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

by David Olusoga

The forces that led Britain to become a slave-trading and slave-owning nation in the seventeenth century have been discussed earlier, and are relatively straightforward. The nation was drawn into the trade for the same reason that English traders like John Lok and Thomas Wyndham broke Portugal’s monopoly of the African gold trade in the sixteenth century and English planters on Barbados moved into sugar cultivation a century later. Simply put, the English (later the British) saw the profits being made by their Portuguese, Spanish and then Dutch competitors and wanted a slice of the action. By contrast the forces that led to the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, and then of slavery itself in 1833, are far more complicated, opaque and contested. What we do know is that the view that the trade in slaves was a national sin emerged in the 1770s and then spread rapidly, growing to become an intellectual and ethical current that ran through society and carried the abolition movement forward. Once it emerged, British abolitionism forced the issue of slavery and the contested humanity of black people into the centre of British politics, where it remained long after the slave trade and slavery had been abolished. Abolitionism, and the developing sense that slavery belonged to the past rather than the future, was one of the forces that shaped and influenced Britain’s relationship with Africa and people of African descent on three continents until at least the end of the nineteent...