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

by David Olusoga

The mills of Lancashire, and the towns that had been built around them, were particularly exposed to shocks elsewhere in the system not merely because the cotton they processed was vulnerable to naval blockade, but because it was produced by enslaved people. Everywhere in the Atlantic world the enslavement of Africans had been met not with passive acceptance but with war and revolution. Slavery was an inherently unstable institution; we understandably focus on its brutality rather than its inefficiency. British abolition had been achieved largely peacefully, but had come about only after a succession of West Indian slave rebellions, and the fear of further impending revolts that drove all sides to the negotiating table in 1833. Slavery in America was extinguished not through slave rebellions but by a war, fought predominantly by white men, over the future of slavery in the South and in the as yet unconquered West. For all her ‘moral prestige’, post-emancipation, anti-slavery Britain had ignored the calls of abolitionists like Thomas Clarkson and remained economically complicit in American slavery. In the 1860s the poor people in the English North-West paid a heavy price for that hypocrisy.