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

by David Olusoga

There was much in Sharp’s Temporary Regulations that was commendable; this, after all, was a blueprint for self-rule and equality drafted at a time when millions of Africans in the New World occupied a chattel status akin to that of livestock. However, that settlement had been established, on the advice of the late Henry Smeathman, just twenty miles from the slave fortress at Bunce Island. The colonists were able to stand on their allotted plots within the Province of Freedom and watch slave ships slip up and down the Sierra Leone River, carrying trade goods to the chiefs and traders inland, and returning with hundreds of fellow Africans, chained and terrified, on their lower decks. The British slave ships that cruised along the shore travelled, as the settlers themselves had done, under the protection of the warships of the Royal Navy. Not only had they set themselves up within one of the centres of the Atlantic slave trade, they had done so in one of the boom decades of that trade.