This collection of ten essays, organized into two sections, deals with Britain's involvement with slavery and its legacy. The first part consists of chapters on people, places, and institutions connected with slavery, the slave trade, and abolitionism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These essays are self-contained, but they all include interesting material and probe into areas of Britain's relationship with slavery that are often neglected in other studies. The topics considered include the connection of the Channel Islands and Cornwall to slavery and the slave trade; a black itinerant Methodist preacher's activities in Liverpool and Portsmouth; an investigation of one Liverpool slave-trading family; the life of a female absentee slave owner and her perceptions of the enslaved; and links between Britain, the Caribbean, and the East India Company. The second part shifts the focus to perceptions of the legacy of slavery and antislavery from the eighteenth century to the present. Specific contributions deal with the planter-historian Edward Long's connections with slavery and his contribution to proslavery thought; memories of slavery in Liverpool in relation to its museums and urban landscape; slavery, memory, and identity in Hackney, east London; the reasons for amnesia over slavery in histories of Glasgow; and museum narratives of slavery and antislavery in Olney, Buckinghamshire.
Katie Donington, Ryan Hanley, and Jessica Moody provide a useful introduction, situating the essays within the context of changing perspectives on slavery in current scholarship and among public commentators in contemporary Britain. Their book charts an increasing awareness of the permeation of slavery's legacy throughout British society, brought to the fore by activities associated with the bicentenary of the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807. A thoughtful afterword summarizes what one can take away generally from these studies, focusing on the interplay between local, regional, and national histories in the way that slavery is remembered. Four color and thirteen black-and-white images enhance a book that benefits from very few errors in typesetting. The contributors are a mixture of relative newcomers to professionally published scholarship and well-known historians of slavery and abolitionism.
The book has some limitations. Each section has a heading referring to “Little Britain,” but it is not clear to what that tendentious appellation refers. Though all the chapters include thoughtful analysis and newly available information on Britain's involvement with slavery, some of them needed further work before they were published. One example is Brycchan Carey's opening chapter, on the links between slavery and the slave trade and the Western English Channel. The general case made here is that the connections between slavery, the slave trade, and abolitionism, on the one hand, and Cornwall and the Channel Islands, on the other, have been underplayed in existing scholarly literature. That is undoubtedly the case. But instead of accepting that there is a reason for this situation—that the links are not particularly important—Carey pulls together snippets of disparate information purporting to show that a significant connection existed. Evidence of intelligent scholarly sleuthing is apparent in this account, but the material gathered is too thin to support the conclusions made. Showing that the famous former slave and abolitionist Olaudah Equiano spent a portion of his wide-ranging travels in Cornwall, or that Edward Long was born in Cornwall, and that a handful of slaving vessels can be linked to Guernsey and Jersey, does not demonstrate that the Western English Channel was “as fully involved in the slave economy as any other part of the British Isles” (22).
Another example of an author making larger claims than he or she can sustain is the chapter dealing with the itinerant Methodist preaching of the African-American John Jea in Liverpool and Portsmouth in the early nineteenth century. Hanley draws upon Jea's hymns, preaching, and autobiography to argue that he made a significant impact on working-class audiences in two different British cities and that he adjusted his preaching to the distinctive religious and abolitionist situation in each place. Jea's writings are expertly dissected, and the social context of Liverpool and Portsmouth's working-class societies is provided as far as the available source material exists. The problem is that no information appears to be available on popular reactions to Jea's preaching. Hanley refers, for example, to the popularity of Jea's sermons in Portsmouth, but he provides no evidence on how people received these orations or what audiences he attracted. We are informed that Jea “was able to maximise the impact of his preaching, garnering support for both his evangelising mission and his anti-slavery activism” (59). This might seem a judicious conclusion except for the fact that no proof is provided to support any of the quoted words.
Specialists dealing with Britain's myriad entanglements with slavery, the slave trade, and abolitionism will find new material in these essays. They will probably be more helpful for research scholars and graduate students than they will for undergraduates because most of them are highly specialized. They testify to the range of creative new scholarly work on Britain and slavery, while reminding us that, in some cases, evidential gaps can lead to difficulties in making convincing historical arguments.
