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Abstract
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In the Christmas issue of The BMJ in 2012 I published an article on the British Abolitionists, arguing that they were the first social movement.1 I was primarily interested in understanding social movements, and I thought that analysing how the Abolitionists had been so effective would both lead to a readable article and be a way to pull out useful points on how a social movement might achieve its aims. This was a reasonable approach to take, but if I were to write the article today I would write it differently. This piece is my "correction" of that article. I've put "correction" in inverted commas because nothing in the article is, as far as I know, factually wrong, but I've told the story in a biased way.
Two quotes are buzzing around in my brain as I begin, the first is the assertion by the historian E H Carr that history tells you more about the time it is written than the time that it is written about. Next, Eric Williams, the first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago and historian, wrote in 1964: "The British historians wrote almost as if Britain had introduced Negro slavery solely for the satisfaction of abolishing it."2 I wrote my article before the appearance of Black Lives Matter, and I concentrated more on the success of the Abolitionists than on the vastness of the crime of slavery as an industry.
My mea culpa has been brewing some time, but I've finally been inspired to sit down and write it by a visit to the exhibition on slavery at the Museum of London Docklands, which concentrates much more than my article on the suffering that slavery inflicted and its long term benefit and harm to Britain, particularly London.
I failed in my article to make clear the scale of slavery and that Britain's past and present wealth depends on slavery. I did write: "The British economy depended on slavery, and sugar, coffee, and rum, which people loved, were produced by slaves. Many rich men and institutions, including the Church of England, owned plantations worked by slaves, and most members of parliament had close links to slavery." But I didn't make clear that over three centuries the British enslaved more than 2.3 million people. London was the fourth biggest slave trading port in the world after Rio de Janeiro, Bahia, and Liverpool, and over 3100 ships from London carried nearly a million Africans into slavery...
Language: en |