Richard Oswald: Slave trader, merchant

Richard Oswald: Slave trader, merchant and diplomat

Richard Oswald was the son of a Presbyterian minister. He was apprenticed to his cousins in Glasgow who had a successful trade in tobacco and he traveled to the Caribbean and the southern colonies of British North America on their behalf. In 1746 he moved to London and began his own business, initially supplying the army and Royal Navy as well as trading tobacco, but moving quickly into slaves and sugar. He augmented his business interests by marrying Mary Ramsay, the daughter of a wealthy Jamaican merchant. In 1747, he and several associates bought Bance (also Bunce or Bence) Island in the Sierra Leone river, one of the most active slave trading posts on the West African coast. Oswald built a golf course there for the benefit of white slave traders.

Bance (also Bunce or Bence) Island in the Sierra Leone river, one of the most active slave trading posts on the West African coast.

Oswald also acquired shares in slave ships, and plantations in the Caribbean, Florida and South Carolina. His ships could then carry slaves from Bance Island to plantations in the Americas and return to England with cargoes of sugar and tobacco. He was part of a group of Scottish merchants based in London who assisted each other financially, sharing their investments to spread the risk and ensure more reliable and consistent profits. Capital gained from investments in slavery financed investments in related products, such as tobacco and sugar production.

On July 25, 1782, official negotiations began. The preliminary articles were signed by Oswald for Great Britain, and John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, and Henry Laurens for the United States on November 30, 1782. With almost no alterations, these articles were made into a treaty on September 3, 1783.

Most of the slaves Oswald traded were shipped to the southern colonies of British North America. One of his most important business associates there was the South Carolina planter and slave owner Henry Laurens. In 1781, Oswald lobbied successfully for Laurens' release after he was captured by the Royal Navy when he was returning from negotiating Dutch support for the American War of Independence. The following year, Oswald became an adviser to the British prime minister, Lord Shelburne. His knowledge of North America resulted in his appointment as one of the British negotiators at the 1783 Paris peace conference with the American colonies. Laurens was on the American team. The two sides agreed that the British should not take 'Negroes or other Property' from Americans when they withdrew from the American colonies.

Auchincruive House. Richard Oswald (a merchant from London, and a commissioner in Paris for peace negotiations with the Americans) bought the estate in 1764.

Oswald's London base was at Philpot Lane in the City of London, but his vast fortune enabled him to buy Auchincruive - an estate in Scotland where the Adam brothers built him a large house - as well as an extensive library and art collection. (BBC Business of Enslavement)

Antigua and Barbuda

The islands of Antigua and Barbuda form a small nation whose strategic importance is greater than its size. Located at the outer curve of the Leeward Islands, Antigua and Barbuda are well placed for strategic defense of the Caribbean against outside forces. The natural harbors along Antigua's indented coast also offer havens for naval forces.

By the eighteenth century B.C., Antigua and Barbuda had been settled by their first inhabitants, the Ciboney (or Guanahuatebey) Indians. They were followed by the Arawaks, a peaceful Indian tribe that migrated from northern South America through the Caribbean islands and arrived on Antigua around A.D. 35. They began slashand -burn cultivation of the island and introduced such crops as corn, sweet potatoes, beans, pineapples, indigo, and cotton. The Arawaks were uprooted by the Carib Indians around A.D. 1200; however, the Caribs did not settle on Antigua but used it as a base for gathering provisions (see The Pre-European Population, ch. 1).

In 1493, on his second voyage, Christopher Columbus sighted the island of Antigua and named it after Santa Maria de la Antigua. Early settlement, however, was discouraged by insufficient water on the island and by Carib raids. Europeans did not establish settlements on Antigua until the English claimed the island in 1632. Antigua fell into French hands in 1666 but was returned to the English the following year under the Treaty of Breda. Antigua remained under British control from 1667 until independence was granted in 1981.

From the start, Antigua was used as a colony for producing agricultural exports. The first of these were tobacco, indigo, and ginger. The island was dramatically transformed in 1674 with the establishment by Sir Christopher Codrington of the first sugar plantation. Only four years later, half of Antigua's population consisted of black slaves imported from the west coast of Africa to work on the sugar plantations. Antigua became one of the most profitable of Britain's colonies in the Caribbean (see The Sugar Revolutions and Slavery, ch. 1).

In 1685 the Codrington family leased the island of Barbuda from the English crown for the nominal price of "one fat pig per year if asked." The Codringtons used Barbuda as a source of supplies--such as timber, fish, livestock, and slaves--for their sugar plantations and other real estate on Antigua. This lease continued in the Codrington family until 1870. Barbuda legally became part of Antigua in 1860.

Although the British Parliament enacted legislation in 1834 abolishing slavery throughout the empire, it mandated that former slaves remain on their plantations for six years (see The PostEmancipation Societies, ch. 1). Choosing not to wait until 1840, the government on Antigua freed its slaves in August 1834. This was done more for economic than for humanitarian reasons, as the plantation owners realized that it cost less to pay emancipated laborers low wages than to provide slaves with food, shelter, and other essentials. The plantation owners continued to exploit their workers in this way into the twentieth century. The workers perceived little opportunity to change the situation, and sugar's dominance precluded other opportunities for employment on the island.

Slaves cutting the sugar cane, in Antigua, William Clark, 1823

© The British Library

The Antigua sugar industry was severely jolted in the 1930s, as the dramatic decline in the price of sugar that resulted from the Great Depression coincided with a severe drought that badly damaged the island's sugar crop. Social conditions on Antigua, already bad, became even worse, and the lower and working classes began to protest to the point that law and order were threatened. The Moyne Commission was established in 1938 to investigate the causes of the social unrest in Antigua and elsewhere in the Caribbean (see Labor Organizations, ch. 1). In 1940, in response to the situation, the president of the British Trades Union Congress recommended that the workers on Antigua form a trade union. Two weeks later, the Antigua Trades and Labour Union (ATLU) was created. The union soon began to win a series of victories in the struggle for workers' rights.

Despite these victories, the ATLU recognized the need to participate in the political life of the island, as the plantation owners still held all political power. Thus, in 1946, the union established a political arm, the Antigua Labour Party (ALP), and ran five parliamentary candidates who met the qualification of being property owners. All were elected; in addition, one of the five, Vere Cornwall Bird, Sr., was selected to serve on the government's Executive Council. Bird and the ATLU continued to push for constitutional reforms that would give the lower and working classes more rights. Largely because of these efforts, Antigua had full adult suffrage by 1951, unrestricted by minimum income or literacy requirements. With each general election, the union and the ALP put forth more candidates and won more seats in the Antiguan Parliament. In 1961 Bird was appointed to fill the newly created position of chief minister. Five years later, he led a delegation to London to consider the issue of Antiguan independence. Following a constitutional conference, Antigua became an associated state (see Glossary) in February 1967, with Barbuda and the tiny island of Redonda as dependencies. Antigua was internally independent, but its foreign affairs and defense still were controlled by Britain.

Map of Antigua.

Antigua is located at the outer curve of the Leeward Islands

During the period of associated statehood (1967-81), Antigua saw the rise of a second labor union and its affiliated political party and the beginnings of a secessionist movement in Barbuda, as well as the replacement of sugar by tourism as the dominant force in the economy. In 1978 Deputy Prime Minister Lester Bird (younger son of Vere Cornwall Bird, Sr.) and other like-minded political leaders called for full independence. Following their return to office in the 1980 general election, which was regarded as a popular mandate on independence, another constitutional conference was held in London in December 1980. An obstacle to achieving independence was the issue of Barbudan secession; this barrier was overcome when a compromise was reached that made Barbuda relatively autonomous internally. Complete independence was granted to the new nation of Antigua and Barbuda in 1981. (source: US Library of Congress)

Jamaican anger over slave trade

"Jamaican anger over slave trade," By Clive Myrie, BBC News in Kingston, Jamaica, 26 March 2007.

On a plantation just outside the Jamaican capital, Kingston, we watched workers with long machetes slice down towering stalks of sugar cane with industrial precision.

The crop is only harvested by hand on modern plantations when it rains and today there is a steady drizzle. Usually machines do the graft. But for more than 300 years until the early 19th century the machines were African slaves.

Men, women and children were overworked and brutalised. Cruelty and torture meant as many as a third of all slaves died within three years of arriving here.

In the fields, the tears of the living often mixed with the blood of the dead. In all one and half million Africans sailed here. It is their descendents who make up modern Jamaica.

Kingston is the capital of a proud nation, a proud people, but there are painful memories of slavery and racism here. There is also a defiance of spirit that came with the first Africans and today sets this nation apart. It's a defiance that saw slaves endure the worst indignities at the hands of British slave masters.

At the Institute of Jamaica, the staff laid out for me some of the shackles and chains used to keep slaves in line. They are rough-hewn from iron and browned with age. They are also very heavy and would weigh down the slaves forced to wear them.

One artefact is particularly disturbing. It's a tongue restraint, a thin strip of metal and would be fitted around the lower jaw and held in place by a lock at the back of the neck.

At the front is a little plate which would rest on top of the tongue, holding it down. This shackle might be used to force feed slaves. One punishment was the force feeding of human excrement.

There is unease here that British commemorations marking the end of the slave trade are too focused on white abolitionists like William Wilberforce and they do not acknowledge the effect on the morale of the British of numerous slave rebellions.

Many Jamaicans believe Britain wants to play up its role in helping to end the trade and downplay its role in slavery itself.

Descendant's shame

The bicentenary of the Act outlawing the slave trade has raised interesting questions about who owns slave history and what should be done about that history. Nick Hibbert Steele is the descendant of one of the most important slave owning families in Jamaica.

At the height of their wealth and prestige, the Hibberts had interests in 60 plantations and owned 4000 slaves. He's been researching his family history and says he feels it is important to apologise.

"All I can do is say I'm sorry, I come here with clean hands. I don't want my family's history buried any longer."

But Professor Carolyn Cooper of the University of the West Indies says personal apologies mean nothing. "What Britain needs to do as a nation is acknowledge the scale and magnitude of the crimes it committed and then having made that acknowledgement find the appropriate way to right historic wrongs."

The Jamaican parliament is discussing whether or not a formal claim for reparations should be made to the British government. Any final decision is a long way off and a vote for reparations is likely to be greeted with a firm rejection from No 10.

Jamaican Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller, in a rare interview, told me that in this bicentenary year, there is no statute of limitations on genocide and that Jamaicans will never forget the cruelty done to their ancestors.

"They were packed into ships like sardines in a sardine can. We will never forget what was done to our foreparents. It was a crime against humanity."

Perhaps that's the price Britain must pay, that it will never be allowed to forget what it did. It is a heavy price, the burden of history. Fitting perhaps for a monumental crime. (source: BBC)

Pacific Islands Appeal to UK for 'Slave Voyages'

Pacific islands appeal to UK for 'slave voyages' compensation: Cheap labour from Vanuatu laid basis of sugar fortunes, by David Fickling in Sydney for The Guardian, 13 April 2004.

The government of the Pacific country of Vanuatu is to appeal to Britain and France for compensation for 19th century "slave voyages" which saw 62,000 Melanesians uprooted to work in the sugarcane fields of Queensland and Fiji.

Thousands of Pacific islanders were kidnapped or tricked by European and South American traders and taken away for manual labour in Pacific colonies in the late 19th century.

Labourers were sold to plantation owners for £6 to £9 a head and were typically paid £6 a year to work six days a week in cane plantations, where at times the death rate was as high as one in 10.

Traders got round anti-slavery laws by forcing or coercing Pacific islanders to sign contracts guaranteeing a limited term of indentured labour.

Vanuatu's foreign minister, Moana Carcasses, told the Guardian that he was in contact with local groups demanding compensation, and planned to raise the issue with the British and French governments later this year.

"The group who are speaking to me had about 1,000 families. It's quite big numbers who are claiming, and of course there are others who are claiming whom I have not spoken with," he said.

An appeal to the Australian government has been rebuffed: "They said that's a long time ago, why should they be responsible? I respect that way of seeing things, but it won't stop me knocking on the door."

The move follows a billion-dollar claim launched in New York last month against the shipping insurer Lloyd's of London and two American companies accused of profiting from the transatlantic slave trade.

A class action is also being prepared in Australia after it was revealed in February that the New South Wales government had taken an estimated £30m in "stolen wages" held in trust funds and never distributed to the Aborigines who earned it.

More than 30,000 people were taken from Vanuatu to work in Queensland, New Caledonia and Fiji in the late 19th century, and 870 labour trade voyages between 1863 and 1904 provided the bulk of the workforce on which Queensland's cane industry was built.

The trade was stopped in 1906 when the newly independent Australian government deported thousands of Melanesians from tropical Queensland because of fears that they might swamp the country's white population.

Among the most notorious of the so-called "blackbirders" was Ross Lewin, who often adopted the guise of an Anglican bishop to entice islanders on to his ship. Others ambushed villages or took people from beaches by force.

James Murray, an infamous blackbirder of the early 1870s, encouraged villagers to paddle their canoes out to his schooner with promises of trade in beads, paint, pipes and tobacco, before holing their boats with pig-iron weights and throwing the "rescued" survivors in the hold.

Clive Moore, an associate professor at the University of Queensland and an expert on the trade, said that Vanuatu was right to pursue the claims, but could run into difficulties proving how much of the trade was forced.

"There's force and there's deception, and some very cruel things happened," he said. "Europeans were using these people as cheap labour, but it's insulting to the intelligence of Melanesians to believe that they stood on their beaches for decade after decade allowing themselves to be captured.

"In the first 10 years or so that labour was taken from any island, it was largely by kidnapping or deception. But then what occurs is [the people originally kidnapped] come back again and explain to the ones about to leave what it involves. So physical kidnapping stops, but it's still a type of cultural kidnapping."

Mr Carcasses said many of the families who had contacted him were prepared to take legal action if negotiations failed. But he admitted that Vanuatu, an aid-dependent archipelago of about 80 islands with a population of 200,000 and a gross domestic product of £300m, had slender means to pursue such an action.

"I've said to the people here that I will try my best, of course if that fails the families have the right to use legal means," he said. "What I say to them is, don't take your expectation too high. Don't expect you're going to receive billions of dollars. Maybe the English government will say sorry. Maybe they'll give you a hospital and that's it."

Serial Enslavers

Blood, sweat, tears and sugar

An 1886 cartoon depicting a slave trader using coconuts as a lure to entice buyers for his "niggers".

The caption reads: “South Sea Island Trader: ‘Now gentlemen, give me a start. What shall we say for this ‘ere cocoanut – and the nigger thrown in? Five pounds only bid for this cocoanut. Five pounds; five o’ny; five – did I hear six? No advance; going at five; gone. Next nigger; I mean next cocoanut.’ ”

From Green Left Weekly issue 198, website, this article "Blood, sweat, tears and sugar: The Big Picture: Sugar Slaves," published on 16 August 1995, by Norm Dixon, discusses a documentary on Australia's Queensland sugar industry and Pacific Islander slavery. They call it "blackbirding," but it's more akin to "blackjacking," kinda like carjacking only its about abducting/kidnapping black bodies to work on the sugar cane fields. The Aussies get really sensitive about the word "slavery" there have been a number of lawsuits regarding slavery, so they preform linguistic gymnastics to call their labor practices anything but enslavement. I'm still looking for this documentary, I can only find non-downloadable clips, thus far, but I'm still looking. -- Ron Edwards, US Slave.

Norm Dixon writes: The sugar industry in Australia generates around $2 billion a year, and Australia recently surpassed Cuba as the world's largest exporter of raw sugar. Plantation, refinery and distillery owners amassed huge fortunes from the blood, sweat and tears of enslaved Pacific islanders, as this compelling documentary proves.

In 1863 — 30 years after the British parliament abolished slavery in the British Empire and at the height of the civil war to end slavery that United States — the first shipload of kidnapped South Sea Islanders (as the islander community today prefers to be known) arrived in Brisbane to open a sad new era of forced labour that is largely glossed over in the history books. Those first "Kanakas" were offered for sale at $7 a head.

Sugar Slaves is a timely reminder that Australian capitalism was partly built on the exploitation of the people of the Pacific islands. Australian capitalism's birth was as brutal and unjust as any other capitalism on this planet. As historian Clive Moore says, "Queensland could not have developed as quick as it did in the 19th century without the use of cheap Melanesian labour".

Between 1863 and 1904, more than 50,000 islanders were transported to Queensland to labour in the cane fields. Men, women and children were seized from villages and beaches throughout the Pacific by sea "traders". On Pentecost Island, in Vanuatu, whole villages were captured, causing areas, inhabited for generations, to revert to jungle. Families were separated and all contact with their stolen relatives lost.

Life on the plantations was harsh. Technically, the South Sea Islanders were not slaves but were paid wages 80% less than those paid to Australian workers. After arrival in Queensland, islanders were sent straight to the plantations, given a set of clothes and set to work clearing fields or cutting cane. They were watched by often brutal overseers on horseback who needed little encouragement to set upon the hapless labourers with whip or boot.

Back-breaking work, disease, and poor and too little food led to death rates 400% higher than for Europeans. The "lucky" ones were buried in unmarked graves away from the cemeteries housing good, white Christians. Many others were buried in the fields where they dropped.

Opposition to the slave trade — euphemistically dubbed the "Queensland labour system" — was strong in the southern Australian colonies. It was also opposed within the Queensland labour movement.

In 1868, Queensland's parliament, though dominated by pastoralists and plantation owners, was forced to modify the system. Employers were now bound to provide food, clothing and lodging, and pay a wage of $6 per year. South Sea Islanders were to be employed by contract for a maximum of three years, after which the employer had to pay their fare home. In Britain too, the slave system in Queensland was a scandal, and in 1872 the British parliament passed a law to outlaw kidnapping of islanders in the Pacific.

The sea "traders" now relied more on "persuasion" rather than brute force to lure islanders to the cane fields. By law, Melanesians were forbidden to strike or "desert" their employer on pain of three months' imprisonment.

The labor movement's response was thoroughly selfish and racist. Unions argued that islanders undercut "white" wages, yet refused to organise them or permit them to join. Labour movement newspapers like the Worker and the Boomerang published racist caricatures of islanders, depicting them as threatening the "purity" of white women. After federation, despite the vehement opposition of the plantation owners, the white Australia policy outlawed further use of islander labour. All islanders were to be deported in 1906.

After considerable agitation by South Sea Islanders opposed to deportation, the government allowed elderly islanders, those married to Aborigines or to Australian citizens and those who had been resident for over 20 years to remain. Despite this, fewer than 2000 were permitted to remain legally. The deportations caused terrible pain and disruption, with families being split up, never to be reunited. To escape deportation, some jumped ship, and some even walked to Sydney!

Following the deportations, the Australian Workers Union launched a despicable crusade to eliminate South Sea Islanders from the sugar industry. The federal government paid a bounty to farms that employed only whites. In 1919, Melanesians were excluded by law from working on farms, although many farmers secretly allowed islanders to cut cane at night for a pittance. To survive, islanders returned to a traditional lifestyle of growing gardens and catching fish. Only during World War II were islanders again allowed to work in the sugar industry.

South Sea Islander men and children under a tree in Cairns c1906
Departure of the first shipment of deported Polynesians from Cairns under the Commonwealth Act: the muster at the Court House for medical examinations. (Description supplied with photograph). A large group of South Sea Islanders queueing for medical examinations prior to deportation from Cairns, 1906.

Today, the 20,000 descendants of South Sea Islanders are a distinct community which is rediscovering its heritage and demanding recognition of the role their ancestors played in building the Queensland and Australian economy. In the words of Noah Sabbo: "I'm proud to be a 'Kanaka'". To most Australians, people like Ken Negus and Mal Meninga are known as sports superstars not as South Sea Islanders, something the islander community wants to see changed.

But the documentary also makes it plain that South Sea Islanders now in many ways have more in common with fellow Australian workers than they do with their long-lost relatives in the Pacific. This painful discovery was made by Joe and Monica Leo as they returned to Pentecost Island, from which Joe's grandparents and Monica's father were kidnapped 100 years ago. In a heart-rending scene, the old chief of Joe's grandfather's now deserted village urges Joe to return to Pentecost so the village can be re-established. Joe cannot find the words to explain that he has too many ties in Australia, not least a job driving a council grader, to return, and he lapses into a tearful silence. --Norm Dixon, Green Left Weekly

Serial Enslavers: Guest Worker Scam

Slavery: Turning Humans Beings into Things

St Nicholas Abbey has no church connection. It has always been a sugar plantation house.

Sitting in the grand plantation house, next to the mills that turned sugar into liquid gold...What did you care if you had to go to West Africa to by the slaves. Then ship them back across the Atlantic.

Oh yes, the logistics were difficult, but nothing the greatest seafaring nation in the world couldn't handle. The British were good at commodities. A couple of thousand pounds bought you 200 acres of Barbadian cane fields, a mill and 200 odd slaves. And within a few years, it returned an equal amount every year.--for the rest of your life.

You were now among the richest men anywhere in the British Empire. The slave economy in the Caribbean wasn't just a “sideshow” of Empire--it was the Empire.

Three and a half million slaves were transported in British ships alone. They went to British plantations, to make British profits and build British cities—Bristol, Liverpool, and Glasgow. Where the cult of liberty is still on everyone's lips in smart coffeehouses.

Apart from the occasional visiting Quaker or exiled Puritan, there was a deafening silence in the “land of liberty” about turning fellow men into “work animals.” The scale of profits sealed the conspiracy of silence.

Here's a little thing of devilish prettiness—silver-- it looks like jewelery. Might be a hat pin, or something like that. But, it's not. This is an object that marked the passage of a human being to a thing. This is a branding iron. "Once these initials were burned into your flesh, you were no longer a human...You were an object. You were a commodity. You belonged to someone. You were a beast-of-burden. . ."-- Simon Schama (historian)

The Wrong Empire, chapter 3

Queen Sugar and the British Empire

Island Sugar

"...but it was rather small potatoes, shall we say, if you want a large palazzo in England, rather than a picket fence in New England. Suppose you wanted to make a serious fortune. Now, where could that happen? "

"In the mid-seventeenth century the Caribbean is where. Nobody settled in the West Indies in order to read the bible unmolested. This was not Massachusetts. No, you braved the fevers and the swamps for one reason alone. To make yourself very rich, very fast."

"Serious profits were already being raked in catering to Europe's little addictions: chocolate, coffee, and in England, of course, especially tea. But, as money sped-up, nothing compared as the stuff that made them more palatable-- sugar. Once seen as a luxurious drug it was now seen as a necessity--The Cash Crop of the Empire."

Barbados provided the perfect habitat to grow the sugarcane, tropical heat and saturating rain. So, the British settled in the West Indies transforming virgin forests into a patchwork quilt of Sugar Plantations.

But, Queen Sugar was a bitch.

Demanding absolute service, before she would spill her bounty. She took 14 months to get ripe (all 8 feet of her), but when she was ready, she was ready. Cut the cane at once. Get it to the crushers before it spoiled. Boil the juice, before it degraded. All very messy, and all very dangerous. By the side of the crushing mills hung a sharpened machete ready to sever the limbs of anyone that got caught in the rollers. What She needed was a combination of strength and lightning speed.

What She needed were human beasts of burden -- strong, quick, durable and uncomplaining. One commodity would be reaped by another... by slaves."--by Simon Schama

A History of Britain, episode 11: The Wrong Empire, chapter 2