Abolitionism and Environmental Justice: Lessons from the Eighteenth to the Twenty-First Century

Brycchan Carey—

How can reading about the eighteenth-century abolitionist movement help environmental and social justice activists today? This is a question I kept in mind as I wrote The unnatural trade, in which I show how naturalists visiting Africa and the Caribbean in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries created an archive of representations of plantation slavery and the slave trade on which it was based. This archive was scoured by antislavery activists in the late eighteenth century for evidence that European enslavement of captive Africans was not only clearly cruel and unjust but also a “terrible perversion of nature.” Antislavery discourse was constructed from the natural histories, traveler’s accounts, and agricultural manuals that made up the environmental literature of the eighteenth century.

This environmental reading of abolitionist literature resonates with the social and environmental challenges we face today. Although slavery is now illegal around the world, illicit forms of exploitative labor are still widespread and common. The attitudes that sustain modern slavery are linked to attitudes that ignore the impact on the climate, nature, or habitats, while the exploitation of people often goes hand in hand with the exploitation of the environment. Very often, modern slavery is associated with the most dangerous and destructive forms of environmental damage, such as illegal logging, overfishing, unlicensed mining, and the trade in endangered species. The international criminal gangs responsible for the trafficking of people, weapons, and drugs also cut down rainforests and exterminate endangered species.

Public opinion has forced governments and companies in many countries to tackle illegal slavery in recent years. For example, the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act was passed in the United States in 2000, while the United Kingdom introduced the Modern Slavery Act in 2015. Other countries have passed similar legislation. Critics say, and rightly so, that these laws are neither strong enough nor well-funded enough to protect the tens of millions of people currently trapped in forms of modern slavery. Nevertheless, while far from perfect, modern slavery legislation is making a positive difference to the lives of many.

The recent public pressure for such legislation can in many ways be seen as a modern continuation of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century abolition movement. At the same time, the painfully slow progress of measures to address climate change and biodiversity loss continues a long history of both exploitation and protection of the natural environment. Customs and laws to protect irrigation and drinking water date back to ancient times, although the need to protect animals and create nature reserves was not widely recognized until the early twentieth century. Nevertheless, throughout history, people have been aware of the damage that economic activities inflict on landscapes. Nowhere was this more evident than in European colonies. In addition to the incalculable human costs, forests were cleared, invasive species were introduced, and entire populations of animals were driven to extinction. Across the Americas and the Caribbean, landscapes were indelibly altered to support non-native crops such as sugar and cotton.

A seventeenth-century colonist on Barbados, Richard Ligon, witnessed the clearing of the island’s rainforest, a process that lasted only a few years, to make way for sugar grown by slave laborers. Ligon found the process of colonization and clearance to make way for non-native species new and remarkable. It spread rapidly and would have disastrous consequences for biodiversity on islands and in forests around the world. Ligon witnessed one of the first instances in history of the clearing of tropical forests to create a monoculture of cash crops grown by exploited laborers for the profit of transnational agribusinesses. The business model he saw introduced in the seventeenth century is not only common around the world today, but is also rapidly spreading to what remains of the world’s tropical forests. Ligon returned to England in the 1650s, but visitors in the decades that followed were shocked by the damage that had been done. The Countryman’s instructorPublished in 1684 and often reprinted, Thomas Tryon noted the spread of invasive species, which he called “a great quantity of new and unknown vegetables, called weeds” and lamented the loss of forests, declaring that “the whole island is become a kind of rock.” The following decade, naturalist Hans Sloane also noted the dramatic deforestation and decline in fertility when he visited the island. “They in Barbados are very desirous of wood,” he later wrote in his monumental Travel to Jamaica (1707). Barbados “has had such great fertility, though it has fallen from what it was, by the great labor and continual working thereof, that they are now forced to fatten to the extreme what was formerly Rank of itself.” Both Tryon and Sloane provide powerful evidence that what historians call “the sugar-slave complex” had destroyed an irreplaceable ecosystem in just a few decades.

The accounts of visitors like Ligon, Tryon, and Sloane offer ecologists today an invaluable resource for understanding the environmental change that has occurred over the past few centuries. For eighteenth-century abolitionists, they provided powerful evidence that Caribbean plantations and the forced labor system on which they depended were unnatural. But there was a sting in the tail of antislavery discourse. Abolitionists called for the replacement of the slave trade and plantation slavery with free trade in African and American natural resources, which they understood to be the natural form of trade between nations. While these calls were arguably well-intentioned, they supported new forms of resource exploitation in the nineteenth century and beyond that became the business model for expanding European empires in Africa and Asia, as well as in the Americas. Often unintentionally, but sometimes overenthusiastically, nineteenth-century abolitionism was increasingly used in the service of new forms of imperialism.

Today’s antislavery and environmental activists have much in common with the late eighteenth-century abolitionists from whom they descend politically. They have identified a serious and urgent global problem and are pressing for political change to address it. Eighteenth-century abolitionists faced, and twenty-first-century environmentalists continue to face, the difficulties inherent in challenging well-funded transnational corporations and governments reluctant to change long-established and often lucrative ways of operating. Both abolitionists and environmentalists have been, or continue to be, told by opponents that the solutions they propose are ineffective, expensive, or address non-existent problems, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Studying the abolitionist movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reminds us that vested interests can be successfully challenged and that real change can be achieved through public pressure. But it also reminds us of the danger of unintended consequences. European abolitionists achieved much, but ultimately failed to work with the communities in Africa and the Caribbean they originally sought to protect. Wealthy environmentalists today should learn from this and guard against the impulse to impose external solutions or to fund only conservation or development that conforms to Western cultural norms. Working with the communities in developing countries most affected by climate change and biodiversity loss, rather than simply imposing external solutions, will be the most effective way to ensure a fair and sustainable future for all, not just those in the wealthy global north.

Brycchan-Carey is Professor of Literature, Culture and History at Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne. He has published numerous books and articles on the cultural history of slavery and abolition.