{"id":779744,"date":"2026-09-23T07:38:12","date_gmt":"2026-09-23T07:38:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/779744\/"},"modified":"2026-09-23T07:38:12","modified_gmt":"2026-09-23T07:38:12","slug":"britains-slave-traders-by-william-a-pettigrew-review-the-inconvenient-truth-history-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/779744\/","title":{"rendered":"Britain\u2019s Slave Traders by William A Pettigrew review \u2013 the inconvenient truth | History books"},"content":{"rendered":"

One tedious aspect of Britain\u2019s post-imperial melancholia is the\u00a0number of amateur historians who would rather we stopped going on about our role in the\u00a0slave trade. Isn\u2019t it all in the past? Weren\u2019t we the first to abolish it anyway? In April, the Reform party announced a new policy<\/a> of halting visas to people from countries seeking slavery reparations from Britain. \u201cThe United Kingdom is not an\u00a0ATM for ethnic grievances from the\u00a0past,\u201d the party\u2019s home affairs spokesperson, Zia\u00a0Yusuf, said.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately for those who would\u00a0rather forget, the slave trade, as\u00a0William Pettigrew argues in this grimly important book, can be found \u201cin the depths of Britain\u2019s grain\u201d. Ninety per cent of the enslaved Africans transported to America went on British ships, and slave traders\u2019 actions transformed Britain in ways that still resonate today.<\/p>\n

The erasure of this history began with the abolitionists, who quickly realised that identifying and shaming slave traders might harm their cause. They chose instead to argue that abolition would confirm Britain\u2019s superior moral righteousness. Lauding abolition obscured what Pettigrew calls \u201cslave gain\u201d: Britain\u2019s gigantic profiting from the trade. Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens, in a jointly authored article of 1857, blithely suggested that the gains of slavery had evaporated \u201cas the Arabian Wizard\u2019s money turned to leaves\u201d. Thus began a general tendency to downplay Britain\u2019s role, offshoring slavery\u2019s causes and effects to the Americas or localising them to port cities such as Bristol and Liverpool.<\/p>\n

Since April 2021, Pettigrew has led a group of nine academic historians identifying all the known investors \u2013 about 13,000 of them \u2013 who financed Britain\u2019s brutal trafficking of 3.3 million enslaved Africans, of whom about half a million died during the Atlantic crossing. The\u00a0traffic began in the 1560s with a\u00a0syndicate of city merchants, naval and state officials. It soon earned royal\u00a0approval, because of the role it played in humiliating the Spanish, increasing\u00a0influence in the New World, establishing a foothold in west Africa, and enlarging the royal purse.<\/p>\n

After the Glorious Revolution of 1688, English slave merchants loosened their ties with the monarchy and embraced a free market. The trade expanded beyond political and commercial elites, and out from London to the regions. Bristol and Liverpool shared out the trade in the 18th century, the latter perfecting and industrialising it.<\/p>\n

In Pettigrew\u2019s account, hardly an event in this period of British history \u2013 the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire of 1666, the 1707 Act of Union between England and Scotland \u2013 wasn\u2019t impacted directly or indirectly by the slave trade. Slave gain funded the physical structures, from docks to canals, that helped make Britain a global force. The conventions of mercantile philanthropy also meant that it greatly improved the lives of the sick and poor, mainly through huge endowments to London\u2019s hospitals. Institutions such as the British Museum and the Royal Academy of Music were founded with the help of slave traders\u2019 donations. The Royal Society was not only a pioneer institutional investor in the slave trade but developed the racist \u201cscience\u201d that perpetuated its inhuman practices.<\/p>\n

Civilised Britons justified participating in the slave trade with what Pettigrew calls \u201can impressive degree of societal cognitive dissonance\u201d. Daniel Defoe, an uncompromising satirist of his own society, promoted the slave trade in countless articles, arguing that it \u201cexports nothing but what we want to part with, and it imports nothing but what we cannot be without\u201d. Samuel Taylor Coleridge won the Browne Medal for classical poetry for a Greek composition condemning the slave trade; his education at Christ\u2019s Hospital School and Jesus College, Cambridge had been funded by slave traders. Thomas\u00a0Southerne, author of the successful play Oroonoko, with its unflinching account of the cruelties of\u00a0slavery, invested \u00a32,000 of the money it\u00a0generated in slave stocks.<\/p>\n

Pettigrew tells the story straight, with little reference to today\u2019s\u00a0culture wars. The most recent politician cited is Tony Blair. There is\u00a0no mention of the opprobrium heaped on the National Trust for exploring its\u00a0historic links to slavery; nor of the toppling of Edward Colston\u2019s statue in\u00a0Bristol in 2020, although Pettigrew does point out that he was a\u00a0far less significant slave trader than other Bristolians.<\/p>\n

But Pettigrew\u2019s careful tone is ultimately more effective than stridency. In this argument, slave traders cannot be conveniently separated out; they become central to the\u00a0British project of economic and technological progress and cultural enlightenment. The slave trade, for instance, was at the forefront of effective treatments for smallpox, the\u00a0concern to save human cargoes from this deadly disease being a simple commercial imperative. Virtually any\u00a0behaviour could be justified if it supported free trade, including the violent trafficking of children. \u201cThose who fetishise economic advancement,\u201d Pettigrew writes in a rare moment of acerbity, \u201cmust confront the role that self-interpreting economics has played in undermining African humanity.\u201d Nigel Farage has said that he is \u201ctired\u00a0of this endless conversation about the UK\u2019s complicity with slavery\u201d. As this deeply researched and revelatory book\u00a0demonstrates, the\u00a0conversation has barely begun.<\/p>\n

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Britain\u2019s Slave Traders: A Forgotten History by William A Pettigrew is published by Bodley Head (\u00a325). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com<\/a>. Delivery charges may apply.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One tedious aspect of Britain\u2019s post-imperial melancholia is the\u00a0number of amateur historians who would rather we stopped going…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":779745,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-779744","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/779744","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=779744"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/779744\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/779745"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=779744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=779744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=779744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}