Over the past few years it’s been increasingly revealed – or rather, re-revealed – just how much of Britain’s wealth – which built and ran factories, canals and industrial machinery, the stately homes, the museums, the universities – came from “the West Indians” – the UK-based absentee landlords who profited from the transatlantic trade in African people. August institutions were created, sustained and enriched by the unpaid labour of enslaved Africans who produced cocoa and cotton, indigo, coffee and, cruellest of all, sugar, on estates throughout the Caribbean.
The British would have been aware of a lot of this a long time ago, of course, if they’d just read Eric Williams. It was he who wrote in the 1940s in Capitalism and Slavery that the bricks of Liverpool, England’s biggest slaving port, were cemented with African blood – an unforgettably sickening but almost literal metaphor.
Recently, the Scots writer Alex Renton discovered his own family’s once quite substantial fortunes (one branch, the Fergussons, had a grand house in Ayrshire with a dozen servants) also came from slavery. The house held boxes of old diaries, letters, photo albums – but although his grandfather was their informal archivist, their Caribbean-related contents were not discussed.
Eventually Renton read them for himself, deciphering the cramped cursive script from the late eighteenth century onwards, as well as documents that had “all the clarity of a punch to the stomach.” When he first saw an inventory of family property in Tobago, which included the names (they had no surnames) and “value” of 70 enslaved people, “I felt nauseous…my ancestors were indeed plantation owners in the British slave colonies, farmers of human beings.”
Unlike those ancestors, though, obviously, Renton, a campaigning journalist, didn’t put the archives back in the basement. Instead, jolted out of ignorance and into action, he wrote a book based on them: Blood Legacy: Reckoning with a Family’s Story of Slavery.
Renton’s family’s involvement shouldn’t have come as a surprise (though, as in this part of the world, little is taught in the UK of the history of slavery): the Scots played a disproportionate part in the extortion of profit from this region, whether as overseers or owners or industrialists like James Watt, who made money from his new, improved steam engines being used to work sugar mills.
Firmly based in the family records, this is not just a history but also a memoir of sorts, often horrified and, inevitably, often horrifying.
Renton visited the sites of the former family estates, at Bloody Bay in Tobago and Rozelle, in St Thomas-in-the East in Jamaica, recording with a mixture of naivete and journalistic inquisitiveness his discussions with local people on slavery, race, reparations and their attitudes now to white people.
The book of course reveals too the thoughts and feelings of a modern, liberal white Briton about a scandalous past, the depths of whose monstrosity, and whose personal implications, he had never suspected.
Many of the
