A powerful example of abolitionist imagery, printed onto a receptacle designed to hold sugar: the most profitable commodity produced by enslaved labour in the British-owned Caribbean plantations.
The 1807 Abolition Act outlawed the capture of and trade in enslaved Africans in the British colonies. However, the institution of slavery, and the plantation economy, remained an ever-present part of British society. Despite continuous grass-roots campaigning against the use of enslaved labour, there was little traction for a total abolition bill in Parliament whilst powerful political organisations like the West India Lobby sought to protect the lucrative Caribbean sugar industry. As a result, the critique of slavery during the second wave of abolition was once again championed by religious radicals and women, whilst Parliament dragged its feet on taking legislative action.
The present piece of pottery is almost certainly associated with the Female Society for Birmingham, West Bromwich, Wednesbury, Walsall, and their Respective Neighbourhoods, for the Relief of British Negro Slaves. Founded in 1825, this group held meetings, lectures, and anti-slavery fairs, and fundraised through the sale of abolitionist handicrafts, pottery, publications, and composite albums. Examples of the images used on this transferware sucrier can be found in such albums, including one held at the New York Public Library (ID: b11668324), and another presented to King George IV, in the Royal Collections Trust (RCIN 1125994) [see below for more details].
The Society counted amongst their founding members Sarah Wedgwood (1734-1856), wife of pottery magnate Josiah Wedgwood, whose workshops produced the first iteration of the “Am I Not a Man and Brother” motif referenced in female counterpart on the lid of this receptacle. This influential logo, originally designed in 1787 for the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, was reproduced as jewellery, on the title-pages of books and pamphlets, and on ceramics and other household wares. The kneeling, chained, supplicant, enslaved African figure became synonymous with the British abolitionist movement, and has been much interpreted in the context of its white saviour overtones.
The Female Society for Birmingham also promoted a hugely successful sugar boycott. Following in the footsteps of the 1791-92 Anti-Saccharine Campaign, the women of the Female Society disseminated information about the horrors of the sugar industry to encourage British consumers to eschew the products of enslaved labour. In some instances, this meant buying “East India” sugar instead (produced in South East Asia), or it could mean a total refusal. As household provisioning was usually the domain of women, such a boycott was a way in which those who had little direct political power could wield influence over this polarising issue. Interior design and tableware were also considered to be feminine, domestic concerns. The choice to serve tea and sugar from a set of china bearing expressly abolitionist sentiments was a provocative political statement within the confines of genteel society.
Such boycotts could have a real and measurable impact upon the fortunes of Caribbean sugar merchants. In his 1791 publication An Address to the People of Great Britain, on the Utility of Refraining from West India Sugar or Rum, William Fox quantified the literal human cost of each pound of sugar produced by enslaved labour, at two ounces of flesh. This, alongside other harrowing exposés of the conditions on sugar plantations, resulted in what is thought to have been as many as 25,000 families abstaining from the consumption of West India sugar. These statistics come from the papers of Josiah Wedgwood, and as such it’s no wonder that his wife would be instrumental in reinitiating the boycott several decades later.
Staffordshire pottery had a long and intimate association with the Abolitionist cause. Amongst the most powerful pottery magnates, there were prominent Anti-Slavery campaigners in the Wedgwood, Spode, Minton, Davenport and Ridgeway families, actively campaigning towards the 1807 Act, and again in the 1820s and 1830s (Jones). The production of abolitionist ceramic wares began with the Wedgwood medallions, but was carried forward and particularly enhanced by the advances in transferware techniques, which hit their stride in the 1820s. This method of printing an engraved illustration from a copper plate to a piece of china via a paper transfer made it possible to reproduce text and illustration on ceramics without the labour-intensive process or hand copying, sgraffito or delicate glazing.
There is a good chance that this piece was made in Herbert Minton’s workshop. In The Fifth Report of the Female Society … (Birmingham, 1830) there is a notice advertising to members that: “Anti-Slavery China may be purchased at prime cost, of Sarah Bedford and Son, China Rooms, New Street, Birmingham; and Associations and District Treasurers can have any quantity by writing to Herbert Minton, China Manufacturer, Potteries, Staffordshire” (p.69). In the same report, amongst the societies resolutions, the terms and aims of the sugar boycott are clearly stated: “That this Society, convinced that abstinence from the use of Slave cultivated Sugar is one of the best modes to which recourse can be had to express its abhorrence of the system of Colonial Slavery; and that the exclusive consumption of the produce of free labour is the most effectual means of annihilating the existence of that scourge of humanity […] earnestly desires, that its Members will endeavour by their influence, as well as by their example, to promote the exclusive use of the productions of free labour in the neighbourhoods in which they reside” (p.46).
The four transfer-printed illustrations on the bowl are as follows: an enslaved woman kneels before broken chains, a copy of the Holy Bible held to her chest. Beneath her the legend “This Book tell Man not to be cruel. Oh that Massa would read this Book.” The image and caption are probably sourced from a broadside abridgement of Hannah More’s poem “The Sorrows of Yamba or the Negro Woman’s Lamentation,” first published in the 1790s and much reproduced in abolitionist tracts and chapbooks thereafter. There is a copy of this broadside at Royal Museums Greenwich (ID: ZBA2552), which is titled “The Negro Woman’s Lamentation,” and given a date of c.1805. A version of the same image and caption is then used again for the frontispiece of Mary Dudley’s 1828 pamphlet Scripture evidence of the sinfulness of injustice and oppression: respectfully submitted to professing Christians, in order to call forth their sympathy and exertions, on behalf of the much-injured Africans. The image on the other side of the bowl shows an enslaved woman mourning a dead child in her lap. This transfer closely matches an untitled print included in an album held at the New York Public Library compiled by the Female Society for the Relief of Negro Slaves (ID: b11668324). The two repeating transfers on the lid of the bowl derive from the original Wedgwood logo for the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, here rendered as a female rather than male figure. Versions of this adapted image were used by many women’s anti-slavery societies, and it is repeated in both the Female Society album at NYPL, and delicately engraved onto a song-sheet titled “Negro Woman Dost Thou Chide Us?” in the album in the Royal Collections Trust (RCIN 1125994). A later notable iteration of the motif was engraved in 1835 by Patrick Henry Reason “A Coloured Young Man of the City of New York” (caption) (Mass Hist: https://www.masshist.org/database/1681).
Jones, Mark. “The mobilisation of public opinion against the slave trade and slavery: Popular abolitionism in national and regional politics, 1787-1838.” PhD Dissertation, University of York, 1999. Accessed online 12 Sept 2023: https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/14169/1/286110.pdf .
