Romero fictionalises various real-life characters from the battle to get the Slavery Abolition Act of through the House of Commons, the deals and compromises that had to be made, as well as the role that women, working people, and runaway slaves played in the campaign. It includes a character inspired by proto-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and another based on Mary Prince, a former slave who became the first black woman in Britain to petition Parliament, and to write a memoir.
The Whip fictionalises real-life characters from the battle to get the Slavery Abolition Act of passed. But it was cold-eyed and pragmatic. So while what Parliament managed was flawed, I also look at it in the context of what happened in America. Which means that living British citizens helped pay to end the slave trade. It includes characters based on Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Prince, a former slave who became the first black woman in Britain to petition Parliament.
The Whip offers a critical lens on a period of British history that typically has a more positive spin on it. Between and , around 1, slaving voyages were mounted from British ports, carrying nearly , Africans to the Americas.
In alone, almost ships left Liverpool for West Africa. New colonies in the Caribbean and the continued consumer demand for plantation's goods fuelled the trade. Clarkson and Wilberforce were two of the most prominent abolitionists, playing a vital role in the ultimate success of the campaign. Clarkson was a tireless campaigner and lobbyist. He made an in-depth study of the horrors of the trade and published his findings. Clarkson toured Britain and Europe to spread the abolitionist word and inspire action.
As a result, the abolition campaign grew into a popular mass movement. William Wilberforce was the key figure supporting the cause within Parliament. In , with the abolition campaign gaining further momentum, he had a breakthrough. The bill received royal assent in March and the trade was made illegal from 1 May It was now against the law for any British ship or British subject to trade in enslaved people.
The abolition of slavery now became the main focus of the campaign though this was a long and difficult struggle. Full emancipation was not achieved until and none of the ex-slaves received compensation. In the late 18th century a movement started to end the slave trade — the transatlantic trading by European merchants of people from Africa, in exchange for manufactured goods. These captives were transported to the Americas or the Caribbean to be sold to plantation owners, who needed mass labour to cultivate and harvest crops such as cotton, sugar and tobacco.
The campaign to end slavery coincided with the uprisings of the French Revolution and the retaliation of enslaved communities in the British colonies. On 23 August a massive revolt by enslaved Africans erupted on the island of Saint Domingue, now known as Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The uprising would play a crucial role in making Saint Domingue the first Caribbean island to declare its independence and only the second independent nation in the Western Hemisphere. For 13 years, the country was in a state of civil war with the enslaved fighting for their freedom under the leadership of their fellow Africans.
Under the military leadership of Toussaint, the freedom fighters were able to gain the upper hand and defeat the French, Spanish and British forces that attempted to regain control. The records of the Slave Compensation Commission are an unintended byproduct of the scheme.
They represent a near complete census of British slavery as it was on 1 August, , the day the system ended. All of them. The T71s tell us how many slaves each of them owned, where those slaves lived and toiled, and how much compensation the owners received for them.
Although the existence of the T71s was never a secret, it was not until that a team from University College London began to systematically analyse them. The Legacies of British Slave-ownership project, which is still continuing, is led by Professor Catherine Hall and Dr Nick Draper, and the picture of slave ownership that has emerged from their work is not what anyone was expecting.
The man who received the most money from the state was John Gladstone, the father of Victorian prime minister William Ewart Gladstone. There are other famous names hidden within the records. As did a distant ancestor of David Cameron. But what is most significant is the revelation of the smaller-scale slave owners. Slave ownership, it appears, was far more common than has previously been presumed.
Many of these middle-class slave owners had just a few slaves, possessed no land in the Caribbean and rented their slaves out to landowners, in work gangs. These bit-players were home county vicars, iron manufacturers from the Midlands and lots and lots of widows.
The geographic spread of the slave owners who were resident in Britain in was almost as unexpected as the gender breakdown. Slavery was once thought of as an activity largely limited to the ports from which the ships of the triangular trade set sail; Bristol, London, Liverpool and Glasgow. Yet there were slave owners across the country, from Cornwall to the Orkneys. In proportion to population, the highest rates of slave ownership are found in Scotland.
The T71 files have been converted into an online database; a free, publicly available resource. Those whose surnames flashed up on screen experienced, like Ben Affleck, a strange sense of embarrassment, irrespective of whether the slave owners in question were potentially ancestors. The descendants of the enslaved carry the same English surnames that appear in the ledgers of the Slave Compensation Commission — Gladstone, Beckford, Hibbert, Blair, etc — names that were imposed on their ancestors, initials that were sometimes branded on their skin, in order to mark them as items of property.
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