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On 26 September 1996, a memorial was inaugurated in Westminster Abbey to honour Thomas Clarkson, one of the best known of the British anti-slavery abolitionists. The eulogy was delivered by no less a person than the Bishop of Ely. The inauguration of the Clarkson memorial pointed to a disjunction between academic history and public memory that was attracting scholarly attention. Some of the historians who contributed to Nora's volumes directed attention to buildings that functioned as symbolic sites of public memory. One of these was the Pantheon, to which, in Mona Ozouf's words, on a memorable occasion President Mitterand had summoned the French people to participate in 'a gathering of the national community around its great men'. The Pantheon, however, exemplified another of the conclusions to which Nora's volumes pointed: public memory is not monolithic but pluralist and 'conflictual'.

This volume has emerged from a five-year Japanese research project, ‘Eurasia in the Modern Period: Towards a New World History.’ As the book’s title suggests, it offers an attempt to recast the his...

Econocide. British Slavery in the Era of Abolition, by Seymour Drescher, Second edition, With a new preface by the author and a new foreword by David Brion Davis, xxxii + 279 pp, The University of ...

[First paragraph] Shaping the Stuart World 1603-1714: The Atlantic Connection. Allan I. Macinnes & Arthur H. Williamson (eds.). Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2006. xiv + 389 pp. (Cloth US$ 135.00) Slavery and the British Empire: From Africa to America. Kenneth Morgan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. x + 221 pp. (Paper US$ 32.00) Although an important debate continues about the concept itself, the use of “the Atlantic” has embedded itself in scholarly vernacular. The scholarly output directly spawned by an engagement with the concept continues apace. That ocean, and the peoples who lived and traded along its edges, and who finally moved across it, have provided an important geographical focus for some major reconsiderations of modern history. Prompted by the Macinnes/Williamson volume, I returned to my own undergraduate and graduate notes and essays from courses on Stuart Britain: the Atlantic was totally absent – not even present as a distant speck on our intellectual map. We studied, and debated, the formal histories of migrations to the Americas (i.e. European migrations) but there was no mention of Africa or Africans. And no sense was conveyed that the European engagement with the Americas (in their totality – as opposed to North America) was a two-way, mutual force: that the European world was influenced, indeed shaped in many critical regards, by the Americas: by the land, the products, the peoples, and by the markets of that hemisphere. At its most obvious in the ebb and flow of peoples, even that eluded the historians I encountered as a student. It was as if we were talking about a different cosmos; few moved beyond the conventions of European migrations westwards and little attention was paid to that most dominant of migrations – the enforced African migrations to the Americas.

The bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act in 1807 prompted a remarkable wave of public commemorations across Britain. In contrast to the low-key events of 1907, 2007 saw a sustained and nation-wide urge to commemorate, publicise and discuss the Atlantic slave trade and its abolition. Government interest proved an important influence, and was reflected in a lively educational debate (resulting in changes to the National Curriculum.) This political interest may have stemmed from the parallel debate about modern human trafficking, and contemporary slave systems. Equally, the availability of funding (from the Heritage Lottery Fund) may have persuaded a host of institutions to devise exhibitions, displays and debates about events of 1807. Perhaps the most striking forms of commemoration were in broadcasting and publishing: the BBC was especially active. There were few regions or localities which remained unaffected by the year's commemorations.But why was there such interest? Was 1807, with the outlawing of an unquestioned evil, seen as a moment of national virtue? But if so, how are we to recall the role played by the British in the perfection of Atlantic slavery and the slave trade? The lively debates in 2007, from major national institutions to small local gatherings, revealed the problematic nature of abolition itself. After all, slavery survived, and even the slave trade continued after 1807. So what was important about 1807? The commemorations of 2007 raised public awareness about an important transformation in the British past; it also exposed those intellectual and political complexities about the ending of the Atlantic slave trade which have proved so fascinating to academic historians.

The British did not initiate, but they came to dominate the Atlantic slave trade. Few expressed moral or ethical doubts about slavery. The Anglican church, was directly involved in slavery. When a Christian voice was raised against the slave trade, it was led by Quakers who also played a critical role in the campaign to end the slave trade.

Students of the abolition of the British slave trade and slavery face a daunting volume of material. Quite apart from the rising tide of modern scholarship, the contemporary evidence forms an intim...

Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa and the Atlantic Edited by Derek R. Peterson Athens, OH, Ohio University Press, 2010 ix + 235 pp., ISBN: 978-0-8214-1902-1 ($28.95 paperback) The 200...

Black Writers in Britain, 1760–1890. Edited by PAUL EDWARDS and DAVID DABYDEEN. Edinburgh, 1991. 239pp. £14.95. ISBN 0–74860327–1. The Letters of Ignatius Sancho. Edited by PAUL EDWARDS and POLLY REWT. Edinburgh, 1994. 288 pp. £39.50. ISBN 0–7486–0453–7. Our Children Free and Happy. Letters from Black Settlers in Africa in the 1790's. Edited by CHRISTOPHER FYFE. Edinburgh, 1991. £15.00. ISBN 0–7486–0270–4. The Horrors of Slavery and Other Writings by Robert Wedderburn. Edited by IAIN McCALMAN. Edinburgh, 1991. £30.00 (hardback); £12.95 (paperback). ISBN 0–7486–0312–3.

The story of British abolition has been exhaustively studied over the past generation, and especially before and after the bicentenary of 2007. It has been clear to students in the field, however, ...

The two hundredth anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in 2007 was marked by a host of British institutions. The Abolition Act of 1807 has been described as the most important Act of Parliament ever. Not surprisingly, many major state and civic institutions offered their own distinctive version of 1807. The Houses of Parliament led the way, followed, among others, by the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the National Maritime Museum (both Greenwich and Liverpool). In fact dozens of institutions, down to tiny local schools, offered their own interpretation of the events leading to 1807 — and the significance of that Act. All this was in addition to a veritable blizzard of media coverage, and publications plus hundreds of lectures and a string of academic gatherings. Community-based organizations, ranging from the ‘Equiano Society’ to Wilberforce’s old school in Pocklington, were equally keen to join in. Never, at any point in my adult lifetime, has slavery and the slave trade occupied so central a place in such a broadly based social and political debate as it did in Britain in 2007.1

The Quaker Community on Barbados. Challenging the Culture of the Planter Class, by Larry Gragg, Columbia and London, University of Missouri Press, 2009, x + 192 pp, $39.95, ISBN 978-0-8262-1847-6 D...

This social history looks at African slavery and the Atlantic slave trade which, in the space of 300 years, transported more than 11 million Africans to the Americas and the Caribbean - with millions more dying en route. No other slave system in world history was so regulated and determined by the question of race, or had forcibly removed so many people and scattered them across such vast distances or had such prodigious results for the slave-owning class. Using contemporary accounts, this book shows how the British maritime trade and power were transformed by the Atlantic slave trade, and how ports like Bristol, Liverpool and London grew into international trading centres on the backs of the slaves. The book describes the enslavement of Africans, the brutal conditions for the human cargoes, the slave auctions and prosperous plantocracies of the slave colonies in the West Indian islands of Barbados and Jamaica, the songs of the slaves, revolts and runaways, the effects of conversion to Christianity and growing literacy among the slaves, the abolition campaign, the problems of freedom and the legacy of racism.

(1984). Recurring themes: White images of black life during and after slavery. Slavery & Abolition: Vol. 5, No. 2, pp. 118-140.

In 1764 the Gentleman’s Magazine reported: ‘The practice of importing Negro servants into these Kingdoms is said to be already a grievance that requires a remedy, and yet it is every day encouraged, insomuch that the number in the metropolis only is supposed to be near 20,000.’1 This was in a total population of three quarters of a million. Over the next twenty years, there was a flurry of estimates about the size of the black population. Many of the estimates were politically inspired; ammunition in the increasingly bitter fight between slaveowners and humanitarians. Planters and their supporting scribes deliberately raised their estimates of blacks in England in order to alarm their readers. Then, as in the 1980s, the size of the black community had established itself as a fierce political issue. However imprecise the estimates, there can be little doubt that black society, by the late eighteenth century, had become a striking, unavoidable feature of metropolitan life. The Universal History went so far as to claim that ‘every man who has ever stepped beyond the place of his birth has seen them’.2

The movement of African people from their homelands to the far reaches of the Atlantic empires was to be, in retrospect, the most significant and large-scale enforced movement of peoples in the pre-modern world. The compulsory emigration of black Africans took place over a period of many centuries. If we include the trans-Saharan shipment of Africans to the Mediterranean which became significant in the ninth century, then we are dealing with a migration which spanned 1000 years. It was, however, in the years of European ascendancy, from the fifteenth century to the nineteenth, that this African diaspora reached staggeringly high levels; draining certain African societies of their healthy and largely young labour force and in the process transforming the economics and demographic face of the New World settlements. Naturally enough from such complex and confused historical upheavals it is enormously difficult to assess the numbers of people involved and in fact this topic has become a major academic growth industry. The numbers of Africans forced to leave their homelands is still disputed and various scholars have calculated the total to be anything from ten to twenty-five million. The standard authority, Philip Curtin, convincingly argues that somewhere in the region of ten million Africans landed in the Americas, but there were also to be counted in their millions many more who did not survive capture, upheaval and transportation.1

In the immediate aftermath of Brussels no explanation for what had happened seemed too bizarre to be credible. Those with most to lose — Liverpool Football Club, the local police and the game’s organisers — sought to locate the problem beyond their own control, to spread the blame to others. Within hours of the disaster some were pointing to the activities of the National Front, some of whose pamphlets were found in the debris after the game. There were reports of National Front leafleting, of their banners and of their general presence among the fans before the game. Such a presence by elements from fascist groups in English life ought not to have surprised anyone — though much of the reaction to the news took the form of puzzled outrage — if only because for some years English football crowds had been plagued by the attention and presence of the fascists. But this is far from claiming that any National Front presence at Brussels played an instrumental role in the violence which led to the disaster.

By the late nineteenth century, the British people enjoyed a range of leisure and recreational facilities which their forebears could scarcely have dreamed of. Indeed many of the mass enjoyments of the modern world were well-established features of British life by the 1890s. Modern soccer was played by thousands and watched by millions; cricket too was a popular, participatory and spectator sport. In fact there was a host of games and sports which were newly-codified, nationwide and immensely popular — in schools, in commercial stadiums and in more informal settings — on open spaces, in streets and parks. This was true of tennis, athletics, rowing and rugby (of both varieties). Moreover all of these sports — and more besides — were at the same time being rapidly adopted in a great number of different societies around the world. Black South Africans played football, the descendants of slaves swiftly took up cricket throughout the Caribbean and of course white settlements around the world turned to the leisures of their ‘Mother Country’ — Britain.1

In the forty years between the accession of George III and the end of the century, black society in Britain reached its apogee. Yet even by the earliest years of the new century, that society was in decline, under attack from invisible but nonetheless potent demographic forces. But any understanding of Britain’s black population must end, as it began, with the wider problems of Britain’s slave trading empire for it was the history of the slave trade and of the slave colonies which, to a large degree, dictated the changing size and patterns of the black population in Britain.