SLAVERY AND THE BIRTH OF WORKING-CLASS RACISM IN ENGLAND, 1814–1833The Alexander Prize Essay

Abstract

ABSTRACT. This paper examines racist discourse in radical print culture from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the passing of the Abolition of Slavery Act in Britain. Acknowledging the heterogeneity of working-class ideology during the period, it demonstrates that some radical writers actively sought to dehumanise enslaved and free black people as a means of promoting the interests of the white working class in England. It argues that by promoting a particular understanding of English racial superiority, radical intellectuals such as John Cartwright, William Cobbett, and Richard Carlile were able to criticise the diversion of humanitarian resources and attention away from exploited industrial workers and towards enslaved black people in the British West Indies or unconverted free Africans. Moreover, by presenting a supposedly inferior racial antitype, they sought to minimise the social boundaries that were used to disenfranchise English working men and reinforce their own, seemingly precarious, claims to parliamentary reform and meaningful political representation.In Britain, the early nineteenth century saw the emergence of both a distinctive working-class political identity and new ideas about human difference. The two were not completely discrete phenomena. During this period, the abolition of slavery and the suppression of the transatlantic slave trade entered popular discourse as manifestations of Britain's inherent national moral supremacy.1 Nevertheless, the textures and referents of this patriotism -specifically who and what it was that made Britain so great -were contested. While the industrial working classes in Britain were intellectually as heterogeneous as any social group, a particular strand of radical discourse became dedicated to spreading ideas of a different type of natural English superiority among the nation's disenfranchised workers. This discourse drew ideas about race and nation together with attacks on well-to-do parliamentary abolitionists, and in some cases led to a thoroughgoing pro-slavery position by the early 1830s. For these radicals, enslaved black people in the West Indies neither deserved the attention of British philanthropists, nor were they

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