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

by David Olusoga

The most effective and remarkable of these had been the almost surgical excision of slavery and the slave trade from the histories of Britain of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Here geography, coupled with a strong urge to focus on abolition rather than slavery, had made the process easier. The cotton plantations of the American South existed on the soil of the United States itself; British slavery took place an ocean away on the islands of the Caribbean or the plantations of the North American colonies. As a result even today many people in Britain have a more vivid image of American slavery than they do of life as it was for enslaved Africans on the British plantations of the Caribbean. Slavery for them conjures up images of cotton fields and whitewashed plantation houses at the end of long avenues of tall trees – the imagery of Roots, Gone With the Wind and 12 Years a Slave. Fewer people find their mind’s eye drawn to images of the semi-industrial process of sugar cultivation in Jamaica, Guyana or Barbados in the eighteenth century, and fewer still think of the British slave fortresses like Bunce Island through which the Africans who worked those plantations were channelled.