Slave rebels’ destruction made maintaining slavery costlier than abolishing it

Evidence

In this tragic record, however, the slave societies of the West Indies had also written their own end. In their brutal repression, their flirtations with treason against the Empire, and their ruthless campaigns against the missionaries, they had overplayed their hand, lending their own resources to the cause of the slaves. By 1838, slavery in the British Empire had been officially abolished by a Parliament now “reformed” to enhance the power of industrial capital. “The slaves,” Mary Reckord reports, “had demonstrated to some at least of those in authority that it could prove more dangerous and expensive to maintain the old system than to abolish it.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 817

Categorization

• XREF: Links to the reader’s interest in the causal arc of the Black radical tradition’s rise and outcome, and echoes arguments about slave agency forcing emancipation found throughout Robinson’s account.