The Great Distress: Wage Labor and British Antislavery after 1815

In 1834, hundreds of thousands of enslaved people in the British empire became free laborers under the 1833 Abolition of Slavery Act. In Britain that same year, the Poor Law Amendment Act created the first free market in labor for some of the United Kingdom’s poorest workers, agricultural laborers on British and Irish farms. Although political economists in Britain posited that slavery was estranged from the free market, “free labor”—at least for farmworkers—came to Britain and its empire at roughly the same time. For some activists in the British antislavery movement, wage labor appeared to have a civilizing power, and it seemed that enslaved people would need to be taught how to behave in a free labor market so that its “natural” laws would impel them to steady wage work after emancipation. In 1815, the end of the Napoleonic wars brought a prolonged period of economic “distress” in Britain and Ireland. In this era, antislavery thinkers began to reflect on the ways that wages, properly calibrated, could civilize free as well as enslaved workers. This article traces overlapping ideas about the free market in both antislavery and laissez-faire economic thought. It shows how antislavery thinkers struggled with the tension between their faith in a free labor market and their concerns about setting a “civilizing” rate of wages. Finally, it sketches the history of the Quaker abolitionist William Allen’s attempt to build a colony in England that would educate free workers in wage labor.