‘The Interest’ - uncovering the opponents of 1823’s new anti-slavery campaign

The campaign launched in London in January 1823 to abolish slavery knew it had a fight on its hands. It would come up against powerful forces in Britain and its empire, marshalled by what was known as the West India Interest. But who were these people?

Michael Taylor,

author of The Interest, explains.

In the early months of 1823, the British campaign against slavery lurched into gear. In January, the veteran abolitionists met in London to establish the Anti-Slavery Society; in February, they issued their prospectus; by March, William Wilberforce had presented a petition from Quakers to MPs; and in May, Thomas Fowell Buxton moved in Parliament for amelioration and ‘gradual’ emancipation of enslaved people in the British West Indies.

In doing so, however, the abolitionists would provoke the wrath of one of the most formidable political lobbies in British history. The West India Interest comprised the slaveholders, planters, and merchants for whom the defeat of the abolitionist campaign now became a consuming obsession.

Dozens of MPs and peers constructed the political defence of slavery in Parliament; vast meetings of bankers and financiers called for the protection of the money they had invested in the plantation economy; and the colonists in the Caribbean even threatened to secede from the British Empire should the government seek to abolish slavery.

In these early months of the campaign, it was the West Indians who held sway. They had friends in government, among them the foreign secretary George Canning, the home secretary Robert Peel, William Huskisson, and the Duke of Wellington. They also commanded the favour of the conservative press, and influential journals such as the Quarterly Review and Blackwood’s Magazine

MICHAEL TAYLOR IS A HISTORIAN.

THE INTEREST: HOW THE BRITISH ESTABLISHMENT RESISTED THE ABOLITION OF SLAVERY (2020) WAS SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL WRITING; HIS NEXT BOOK, IMPOSSIBLE MONSTERS: DINOSAURS, DARWIN, AND THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION WILL BE PUBLISHED BY THE BODLEY HEAD.

These provided welcome homes for articles which invoked the Bible, protectionist economics, racial theories, and imperial security in defence of slavery. And when, in August 1823, the enslaved people of Demerara rebelled in search of their ‘rights’, it was the abolitionists – and their agitation – who were blamed.

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