The Trader, The Owner, The Slave – Parallel Lives in the Age of Slavery

James Walvin has researched and written an excellent book, shining a light into the very dark past, that some people would rather we forget about. At the same time this book is remarkable and is a very gripping read. Besides highlighting these lives, providing an insiders view of the slave trade and its cost, human and financial. What Walvin has also managed to do is alert us to the remarkable contradictions of all humans.

Slavery has been an age- old problem that we can see from the Bible, to our current times. What sets this apart is that there was nothing like Atlantic Slavery. In its scope, how far reaching it was and at what cost, and the profits made by so few. This is the story of three individuals whose paths may never have crossed but were all active within the Slave Trade in one form or other during the same time period.

James Newton the author of probably the world’s most recorded hymn ‘Amazing Grace.’ Newton had been many things in his life, but what brings him to this story that he was a slave captain, who knew how to negotiate in Western Africa to purchase the slaves, transport them to the West Indies, to be sold, before transporting the wealth back to Liverpool. Walvin takes you through Newton’s life, even through to his ordination and his evangelical preaching. Even though Newton eventually came out as an abolitionist, he never told the full extent of what he did on those ships. He did look back on those times when he dealt with his human cargo of slaves with brutality with shame and contrition. What he does not ever do is to explain his role in the brutality aboard ship, the floggings, and the use of the thumbscrews. Fortunately for us his ship logs still remain.

Thomas Thistlewood was a slave owner who left the world his very interesting diaries. Thistlewood moved to Jamaica to work on other plantations, and what he learnt there as an overseer would help him when he became an owner in his own right. His diaries record his interactions and work on the plantation, from what he did to what he did to the slaves who disobeyed. He lists the beatings, the summary “justice” and the rape of female slaves. We also learn that he took a common law wife from one of the slaves and had a son by her and took care of her in his will. We learn a lot about the slavers attitude towards the slaves, how they often had sexual relationships with some, got on with some and beat others.

Olaudah Equiano was a slave and died a free man. Between birth and death led many different lives, left an account of his life, which was famous in his lifetime but largely forgotten since. How even as a freed slave life was still dangerous for him, whether in England, the West Indies or in the Americas. How Equiano quickly learnt and became an important cog of where he worked. Eventually earning enough to buy his freedom, own slaves, and eventually write his own autobiography and leave a generous some of money in his will.

The three very different men that emerge from the pages of this book were all shaped by African slavery. While Africa would not have even registered with the majority of Britons at this time, these lives reveal the importance of slavery to the economy in the nineteenth century. All their stories are very different but also show the contradictions in life that we all face. Some face them better than others.

Even with the distance of a new millennia some stains on British history are too bad to try and hide away from. While some try and make excuses for it, try, and tell us it was a different time, it is hard to agree with them. The 1835 Slave Compensation Act, which gave money per slave to former owners, may have been enacted nearly 200 years ago, but the British Taxpayer was still paying back the loans for it until 2015.

It is time we British did a vergangenheitsaufarbeitung (working off or facing the past) the Germans are still doing that. But due to British exceptionalism, we still have our heads in the sand and anyone challenging the narrative of things were not that bad are woke.

An excellent book, very readable, and shows Britain in its inglorious past in a different light. ( )