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THE SLAVE TRADE | LOCAL TRUTHS
The slave trade: local truths
The Black Lives Matter campaign has seen people demonstrating against the presence of historic statues in cities across the world where the individuals had connections with slavery. Emma Clegg investigates and discovers that the slave trade is ingrained in our urban landscapes and our cultural heritage, including those of Bath and Bristol
The now infamous statue of Edward Colston, before it was removed from its pedestal and thrown in Bristol harbour
58 TheBATHMagazine
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suMMer 2020
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issue 212
owners in the British Empire. Money talks, and for more than 200 years it talked louder than the individual rights of the 3.1 million African men, women and children who were stolen from their homeland and sold into slavery in the British colonies. It had to talk again to buy them their freedom. THE STATUE DEBATE As the Black Lives Matter movement upsurged in the aftermath of the brutal death of George Floyd in May in Minnesota, angry demonstrations took place internationally, defying the social distancing measures brought on by a pandemic. In a demonstration in Bristol, the controversial statue in Colston Avenue of sugar merchant and Royal African Company member Edward Colston was torn down from its pedestal, dragged through the streets, and thrown into the harbour, making international headlines. Some were outraged by what has been described as the whitewashing of history and the importance of protecting our historic statues. Historian and presenter David Olusoga countered this with, “The toppling of Edward Colston’s statue is not an attack on history. It is history”, and the mayor of Bristol, Marvin Rees, described the act as a “piece of historical poetry”. The statue wars are one thing, but what about the real slave-owning stories behind the statues that bring out the demonstrators? BRISTOL AND THE SLAVE TRADE Britain was a major player in the transatlantic slave trade, with the principal ports being London, Glasgow, Liverpool and Bristol. Bristol’s official involvement in the slave trade started in 1698 when the trading monopoly of the London-based Royal African Company – a company established by King Charles II in 1662 – was ended, although the illegal trade in slaves in Bristol was believed to have started well before this. Bristol merchants were so successful in the 1730s that the Bristol docks overtook London in being the busiest in Britain and many ports of the west country made huge profits. The trade in slaves formed a triangle from England to West Africa and then to the West Indies and back. Ships travelling to Africa were loaded with cargo that would be traded for slaves with Black African slave traders. The village of Saltford, six miles from Bath, has the last remaining brass mill in the country and its brass products, and those of other companies such as the Warmley Brass Company, owned by the
Goldney and Champion families, were used as a main currency of the slave trade. Once in West Africa, the cargo products were sold, the ships were filled with their human ‘purchases’, with each African man, woman and child secured in chains in unsanitary and cramped conditions, and transported to the West Indies, a voyage that took around 10 weeks. With dysentery, dehydration and scurvy rife, many didn’t survive the journey. British ships transported in the region of 3.1 million enslaved Africans with just 2.7 million surviving the crossing. Bristol traders were responsible for a fifth of these shipments, so more than 600,000 slaves. BRITISH SLAVE OWNERSHIP Let’s consider the study of an archive in the 1830s, the Legacies of British Slave Ownership, showing all slave owners in Britain in 1834, after slavery was abolished. It contains some startling truths. This record – discussed in David Olusoga’s Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners, a two-part BBC series that aired in 2015 and is now available
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What about the real slaveowning stories behind the statues that bring out the demonstrators?
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W
illiam Wilberforce has loomed large in our history text books as the British abolitionist parliamentary warrior. He supported the campaign for the abolition of slavery, which led to the banning of the slave trade throughout the British Empire in 1807 and the introduction of the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833. His statue has a duly prominent place in Westminster Abbey. For those studying the modern history of slavery however, Wilberforce only tells a fraction of the story. In fact he provided a convenient national hero, allowing the British in the years following the abolition to hide behind their country’s violent, self-seeking and profitable past. Wilberforce could not have achieved what he did within parliament if there had not been a huge popular anti-slavery movement beyond it creating pressure on the elite political system who had benefitted. It was a host of voices who eventually caused the tide to turn, who forced parliament to rethink a system that had brought unparalleled wealth to the country, and even then a colossal budget was required to compensate the slave
again on iPlayer – shows how the slave trade and its profits were entrenched within British society. It is the only record of British slave owners at a given moment in time, showing all the claims for compensation across the British Empire following abolition. It gives the claimant’s name, address, biographical information where available, how many slaves they had and how much compensation they received. There were 46,000 claimants, 800,000 slaves and £20 million (£70 billion in today’s money) was paid in compensation. On this record there were 182 people resident in Bath in 1834 who applied for compensation for the loss of their slaves, and these slave owners made a total of 275 claims (a ‘claim’ represents a claim for however many slaves a person owned in a certain plantation; some owned one slave, others hundreds). There were 131 people resident in Bristol that applied for
