Abstract

"The British Financialization of American Slavery, 1820s–1840s"

John Handel, Baylor University (John_Handel@baylor.edu)

In the 1830s, at the same moment that slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire, Britons became slaveowners again in new ways. Rather than buying and selling enslaved people in West African ports or on colonial auction blocks, Britons began buying and selling them through financial instruments traded on the London Stock Exchange. This paper argues that the abolition of slavery within the British Empire created a massive market opportunity for investing in slavery beyond the empire’s boundaries, an opportunity that British financiers pursued aggressively throughout the 19th century. In other words: the codification of liberal, anti-slavery laws within the British Empire presented actors who were willing to avoid, subvert, and challenge those laws with profitable, if morally odious, investment opportunities throughout the rest of the world. As British capital poured into the slave societies of the U.S. South, Cuba, and Brazil, British slave-ownership morphed into more abstract financial forms, creating a financialized property in people that lasted well into the age of abolition. This paper asks two questions. First, how did financiers in Britain assess investments in slave-backed assets during an age of abolition and liberal political reform? What were the differences between how financiers assessed the risk and reward of investments in slave societies and free societies? Second, how important were slave-backed assets to the British financial system as a whole? Who were the investors (both institutional and individual) that purchased these slave-backed assets and in what quantities? Using both qualitative and quantitative sources, this paper will show how British financiers understood, justified, and sometimes hid their investments in American slavery during the age of reform. It will also trace how slave-backed financial assets became increasingly central to the British financial system as a whole and made up crucial components of the investment portfolios of both wealthy aristocrats and small provincial investors alike.