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

by David Olusoga

Those who fought for the patriots must have hoped that the ideals of the Declaration of Independence would, some day, apply to them, but more American slaves concluded that King George was likely to confirm their freedom than George Washington. Yet while George Washington was a slave owner, King George was monarch of a nation that in the 1770s and 1780s was the most prolific slave-trading power in the North Atlantic. That Britain, with her fleets of slave ships and her sugar islands carpeted with plantations, was regarded as the best friend of the slave shows how desperately short of friends Africans in the New World were.