James Cropper, Liverpool docks and the Liverpool & Manchester railway

Journal of Transport History, The, Mar 1998 by Jarvis, Adrian

The group of men among whom he found himself as an impressionable apprentice at the age of seventeen could be held to be dangerous company. Rathbone was closely connected with William Roscoe, the celebrated cultural polymath banker whose name is synonymous with the beginnings of a distinctive Liverpool `arts scene'."7 Most of this group had two things in common: they were of Whig-to-Radical persuasion and they were Dissenters of one complexion or another, mainly Quaker or Unitarian. They were therefore united in a number of highly contentious issues of the day - the abolition of the slave trade, free trade, religious emancipation and, later, the eradication of slavery from the colonies. These were not, it must be recalled, fashionable or popular causes at the time. Roscoe, for example, wrote a poem in praise of the French revolution, and all of the group sailed very close indeed to the wind in their campaign against the orders-in-council which empowered the Royal Navy to stop and search neutral shipping.18

It may be suggested that this group acted in their own pecuniary interest dressed up in the guise of high-minded love of their fellow men. There is little doubt that their concern in the orders-in-council dispute was largely to avoid disruption of trade with the United States, though in the light of the absurd American War of 1812 - which would not have happened had London listened to them - they stand retrospectively justified. This form of counter-attack drew an ingenious response from Cropper.

He was open to the accusation that it was easy to suggest that West Indies traders should accept the probability of ruin through the abolition of slavery when he spoke from the secure position of a successful East Indies trader. He could not, therefore, expect to succeed in his continuing campaign against slavery if he argued on humanitarian grounds. He argued instead that slavery was expensive and inefficient and ought to be abolished in the interests of greater profit. " This was, of course, counter-intuitive, in that any employer concerned with costs of production could see that you could not get cheaper labour than that which you did not pay at all. Not so, said Cropper: the individual output of slaves as compared with wage labour was poor, with resultant high feeding and accommodation costs. Incentives to productivity more or less began and ended with flogging, which had the effect of incapacitating the victim for a time and leaving scars which diminished resale value. Wage labourers entailed no capital depreciation, and when trade was slack they could simply be laid off. When trade was brisk they could be offered bonuses.

In short, it was possible to exploit a wage slave far more efficiently than a chattel slave. In such a context - and, given his interests in the East Indies, only in such a context - he could argue that the large discrepancy in duty between East and West Indian sugars should be abolished, as it was only the preference accorded to the West Indian product which enabled inefficient slave production to compete with efficient wage-labour production. Why, he asked, should the fiscal system be employed to subsidise the moral nastiness of slavery? The figures he produced indicated that the subsidy was of the order of 12 million per year, and he suggested that about a quarter of that sum would suffice to provide transitional help to the plantation owners to abolish slavery.20