Marika Sherwood: after abolition the British were bankrolling the trade

Abolition: Trade secrets

Historian Marika Sherwood puts the record straight on Britain’s slavery role

After Abolition: Britain and the Slave Trade Since 1807. By Marika Sherwood.
B Tauris & Co Ltd £19.50.
Available from Bookmarks bookshop order this book

THE rather smug, self-congratulatory tone of many of the celebrations marking 200 years since the abolition of the slave trade has jarred with the eminent historian Marika Sherwood.
Because, though Britain was banned from participating in the transatlantic slave trade from 1807 by the Abolition, it was far from the end of British involvement and profiteering from slavery.
Ms Sherwood, biographer of Claudia Jones, founder of the Notting Hill Carnival, was at Bookmarks bookshop in Bloomsbury Street talking about her book, After Abolition: Britain and the Slave Trade Since 1807.
“After abolition the British were bankrolling the trade. There were mass profits from insurance companies and they owned the means of production,” revealed Ms Sherwood, a former Dartmouth Park resident who now lives in Kent.
“They ran the plantations and made more from the trade than before it became illegal.”
Indeed, Britain was still cashing in on the slave trade in the Gold Coast and Sierra Leone in 1928.
William Wilberforce and Prime Minister William Pitt take the credit for putting slavery to the sword.
A recent Hollywood blockbuster, Amazing Grace, portrays Wilberforce’s struggles against his peers. Many argue that this is not the full story: that slaves actually won their own emancipation has been generally overlooked.
It was in anger at the celebrations that Ms Sherwood felt compelled to write to Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, “to tell him his journalists were making basic factual errors in their articles about the slave trade. I didn’t get a response, not even an acknowledgement. I don’t think that reflects very well on the Guardian.”
Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chavez, announced he is to give the American actor Danny Glover almost £9million to make a film about the slave uprising in Haiti. It will chronicle the story of slave leader Toussaint L’Ouverture as told by C L R James, the great Trinidadian Marxist, in his book The Black Jacobins, published in 1938.
Meanwhile, Ms Sherwood is mulling over why so many accounts of the slave trade in this anniversary year have overlooked the struggle by the slaves themselves to be free.
She said: “I think there are a lot of historians who are clearly wanting political jobs.” She is hoping some of them will read her book. “I imagine they may appear a little shame-faced,” she said.