Caribbean and the Slave Trade

Historiographical and Theoretical Context

Given that the early modern consumer cultures were all thoroughly grounded in the wealth produced by the African slave trade and Caribbean slave plantations, initial studies of early modern consumer culture are reticent in addressing slavery and the slave trade. The landmark collection edited by John Brewer and Roy Porter, Consumption and the World of Goods (1994), for example, was one of the first to backdate the birth of European consumer culture to the early modern period, yet from fifteenth-century Italy to sixteenth-century Holland to eighteenth-century England, their work largely ignores the slave trade. Though there was slightly more attention on empire in the subsequent volume edited by Ann Bermingham and Brewer (1995), the slavery-based transatlantic economy that drove the growth in consumption remained peripheral to the study of European consumer cultures.

At the same time, the literature on the “bourgeois public sphere” (Habermas 1989) also has generally ignored the colonial connections of the new political public sphere of the eighteenth century. Although many critics of Jurgen Habermas's public sphere model focus on his lack of attention to “subaltern counterpublics” and the constitutive exclusion of women from the masculine public sphere, few noted how his understanding of publicity precluded any discussion of the colonial world in relation to an emerging modernity. Consuming publics arguably played a crucial part in the emergence of a political public sphere in the era of slavery and created a consumer culture premised on slave-based economies in the Caribbean. Public spaces of consumption, such as London's coffeehouses, were “the site for the public life of the eighteenth century middle class, a place where the bourgeoisie developed new forms of commerce and culture” (Schivelbusch 1992, 59). They were dedicated both to the consumption of colonial goods and to the discussion and transaction of colonial trade, including the slave trade and the sale of enslaved African children to work as domestic servants in British households. As a political public formed here, that public was also forming relations of consumption premised on distant imperial trade and the ingestion of colonial commodities and labor.

[Page 141]Consuming publics, defined as elements of the public oriented toward a world economy from which a new cornucopia of consumer goods flowed, were crucial to the emergence of London as the center of networks of material and cultural exchange that spanned the world. Through the work of Chandra Mukerji, Simon Schama, Colin Campbell, and others, the modern capitalist consumer emerges as a complex bundle of impulses toward spending and saving, acquisitiveness and asceticism, gratification and deferment. Puritanism and hedonism occur as a central contradiction within capitalist consumer culture, closely related to concerns over the domestic and moral impact of empire, associated both with its exotic luxuries and with the system of slavery itself. Through various phases of the formation of Atlantic markets and cultures of consumption, this initial set of dilemmas concerning bodily indulgence and moral corruption, consumer luxury and producer exploitation, natural acquisitiveness and moral restraint, have repeatedly resurfaced right up to the ethical consumer movements of today.

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