Introduction

Edward Colston (1636-1721) became the public face of the British slave trade when his statue was thrown into Bristol harbour during the Black Lives Matter protests of June 2020. Colston had been a member of the Society of Merchant Venturers in Bristol and deputy governor of the Royal African Company (RAC). Slave trading was his main source of wealth from the 1680s. He later became MP for Bristol and a noted philanthropist, giving more than £70,000 to educational and social causes. In the nineteenth century he was a Bristol legend, celebrated in statuary and stained glass, in landmarks and street names, in the (charitable) Colston Society (disbanded in 2020 after 275 years) and even in a regional bread roll, the 'Colston bun'.1 'The Colston Four', charged with criminal damage to the statue, were acquitted in a Bristol jury trial on 5 January 2022 to applause from the public gallery. Britain's leading public historian, echoing their legal defence, suggested that the Four were 'on the right side of history'.2

Two days after Colston was toppled, the statue of Robert Milligan (1746-1809), a Scottish West India merchant, ship owner and slave factor, was covered with a calico shroud and placard by protesters in London. Mulligan, the main instigator of the West India Docks, had also made his fortune from slavery and plantations. A week later, the statue was quietly removed as part of a wider drive to review all London's statues with links to slavery.3

At the same time, heated debates about the memorialization of individuals involved in slavery were underway in Scotland, above all in calls for the 46-metre-high Melville Monument in St Andrew's Square, Edinburgh, to be 're-interpreted' or removed. The statue is dedicated to Henry Dundas (1742-1811), the statesman whose advocacy (against William Wilberforce) of 'gradual' rather than immediate abolition probably delayed the ending of the British slave trade by fifteen years.4 In south Wales, another area of Britain that benefitted markedly from Atlantic slavery, the 23-metre Picton Monument in Carmarthen became a focus of protest generating a petition, with 20,000 signatories, calling for its removal. Sir Thomas Picton was a British lieutenant general notorious for the ill treatment and torture of enslaved people during his period as governor of Trinidad (1797-1803).5 A marble statue in the 'Heroes of Wales Gallery' and a portrait of Picton at Cardiff City Hall were removed in 2020.6

Many British cities, universities, museums, public and private institutions and commercial and financial houses of long standing have, in the last few years, carried out or completed reviews of their connections to slavery. A report by the National Trust, which has in its care many of the fine country houses connected with wealth from slavery, created much controversy.7 Many Oxford and Cambridge colleges and several universities, especially Bristol and Glasgow, have committed resources and made appointments to investigate their connections to the profits of slavery and empire.8 Glasgow University pledged to raise £20 million for a joint Glasgow-Caribbean Centre for Development Research. The Church of England initiated a review of its slave-related statuary in 2021, yet an application to the Church from Jesus College Cambridge to remove a chapel memorial to seventeenth-century slave trader Tobias Rustat was controversially declined by a consistory church court.9 The Bank of England has apologized for its role in the slave trade and for the twenty-five governors and directors who owned slaves. It has removed eight paintings and two busts from public display.10 Reviews by several banks and businesses in the City of London have led to a number of secretive 'restorative justice grants' intended to benefit the Afro-Caribbean population in Britain.11

Protest and debate over the commemoration and activities of slave traders and plantation owners operating centuries ago highlight major questions about the origins of Britain's wealth as well as the foundations of deep-seated racial disparities and racial injustice in Britain and elsewhere. Britain's early industrial revolution, which has defined her economic, political and cultural identity ever since, was inextricably bound up with the slave trade and colonial plantations. But this has received less attention from historians than has Britain's celebrated, pioneering role in the abolition of her transatlantic trade in enslaved people (in 1807) and in ending slavery in most British territories (in the 1830s). The extent of Britain's trade in enslaved peoples, her brutal exploitation of plantation labour and the wealth that these activities brought to British families and wider society have been obscured in favour of a more heroic island story of early economic improvement and cultural benevolence. This has been reflected in school curricula and in the treatment of slavery as a minor subject in the range and sweep of British domestic and imperial history as taught in universities.

In 2022 an engaging popular history of the 1823 slave rebellion in Demerara was published with the title White Debt: the Demerara Uprising and Britain's Legacy of Slavery. Despite graduating from elite British educational institutions, the author, as he began his research, was 'quickly shocked' at how little he knew:

That it had been British captains commanding British boats operated by British sailors who had transported around 2.8 million captive Africans to the British Caribbean, that it was British families who owned plantations in the Caribbean run by British managers and overseers where hundreds of thousands of enslaved men, women and children were forced to live and die. That it had been British businesses that had transported the cotton, tobacco, sugar and other crops cultivated by the enslaved people to the consumers back in Britain. How was it possible I didn't know any of this? It was like a national amnesia.12

The bulk of professional historians of Britain were partly to blame for this amnesia, although the history of slavery did gain increasing prominence as part of the rise of social and labour history in the 1970s and 1980s, and as a response to the growing historiography of slavery in the United States at that time. With a few notable exceptions, however, it was largely treated as an aspect of the history of the Americas rather than as a vital element of Britain's history. In Capitalism and Slavery (1944), the Trinidadian scholar Eric Williams stood alone in placing the slave trade and plantations centrally among explanations of Britain's industrial revolution.13 His work was initially largely dismissed, but discussion resurfaced in the 1970s and 1980s with debate over profit rates in the slave trade and plantation businesses, and the degree to which those profits directly financed Britain's industrial infrastructure. Such partial assessments of Williams' thesis, which were also constrained by the data available at the time, led most historians to give slavery a minimum role, if any, in the economic history of Britain. The gains from slavery accrued not only to elite merchants and wealthy plantation owners but also, by providing incomes and livelihoods, to many others throughout British society. But the widespread connections between the exploitation of enslaved Africans and mainstream British economic history have been avoided by the bulk of historians. The separation of British history from wider colonial and global history sidelined the history of slavery in British research, education and popular consciousness.

Most major works on the industrial revolution since the 1980s have ignored slavery and plantations altogether. Textbooks that currently lead the field concentrate on changes in resource use, capital and labour, internal to Britain, or on the economic benefits derived from favourable 'inclusive' politics and institutions. They devote scarcely a sentence to slavery or West Indian plantations.14 Slavery has, however, returned to wider historians' interests in recent years with the heightened political consciousness of racial inequality in Britain. Historians are also now addressing this subject as part of fresh conceptual frameworks: new histories of consumption and commodity flows; new forms of global history; studies of globalized coercive labour regimes, including modern slavery; and moves, in the USA in particular, to write new histories of capitalism that give central significance to slavery and race.

Apart from new historical frameworks, we also now have a wealth of digitized and searchable primary sources that were unavailable to earlier scholars. In particular, the Legacies of British Slavery database makes it possible not only to trace many British owners of plantations and the enslaved, but their links with other businesses, industries and investments. 'Slave Voyages', the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, details all recorded slave ships and their human cargoes travelling from Europe to the Americas via Africa.15 Other online data, such as the Cambridge Group's occupational statistics, make it easier to consider the impact of slave-based Atlantic trade upon Britain's pioneering industrial regions and sectors.16 New historical frameworks, new sources and the political moment make this the time for a...