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

by David Olusoga

The greatest criticism of Britain’s crusade against the Atlantic slave trade has to be that the vast majority of slave ships were not intercepted. When measured in raw statistical terms, the anti-slavery squadron was a failure. It has been estimated that around one in five of the approximately 7,750 slave ships that were engaged in the Atlantic trade between 1808 and 1867 were condemned by the courts; 85 per cent of those interceptions were the work of the Royal Navy.39 In all, around a hundred and sixty thousand African captives were liberated. For those thousands of men, women and children, people whose shackles were broken off and who were guided out of the gloom of the slave decks and landed on King Jimmy’s Wharf in Freetown, their personal liberation was miraculous. But they represented only around 6 per cent of the approximately 2.7 million Africans who were captured and put on slave ships bound for the Americas in the three decades after 1836.40 In its first decades of operation not only did the squadron fail to have a significant impact on the scale of the Atlantic trade, it watched impotently as the trade increased markedly. By the 1820s it reached levels of intensity beyond even those of the 1780s, when the British trade was at its apex.