The Perils of Improvement: Burke, Slavery, and Colonial Governance in the West Indies

Edmund Burke’s thoughts on plantation slavery have long been the subject of scholarly attention. Too often, however, discerning Burke’s long-term intention in relation to slavery has taken precedence over examining the specific administrative strategies he proposed for managing enslaved populations in the interim. Seeking to remedy this gap, the article reads Burke’s Sketch for a Negro Code as an exercise in colonial ameliorationism; that is, a reform programme that looked to ameliorate the institution of slavery as a way of strengthening British colonialism in the West Indies and civilising the African coast. Using colonial ameliorationism as an interpretive lens, I argue, allows us to reconstruct a consistent Burkean vision for colonial management in the West Indies, one that survived his vacillations on the question of abolition. It also throws into doubt the common argument that Burke saw imperial governance in negative terms; a matter of taming abuses of power and exercising restraint. In the West Indies, by contrast, Burke’s commitment to ameliorationism led him to embrace a productive form of colonial power aimed at enhancing the physical and mental capacities of the enslaved population through discipline, religious instruction, and the encouragement of biological reproduction. I conclude by showing how Burke’s faith in the improvability of the slave system is vulnerable to his own criticisms of other projects for political reform; namely that a certain guilelessness can blind reformers to the dangers inherent in their projects and reconcile them to what they purport to oppose.