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.

treatment of children

There is no question that there was a significant moral component within British policy, and the long-standing belief that the promotion of ‘legitimate’ trades would render the slave trade economically redundant means that the promotion of Britain’s palm-oil trade and the suppression of slavery could be viewed as complementary policies.

When the British landed, the battle was all but over and the city had been evacuated. Lagos belonged to the British; they were to stay for the next hundred and nine years. The bombardment of the city was, like much of British policy on the slave coasts of Africa, motivated by the twin objectives of suppressing the slave trade and opening up the interior of Africa to ‘legitimate trade’, that would be of benefit and advantage to Britain, as the anti-slave-trade mission and colonial expansion increasingly dovetailed.

The industrial revolution that had enabled Victorian Britain to become an economic superpower is often imagined as a great burst of heavy industry, an orgy of smelting, hammering, riveting and forging. Yet in the North-West of England the sounds that wafted over the valleys of industrialized Lancashire and Cheshire were not the thuds of heavy machinery or the roars of the blast furnace but the rhythmic chatter of the power loom and spinning jenny. Here industry and wealth rested upon the mastery of fine precision movement and repeatability. In that region and in smaller clusters elsewhere in the British Isles, mass production on an unprecedented scale had been perfected and new ways of life, new relationships to time and new family structures had all yielded to the discipline of the factory and the factory clock. The most important and profitable of all the goods that flowed out of the coal-blackened cities of northern England in the middle of the nineteenth century were cotton cloth, chintzy fabrics, thread and finished clothing. By 1860 cotton goods accounted for 40 per cent of all British exports.

The cotton industry had started in earnest in Lancashire in the middle decades of the eighteenth century. Some of the initial capital invested in the cotton trade had been accumulated through Britain’s triangular slave trade, as had much of the business acumen that was a feature of the early cotton entrepreneurs. Decades of slave-trading and sugar-trading had brought into being complex networks of finance and credit that helped the cotton industry advance at a rapid speed. As cotton moved from a cottage industry that fitted around older rhythms of rural life into factories and mills, other lessons learnt from New World slavery were applicable. Management techniques and methods of labour accounting drew their inspiration from the plantations of the West Indies. The cotton goods produced in the mills that grew up around Manchester were themselves commodities within the Atlantic economy. Raw cotton, some of it grown by enslaved Africans in the West Indies, was processed into cloth and clothes in English mills and was then sold to the slave-traders of Liverpool. Some of these ‘Manchester Cottons’ were then shipped to the slave coasts of Africa on the first leg of the slave-traders’ triangular journeys. There they were offered to the African and Afro-European coastal slave-traders in exchange for captive Africans. Some of the cheaper Manchester cotton was dyed and patterned to resemble higher quality Indian cotton cloth that had long been sought after in Africa.4 Other Manchest...

Link between cotton boom and salvery.

The Economist wrote that ‘the cotton manufacture, from the first manipulation of the raw material to the last finish bestowed upon it, constitutes the employment and furnishes the sustenance of the largest proportion of the population of Lancashire, North Cheshire, and Lanarkshire . . . if we take into account the subsidiary trading occupations and add the dependent members of their families we may safely assume that nearer four than three million are dependent for their daily bread on this branch of our industry’.11 Four million people was a fifth of the entire population of Britain. The rise of cotton had forged what one American journalist described as ‘a fusion of interests’ between ‘The planters of the United States . . . and the manufacturers of Great Britain’.12 The Cotton Kingdom and Cottonopolis lived in a state of economic co-dependency; disruption in one region risked bringing ruin upon the other.

Liverpool, the dominant port of the eighteenth-century triangular slave trade, became the great nineteenth-century port for the importation of slave-produced cotton. One commentator noted that, ‘When the Whigs . . . effected its abolition there were many who thought that the sun of Liverpool’s prosperity had set. [but] The cotton trade was to do a vast deal more for the great port of the Mersey than the trade in human flesh’.14 This was because, as was explained, ‘The same wind which bore a vessel from the Mersey would waft her across the Atlantic to the rich Sea Islands, or to New Orleans, the great emporium of the Cotton States of America.’15 The Liverpool banks and trading houses that had financed the slave trade diversified into the cotton business. The string of docks along the Mersey rapidly expanded.

The roots of much of this wealth stretched across the ocean and into Southern society, feeding off the lives and labour of 1.8 million American slaves. Their bodies were commodities within the global cotton economy, their sweat and their suffering integral to Britain’s industrial power.

Uk ecnomy still dependant on enslavement long after abolition

Although cotton was drawn into Liverpool from Brazil, Egypt, India and elsewhere, the proportion of that critical commodity which came into Britain from the United States never fell below 73.4 per cent between 1840 and 1858. In the peak year, 97.1 per cent of all the cotton landed on the Mersey came from the US.16 Three decades after abolishing slavery and half a century after abolishing the slave trade Britain was, economically speaking, up to her neck in Southern cotton slavery. Here the barriers between black British history and mainstream history break down. The Africans who grew and picked the cotton that landed in enormous bales on the docks of Liverpool, although they never set foot on British soil, are as much a part of our story as any black migrant. They were as much caught up in British power and the Atlantic economy as the West Indian slaves who just two decades earlier had been freed from bondage on British plantations. When Karl Marx looked at Britain as she was in the early 1860s, he saw the nation dependent upon two systems of slavery. ‘As long as ...

Clarkson and others had therefore called for a boycott of slave-produced Southern cotton and its substitution in the mills of England with cotton produced by free labourers in India. That way, Clarkson suggested, Britain and her factories would no longer be contaminated by America’s ‘blood stained produce’, and the economic foundations of the slave economy of the Mississippi Valley would be swept away. In the two decades since the World Anti-Slavery Convention the opposite had happened. The Cotton kingdom had expanded and Britain had become even more dependent upon Southern cotton.

Although additional supplies of raw cotton were arriving from India and elsewhere, Britain’s imports of cotton in 1862 were half what they had been in the last year of peace. Imports from the United States stood at 4 per cent of their pre-war levels. By October 1862, around 58 per cent of all Lancashire looms stood idle for want of cotton.

At the end of 1862 around 70 per cent of the labour force, 312,200 men and women, were without work. The Lancashire Cotton Famine, as it had become known, impoverished both mill workers and men and women employed in related trades and industries.

In 1863 the government pushed through the Public Works Act, which allowed local authorities to raise funds to pay for public-works schemes that would provide paid work for the unemployed mill workers. Across Lancashire today are their physical remains. Sewers were constructed, canals dug, parks created, roads resurfaced or constructed from scratch. One of the most bizarre relics of the cotton famine can be found above Rochdale. Running across the Pennines through Rooley Moor is the Cotton Famine Road, a substantial, well-built, Victorian cobblestone highway. It shoots incongruously across the heather going to nowhere in particular. It was the labour of thousands of men who would much rather have been earning the high industrial wages available in the cotton mills.

Hundreds of thousands of working-class Britons had been cast into destitution, new forms of poor relief had been hurriedly put in place and the British economy had been dealt a thunderous blow, all because an ocean away the forced labour of four million enslaved, black Americans had been disrupted.

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.

Liverpool in the 1860s was a city that had little sympathy for fugitive slaves or for anyone whose actions disrupted the transatlantic flow of American cotton. More than any British city, Liverpool stood by and sided with the pro-slavery Confederate states during the Civil War.

The pioneering work of the historian Mary Ellison shows how in the face of distress some of the workers of Lancashire acted out of self-interest and sided with the Confederacy, or at least favoured its recognition by the British government.38 Her analysis suggests that the areas worst affected by the cotton famine tended to be those most committed to supporting the South’s right to secede from the Union. This is not to say that the people of Oldham or Preston were pro-slavery but merely that they were desperate for their government to intervene on their behalf, recognize the Confederacy and restore the flow of cotton. Yet many workers, the men and women with the least to gain and the most to lose, did support the North and doing so acted counter to their immediate economic interests. There were men and women in all the mill towns who even during the worst months of the cotton famine regarded themselves as the guardians and inheritors of Britain’s anti-slavery traditions and acted accordingly. To them anti-slavery was so intertwined with Britishness that support for the South was unthinkable. Viewing the conflict through the prism of class they also saw in the plantation owners of the Deep South a propertied class that reminded them of the mill owners and the aristocrats of Britain.

Some of the men and women who were impoverished by the cotton famine understood that the last hands to have touched the bales of cotton that arrived in the mills were those of the black slaves who had loaded them onto ships on the docks of Mobile and New Orleans. The Lancashire towns from which unions and cooperative societies emerged were those that most firmly supported the North and its advocacy of free labour. The town most strongly pro-North and most passionately anti-slavery was Rochdale, where abolitionist and anti-slavery societies had been vocally active long before the outbreak of the American Civil War.

Long before the publication of On the Origin of Species it had been suggested that Africans were natural slaves because they were supposedly stronger and more vigorous than other races yet lacked the gifts of intellect and invention that might have made other forms of work appropriate. Others contended that black people felt pain less acutely than other races, which was surely a trait that further demonstrated their unique suitability for slavery. Slavery was also a fitting institution for Africans as they supposedly would only work when compelled to do so. Slavery was therefore a system appropriate to both their physical make-up and inner nature. The writer Anthony Trollope spoke for many when, after a short trip to the West Indies in 1859, he resolved that black people were an inherently ‘servile race’ lacking in initiative and enterprise. ‘The negro’s idea of emancipation’, wrote Trollope, ‘was and is emancipation not from slavery but from work. To lie in the sun and eat breadfruit and yams is his idea of being free.’

On 13 November The Times ran an article that concluded that events in Morant Bay had demonstrated that it was ‘impossible to eradicate the original savageness of African blood.’ For ‘as long as the black man has a strong white Government and a numerous white population to control him he is capable of living as a respectable member of society. He can be made quiet and even industrious by the fear of the supreme power, and by the example of those to whom he necessarily looks up. But wherever he attains a certain degree of independence there is the fear that he will resume the barbarous life and the fierce habits of his African ancestors.’

The plantation owners, The Times recalled, had repeatedly warned the British people that ‘the negro was incurably idle, intractable, insolent, that he needed a strong master, and was incapable of either self-control or gentle management . . . But very little of this came out.’ The Jamaica planters, who were of course the former slave owners, had not been listened to when they had counselled the nation on the true nature of black people, and now Britain was paying the price for her refusal to accept their forewarnings. The rebellion, The Times suggested, was a catastrophic blow for those who believed in the ‘grand triumphs of humanity, and the improvement of races, and the removal of primeval curses’.40

For Britain, the Scramble meant that the era of informal anti-slavery imperialism on the coast of Africa was over, and the phase of annexation and control of the interior began. In the minds of a number of statesmen and colonial theorists, Africa’s new role was to act as a safety valve for Europe. It was to be an outlet for Europe’s energies, ambitions and manufactured goods and an arena in which Europe’s internal rivalries could also be played out at a safe distance. In effect, the freedoms of one continent and its people were to be forgone in the economic and security interests of another. To protect peace in Europe, Africa was to be divided and colonized. She was to provide new markets and raw materials. Where her climate was appropriate she was to offer up her soil to white settlers. In Africa, those new colonists would find what German theorists were, in the late nineteenth century, already beginning to call ‘Lebensraum’ – living space. In those regions that were habitable to Europeans the local Africans were to be divested of their ancestral lands and forcibly converted into a class of landless labourers. The exploration, conquest and colonization of Africa – the last continent to hold

was the great project of the age. The sheer speed of the Scramble for Africa was breathtaking. In 1870, 10 per cent of Africa was under European control and 90 per cent of the continent was ruled by Africans. By 1900 that situation had been reversed. Ultimately only Ethiopia and Liberia resisted the European onslaught. Within three decades, nine million square miles of territory were added to the empires of Europe, one-fifth of the land area of the globe. Britain had, by some criteria, won the Scramble. One in three Africans became British colonial subjects; forty-five million people, more than the entire population of the UK at the time.

Recent historical debates about the extent to which British people knew or cared about the empire to some extent miss the point. The public might not have regarded Africa as the key to national wealth and security, or as a project that affected their day-to-day lives in material or measurable ways, but they were often fascinated by its sheer drama and exoticism. It was the people of Africa rather than the land, rivers or mountains that gripped the imagination most tightly in the late nineteenth century.

These

Link between historical racism Darwinism and facism

Imperial conquest put the builders of the British Empire in a position to make such judgements, and Social Darwinism enabled these influencers to regard the act of conquest itself as proof that they were superior to the ‘dark races’. That the Africans had been conquered meant that they were inferior, so the argument went, and as inferiors their inevitable fate was to be ruled over by a wiser and stronger race. The belief that the British were such a people became more deeply ingrained and widespread in the later nineteenth century, as the humanitarianism of the abolitionist and anti-slavery eras – hypocritical and paternalistic though it was – evaporated. In its place came this harder, more biological view of race.

On 12 August 1914, hundreds of thousands of French soldiers in uniforms of blue jackets and red trousers surged across the German border. To their north, in Belgium, German cuirassiers launched a thunderous cavalry attack on the little town of Haelen. Three thousand miles away, little noticed or commented upon at the time, a small British force headed through the African bush towards Lomé, the capital of the German colony of Togoland. That day, far from the battlefields of France and Belgium, Lance Corporal Alhaji Grunshi of the British West African Frontier Force became the first soldier in British service to fire a shot in the land war. Ten days later Edward Thomas, of the 4th (Royal Irish) Dragoon Guards, became the first white British soldier to fire his rifle in anger in Europe. The First World War began in Africa and it was to end there on 14 November 1918, when the last German units surrendered, three days after the armistice in Europe.

On 28 August 1914, just three weeks after the war began, officials from the Colonial Office asked their colleagues in the War Office to consider the possibility that a contingent of troops raised in the British West Indies might be permitted to serve abroad. The War Office responded first by questioning the fighting quality of black West Indian men, suggesting they would be ineffectual in the cold of a European winter, and then by proposing that they might be put to better use ‘maintaining order if necessary, in the islands’ of the West Indies.

The War Office regarded West Indians in the British army as highly undesirable and in late 1914 they called upon the Colonial Office to discourage volunteers from believing that if they travelled to Britain they would be welcomed into the army.

There was a determination within the War Office, and among white settlers in Africa, that black Africans and black West Indians were not to be permitted to fight against white men, as this, it was feared, would undermine white racial prestige, and threaten the security of white settlers in the colonies. For decades colonial administrators had striven to ensure that modern weapons were kept out of the hands of their black subjects, and it was impressed upon them that the lives of white men (and even more so white women) were sacrosanct. Violence against white people in the empire elicited extraordinarily violent responses – punitive raids and exemplary punishments. The informal rules of imperial government determined that black men were armed only when formed into colonial regiments (often known as askari) and used to fight Africans, under the guidance and watchful eyes of white officers.

alongside white soldiers and against a white enemy. While the Colonial Office had worried that the rejection of West Indian volunteers would damage morale in the colonies they too saw the conflict in Europe as a ‘white man’s war’, and envisaged West Indian volunteers serving elsewhere in the empire. On this the two government departments were united, black men were not to be permitted to fight and kill white men.

The men of the BWIR were also subjected to racial taunts from white troops. A BWIR soldier from Trinidad complained that he and his comrades were ‘treated neither as Christians nor as British citizens, but as West Indian “Niggers”, without anybody to be interested in or look after us.’12

Only in the unique conditions of the African theatre of operations were black British soldiers – both African troops and units of the BWIR – put into combat against the Germans. The German forces in Africa consisted of local African recruits and thousands of press-ganged carriers, who outnumbered the German colonial troops.

However in 1915 Andrew Bonar Law, Secretary of State for the Colonies, wrote a secret memorandum in which he concluded that the recruitment of Africans would pose too great a threat to British rule in Africa after the war – particularly in South Africa as there ‘a large body of trained and disciplined black men would create obvious difficulties, and might seriously menace the supremacy of the white.’13 Like many others Bonar Law was also convinced that ‘no South African native could stand a European winter’. This refrain – that was to be constantly repeated by British politicians and colonial administrators right up until the 1940s – grew harder to sustain over time as the black soldiers of France, the Tirailleurs Sénégalais, proved themselves as capable as any other troops of weathering the most terrible winters of the war – albeit with appalling casualties.

There was, in certain circles, a fear that if the black troops were deployed on the Western Front, their supposed primitive vitality would be set alongside the emasculated sickliness of many British recruits in a way that would damage white racial prestige. Thus national paranoia and long-established racial stereotypes conspired to form new, if largely unspoken, justifications for the exclusion of black men from the European theatre.

Churchill

Churchill supporter of million blck army movement

‘It must not be forgotten that a West African native trained to use of arms and filled with a new degree of self-confidence by successful encounters with forces armed and led by Europeans was not likely to be more amenable to discipline in peace time.’26 Almost every pretext and plausible argument was employed to counter the suggestion that the wartime manpower shortage necessitated the recruitment of black soldiers to fight against a white enemy on European soil. It was suggested – yet again – that Africans could not endure or even perhaps survive European winters and it was claimed that they were intellectually incapable of using of complicated modern weapons and would be unable to grasp contemporary military tactics.

So confused were recruiting officers by the question of race that some black British men who had been conscripted into the army, after the 1916 Military Service Act, were rejected from service, or prevented from gaining admission to recruiting offices even though they had their call-up papers in their hands.

The

Story of black footballer walter tull

The opponents of the ‘Million Black Army’ movement, having largely succeeded in preventing the deployment of black men on the European battlefield, were equally determined to ensure that the role Africans and West Indians had played in the war was airbrushed out of the developing national memory of the conflict.

Each of the generals saluted their fallen comrades in the London Victory Parade at the head of columns from which all black men had been excluded. Within the British columns were men from Canada, Australia, South Africa and India. No troops from the West Indies were permitted to march; neither were any black African units.

In your issue published the week after the Victory march in London, you asserted that Africans could not be in the march because there was no time to get them to England owing to lack of transport. You do not mean to say that Great Britain could not afford to send out two men-of-war to bring them if they had been wanted? . . . They were fit to assist in breaking the aggression of Germany but they were not fit to be in the Victory march . . . 35

‘we can only conclude that it is the policy of His Majesty’s Ministers to ignore the services of the black subjects of the Empire.’

BWIR troops reported being ostracized and segregated from white soldiers. When a pay rise was given to other imperial troops, it was denied to the West Indians on the grounds that they were ‘natives’. In December 1918, the West Indians, who had volunteered to fight and seen action in the Middle East, were ordered to do the laundry of both white British troops and civilian Italian labourers, and then to clean the latrines of the white troops.

Of the seven hundred black people who were forced to take shelter from white mobs in the Liverpool bridewells in the summer of 1919, around eighty were soldiers or sailors recently discharged from their war service.63 Many of these black men were viewed by the mobs as foreigners with no legitimate claims to Britishness or British residency, but were nothing of the sort: they were men who had volunteered for service and put themselves at risk of injury or death only to find themselves assaulted on the streets and in their homes by other Britons who regarded their skin colour as incontrovertible evidence that they were not and could never be British. Those who were British-born were also notionally stripped of their nationality and identity by the racial thinking that informed and fuelled the indiscriminate racial violence of 1919.