Chapter 8 of 14

The Plantation: Atlantic Slavery and the Colonial Farm

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The ship Zong

In the late summer of 1781, a slave ship called the Zong left the coast of West Africa bound for Jamaica. It belonged to a syndicate of Liverpool merchants headed by William Gregson, and it carried far more captives than it had been built for: 442 African men, women and children, chained below decks. The voyage went badly. Sickness spread among the captives and the crew. A navigational error took the ship past Jamaica, and by the time the mistake was discovered, the crew claimed, the drinking water was running short.

Over several days at the end of November and the beginning of December 1781, the crew, on the orders of the captain, Luke Collingwood, threw around 130 of the captives into the sea alive. The ship's insurance, it was later argued, would cover the loss of "cargo" jettisoned to save the rest of the ship, but not the deaths of captives who died of sickness or thirst on board. One man managed to climb back onto the ship. The rest drowned.

When the Zong reached Jamaica and the owners claimed the insurance for the people who had been thrown overboard, the underwriters refused to pay, and the case went to court in London in 1783. It was argued as a dispute about property and insurance. Nobody was charged with murder. At the hearing, the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Mansfield, is recorded as observing that the case of the slaves was the same as if horses had been thrown overboard; the question was only whether there had been a genuine necessity. He ordered a new trial on the insurance question. There is no record that it ever took place.

The case became known to the public because Olaudah Equiano, a formerly enslaved African who had bought his own freedom and was living in London, brought it to the attention of the abolitionist Granville Sharp. Sharp tried, unsuccessfully, to have the crew prosecuted for murder. The Zong became one of the founding scandals of the British movement to abolish the slave trade.

In Chapter 1 I said that this was the chapter of the book where the farm metaphor stops being a metaphor. The Zong is the reason. In an English court of law, in the Age of Enlightenment, human beings were discussed as livestock — as horses — and the only question was whether their owners could recover their market value. The pages that follow describe a system in which millions of people were bought, sold, worked, punished and bred as property, for the profit of others. It requires a particular care. The people inside it were not animals; they were people who knew exactly what was being done to them, and who resisted it, every day, in every way they could. The farm treated them as livestock. This chapter must not.

The silver mountain

The colonial farm began not with sugar but with silver, and its first workers were not Africans but the Indigenous peoples of the Americas.

When Spanish conquistadors overthrew the Aztec and Inca empires in the 1520s and 1530s, they found societies that already had their own farms: tribute-collecting states with nobilities, priesthoods and systems of compulsory labour. The Spanish took over the top of these farms and redirected their feed. Under the encomienda system, Spanish colonists were "entrusted" with groups of Indigenous people, from whom they could demand tribute and labour, in return for the obligation to protect them and instruct them in the Christian faith.

In 1545, in the highlands of what is now Bolivia, Spaniards began to mine a mountain of extraordinarily rich silver ore, the Cerro Rico of Potosí. Within a few decades Potosí had become one of the largest cities in the Western world. To supply its mines with labour, the viceroy of Peru, Francisco de Toledo, reorganised in the 1570s an Inca system of rotating labour service, the mita. Each year, thousands of Indigenous men from a wide region of the Andes were required to travel to Potosí and work in the mines and refineries for a year at a time, for wages too low to live on. Many died underground or from mercury poisoning in the refineries; many others fled their villages to escape the draft. The mita continued, in one form or another, until the early nineteenth century.

The silver of Potosí, and of the mines of Mexico, flowed out across the world. Much of it went to Spain, and from Spain to its creditors in Genoa, Antwerp and Amsterdam, paying for Spain's wars. A great deal of it crossed the Pacific on the Manila galleons, or travelled east through Europe and the Indian Ocean, and ended up in China — where, as we saw in Chapter 6, the Ming state had begun demanding its taxes in silver. The farm had gone global. An Andean miner's labour paid a Chinese peasant's land tax.

The human cost of the conquest was catastrophic. The Indigenous population of the Americas fell by a very large proportion — most estimates suggest somewhere between half and nine-tenths — in the century after 1492. Historians agree that the main killer was epidemic disease, such as smallpox and measles, to which the people of the Americas had no immunity. But disease worked together with war, enslavement, forced labour, famine and the destruction of communities; and the debate over how to weigh these causes is long, painful and unfinished.

The natural slave, again

The conquest raised a question that the Spanish crown took seriously: by what right did Spain rule these peoples and take their labour?

In 1550 and 1551, at the city of Valladolid, the emperor Charles V convened a panel of theologians and jurists to hear a debate on exactly this question. On one side was the humanist scholar Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, who argued, drawing explicitly on Aristotle's theory of natural slavery that we met in Chapter 4, that the Indigenous peoples of the Americas were by nature inferior and therefore rightly subject to Spanish rule. On the other side was Bartolomé de las Casas, a Dominican friar who had himself once held an encomienda, had given it up in horror, and had spent decades documenting the atrocities of the conquest. Las Casas insisted that the Indigenous peoples were fully rational human beings, with the same rights as Spaniards.

The panel never issued a formal verdict. Las Casas's arguments influenced Spanish law, which formally prohibited the enslavement of Indigenous people. But they did not stop the exploitation of their labour. And Las Casas himself, early in his career, had suggested that the colonists' labour needs could be met by importing enslaved Africans instead, in order to spare the Indigenous peoples. Late in life he bitterly regretted it, concluding that the enslavement of Africans was just as unjust. By then, the Atlantic slave trade was well under way.

The numbers

The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, the result of decades of work by historians led by David Eltis and David Richardson, has assembled records of more than 36,000 slaving voyages. Its estimates are the best we have. Between 1501 and 1866, around 12.5 million people were forced aboard slave ships on the coast of Africa. Around 10.7 million survived the voyage across the Atlantic — the "Middle Passage" — to be landed in the Americas. The difference, some 1.8 million people, died at sea, from disease, dehydration, violence and despair.

They were taken overwhelmingly to the places where the farm's most profitable crops were grown. The largest single destination was Brazil, which received close to five million captives over the whole period — more than any other country — to work on sugar plantations, in gold and diamond mines, and later on coffee estates. The British Caribbean received about 2.3 million, the French Caribbean over a million, and the Spanish Americas well over a million. Mainland North America — the territory that became the United States — received fewer than 400,000, less than four per cent of the total.

That last figure is one of the most revealing numbers in the history of the farm, and we will return to it.

Sugar

The engine of the Atlantic farm was sugar.

Sugar cane had been grown with enslaved labour on Mediterranean and Atlantic islands — Cyprus, Sicily, Madeira, São Tomé — since the Middle Ages. In the sixteenth century the Portuguese transplanted the system to Brazil. In the 1640s it reached the English island of Barbados, where planters, advised by Dutch merchants with Brazilian experience, switched from tobacco and cotton grown by indentured English servants to sugar grown by enslaved Africans. Within a generation Barbados had become one of the richest places on earth, and its society had been transformed into a small white planter elite ruling a large and growing enslaved African majority. The same "sugar revolution" spread to Jamaica, the Leeward Islands, the French islands of Martinique, Guadeloupe and Saint-Domingue, and beyond.

Sugar was a uniquely demanding crop. The cane had to be cut at exactly the right moment and crushed within hours, or the juice would spoil; the juice then had to be boiled down in a series of copper kettles over furnaces that burned day and night during the harvest. A sugar plantation was, as many historians have pointed out, as much a factory as a farm, with a division of labour, a work discipline and a pace set by the machinery and the crop. The work was organised in gangs, with the strongest men and women in the "great gang" doing the heaviest field work, and was driven by the whip. During the harvest, enslaved people worked through the night in shifts at the mill and the boiling-house. Accidents with the rollers of the mill were common, and a hatchet was sometimes kept beside the rollers to cut off the arm of a worker caught in them.

The death rate was appalling. On many Caribbean sugar islands, deaths among the enslaved exceeded births throughout the era of slavery. The population could only be kept up by continuous imports from Africa. Planters calculated, quite openly, that it was cheaper to work people to death and buy new ones than to provide the food, rest and care that would allow families to survive and children to grow up. The British Caribbean received some 2.3 million captives over the course of the slave trade; when slavery was abolished in the 1830s, the enslaved population of the British Caribbean colonies was somewhere around two-thirds to three-quarters of a million.

This is the farm reduced to its most brutal arithmetic. In Chapter 1 I described the farmer as someone who keeps the herd alive because the herd is his living. On the sugar islands, as long as new captives could be bought cheaply, the planters did not even do that.

The farm in North America

In mainland North America, the arithmetic ran differently — and the difference is just as revealing.

Fewer than 400,000 enslaved Africans were landed in the territory that became the United States. Yet by the census of 1860, there were nearly four million enslaved people in the country. Unlike in the Caribbean, the enslaved population of North America grew by natural increase: more were born than died. Historians attribute this to a combination of factors, including a less deadly disease environment, the nature of tobacco and later cotton cultivation compared with sugar, and more balanced numbers of men and women. But it was also, for slaveholders, a matter of calculation.

In January 1819, Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, wrote to Joel Yancey, the overseer of his plantation at Poplar Forest, about the management of the enslaved people there. He told Yancey that he considered the labour of a "breeding woman" as no object, and that "a child raised every 2. years is of more profit then the crop of the best laboring man." Then he added: "in this, as in all other cases, providence has made our interests & our duties coincide perfectly."

There, in a single letter, is the whole farm: the feed (the children, counted as capital), the shepherd (the overseer receiving instructions), and the story (providence, which has arranged for the owner's profit and his moral duty to point the same way).

After the United States banned the import of enslaved people from abroad in 1808, the natural increase of the enslaved population became the main source of new labour for the expanding cotton frontier of the Deep South. Over the following half-century, roughly a million enslaved people were forcibly moved from the older slave states of the Upper South, such as Virginia and Maryland, to the new cotton lands of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas — by many historians' estimates, a majority of them through sale in the domestic slave trade. Families were broken up at auction; children were sold away from their parents; husbands from wives. In the slave markets of New Orleans and Richmond, enslaved people were examined, stripped and priced like livestock.

Cotton and capital

By the eve of the American Civil War, cotton grown by enslaved people was the most valuable export of the United States, making up more than half of the value of all its exports, and the raw material of the largest industry in the world: the cotton mills of Lancashire, which we will enter in the next chapter. The great majority of the raw cotton used in British mills came from the American South.

The enslaved people themselves were the single largest financial asset in the American economy. By 1860, historians estimate, the market value of the nearly four million people held in slavery in the United States was around three billion dollars or more — more than the value of all the country's railroads and factories combined. They were mortgaged, insured, bought on credit and used as collateral for loans from banks in New Orleans, New York and London. The economic historian Bonnie Martin has shown how commonly enslaved people were mortgaged in the American South to raise capital, even by small slaveholders.

How did the productivity of enslaved cotton pickers rise so dramatically in the decades before the war? The historian Edward Baptist, in The Half Has Never Been Told (2014), argued that the increase was driven above all by torture: a "pushing system" in which enslaved people were given rising daily picking quotas and whipped if they failed to meet them. The economic historians Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode have strongly disputed his evidence and argued that new, more easily picked varieties of cotton seed were the main cause. The debate is unresolved, and both factors may have played a part. What no one disputes is that the whip was the basic instrument of labour discipline on cotton plantations, and that its use was systematic.

The companies

The Atlantic farm was not run by planters alone. Behind them stood a new kind of institution: the chartered joint-stock company.

The English East India Company was founded in 1600 and its Dutch rival, the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC), in 1602. The VOC's shares were traded on the Amsterdam exchange, making it one of the first publicly traded companies in history. These companies were granted by their governments a monopoly on trade with large regions of the world, and also extraordinary powers: to make war, build forts, govern territory and administer justice. They allowed thousands of investors, great and small, to share in the profits of overseas trade and conquest while limiting their risk.

For the slave trade, the English crown chartered the Royal Adventurers into Africa in 1660 and its successor, the Royal African Company, in 1672. Its governor was the king's brother, James, Duke of York, the future James II, and its shareholders included members of the royal family, courtiers, merchants — and, as we saw at the end of the last chapter, the philosopher John Locke. During the later seventeenth century the company transported well over a hundred thousand enslaved Africans to the Americas. Many of them were branded with the letters "DY", for the Duke of York, or with the company's initials. After the company lost its monopoly in 1698, the trade was opened to private merchants, and the ports of Bristol and above all Liverpool became its centres.

The so-called "triangular trade" is a simplification, but it captures the basic flow. Ships left European ports with manufactured goods — textiles, guns, metalware, alcohol — which were exchanged on the African coast for captives sold by African traders and states. The captives were carried across the Atlantic and sold in the Americas. The ships returned to Europe carrying sugar, tobacco, cotton, rum and other plantation produce, or bills of exchange representing the profits. At every stage, there were profits for shipowners, merchants, bankers, insurers and the manufacturers who supplied the trade goods.

The companies also show how the farm could be run on the scale of whole continents. In 1757, at the battle of Plassey, the forces of the English East India Company, commanded by Robert Clive, defeated the Nawab of Bengal. In 1765, the Mughal emperor granted the company the diwani of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa — the right to collect the land revenue of one of the richest regions in Asia. A private company of shareholders in London now held the fiscal machinery of the Mughal farm that we examined in Chapter 6. Five years later, in 1769–1770, Bengal was struck by a catastrophic famine. Estimates of the number of people who died vary enormously, from about one million to ten million, and historians debate how far the company's revenue demands and trading practices made it worse. What is not disputed is that the company's collection of revenue continued during the famine, and that its officials were later widely accused of having profited from it.

Who profited?

How much did the Atlantic farm contribute to the wealth of Europe? The question has been argued over for nearly a century.

In 1944, the Trinidadian historian Eric Williams — who later became the first prime minister of independent Trinidad and Tobago — published Capitalism and Slavery. He argued that the profits of the slave trade and the plantations had helped to finance Britain's industrial revolution, and that Britain abolished the slave trade and slavery not mainly for humanitarian reasons but because the slave economy had become less profitable and less important to British capitalism. Both theses have been heavily debated. Economic historians such as Stanley Engerman argued that the profits of the slave trade were too small, relative to the British economy as a whole, to have financed industrialisation. Others, such as Joseph Inikori, have argued that the Atlantic economy as a whole — the markets it created, the raw materials it supplied, the shipping, finance and insurance it stimulated — was central to British industrial growth. The debate has not been settled.

What is now much clearer, thanks to research such as the Legacies of British Slavery project at University College London, is who in Britain owned enslaved people and what became of their wealth. When the British Parliament abolished slavery in most of its colonies in 1833, it did not compensate the enslaved. It compensated the slave-owners. The government paid out twenty million pounds — around forty per cent of the state's annual expenditure at the time — to some 46,000 claimants, ranging from great absentee planters and merchant houses to widows and clergymen in England who owned a handful of people in the Caribbean as an investment. Part of the money was raised through a large government loan; according to the British Treasury, the debt associated with that loan was finally paid off in 2015. The formerly enslaved, meanwhile, were required to continue working without pay for their former owners for several more years under a system of "apprenticeship", which was ended in 1838 after protests in the colonies and in Britain.

Read that again from the point of view of this book. When the farm was finally forced to let the herd go, it was the farmers who were paid for their loss.

The shepherds of the plantation

Every plantation had its managers, and their writings preserve the daily texture of the system with terrible clarity.

Many of the largest Caribbean planters lived in Britain as absentees, leaving their estates to be run by attorneys, managers and overseers. The overseer was often a young man from Britain of modest background who hoped to make his fortune in the colonies and perhaps one day own a plantation himself. The best-documented of them is Thomas Thistlewood, who went to Jamaica in 1750 and worked there as an overseer and later a small landowner until his death in 1786. He kept a diary of some ten thousand pages, which the historian Trevor Burnard has analysed in Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire (2004). It records, alongside notes on the weather and his garden, a regime of violence and sexual exploitation so extreme that it remains difficult to read: savage floggings, invented humiliations, and Thistlewood's systematic rape of the enslaved women on the estates he managed, all recorded in the same matter-of-fact tone as the crops.

Below the overseers were the "drivers", themselves enslaved, who supervised the gangs in the field and carried the whip. They are perhaps the starkest example in this book of the farm's reliance on shepherds drawn from the herd itself. Drivers received privileges — better food, better housing, exemption from field labour — and were placed in an impossible position, enforcing the master's discipline on their own people while being subject to it themselves. Some used their position to protect the people under them; some became instruments of terror; many did both at different times.

And above them all, in Britain, France, the Netherlands and the northern United States, stood a wider class of beneficiaries: merchants, bankers, shipowners, insurers, manufacturers and shareholders who never saw a plantation, and for whom slavery was a line in a ledger. The farm had extended its shepherds and its owners across an ocean.

The story: race

The Atlantic farm needed a story more powerful than any before it. Its owners were, after all, Christians who professed that all humans were children of God, and, increasingly, citizens of countries that proclaimed that all men were born free and equal. The story it produced was race.

Early justifications for enslaving Africans drew on religion: Africans were heathens, and their enslavement could be presented as a route to their conversion. When enslaved people converted, however, their owners did not free them, and colonial legislatures moved to make sure they did not have to. In 1667, Virginia's assembly declared that baptism did not alter a person's condition of bondage. Five years earlier, in 1662, it had decided that the status of a child would follow that of its mother — so that the children of enslaved women, including those fathered by their white owners, would be born enslaved. The Barbados slave code of 1661 described Africans as a "heathenish, brutish" people who must be governed by special laws. France's Code Noir of 1685 regulated slavery in its colonies in detail.

Over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the justification shifted from religion to an idea of permanent, inherited, biological difference. Writers such as Edward Long, in his History of Jamaica (1774), argued that Africans were a separate and inferior species. Later "race science" claimed to measure the differences. The biblical story of the curse of Ham was reinterpreted to explain why Africans were destined to serve. The intellectual edifice was elaborate, and it was entirely in the service of the farm. As the historian Barbara Fields has argued, race did not produce slavery; slavery, and the need to justify it in a society that talked of freedom, produced the modern idea of race.

The historian Edmund Morgan, in American Slavery, American Freedom (1975), made a related argument about the early history of Virginia. In 1676, during Bacon's Rebellion, poor white indentured servants and enslaved Africans fought together against the colony's elite. In the decades that followed, Virginia's ruling planters increasingly turned from indentured European servants to enslaved Africans for their labour, and passed laws that sharply separated the legal status of white and Black people — giving even the poorest white man privileges that no Black person could have. Morgan argued that this helped to bind poor whites to the planter elite through a shared sense of racial superiority. The extent to which this was a deliberate strategy is debated. But the effect is the one B. R. Ambedkar described in Chapter 6: a division not only of labour but of labourers.

The breakouts

The enslaved people of the Americas never accepted the farm. Resistance began on the African coast and continued on the ships: historians of the slave trade estimate that around one voyage in ten experienced an uprising by the captives. It continued on the plantations, in everyday forms — working slowly, breaking tools, feigning illness, stealing back food, poisoning, running away — and in the creation of families, languages, religions, music and communities that the farm could not own.

Many escaped altogether. Communities of escaped slaves, known as maroons, formed in the mountains and forests of Jamaica, Suriname, Brazil and elsewhere. In north-eastern Brazil, the maroon settlement of Palmares survived for most of the seventeenth century and at its height may have had many thousands of inhabitants, before it was destroyed by Portuguese colonial forces in the 1690s; its last leader, Zumbi, was killed in 1695 and is honoured in Brazil today. In Jamaica, the maroons fought the British to a standstill and won treaties in 1739 recognising their freedom and their lands.

There were great revolts: Tacky's revolt in Jamaica in 1760, the Demerara rising in 1823, the "Baptist War" in Jamaica in 1831–32, led by the enslaved Baptist deacon Samuel Sharpe, which involved perhaps sixty thousand people and helped push the British Parliament towards abolition. In the United States, Nat Turner's rebellion in Virginia in 1831 terrified the slaveholding South. Thousands escaped north along the networks of the Underground Railroad, guided by people such as Harriet Tubman, who escaped from Maryland in 1849 and returned again and again to lead others to freedom.

And some told their own stories, which became among the most powerful weapons against the farm's story. Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative, published in 1789, described his capture as a child in Africa, the horror of the Middle Passage and his life in slavery. (The historian Vincent Carretta has found documents suggesting that Equiano may have been born in South Carolina rather than Africa; the question remains unresolved.) Frederick Douglass, who escaped from slavery in Maryland in 1838, published his Narrative in 1845. Describing the moment when, as a young man, he fought back against a notorious "slave-breaker" who had been hired to crush his spirit, he wrote: "You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man."

The greatest breakout of all took place in Saint-Domingue, the French colony on the western part of the island of Hispaniola. By the 1780s, Saint-Domingue was the most profitable colony in the world, producing a large share of the sugar and coffee consumed in Europe, worked by around half a million enslaved people. In August 1791, the enslaved people of the northern plain rose in revolt. Over the following thirteen years, under leaders including Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, they defeated the planters, the armies of France, Spain and Britain, and finally an expedition sent by Napoleon Bonaparte to restore slavery. On 1 January 1804, Dessalines proclaimed the independence of Haiti, the first nation in the world born of a successful slave revolt and the second independent republic in the Americas.

The farm's response to Haiti is one of the most chilling episodes in this book. France refused to recognise Haitian independence. In 1825, with French warships off the coast, King Charles X demanded that Haiti pay an indemnity of 150 million francs — later reduced to 90 million — to compensate the former French colonists for their lost property, including the people who had freed themselves. Haiti, unable to pay, borrowed from French banks to do so. The payments, with interest, continued for many decades; a 2022 investigation by the New York Times estimated that they cost Haiti's economy somewhere between 21 and 115 billion dollars in lost growth over two centuries. The figures are estimates, and their methods have been debated. The principle is not. The herd had broken out, and the farmers sent it a bill.

Abolition, and what came after

The trade and then slavery itself were abolished, piece by piece, over the course of the nineteenth century: by Britain, the slave trade in 1807 and slavery in most of its colonies in 1833; by France, briefly in 1794, then — after Napoleon restored it — finally in 1848; by the United States, through civil war and the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865; and, last in the Americas, by Brazil in 1888. Abolition was the result of many forces: the resistance and revolts of the enslaved themselves; the moral campaigns of abolitionists, Black and white; economic and political changes; and, in the United States, a war that killed some 700,000 people.

It was one of the greatest breakouts in human history. And yet the farm adapted, as it always had.

In the United States, General William Tecumseh Sherman's Special Field Order No. 15, issued in January 1865, set aside land on the coast of South Carolina, Georgia and Florida for settlement by freed families in plots of up to forty acres — the origin of the phrase "forty acres and a mule". Within months, President Andrew Johnson had reversed the order and returned most of the land to its former owners. Without land, most freed people had little choice but to work for their former masters. The system that emerged was sharecropping, in which Black families farmed land owned by whites in return for a share of the crop, and were often kept permanently in debt to the landowner and the local merchant who advanced them supplies. The fence had changed from chains to debt.

Southern states passed "Black Codes" that restricted the movement and employment of freed people and criminalised vagrancy. The Thirteenth Amendment itself contained an exception: slavery and involuntary servitude were abolished "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted". Southern states used that exception to arrest Black men for minor offences such as vagrancy and lease them as convict labour to plantations, mines, railroads and lumber camps, under conditions that the historian Douglas Blackmon called Slavery by Another Name (2008). In the Caribbean and elsewhere, the end of slavery was followed by the importation of hundreds of thousands of indentured labourers from India and China to work the plantations under contracts that bound them for years.

What the plantation teaches

The fence of the Atlantic farm was the most total in this book: the slave ship, the plantation, the law of hereditary bondage that followed the mother, the slave patrols, the fugitive slave laws, and the colour line itself — a fence that a person carried on their skin.

The feed was the labour and the very bodies of the enslaved: their work in the cane fields and boiling-houses, the cotton fields and the mines; their children, counted as capital; their value as collateral for loans.

The shepherds were the overseers, attorneys and drivers on the spot, and, at a distance, the merchants, bankers, insurers and shareholders of the chartered companies and trading houses — the first truly global managerial class.

The story was first religion and then race: the idea that Africans were destined by God or nature to serve, which justified the enslavement of millions in societies that preached freedom, and which has outlived slavery by more than a century and a half.

The breakouts were constant, from shipboard revolts and maroon communities to the Haitian Revolution, the great Caribbean risings, the Underground Railroad and the testimony of people like Equiano and Douglass. Abolition was won. But the farm's response — compensation for the owners, indemnities from Haiti, the reversal of land grants, sharecropping, convict leasing and indenture — showed, more clearly than any other episode in this book, its capacity to survive its own defeat.

Bridge: Lancashire

In 1860, most of the raw cotton spun and woven in the mills of Lancashire in north-west England was grown by enslaved people in the American South. When the American Civil War cut off the supply, the "cotton famine" that followed threw hundreds of thousands of Lancashire mill workers out of work. Many of them — though not all — supported the Union and the cause of emancipation, even at the cost of their own livelihoods; in 1863 Abraham Lincoln wrote to the working men of Manchester to thank them.

The cotton that left the plantations went into a new kind of farm, which used free labour rather than enslaved labour, wages rather than the whip, and the clock rather than the overseer's horn — though it, too, employed children, broke bodies and kept its workers on the edge of hunger. In the next chapter, we follow the cotton to the factory.