Black and British: A Forgotten History, from the acclaimed historian and star of 'Celebrity Traitors'

by David Olusoga

Granville Sharp’s campaign harnessed an interest in the issue of slavery that already existed and that was building within sections of the public. Here was an institution that raised difficult questions about the limits of the freedoms that Englishmen increasingly valued. Slavery was built on violence; it ripped families apart, separated husbands from wives and children from their mothers. All of this played on late Georgian notions of sentiment and tragedy. Much of this sentimentalism was paternalistic, and fixed the black African very much as a passive victim, but the emotions it elicited were real and powerful. The slow rise of a new Christian philanthropy, the same spirit that had provided both Jonathan Strong and James Somerset with white godparents from the churches in which they had been baptized, inspired a moral and religious fervour in people who, in later years, would be called abolitionists. To them the potential of the Somerset case was clear and unambiguous.