The East India Company were also responsible for exporting enormous quantities of opium to China from this period up until 1860 – averaging 900 tons a year in the late eighteenth century, rising to 1,400 tons a year by 1838. As China had banned imports of opium, realising the significant damage that addiction caused, the exports were routed via Calcutta and smuggled in by companies including Dent & Co., and Jardine Matheson & Co.fn4 – the brainchild of two Edinburgh University graduates. There are no reliable statistics for the tens, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of Chinese lives devastated through the trade of opium, which gave this company its vastly profitable foundation. The trade led to the Opium Wars of 1839–42 and 1860, and the destruction of one of the wonders of the world – the Old Summer Palace, just outside Beijing. This entire complex, and the 300 Chinese people inside, were incinerated by British soldiers on 18 October 1860.
But perhaps we need to go back even earlier, to look at how the seeds of the slave trade were planted in the English psyche. The first documented English slave trafficker we know about was Sir John Hawkyns. In 1562 he ‘acquired’ at least 300 inhabitants of the Guinea coast, some bought from African merchants, some hijacked from Portuguese slavers, some simply seized. He took these 300 people to Hispaniola (now Haiti), where he sold them to the Spanish for the then phenomenal sum of £10,000 worth of pearls, hides, sugar and ginger. And once that first act was proved to be profitable, hundreds of other slavers followed in Hawkyns’ wake.
Through the slave trade, England, and then Britain, became skilled at turning human beings into commodities. The men, women and children transported across the Atlantic in the ‘Middle Passage’ were classed as ‘goods’ not people. They were valued only in so far as they could bring profit to the sugar and tobacco plantations. To understand the extent of the commodification of human beings into objects, you only have to look at the mass killing of slaves which took place on the Liverpool-based slave ship Zong in 1781: 133 slaves, who had been insured just like any other ‘asset’, were thrown overboard and drowned when the ship was running low on water, so that the ship’s owners could claim insurance on their dead ‘assets’.
By 1670 there were already almost 50,000 African slaves used on Caribbean plantations. A century later there were more than 330,000 African slave labourers on the British colonial plantations in America. We now know that many of the investors who benefited from slavery were not only major shareholders like banks and shipping companies, but also the Church of England, and an army of smaller investors, respectable and upstanding men and women across the land – ministers and clerks, farmers and widows. The plantations, and the sugar and tobacco produced, became a central part of the British economy. It has been estimated that 11 million human beings were transported as slaves in English and British ships in the 271 years between Hawkyns’ first trade in 1562 and the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act in 1833. I do not think we as a culture have even begun to grasp the meaning of these 271 years of atrocity, repeated again and again, the thousands of ships, the millions of people – and the fact that this trade in human beings resulted in vast profits – profits which helped to power the Industrial Revolution, as well as the establishment of many financial and insurance institutions that are still at the heart of our society today.
So, when the movement for abolition of the slave trade began in the 1750s, you can imagine the uproar across the country – how on earth would the plantation economy function without this supply of free labour? How could Britain survive without this income stream? But by 1800 the movement towards abolition of the slave trade had become unstoppable, and the British government could see the writing on the wall, and this situation meant the need for territorial expansion and diversification of the economy became urgent. There was another significant problem: an overflowing prison population, exacerbated by American independence in 1775. For almost 150 years England and then Britain had exported more than 1,000 convicts a year to the American colonies – essentially a form of white slavery, but with the significant difference that after completing a seven- or fourteen-year term, the convicts could become free. On gaining their independence, America piously declared that they no longer wanted to be a repository for Britain’s criminals – preferring to replace this convict labour in the plantations with African slave labour. So Britain was faced with the question of what to do with a rapidly expanding prison population and how to replace the economic productivity lost through the abolition of the slave trade.
The Tory government of William Pitt the Younger attempted to solve these two problems with a single idea – why not transport the convicts to the other side of the world and establish new colonies there? In the 1780s a British parliamentary committee was established to investigate the feasibility of setting up a penal colony on the Namib coast; and in 1785, a ship, the Nautlilus, was sent to survey the south-western coast of Africa to find the best place for such a colony. But it returned reporting that the Skeleton Coast was aptly named, and that colonists would face certain death there. At this point, the government began to look even further afield. Australia, as we’ve already seen, had been ‘claimed’ for Britain by Captain Cook in 1770 – this despite the fact that it had been the Dutch who had first mapped its northern and western shores; it was Cook who had named a harbour on the eastern coast Botany Bay, given its rich diversity of flora. The fact that there was an Aboriginal population on the island was of no concern whatsoever to Pitt and his ministers, all they could see was the potential of 8 million square kilometres of terra nullius (nobody’s land) – a territorial area greater than all the countries of Europe put together.
It was primarily Cook’s reports that encouraged the British government in 1786 to go forward with their curious plan, and in May 1787 the ‘First Fleet’ of eleven ships sailed from Portsmouth, carrying two years of supplies for a crew of 671 officers, sailors and their families (including the first governor of the colony and his staff) – and 798 convicts, housed in rather less comfortable conditions. In January 1788 the ships arrived in Botany Bay. It was not an auspicious beginning to this new world – Cook’s glowing reports had not revealed the poverty of the soil or the lack of stone for constructing buildings, so the governor, Captain Arthur Phillip, ordered the ships further north to the more promising site of ‘Sydney Cove’, as he named it. Within four years Sydney had grown to a settlement of 3,000 people, and the colony had established itself as self-sufficient in food and had even begun exporting wheat to other countries.
By 1803 a new governor, Philip King, was now looking to expand British territory in Australia – particularly to find an island off the main territory, an isolated place where the unreformable criminals of the new convict colony could be held. Van Diemen’s Land (renamed ‘Tasmania’ in 1856) had been sighted by the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman in 1640, though never settled. King thought this place would be perfect for his penal colony, and in 1803 he despatched an officer to land on the east coast of Van Diemen’s Land, raise the Union Jack and claim the island for King George III. Over the next months, settlements were established at Hobart and Risdon, on either side of the ‘River Derwent’, which formed an inlet on the south-east coast of the island, and a further settlement at Launceston, on the northern coast. Within fifty years the indigenous population of the island was almost totally exterminated.