A street market in Huambo, Angola. Livingstone wished that the British rather than the Portuguese had colonised Angola, but London had been preoccupied with the ‘frontier colonies’ of the Eastern Cape, despite lengthy and costly wars against African peoples and the slave-owning Dutch Boers. Explorations around the River Niger, he said, had been much more promising, because the locals had embraced “English love of commerce and English hatred of slavery”. He estimated that the English would have brought Angola ten times the trade it currently had.
WE now demand increased supplies of cotton and sugar, and then reprobate the means our American brethren adopt to supply our wants. We claim a right to speak about this evil, and also to act in reference to its removal, the more especially because we are of one blood. It is on the Anglo-American race that the hopes of the world for liberty and progress rest.
Now it is very grievous to find one portion of this race practising the gigantic evil, and the other aiding, by increased demands for the produce of slave labour, in perpetuating the enormous wrong. In Africa the land is cheap, the soil good, and free labour is to be found on the spot. Our chief hopes rest with the natives themselves; and if the point to which I have given prominence, of healthy inland commercial stations, be realized, where all the produce raised may be collected, there is little doubt but that slavery among our kinsmen across the Atlantic will, in the course of some years, cease to assume the form of a necessity to even the slaveholders themselves.*
Slavery does not actually confer an economic advantage – businesses or countries that rely on it cannot compete with a lightly regulated, lightly taxed free market. Well-paid employees, with plenty of leisure, work more efficiently than slaves, already possess a basic education, and have an incentive to acquire skills and experience; they take care of their own families, health, retirement, and domestic life as much as possible; and they do not need to be bought, transported or guarded night and day. Free men, moreover, have wage-money in their hands which they spend on goods and services of their choice, expanding a market in which a variety of businesses thrives. See The Economic Case for Generous Wages and The Economic Case for Time Off by Adam Smith; and see How Liberating the Slaves also Clothed the Poor by Charles Dickens.
Précis
Writing shortly before the American Civil War, Scottish explorer David Livingstone urged Britain to stifle the slave-worked plantations of the Southern States by establishing cotton and sugar farms in Africa as direct competition. By employing local labourers at market rates and exporting their produce to Britain, they would soon force American growers to abandon slavery. (55 / 60 words)
