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

by David Olusoga

What he was sensing was a generational shift in both people and ideas. The generation that had called the World Anti-Slavery Convention twenty years earlier, many of whom had been veterans of the abolition campaigns of the 1820s and 1830s, were ageing and fading away. In the same years, the optimism of those earlier decades was being overwhelmed by newly emergent racial ideas. The capacities of black people, intellectual, spiritual and political, were increasingly being called into question by new supposedly scientific ideas about race and the capacities of the various branches of humanity. These new ideas fused and mingled with the older racisms. In this new atmosphere not only did increasing numbers of Britons believe that the nation had no business intervening in the issue of slavery in America, some suggested that even abolition in the West Indies, the great act of moral absolution on which so much of Britain’s self-image and patriotic triumphalism rested, might have been a mistake.