One tedious aspect of Britain’s post-imperial melancholia is the number of amateur historians who would rather we stopped going on about our role in the slave trade. Isn’t it all in the past? Weren’t we the first to abolish it anyway? In April, the Reform party announced a new policy of halting visas to people from countries seeking slavery reparations from Britain. “The United Kingdom is not an ATM for ethnic grievances from the past,” the party’s home affairs spokesperson, Zia Yusuf, said.
Unfortunately for those who would rather forget, the slave trade, as William Pettigrew argues in this grimly important book, can be found “in the depths of Britain’s grain”. Ninety per cent of the enslaved Africans transported to America went on British ships, and slave traders’ actions transformed Britain in ways that still resonate today.
The erasure of this history began with the abolitionists, who quickly realised that identifying and shaming slave traders might harm their cause. They chose instead to argue that abolition would confirm Britain’s superior moral righteousness. Lauding abolition obscured what Pettigrew calls “slave gain”: Britain’s gigantic profiting from the trade. Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens, in a jointly authored article of 1857, blithely suggested that the gains of slavery had evaporated “as the Arabian Wizard’s money turned to leaves”. Thus began a general tendency to downplay Britain’s role, offshoring slavery’s causes and effects to the Americas or localising them to port cities such as Bristol and Liverpool.
Since April 2021, Pettigrew has led a group of nine academic historians identifying all the known investors – about 13,000 of them – who financed Britain’s brutal trafficking of 3.3 million enslaved Africans, of whom about half a million died during the Atlantic crossing. The traffic began in the 1560s with a syndicate of city merchants, naval and state officials. It soon earned royal approval, because of the role it played in humiliating the Spanish, increasing influence in the New World, establishing a foothold in west Africa, and enlarging the royal purse.
After the Glorious Revolution of 1688, English slave merchants loosened their ties with the monarchy and embraced a free market. The trade expanded beyond political and commercial elites, and out from London to the regions. Bristol and Liverpool shared out the trade in the 18th century, the latter perfecting and industrialising it.
In Pettigrew’s account, hardly an event in this period of British history – the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire of 1666, the 1707 Act of Union between England and Scotland – wasn’t impacted directly or indirectly by the slave trade. Slave gain funded the physical structures, from docks to canals, that helped make Britain a global force. The conventions of mercantile philanthropy also meant that it greatly improved the lives of the sick and poor, mainly through huge endowments to London’s hospitals. Institutions such as the British Museum and the Royal Academy of Music were founded with the help of slave traders’ donations. The Royal Society was not only a pioneer institutional investor in the slave trade but developed the racist “science” that perpetuated its inhuman practices.
Civilised Britons justified participating in the slave trade with what Pettigrew calls “an impressive degree of societal cognitive dissonance”. Daniel Defoe, an uncompromising satirist of his own society, promoted the slave trade in countless articles, arguing that it “exports nothing but what we want to part with, and it imports nothing but what we cannot be without”. Samuel Taylor Coleridge won the Browne Medal for classical poetry for a Greek composition condemning the slave trade; his education at Christ’s Hospital School and Jesus College, Cambridge had been funded by slave traders. Thomas Southerne, author of the successful play Oroonoko, with its unflinching account of the cruelties of slavery, invested £2,000 of the money it generated in slave stocks.
Pettigrew tells the story straight, with little reference to today’s culture wars. The most recent politician cited is Tony Blair. There is no mention of the opprobrium heaped on the National Trust for exploring its historic links to slavery; nor of the toppling of Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol in 2020, although Pettigrew does point out that he was a far less significant slave trader than other Bristolians.
But Pettigrew’s careful tone is ultimately more effective than stridency. In this argument, slave traders cannot be conveniently separated out; they become central to the British project of economic and technological progress and cultural enlightenment. The slave trade, for instance, was at the forefront of effective treatments for smallpox, the concern to save human cargoes from this deadly disease being a simple commercial imperative. Virtually any behaviour could be justified if it supported free trade, including the violent trafficking of children. “Those who fetishise economic advancement,” Pettigrew writes in a rare moment of acerbity, “must confront the role that self-interpreting economics has played in undermining African humanity.” Nigel Farage has said that he is “tired of this endless conversation about the UK’s complicity with slavery”. As this deeply researched and revelatory book demonstrates, the conversation has barely begun.
• Britain’s Slave Traders: A Forgotten History by William A Pettigrew is published by Bodley Head (£25). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
