian and village living. Indeed, Blyden’s preference for towns over cities and for communal land ownership and egalitarianism, despite the contradictory preference for foreign trade, as well as Hillary Teage’s aversion to manufacturing and preference for agrarian life (Armistead et al. Reference Armistead, Roberts, Teage and Garnet1848, p. 32), may be Black expressions of this “communalistic abolitionism,” in defiance of both liberal abolitionism and developmental abolitionism.

The key point is that there were multiple avenues for experimentation that did not even come up in the first place due to the non-emergence of real attempts at development assistance involving the amelioration of use of slave or forced labor.

III. DEVELOPMENTAL ABOLITIONISM

Over the course of the nineteenth century, Britain entered into bilateral anti-slave trade treaties with a number of European, American, Middle Eastern, and African states (Allain Reference Allain2007). Some of these rulers petitioned for material compensation or aid (a history that has not been fully unveiled) to at least partly offset revenue and export losses and enable a smoother transition to alternate economic activity. While Britain did not care substantially for the well-being of former slaves, its envisioning of subsidies for anti-slavery was so that state revenues could less disruptively transition to a dependence on income from legitimate trade, even if such revenues were not spent developmentally. This transition to legitimate commerce would then expand commercial opportunities for British merchants—a trade that Spain and other European powers accused the British of monopolizing.

It appears that the first emergence of an offer of fiscal subsidy for trade disruption to a non-European state occurred with the 1817 Anglo-Merina treaty (renewed in 1820) with Emperor Radama I, the ruler of the Merina Empire in Madagascar. Britain offered material assistance in response to a cessation of the slave trade (Klein Reference Klein and Campbell2005, p. 181). This was to calm Radama’s fears that, since the slave trade was a major source of his revenue, abolition would be economic suicide (Mutibwa Reference Mutibwa and Ade1989, p. 418). Several other rulers requested subsidies, including Tripoli’s Yusuf Karamanli Pasha, and rulers of Dahomey and Zanzibar.

Martin Delany opposed the idea of providing subsidies to rulers to incentivize them to abolish the slave trade. Speaking on the Dahomey case, he commented:

Delany was therefore concerned about the morality of compensating slaving states for an immoral trade and the perverse effects this would create, especially since the subsidy was not to help the freed slaves but to compensate the ruler. Besides this concern, Delany was perhaps also worried about the state-centric approach taken with abolitionism by Britain, given his preference instead for “self-regeneration in Africa” through a different means.

Delany agreed with Buxton that “Great Britain has for half a century been employing physical force for the suppression of the slave trade, which after the expenditure of upwards of forty millions sterling, and the noble sacrifice of the lives of some of the best and bravest of her sons, still exists” (Delany [1860] Reference Delany, Bell, Delany and Campbell1969, p. 130). Yet he had a more ambitious vision of the “Bible and the Plough” in mind. With Liberia having received its independence from the American Colonization Society since 1847, Delany observed the difference between Liberia’s President Roberts and President Benson in their attention to economic policy years later. He argued that due to the formative role played by the former in establishing the newly independent nation, President Roberts’s focus was on gaining international recognition for Liberia’s independence and sovereignty, thereby paving the way for President Benson to more comfortably focus on economic development. Hence, while President Roberts played his part in “pressing the claims of his country before the nations of Europe” as the times required, President Benson had “spared no authority which he possessed in developing the agricultural resources of his country” (Delany [1860] Reference Delany, Bell, Delany and Campbell1969, p. 60).

It was under President Benson that the 1858 national fair was organized. It was to the national essay competition organized during that fair that James S. Payne submitted his A Prize Essay on Political Economy, as Adapted to the Republic of Liberia (for which President Benson in turn wrote the introduction). However, for Delany, not enough had been done by President Benson to move Monrovia towards being a great metropolis. It could even be argued that this was a critique of the liberal emigrationist abolitionism that produced the colony of Liberia. Hence, whereas Delany preferred Liberia to have been a self-sufficient metropolis, an article published in the October 18, 1854, paper of the Pittsburgh Daily Morning Post opposed Delany’s previous vision to create a Black empire in the Americas, and argued, “On the African coast already exists a thriving and prosperous Republic,” focusing on the “dignity of manhood, the rights of citizenship, and all the advantages of civilization and freedom” that Blacks could enjoy (quoted in Delany [1860] Reference Delany, Bell, Delany and Campbell1969, p. 35). By perceiving Liberia, as it was at the time, as a full-fledged prosperous republic, liberal abolitionists and liberal emigrationists implicitly saw no value in Delany’s grander economic aspirations.

Delany was pessimistic about the prospects of Black people in the United States, and favored an emigrationist approach to social improvement. From 1854 to 1858, he worked through the Board of Commissioners of colored people organized at the Cleveland National Emigration Convention of Colored People in 1854 (Bell Reference Bell, Bell, Delany and Campbell1969, p. 15). He sought the establishment of a Black empire in the Western Hemisphere; and it was when new information about the African interior was emerging in the 1850s—particularly through the explorations of Thomas Jefferson Bowen and David Livingstone in 1857—that Delany’s attention was turned towards emigration to Africa. He eventually adventured into Yorubaland in modern-day Nigeria (from Liberia, to Lagos, and then to Abeokuta), under the auspices of the Niger Valley Exploring Party, with the goal of securing land and establishing networks for Black Atlantic settlers in Africa.

His theory of development is partly embedded in the chapter “To Direct Legitimate Commerce” of the “Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party” (Delany [1860] Reference Delany, Bell, Delany and Campbell1969). He argued that there were three “elementary principles” that form “the basis of great nationality” (Delany [1860] Reference Delany, Bell, Delany and Campbell1969, p. 112). These are “first, territory; second, population; third, a great staple production either natural or artificial, or both, as a permanent source of wealth.” He believed that “Africa comprises these to an almost unlimited extent” (Delany [1860] Reference Delany, Bell, Delany and Campbell1969, p. 112) with its population, which he believed to be about 200 million in 1860, 100 million more than modern estimates suggest. It is easy to see the conflict between Delany, whose mention of population was to show how Africa could be economically great, and Equiano and Cugoano, who characterized African demand as having the potential to absorb European manufactures while Africa benefits from agricultural exports.

Delany was motivated not only to complement the spread of Christianity by improving social relations and productive organization to foster “improvements of towns, cities, roads, and methods of travel … implements of husbandry and industry” and “the methods of conveyance and price of produce” (Delany [1860] Reference Delany, Bell, Delany and Campbell1969, p. 109). He also sought to put “a permanent check to the slave trade” in Africa (Delany [1860] Reference Delany, Bell, Delany and Campbell1969, p. 114). He desired such an African nation to cultivate staple crops that competed with slave-produced crops such as cotton, and thereby lessen the profitability of slave production in the United States. The ambition and progressiveness of this vision should not be taken for granted, as a similar vision was held by some Spaniards for opposite reasons. In the 1820s and 1830s there were various suggestions, including by the captain-general of Cuba in 1825, Dionisio Vives, that Africans illegally landed in Cuba and freed according to the anti-slaving treaties (emancipados) should be taken to Africa (to Sierra Leone, Haiti, Trinidad, or Fernando Po)—where they would engage in legitimate commerce—in order to avoid their subversion of the Cuban slave order (Sundiata Reference Sundiata1996, p. 51). Under such conditions of emigration, the focus was on the negative benefit to the American slave plantation system rather than on the growth and national power of the emancipados.

Delany, however, did not directly explain the post-emancipation fate of slaves freed as a result of the fall in profitability of slave-produced goods and diplomatic pressure from the strong Black nation responsible for this. The answer, by implication, lies in his expectation that Black people in the US would emigrate to the prosperous African territories. This would therefore increase the population of the continent, further fueling its greatness. Indeed, James S. Payne, two-time president of Liberia (1868 to 1870 and 1876 to 1878), recognized the key role played by economic prosperity in attracting migrants from the Western Hemisphere. This is in contrast to Edward Blyden, who believed that that the true greatness of a nation—which brings it perpetuity in legacy and memorability—is not created by wealth, material comfort, commercial prosperity, and political power (Blyden Reference Blyden1890, p. 11), and also believed that diasporic immigration into Africa could not be driven by an economic logic. For Blyden, “No natural impulses bring the European hither—artificial or external causes move him to emigrate. The Negro is drawn to Africa by the necessities of his nature” (Blyden Reference Blyden1883, p. 17), since many Liberians would not have emigrated from the US if wealth had been the attraction (Blyden Reference Blyden1869, p. 19).

According to Delany, in the selection of territory, it is preferable to have fertile and productive land that has navigable waterways that enable the nation to be “an export and import metropolis” (Delany [1860] Reference Delany, Bell, Delany and Campbell1969, p. 111). However, while Delany differentiates between “natural” and “artificial” sources of wealth, these seemed to be equally viable for him as means to greatness, which is why he argued that by being able to cultivate “great staple products” such as sugar cane, coffee, rice, and palm oil, “Africa has that without which the workshops of Great Britain would become deserted, and the general commerce of the world materially reduced; and Lagos must not only become the outlet and point at which all this commodity must center, but the great metropolis of this quarter of the world” (Delany [1860] Reference Delany, Bell, Delany and Campbell1969, p. 113). For him, Africa held “the balance of commercial power, the source of the wealth of nations in his hands” (Delany [1860] Reference Delany, Bell, Delany and Campbell1969, p. 118).

While Delany equated the capacity to achieve national wealth and commercial power through natural wealth (as Lagos had potential for) with that possible through artificial wealth (as Britain relied upon), he inadvertently converged with James Payne in supporting domestic manufacturing, not because he realized the principle of increasing returns or increased incomes from value-addition. He instead emphasized the role of self-reliance. He had “[o]ne word as a suggestion in political economy to the young politician of Liberia. Always bear in mind, that the fundamental principle of every nation is self-reliance, with the ability to create their own ways and means, without this, there is no capacity for self-government” (Delany [1860] Reference Delany, Bell, Delany and Campbell1969, p. 60). It was imperative that “[t]o succeed as a state or nation, we must become self-reliant, and thereby able to create our own ways and means; and a trade created in Africa by civilized Africans, would be a national rock of ‘everlasting ages’” (Delany [1860] Reference Delany, Bell, Delany and Campbell1969, p. 120). Delany’s neomercantilist thought comes out in his prescription for Liberians to pursue, “as a policy as much as possible,” a patronization of home-manufactured and home-produced articles, preferring these over using foreign goods. Even if these are not equal in quality to foreign goods, this patronage, rooted in policy, “is the only way to encourage the farmers and manufacturers to improve them” (Delany [1860] Reference Delany, Bell, Delany and Campbell1969, p. 119). Liberians should also seek to control their own shipping trade and distribution networks, rather than rely on “the benevolence of good hearted gentlemen” in America (Delany [1860] Reference Delany, Bell, Delany and Campbell1969, p. 119). This was therefore a vision of agricultural development, diversification, and industrial development.

James Payne, as Delany’s contemporary who also witnessed the weak condition of Liberia, appears to be more familiar with the British and American academic literature or key ideas on political economy than Delany was. His 1858 A Prize Essay on Political Economy, as Adapted to the Republic of Liberia (published 1860) may be the first essay in sub-Saharan Africa to highlight the particular power of manufacturing in writing. Payne was motivated to write this essay partly for the “cultivation and mental improvement” of those Africans whose intelligence was expanded when their lot was “cast in the slave region of North America” (Payne Reference Payne1860, p. 9). His encouragement to the Liberian community and state to learn the practice of political economy served, among many other ends, to enable indigenous Africans to gain better employment and prosperity, in order to ensure “mutual dependence and identity of race” (Payne Reference Payne1860, p. 21). It also served to defend against the “great heathen population” surrounding Liberia and “their ill-feeling toward the intruding Americans who, by banishing the slave trade from the coast, have deprived them of an income to which they have been long accustomed” (Payne Reference Payne1860, p. 22).

Like Cugoano, Equiano, Horton, and Blyden, Payne demonstrated a desire for greater agricultural cultivation. However, he believed that the industrial operations that would result in the greatest advantage to Liberia were not only agriculture—which enabled a weak community to acquire “its first elements of prosperity” (Payne Reference Payne1860, p. 56)—but also “commerce, mechanical employments, including manufactures and works of enterprise, and scientific and professional labors” (Payne Reference Payne1860, p. 54). Payne (Reference Payne1860, pp. 82–83) went further than Cugoano, and even further than Delany, who equated to commercial power of “natural” and “artificial” sources of wealth, to note the difference in gains that arise from trade between a primary goods producer and a manufacturing country:

By “as they have begun to do,” Payne was referring to attempts such as the purchase of sugar cane mills and boilers to produce a turnaround in sugar manufacturing in the second half of the century (Allen Reference Allen2004, p. 458). He therefore advocated the conduct of industrial and trade policy by the state. He supported giving “premiums to the most meritorious entrepreneurs,” using patent laws for inventions and intellectual property, using public procurement, and giving state assistance in the importation of capital goods (Payne Reference Payne1860, p. 79). As for protective duties, he advocated them but also sued for moderation, as “so as not to exclude like products from abroad … protection should not extend beyond an advanced duty” (Payne Reference Payne1860, p. 79).

He also chided the universal application of the principle of free trade, arguing that it applied only to trade between equals, while for Liberia, which was “too young, too feeble, too unequal to the great nations of the earth,” it would be an “injurious policy (Payne Reference Payne1860, pp. 80–81). This suggests that the use of neomercantilist policies was a temporary stage on the path to national prosperity. However, it was an ideal situation for free trade to prevail only when a country achieved industrial development to be organically internationally competitive. This was, he observed, because of the prevalence of hypocrisy in the advocacy of free trade among advanced nations: “The great deal said since Adam Smith’s promulgation of the doctrine of free trade, has not induced the civilized world—much as the theory is favored—to carry it into practical operation. In spite of the cry of free trade the policy of nations is protection. None adopts and practices free trade thoroughly” (Payne Reference Payne1860, p. 83).

As Liberia still had a long way to go in his schema and Payne did not write much about the dynamics of advanced nations, he did not propose institutional arrangements to secure free trade among advanced equals. as Friedrich List did in his proposition for a “World Trade Congress” (List [1837] Reference List1983, p. 126). It is therefore an open question if a developed Liberia would entirely eliminate its trade barriers as long as others maintained theirs, although it would be necessary to reduce barriers to the extent that international competitiveness makes previously high levels of protection redundant. Besides, the fact that Payne does not actually focus much on foreign trade is likely a reflection of the purpose of A Prize Essay being to introduce the discipline of political economy to the general public. It is also due to the small and fledgling state of Liberia, which forced him to write a lot about the principles of political economy, saving, investment, production, business ethics, the process of capital accumulation, the attraction of foreign private capital, and other basic principles, which he believed were not adequately observed in Liberia, within an eighty-six-page essay. Foreign trade and protection are discussed mainly in the final chapter, which comprises four pages. A similar situation is observed for Delany, who did not elaborate much on the neomercantilist aspects of his economic ideas.

This approach to abolitionism appears to have been marginal, having little influence among both Blacks and White Europeans at a time when there were no independent African states interacting with these authors to accept their messages and seeking to implement them, and the major concern was about a commercial transition in West Africa. Moreover, developmental abolitionist visions were antithetical to Western perceptions of Africans’ place in the global economy and of their capabilities. It is telling that the European closest to this strand of thinking was marginalized. This was British missionary Henry Venn, whose ideas have already been expounded upon (Ajayi Reference Ajayi1959; Webster Reference Webster1963; Ayandele Reference Ayandele1971). For Venn, the increase in legitimate trade was not enough to permanently eradicate African slavery—social change and a growing middle class were necessary (Ajayi Reference Ajayi1959, p. 335). Indeed, he recognized the dependence of chiefs on slaves for the coastal palm oil trade in the absence of social revolution (Ajayi Reference Ajayi1959, p. 336). British commercial activity must then be devoted to the creation of national states, not colonial territories (Webster Reference Webster1963, p. 420). This “pro-Negro” policy by the Church Missionary Society was, however, reversed by Venn’s successors (Webster Reference Webster1963, p. 421), and Venn lacked political backing for his ideas (Ajayi Reference Ajayi1959, p. 340). In essence, “People like Henry Venn were lonely voices crying in the wilderness” (Ayandele Reference Ayandele1971, p. 704).

The developmental abolitionists catered to different Black constituencies. Venn targeted African slaves employed in legitimate commerce and sought to use economics to undermine the power of slave-using chiefs. Payne targeted Black migrants to Liberia and sought to use economics to more sustainably pacify relations between Black settlers and indigenous Africans. Delany focused on slaves in the Americas and on forging a strong Black nation that would economically undercut American slavery and exert international political pressure towards abolition. They believed that civilization had to be cultivated by establishing self-sufficient sectors of arts and industry and developing a strong African middle class; if it were not, as Payne most clearly asserted, the outward symbols of “civilization” would be predominantly imported—thereby contributing to trade imbalances and low savings rates—and foreign dependency would persist for educational institutions that disseminate civilizational knowledge.

They believed that substantive development was needed to demonstrate, as Delany believed, the temporal benefits of adopting the Christian religion and, as Payne emphasized, to create independent and self-sufficient churches, missions, and schools. They also believed that promoting legitimate commerce was not enough. The extent of their neomercantilist orientation is expressed in their beliefs about the position in the global commercial system. For Payne, it was necessary for the state to use policy tools to capture greater gains from trade through the encouragement of higher value-added activities. For Delany, it was necessary to become self-sufficient and promote home manufactures to strengthen abolitionist geopolitics and grow in national power. Both were concerned not only about the availability of employment after abolition but also the quality of employment and income, which Delany (Reference Delany1852) observed to be low and menial for free Black people in the United States (thereby necessitating a national project), and Payne believed to be low in the international division of labor for a settlement of freed slaves and Black migrants in West Africa.

A major shortcoming of the developmental abolitionists is that they did not directly explore this issue of the use of forced labor in legitimate commerce. The lack of intensive written examination of the issue of labor scarcity among developmental abolitionists is perhaps partly due to the fact that developmental abolitionism was far from being applied and thus remained conceived at an abstract level. Where the problem was encountered in policy-making, there was a resort to forced labor and slavery, as in Zanzibar, Merina, and Asante. For the developmental abolitionists, it was perhaps also because Delany underestimated the challenge of labor scarcity in Africa and thus overestimated the continent’s population by a factor of one. For Payne, it may have been due to his belief that substantive development would attract migrant labor into the continent and increase birth rates within the continent, thereby contributing to population growth. Moreover, Payne argued that in attracting machinery to Liberia, labor-saving machinery would be more suitable.

Although Payne was opposed to foreign aid due to its unreliability or non-perpetuity (Payne Reference Payne1860, p. 22) and an aversion to aid dependency (Payne Reference Payne1860, p. 21), it may reasonably be argued that, above all, it was because he had in mind “social” (for missions, schools, and churches) or “palliative” (for poverty alleviation and to prevent starvation) aid. His support for foreign capital inflows (Payne Reference Payne1860, p. 48), and for government encouragement to agriculture, commerce, and manufacturing, implies that he would have been in support of foreign aid directed at these productive activities, including to import or transfer labor-saving machinery, if not for the political infeasibility of such aid at the time.

A final note is the difficulty of tracking the transmission of ideas between European political economy and Black Atlantic political economy. Why was Payne able to cite Adam Smith and Francis Wayland whereas Delany cited no European political economist, at least not directly? Why did Blyden, a fellow emigrationist, not develop developmental abolitionist ideas or cite European political economists? The relatively homogenous nature of the fields of formal education held by many of these thinkers—mainly medicine and religion—does not explain such variations (since Payne and Blyden were trained as Christian ministers, and Delany and Horton as physicians). This indicates the present insufficiency of research into the intellectual networks and educational settings in which the Black writers on political economy were immersed. Just as European scholars such as Gabriel Paquette (Reference Paquette2009) have made progress in understanding the development of political economy in southern Europe and its Atlantic colonies, similar efforts should be directed at the Black Atlantic.

IV. CONCLUSION

It is in comparison with the grand visions held by developmental abolitionists that the full deficiency of the European response to post-abolition Black societies becomes manifest. Nowhere is the negativity of response starker than in the case of the world’s first successful mass slave uprising and the modern world’s first Black republic—Haiti—which faced an extremely hostile international environment and domestic economic and social precarity (Cheney Reference Cheney, Alimento and Stapelbroek2017), becoming “the first ‘African’ state where creditors built a practice of economic imperialism” (Obregón Reference Obregón2018, p. 614).

This was not an isolated case. Various forms of constrictions were placed upon Liberia, which was the second Black republic and Black post-colonial state of the modern era, and which perennially struggled for “economic and fiscal survival” (Gardner Reference Gardner2014, pp. 1092–1094), and so it had “virtually no impact on ending slavery in West Africa” (Lovejoy Reference Lovejoy1983, p. 255). The Merina Empire (Campbell Reference Campbell1991), Asante, Abyssinia, Zanzibar (Chaves, Engerman, and Robinson Reference Chaves, Engerman, Robinson, Akyeampong, Bates, Nunn and Robinson2014), the Fante Confederation (1868 to 1873), and the Egba United Improvement Association (Lovejoy Reference Lovejoy1983, p. 255) all faced a rapacious international environment led by Europe throughout the nineteenth century. Moreover, directly compensating emancipated slaves was indeed out of the question in British and European debates, although the case was made by some antislavery activists that despite “the need for reparations to former slaves and their descendants, through land redistribution, wages, and education, demands for financial compensation for slave owners always prevailed in these public debates” (Araujo Reference Araujo2017, p. 45–46).

These tendencies continued into twentieth-century colonial Africa, where “[t]he conquest of Africa and the extension of European economic domination proceeded together under the banner of anti-slavery” (Lovejoy Reference Lovejoy1983, p. 286). In the 1920s, the League of Nations began to put pressure on colonial authorities in Africa to abolish slavery. This was, however, a time when the doctrine of colonial self-sufficiency prevailed among colonial powers; when the League of Nations operated in an interwar context of economic liberalism and a liquidity crisis; and when the United States’ open door policy towards Latin America followed a logic of economic liberalism.

It was in this context that one of the only two politically independent African states—Ethiopia—was being pressured to abolish slavery as a condition for entry into the League of Nations. However, given the deposition of Emperor Iyasu V, who tried to disrupt the Ethiopian social order; the institutional nature of, and nobility support for, slavery; and the weak agriculture-based economy of Ethiopia, Emperor Haile Selassie I personally believed that abolition would do more harm than good for his empire (Coleman Reference Coleman2008, p. 71–74). He reportedly lamented, “How can I liberate the slaves? What would they do? There would be no living for them. They would turn into thieves unless I could raise money to make roads and employ them in some way, and that I cannot do” (Noel-Buxton Reference Noel-Buxton1932, p. 518). On the other hand, the need to improve Ethiopia’s international image, to prevent an invasion or partition by Europeans, and to prevent falling into League of Nations Mandate status forced the emperor to attempt immediate abolition (Coleman Reference Coleman2008).

Nonetheless, in Ethiopian law, traceable to the Fetha Nagast, “it was unacceptable to simply leave a penniless and propertyless slave to his fate” (Whyte Reference Whyte2014, p. 659). Therefore, Emperor Haile Selassie envisaged abolition “not as a simple withdrawal of slavery’s legal status in the British Empire but as an emancipation process which would move the slaves into other forms of employment, putting them to work in a newly modernized Ethiopian military, civil service and education system” (Whyte Reference Whyte2014, p. 661). This, in addition to the emperor’s commitment to an imperial modernizing project (Whyte Reference Whyte2014), meant that the obvious solution to this quandary was therefore massive economic aid and assistance for Ethiopia, as recognized by Lord Noel Edward Noel-Buxton (Reference Noel-Buxton1932, p. 519); but such aid was not forthcoming.

Further on, imperial powers also went ahead to ignore the proposal by Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (first established in 1916), presented at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, for the removal of all economic barriers impeding industrial development in Africa (Persaud Reference Persaud, Dunn and Shaw2001, p. 122). The Garveyite movement, which emphasized Black self-help projects, and which Delany was ideologically a precursor for—was also repressed by colonial powers (Andrews Reference Andrews2017, p. 2509). Thus, these formerly slaving and abolitionist powers and subsequently colonial nations simultaneously imposed colonial self-sufficiency, constrained efforts since the early twentieth century by colonial subjects to substantially improve their economic status, and pushed away efforts by the American-based Garvey aimed at Black self-help commercial projects.

For a very long time, developmental abolitionism remained cocooned in the realm of ideas in West Africa. It was not until the period of decolonization that notions of import-substitution, self-sufficiency, and a collective Black African hegemon who could fight for Black people’s rights across the world went into resurgence, this time after slavery had been abolished across colonial empires. These represented rebirths of the spirit of Delany and Payne but without direct mention to them as their texts fell into obscurity after having achieved little influence even in their own day.