THERE IS DEATH IN THE POT - The University of Texas at Arlington

“[Are] we justified in transporting men in chains from one country, to be tortured for the
gratification of our appetites in another?” Hillier asked. 80 Samuel Taylor Coleridge
argued that consumption, especially female consumption, had cost eight million lives in
the East Indies. In exchange for that “most foul and heart-inslaving guilt,” Coleridge
claimed, British consumers received “gold, diamonds, silks, muslin & callicoes for fine
Ladies and Prostitutes. Tea to make a pernicious Beverage, Porcelain to drink it from,
and salt-petre for the making of gunpowder with which we may murder the poor
Inhabitants who supply all these things.” 81 In Coleridge’s narrative, “fine Ladies and
Prostitutes” shared the commercial benefits of an expanding empire, suggesting the world
of goods blurred the distinction between virtuous and corrupt womanhood. Abstention
rhetoric linked the violent exchange of the slave trade to the violent exchange of
murderous, cannibalistic consumption.
The ideological association of women and consumption, especially in the
feminized space of the tea table, lent itself to graphic descriptions of ladies’ sugar bowls
contaminated by the flesh and blood of slaves. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,
published at the height of the sugar boycott, Mary Wollstonecraft asked, “Is sugar always
to be produced by vital blood?” Femininity based on “propriety” rather than reason
sweetened male space in much the same fashion as African blood sweetened tea. Thus,
http://slavetrade.parliament.uk/slavetrade/assetviews/objects/thomasclarksonsafricanbox.html?ref=true/
(accessed November 18, 2009). William Cowper described the speculum oris as “a notable engine.” See
Cowper, Sweet Meat has Sour Sauce; or, the Slave Trader in the Dumps,
http://www.brycchancarey.com/slavery/cowperpoems.htm#sweet (accessed November 18, 2009).
80 Hillier, A Vindiciation of an Address to the People of Great Britain, 13.
81 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Lecture on Revealed Religion,” in Lectures 1795: On Politics and
Religion, ed. Lewis Patton and Peter Mann (London: Routledge & Princeton University Press, 1971), 226.
37