British anti-slavery rhetoric masked thriving profits in other slave economies

Evidence

Notwithstanding the British government’s persistent and public opposition to slavery and its efforts to compel Brazil to abolish the trade—to all of which historians have paid great attention—Williams observed: … The British capitalists, however, remained unimpressed. In 1857 [30 January] an editorial in the London Times declared: “We know that for all mercantile purposes England is one of the States, and that, in effect, we are partners with the Southern planter; we hold a bill of sale over his goods and chattels, his live and dead stock, and take a lion’s share in the profits of slavery; … we are clothing not only ourselves, but all the world besides, with the very cotton picked and cleaned by ‘Uncle Tom’ and his fellow-sufferers. It is our trade… .” British capitalism had destroyed West Indian slavery, but it continued to thrive on Brazilian, Cuban and American slavery. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 755

Categorization

• SEED: Essay angle: the colonial office abolished the form of slavery it no longer needed while financing the slavery it did—moral reform as market repositioning.