Slave Trade and Colonialism

Helen Maria Williams' poetry seeks to unpack many of the social justice issues of the period she was writing in.  Peru tells the cautionary tale of colonialism through the eyes of those being colonized and A Poem on the Bill Lately Passed for Regulating the Slave Trade  was written a year after a committee was formed to organize against slavery.  In Peru, she focuses on Spanish colonialism.  She told the tale of the Incan people in such a way that supported her stance.  Firstly, she wanted to take the reader on a journey.  She wanted it to be an adventure.  She described Peruvia as a lush world of vibrant colors filled with beautiful plants and wildlife.  This description of Peru draws upon a prelapsarian notion.  Peru was beautiful and perfect until the Spanish came and destroyed it just like Eden was perfect before the fall.  Secondly, she rewrote history to justify her stance against colonialism.  She left out key facts about the scientific advances the Inca made and their militaristic society.  They were not as naive as Williams made them out to be, but had she included all of that information, the Peruvians would have been less sympathetic characters.  She rewrote history to justify her stance against colonialism.

Pizarro with the Inca

It is easier to critique an institution that her own country takes part in when she uses an example that is not British.  By relating the story of the Spanish colonizing the Inca, her readers have an easier time empathizing with the Inca.  When she removes the British Crown from her critique, it is a much more palatable truth for the reader to digest.  They are not blinded by their loyalty to their country.  As an extension of her critique of Spanish colonization she is actually critiquing an institution that is happening within her own society.  She also seeks to examine another institution that was happening during her life time: slave trade.  During her lifetime, she would see the abolition of slavery, but she would never see the end to colonization.  England abolished the slave trade in 1807, but living in a British colony was a different type of slavery.  They abolished one form of slavery only to cling harder onto the institution that Williams wanted to dismantle more than anything--colonialism.  It is the exact institution that HMW sought to reform with Peru.

Photograph of the Punjab Lieutenant Governor

Williams wrote A Poem on the Bill Lately Passed for Regulating the Slave Trade in 1788.  That was almost 200 years after the British colonized India.  The idea of colonization was so engrained in British society that it was championed as what should happen.  After her death, from 1858 to 1947, it was considered a period of luxury and excess for the British citizens living in India, but not so much for the natives.  She worked so hard to change the thinking of the time period, but she didn't effect much change.  The need to spread cultural values that Barbauld wrote about in Eighteen Hundred and Eleven seemes to fuel the colonial mindset even after everything the HMW wrote.  The British traded one form of slavery for another believing that colonizing the "savages" was actually bringing the native peoples enlightenment, but what we know from the history of the Inca, even though Williams left out these parts in her depictions of the natives in Peru, the native peoples didn't actually need the help of the colonizers.  The Dutch, Spanish, and British generally only brought death and destruction.

Here is a link to an article of a bunch of pictures that were taken in India during the British Raj.  It's a more modern look on the effect of colonization in a contemporary world.

In the world after Helen Maria Williams' death, the institutions that she wrote about were still intact.  Do you think she would have been happy with the progress the world has made with colonization, or do you think she would still call for more reform?  Why or why not?

Williams saw the abolition of slavery during her lifetime, but never saw the end to imperialism and colonization.  In the modern world, do we still grapple with any type of colonization or have the changes Williams called for been made?  Why?