Defined by the Oppressors

[mtvessel]

Mar 2022
Black and British - David Olusoga – Pan Books, 2016
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This book should not, of course, exist. In a rational, humane world, there would be no reason why the very diverse people with deep brown or black skin coloration who live in the British Isles should be lumped together into a cultural classification about which a history can be written. But in reality, there is a distinctive story to tell. It is not so much about black people themselves – though black individuals have of course contributed enormously to British history and culture – but about the various forms that white racism has taken down the centuries, from straight-up slavery to the more subtle othering, exclusion and denigration that many black people continue to experience to this day. Depressingly, black people have their own label and their own history because it has been defined for them by their oppressors.

That history is not well known and until recently has not been well taught, at least if the lessons I had at school are anything to go by. They skipped the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which even at the time I thought was odd, but now seems like a deliberate attempt to avoid topics such as colonialism and the slave trade that might have caused young minds to question the moral rectitude of the British state. This would support the author's assertion, as indicated by the book's subtitle, "A Forgotten History", that the slave trade and its effects on the subsequent economic and social development of the country have been airbrushed out of official historical narratives, along with the contributions of black individuals to commerce, culture, the armed forces and other institutions, but I am not sure that that is quite right. Racism can be a sin of omission as well as commission. For white people of my generation at least, black history was not forgotten - it was never remembered in the first place.

The book starts, as it inevitably must, with slavery. Black people have lived in the British Isles since at least Roman times, but it is with the rise of the sugar plantations of Barbados and Jamaica in the late seventeenth century, and the establishment of the Royal Africa Company to supply slaves to them, that British black history really begins. Olusoga uses Bunce Island, a slave fortress located about twenty miles upstream from Freetown in Sierra Leone, as a striking symbol of this period. Nowadays it is a set of overgrown ruins, so completely forgotten that when it was re-discovered in the 1970s it was originally presumed to be Portuguese. At least until some cannons were discovered with a crown symbol and the letters G.R. – the sigil of George III.

Olusoga goes on to describe the plight of black people in Georgian times when Britain was the leading slave-trading nation. In Britain itself the status of slaves was ambiguous – it was unclear, for example, if slave-owners had the right to recapture their escaped slaves – until Granville Sharp, moved by a beaten-up runaway slave called Jonathan whom he encountered in the street, launched a campaign to clarify their legal status. Eventually he found his case in James Somerset, who had escaped from the ship on which his master was planning to deport him. After much prevarication, Lord Mansfield ruled that English law did not permit slave-owners to forcibly remove slaves from the country, which was interpreted to mean that slave-owning was incompatible with British law. Thus were the seeds of abolition sewn.

But not yet. The next attempt to do something for black people in Britain was, in effect, to transport them to new settlements in Africa, just like the transport of criminals to Botany Bay. This form of apartheid (which is surely what it was, though Olusoga does not use the word) was enthusiastically supported by Granville Sharp and his supporters who had a Utopian vision of a land where black people could govern themselves in freedom and equality (despite the fact that the chosen locations were just a few miles from Bunce Island), and was bankrolled by the Treasury. But the operation was run by a con man and the early colonies failed, wiped out by disease and bad weather. The only one that succeeded was Freetown.

Eventually, abolitionism became a mass movement. Traditionally this is presented as being driven by white evangelicals and Quakers, but Olusoga highlights the personal testaments and talks given by black people with experience of slavery such as Olaudah Equiano, which played an important role in helping to change minds. He also mentions the importance of women in the movement, unusual at a time when they were generally excluded from the political sphere; they organised boycotts of slave-produced goods such as sugar and rum. The person most associated with abolitionism, William Wilberforce, is not given prominence. Olusoga accuses his two sons of "seizing the narrative" and air-brushing the contributions of black and female abolitionists out of the official history.

Racism, of course, did not stop with the passing of the Slavery Abolition Bill in 1832. Although anti-slavery became a moral mission that spread to the United States, Victorians were perfectly comfortable with combining this with a patronising view of black people as a lesser race, as exemplified by Dickens' American Notes and the rise of black-face minstrel shows (which continued into the 1970s and 80s – I still remember seeing the The Black and White Minstrel Show on TV when I was very young). This disconnect was also apparent in military and economic policy - while the Royal Navy's West African Squadron was intercepting slave ships, linen made from imported slave-produced American cotton was making British industrialists rich, including John Edward Taylor, the founder of The Guardian newspaper. During the American Civil War, local officials and governors in the Bahamas colluded with confederacy blockade-runners to smuggle southern cotton to British markets. Several of the blockade-runners were built in Liverpool and were manned by British soldiers using noms de guerre.

Inevitably there was also a backlash against emancipation, spearheaded by Thomas Carlyle (his famous description of economics as "the dismal science" comes from a tract proposing the reintroduction of slavery as a means of restoring productivity in the West Indies). This was given spurious intellectual backing by Social Darwinism, a movement that used Darwin's theory of evolution to justify the belief that there was a hierarchy of races, with some races "naturally" servile or inferior to others (an idea which was not supported by Darwin himself). After the brutal repression of a rebellion at Morant Bay in Jamaica became a cause celebre, this metamorphosed into the idea that the differences between races made conflict inevitable. It justified the scramble for Africa, the rapacious annexation of tribal lands by the likes of Cecil Rhodes. It manifested in the arguments over the "Million Black Army", a proposal to use African troops in the First World War, and in the riots of 1919 in which black sailors were attacked by white mobs in several British ports. It took the Second World War and the repudiation of the doctrines of Nazism to start to discredit Social Darwinism, and its attendant notions of eugenics and racial purity, in the public mind. Even then, they were still apparent in Enoch Powell's infamous "River of Blood" speech in 1968 and Margaret Thatcher's remarks on being Britain being swamped by immigrants ten years later. The fact that such sentiments are echoed with a slight change of terminology by the current Home Secretary suggests that the poisonous ideas of Social Darwinism are still alive and well in the UK Government.

There are a few criticisms that can be made. Olusoga's definition of black extends to people of African or Caribbean descent only – understandably for the story he is telling, but it would have been interesting to compare the experiences of, say, Irish, Jewish or Asian immigrants to answer the question of the extent to which racism is triggered by differences in appearance or by perceived differences in cultural behaviour. He also occasionally retreats into generalities when some solid statistics would help to make his case more compelling. But given the prejudice against black people that is common even now, the history of white racist ideas is – sadly – a necessary one to know, and Olusoga's calm and generous narrative is a good way of learning it.