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

by David Olusoga

Abolition was portrayed as something that was to be given to the enslaved by the British people rather than seized by them. Yet when the enslaved rose up against their brutalization and commoditization, whether on a plantation or a slave ship of the Middle Passage, and demanded freedom through physical force there were many in Britain who found this alternative picture of the African profoundly disturbing. This discomfort about black agency was repeatedly seized upon by the growing pro-slavery lobby and channelled into propaganda that played upon the well-established racial caricature of Africans as savage people whose innate capacity for violence necessitated brutal suppression and justified slavery.