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

by David Olusoga

The Atlantic slave trade channelled its victims through a process of deliberate de-individualization. As chattels the enslaved were rendered anonymous – at least in the eyes of the traders and the slave owners. This notion of the victims of the Atlantic trade as a great mass of de-individualized black humanity is suddenly and strikingly overthrown by the Registers of Liberated Africans. They cast a sudden flash of light upon the identities of individual Africans, at the very moment they were liberated from the slave ships of the Atlantic trade. Having somewhat miraculously escaped transport to the plantations in Brazil and Cuba we find them in the registers still with their African names, cultures, personal identities and sometimes their familial connections all intact, not yet obscured, hidden or contaminated by new slave personae that, in the Americas, were imposed from above or adopted from below as part of complex survival strategies.