This is a companion piece to Catherine Hall’s article ‘Questions of Race and Repair: Then and Now’ recently published Open Access in History Workshop Journal 100.
The killing of George Floyd in 2020 mobilised Black Lives Matter demonstrations worldwide. In Bristol the dumping of the statue of slave trader, Edward Colson into the Bristol Docks, welded together different times: the time of slavery and the time of now. It had the effect of raising the consciousness of individuals, institutions and corporations, producing a new recognition of the necessity to redress the wrongs of slavery and acknowledge British responsibility. In the years that have followed, a flurry of initiatives from universities, museums and galleries, including the Guardian, the Bank of England and the Church of England, are attempting to address institutional involvement in slave trading, slave-holding and the slavery business, and propose forms of reparation in relation to New World slavery. Reparation, it seemed, was firmly on the public agenda. But now there is a backlash: we are in a new time.
As discussed in my HWJ article, the struggle to redress a wrong that cannot be put right has a long history. The idea of making amends – of finding some form of moral and political repair for the system of racialized chattel slavery – has a long genealogy in Britain. These debates entered public discourse in the 1780s-1790s, activated by the campaigns for the abolition of the slave trade, and then resurfaced in the 1820s-1830s. The focus in those years was initially on abolition of the trade in human beings, and secondly on emancipation, an ending to the system of enslavement and the freeing of enslaved men and women.
Large numbers of people were mobilised across Britain to campaign on these issues. Some were politically conservative, others radical, most were White, some were Black, some were feminists, others misogynist, the majority were probably part of the growing middling classes but there were working people too. Some believed that Black and White were equal, others that ‘freedom’ would enable Black people to become as ‘civilised’ as White, others that the institution of slavery was an expression of the lack of civilisation in the supposedly freedom-loving metropolis. Some looked to a revolutionary transformation, others to a re-settlement. Alliances were made, splits occurred, and arguments flourished as to how to proceed. The shared conviction was that slavery was a national sin and that atonement must be made.
Over a fifty-year period, public debate over forms of redress, reparation, guilt, responsibility, debt, reform of the self, and the meanings of freedom took place on multiple sites – in churches and chapels, in parliament, in political clubs, in pubs, mechanics institutes and people’s homes. Sin lay with everyone, argued Granville Sharp in 1776, one of the first generation abolitionists. ‘The whole Community … every individual’, he insisted, ‘is personally interested in the Consideration of the Subject’. Abolition was a moral duty for all. ‘Has a slave a right to slay his Master who refuses HIS LIBERTY’? asked the Jamaican insurrectionary preacher Robert Wedderburn forty years later at Hopkin’s St Chapel Soho. ‘Sin will lie at our door if we do not agitate, agitate, agitate’, wrote one correspondent to the Birmingham Quaker corn-merchant, Joseph Sturge in 1831. The people must act.
Slavery was abolished by the imperial parliament in the British Caribbean Islands, Mauritius and the Cape in 1833. The abolition of the system of apprenticeship, imposed as a means of extending the forced labour of the so-call ‘freed slaves’ happened in 1838. But neither Act brought freedom. Claims for redress continued, both in the Caribbean and in the UK. It was the bi-centenary of the abolition of the slave trade in 2007 that provoked a new conversation in the UK about slavery. Black British settlement in the metropolis and the refrain that ‘We are here because you were there’ challenged the standard orthodoxy that it was White humanitarians such as William Wilberforce who were responsible for this ‘gift’ of freedom.
The Trinidadian Eric Williams’s 1944 book Capitalism and Slavery, had demonstrated both the economic imperatives behind emancipation and the struggles of the enslaved to effect an ending to chattel slavery, but it had been attacked and ignored. In 2007 these arguments took on new force as the idea of ‘celebrating’ abolition rather than reflecting on the previous centuries of slavery and the unfinished business of freedom were vigorously debated. Judgments differ as to the long-term effects of the range of activities which flourished in that year – from books and exhibitions, radio and TV productions, to community endeavours. But of the many initiatives taken some have lived on and new knowledges once acquired were not forgotten. The bicentenaries 2033 and 2038 now offer another opportunity: to use the occasion of a public memorial to mobilise consciousness and shift understandings of the legacies of slavery, the shadows of which reach deep into the present.
It was ‘the people’ who forced parliament to act in the past. Successive governments, and most recently the Labour government, have refused opportunities to apologise, or to take seriously the demands from the Caribbean and beyond for reparation. Redress is sought for the long-term legacies of slavery and colonialism, for racisms and persistent inequalities, for the absence of social justice, for the yawning gaps between the North and the Global South. Before there can be hope of serious political change in the UK, significant shifts in public understanding are vital. Acknowledgment is a first step. The moves made over these last years by universities, museums, galleries and corporations to recognize forms of institutional complicity at whatever level, in slave-ownership, financial benefits from slavery and colonialism or racist educational practices, are welcome. But they are not enough. Much has been promised, less delivered. Equality, Diversity and Inclusion initiatives can become management speak without effecting real change. New research is delivered by academics and curators on short-term contracts who return to precarity. Racisms are endemic in our society and the far right stirs hatred of migrants and asylum seekers, all those who are constructed as having no right ‘to belong’.
In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the language mobilised was of the ‘national sin’, a sin which happened overseas. Few abolitionists recognised their own racism. Now, in the changed world of the twenty-first century we can reflect on the debts owed by our relatively prosperous society, built on the exploitation of so many both at home and in the empire, to those who have paid the price. What are the responsibilities of the contemporary multicultural British population for those wrongs? How might they be properly acknowledged, steps taken to build a more egalitarian world? What could each or every one of us do? There are no easy answers – but they are questions that need thought, thought that can lead to action.