Crown, Commerce, and Chains: Human Bondage under Britain’s and France’s Monarchies

History

By Dr Shravan Nosib

“Evil destroys even itself” — Aristotle

On the docks of Liverpool and Nantes in the late eighteenth century, bales of raw cotton were unloaded from ships that had crossed the Atlantic, their holds heavy not only with fibre but with the invisible weight of empire. That cotton would be spun into cloth in Manchester and Rouen, sold across Europe and Asia, and celebrated as the fabric of modernity. Yet behind this story of industrial triumph lay a political architecture built and sustained by two of Europe’s most powerful institutions: the British and French monarchies.

The history of slavery and cotton is often told through the lives of plantation owners, merchants, and enslaved people themselves. Less frequently examined is the role of the state — specifically the crown — in transforming forced labour into a pillar of imperial wealth and national power.

The Royal Blueprint for Empire

By the seventeenth century, overseas trade had become a matter of statecraft rather than private adventure. In Britain, King Charles II granted a royal charter to the Royal African Company in 1672, effectively placing the English slave trade under royal patronage. Members of the royal family and political elite invested in the company, which transported tens of thousands of enslaved Africans to the Americas.

France pursued a similarly centralized model. Under Louis XIV, colonial expansion was tightly bound to the authority of the crown. State-backed trading companies and royal administrators governed plantation economies in the Caribbean, especially in Saint-Domingue, Guadeloupe, and Martinique. These colonies became engines of wealth, fuelling both metropolitan industry and royal revenue.

In both empires, the monarchy did not merely permit slavery but also structured, regulated, and protected it. Brutal and inhuman force was often used to enforce this barbaric exploitation.

Cotton and Industrial Greed

The late eighteenth century marked a turning point. Britain’s Industrial Revolution transformed cotton from a secondary crop into a global commodity. Steam-powered mills in Lancashire demanded unprecedented quantities of raw fibre, while French manufacturers expanded their own textile industries to compete in European and Mediterranean markets.

Plantations across the Atlantic — especially in the southern United States — answered this demand. Although these cotton fields lay beyond direct British and French rule, they were deeply embedded in European financial systems. British, French, and American banks extended credit, insurers underwrote shipments, and merchants — often operating through imperial trade networks — controlled the flow of goods. Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds, BNCI, J.P. Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo were at the forefront of this merciless economic exploitation.

The wealth generated by this system did not stop at factory gates. Customs duties, port fees, and colonial profits flowed into national treasuries, strengthening monarchies at home and funding imperial ambitions abroad.

Royal Decree

One of the most enduring legacies of monarchy in the age of slavery was legal authority.

In 1685, Louis XIV issued the Code Noir, a royal decree that defined the legal status of enslaved people in French colonies. It classified them as property, regulated their treatment, and formalized slavery as an institution of the state. Though often framed as a civilizing code, its primary function was to secure plantation economies under the authority of the crown.

Britain took a less centralized approach, relying on colonial assemblies and common law traditions. Yet these systems operated under royal sovereignty. Property rights in human beings were recognized and enforced in courts that ultimately answered to the crown.

Slavery was not an informal practice in both empires. It was a legal condition upheld by sovereign power.

The Empire’s Armed Hand and the Black Spartacus

Military forces sustained what law legitimized. British and French navies protected shipping lanes that connected Africa, the Americas, Europe and Asia. Colonial troops and militias suppressed revolts and guarded plantations, ensuring that the flow of cotton and other commodities remained uninterrupted. The notorious East India Company, while trading in Opium under the cover of tea and spices, was a major player in the slave trade between India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Africa and colonizer Britain.

At the centre of this system’s greatest rupture stood the indomitable “Black Spartacus” Toussaint Louverture, a former slave who transformed a fragmented uprising into a disciplined revolutionary movement that would shake the foundations of the European empire. A skilled military strategist and political thinker, Louverture navigated the shifting rivalries of France, Britain, and Spain, forging an army capable of defeating professional European forces. By 1801, he had effectively made Saint-Domingue autonomous, abolishing slavery and drafting a constitution that challenged the very premise of colonial monarchy.

Although he was eventually captured and died in a French prison, his leadership changed Atlantic history. The Haitian Revolution not only destroyed France’s most lucrative colony but also sent a powerful message across the enslaved world: that imperial power, even when backed by crowns and cannons, could be overturned by organized resistance. Louverture literally single-handedly dealt a death blow to this barbaric exploitation of humans by humans.

Pax Paradox: Enforcers as Abolitionists

By the early nineteenth century, the political wind had changed, paving the way for a paradigm shift in this harrowing narrative. William Wilberforce delivered his first abolition speech to the British Parliament in 1789 and continued doing so annually thereafter until 1807.  The bill was ultimately passed in the same year, just days before his death. Britain abolished the transatlantic slave trade in 1807 and slavery itself in 1833. France followed permanently in 1848 after briefly reinstating slavery under Napoleon. The Second World War broke the final fetters of colonizers and paved the way for the emancipation of former colonies.

Yet emancipation carried a bitter irony. In Britain, the state compensated slave owners for the loss of their “property,” transferring vast sums of public money to former beneficiaries of the system. The formerly enslaved received nothing.

The crowns that had helped build the architecture of slavery now presided over its dismantling, even as the economic and social hierarchies it created remained largely intact. It is not surprising, therefore, that economic slavery persists to this day under a well-grounded framework and foundation.

Reparations: The Runnymede Trust

In September 2025, the Runnymede Trust published a report proposing a blueprint for reparative justice. It recommends a formal apology by King Charles as “a welcome, symbolic first step” towards reparative and proactive reconciliation and the possibility of embracing an ethic of respect, compassion and prosperity without exploitation. The report emphasizes that “Reparations is not about exacting collective punishment or confessions of guilt – a Crown apology should only be offered if there is an accompanying government promise to engage with the systemic work that needs to be done to see how the legacies of slavery have coded our economic and financial infrastructures, and to genuinely commit to their reform and transformation.”

It is hoped that CHOGM, planned for later this year in Antigua and Barbuda, will formally address this crime against humanity and set the stage for reparation and reconciliation. The ball is in King Charles’s court.

A Global Legacy

Today, the legacies of cotton, slavery, and monarchy are the subject of renewed debate. Across Britain and France, museums, royal collections, and historic estates face growing scrutiny over how much of their wealth is derived from colonial exploitation. Caribbean nations and advocacy groups call for reparations, while historians uncover the financial ties linking royal institutions to plantation economies.

The legacy of slavery and colonialism lives on in the Windrush and Grenfell scandals, in police killings in the US, joint enterprise prosecutions and more.

Cotton, once celebrated as a symbol of progress, now stands as a reminder of how modern prosperity was stitched together with political power and forced labour.

Crime against humanity

The story of slavery and cotton is not only a tale of markets and merchants. It is a story of states and sovereigns — of royal charters that legalized human trafficking, laws issued in the name of kings, and imperial power that turned distant fields into pillars of European wealth.

Canadian scholar Adam Jones characterized the deaths of millions of Africans during the Atlantic slave trade as genocide, describing it as” one of the worst holocausts in human history”. To examine this history is not merely to revisit the past. It is to confront how national institutions, not just individuals, shaped one of the most consequential systems of exploitation in the modern world.

Humanity should not forget the brutal lessons of such horrendous violence.  We can only be human together, dixit Desmond Tutu.

References: Wikipedia; Archives of Slavery in North America; The Guardian series on Cotton Capital; Black Spartacus: Sudheer Hazareesingh

Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 13 February 2026