As we mark the bicentenary of the abolition of the British slave trade on March 25, we need to remould our concept of Britishness to acknowledge fully the crucial unrecognised – and never remunerated – input of over three million Africans into shaping our island nation. All were human beings who lost their liberty, their homeland, their families, their life choices, and often their lives too in an unconscionable exploitation by a nation that grew very rich in the process.Many never set foot on British soil, but they too made Britain what it is today.
We currently assume that the direction of travel of economic aid – through Live Aid, and Live Eight, and Make Poverty History – always passes from us to Africa. Yet the forced migration of the 12 million Africans who were trafficked across the Atlantic between the 1490s and the 19th century depopulated Africa of its own labour force, of young people at the height of their economic potential to build up the continent.A third of those journeys were in British ships. The profits from the sugar plantations in the West Indies and the tobacco fields in Maryland and Virginia, where the enslaved people worked, flowed back to Britain. This drove British economic development and wealth creation in the 18th century as Britain became the first industrialised nation.
At the peak of the slave trade between 1690 and 1807, six million African people were enslaved, three million by the British.Hundreds of women and men were packed below deck in chains, cheek by jowl, on the voyage from west Africa to America. Two million died on the way.In an episode of mind-chilling horror, 131 people were deliberately thrown overboard from a British slave-ship in the 1750s to save the malfunctioning vessel. All drowned, except one. Yet no one was ever prosecuted for such a heinous crime. Even more shockingly, an insurance claim was litigated through the British courts to win compensation for the lost human ‘cargo’.Market values reigned supreme and absolute to the exclusion of all human values and of every human right.
So the foundations of modern British industry and prosperity were founded on the back of the slave trade. We need to remember just how great the economic debt is that we owe to Africa because of our exploitation of its people.The hoes, bills, axes and metal tools needed in the American plantations created a new market and a reason to expand for the iron foundries of Birmingham. The slave ports of Liverpool and Bristol were completely rebuilt in the 18th century on the income from the slave ships.
Demand rocketed for British wool, textiles and metals to trade in west Africa for the luckless human beings caught in the slave trade.Many neo-classical stately homes that we think of as quintessentially British, with their landscaped gardens and elegant furniture, were paid for with the new-found wealth of British plantation owners and customs officials.The insurance market of the City of London expanded to insure the slave ships, and the financial industry, which provided bills of credit, flourished.
If you unpack the lexical reality of the word ‘slave’ you find pioneer, planter, grower, economically active settler. Though we think, we are taught, that America was colonised by Europeans, the real figures turn that idea on its head. Colonial America was created by 10 million Africans as against only two million Europeans. We can never justify the inhumanity of slavery, but we can as a matter of justice realise the place at the heart of British industrial development of the African and Afro-Caribbean people whose unpaid labour had a major role in its genesis.
Equality in a multi-racial community involves respect for each other’s achievements and historical contributions to the community.In this bicentennial year, government plans to put the history of the slave trade where it belongs on every school syllabus. We will have succeeded only when every child in a British school understands how much black British, Afro-Caribbean and African ancestors shaped the fabric and the face of modern Britain.