After the Bicentenary: The Abolition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in Recent History

Heroes are tall and handsome these days. Yet they are not all that dark. In the 2006 film Amazing Grace (directed by Michael Apted), Ioan Gruffudd makes a fantastic hero, standing a full eight inches taller than the real William Wilberforce and – to lapse shamelessly from objectivity – being rather more likely to set the hearts of ladies afire. He rampages across the sets of the film with true heroic fervour, on the side of right and good and being kind to the poor, children and animals all.

It’s all great stuff and Wilberforce was undoubtedly a great man, but the problem is that it tells only one side of the story. Yet again it’s the story of the big white hero protecting all those poor denigrated Africans. Didn’t we get over this years ago with the end of colonialism?

In the film the only dark-skinned person seen at all is Youssou N’Dour playing Olaudah Equiano and he has only a small role. All the other countless people of African origin who fought to resist the slave trade and enslavement happen off-screen, unmentioned and as if largely irrelevant to the work of the great (white) man.  

I am not the first historian to point out that this type of hagiography is not only historically incorrect, it also reverts to an earlier understanding of how the transatlantic slave trade came to be abolished. It ignores decades of research and countless works of scholarship to make it all about the ‘saints’ once more. 

Ever since Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery was published in 1944 any such simplistic analysis has not washed with academic historians. Williams asserted that the British abolished the slave trade because profits from plantation agriculture were in sharp decline. It is a view which has been roundly decried by many, not least Seymour Drescher in his classic book Econocide (1977) and more recently in The Mighty Experiment (2004). But it will not completely go away, having been reinvigorated in the last decade by new works exploring Williams’ ideas.

Whether correct or not, Williams’ arguments have ensured that no serious historian can afford to see Wilberforce as the stand-alone great man without at least acknowledging that there was a great deal more to abolition than that.

In fact there are moves to see the abolition of the slave trade in an altogether wider context. Seymour Drescher’s new book Abolition (2009) draws a line through the American, French, Haitian and some Latin American revolutions and then ends with Soviet gulags and Nazi Germany. On a different note, Marika Sherwood, in After Abolition: Britain and the Slave Trade since 1807 (2007), asks whether the ‘great’ moment brought about by the ‘great’ Wilberforce was really that seminal after all.

That the bigger picture is represented matters very much, I would argue, for reasons which go far beyond attempts at historical accuracy. As part of a team led by Professor Paul Lovejoy, which is helping to preserve and digitise items in the Sierra Leone National Archives, I am fully aware that the patchy way we remember abolition and its effects has a heavy footprint today. I have been out in Sierra Leone working among the Liberated African letterbooks which, quite astonishingly, list a huge percentage of the slaves freed by British naval patrols at Freetown. They are remarkable documents, with not only approximations of African names but details of all of those survivors who would become part of the Krio population of Sierra Leone. Yet the documents – perhaps one of the most remarkable collections for the study of transatlantic slavery and British abolition – have been largely ignored and are currently in an advanced state of decay. If they were in Europe or the United States they would be a prized collection, closely guarded.  

And there is a far greater issue, too. With still something in the region of 27 million slaves in the world today, and the Anti-Slavery Society and its American incarnation Free the Slaves as active – and as essential – now as ever, the message given out that it needs one great white man to perpetuate change is a dangerous one. More dangerous still is the message, inherent in all Gruffudd’s heroic actions, that the battle has been won. Tragically, nothing could be further from the truth. If we are ever going to win this fight, we all need to be modern-day Wilberforces.