The idea for this book germinated at two places in the USA. When I was researching the history of one particular painting (J.M.W. Turner's The Slave Ship) I encountered the astonishing riches housed in Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. At much the same time, I was working in the collections of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Williamsburg, Virginia. The books, manuscripts, furnishings, tableware, and portraits housed in the Rockefeller Library and various locations around Williamsburg (and in storage) provide a lavish version of life in colonial America. The longer I worked in Williamsburg, however, on what became annual visits, the clearer it became that there was a ‘back-story’ – a context – to many of the artifacts on display, but one which often goes unnoticed. So many of the material objects derived directly or indirectly from the efforts of African slaves, or provided an entrée into the story of the lives of enslaved Africans in the Americas. Yet who thinks of slaves when looking at a beautiful 18th-century sugar bowl, or a piece of mahogany furniture?

This simple question applies not only to North America but is equally relevant (and perhaps even more so) in Britain itself. Galleries, museum, private collections, stately homes, and palaces – all these and more boast of and display items which belong not merely to the story of wealth, style, and fashionable taste, but to the astonishing history of African slavery in the Atlantic world. The link – between voguish taste and brutal slavery – generally goes unnoticed. This simple point set me off in search of the background. What is the connection between African slavery in the Americas and the development of key features of Western taste and style from the 17th century onward? This book tries to offer an answer.

Like all my earlier books, what follows has been made possible by the help, co-operation – and friendship – of people on both sides of the Atlantic. At the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation James Horn proved a stout friend and supporter over many years. He and his colleagues, notably Inge Flester and more recently Ted Maris Wolfe, but above all the staff in the Rockefeller Library, have always made my visits fruitful and enjoyable.

I made an initial effort to explain my ideas at a Conference on ‘Visualizing Slavery and British Culture in the 18th century’ at Yale University in November 2014. There, David Blight and his colleagues at the Gilder Lehrman Center provided their traditional warm welcome, and an invigorating forum for what I said. Richard Rabinowitz again showed that his friendship does not obstruct his critical and imaginative approach to the study of history. Over many years, my work in the USA has been made possible – and worthwhile – by the kindness of a number of friends: Tolly and Ann Taylor, and Marlene and Bill Davis in Williamsburg, Bill and Elizabeth Bernhardt in New York City, and Fred Croton and Selma Holo in Los Angeles. Caryl Phillips, always willing to listen and to lend invaluable support, seems untroubled by my tendency to talk as much about football as history. Through thick and thin, all these friends have listened more patiently than I have a right to expect. Above all others, and as on so many other occasions, Jenny Walvin has lived at close quarters with my current interests, and makes everything possible.

In Hull, John Oldfield and David Richardson, and Richard Huzzey in Liverpool have proved great supporters. Most important of all, Peter Coveney at Wiley accepted the initial proposal for this book, and was hugely influential in seeing it through, though he had moved on before it appeared. The anonymous reviewers he commissioned to read the draft manuscript provided invaluable help in making what follows an infinitely better book than the one they read initially. This book was also improved by the efforts of Fiona Screen, an exemplary copy editor.

For years, Katie Campbell and Michael Davenport have provided a welcoming home-from-home in London. This time, Michael did not live to see the book materialize. I would have given a copy to him, but now, alas, I can only dedicate it fondly to his memory, echoing his favorite phrase, as we topped up his whisky glass, ‘Un tout, tout petit peu.’

James Walvin
March 2016

Our understanding of slavery has been totally transformed in the past fifty years. Between 1960 and 1964 I studied history as a British undergraduate. Or rather I studied British political history. I still have all my undergraduate notes and essays, and looking through them, and thinking about what I was taught (and on the whole taught well), I am now struck by how curiously insular – how ‘British’ (English even) – were the historical issues on offer. What has become my major historical preoccupation – slavery – was not even mentioned. In lectures, tutorials, seminars, and essays, I can recall no mention whatsoever about slavery – not one. The book of documents used for a Special Subject on the American Revolution mentions slavery on a mere 19 of the 368 pages, and even then largely in passing.¹ It was of course a very long time ago, and historical interests, trends – fads even – have changed substantially: some have simply come and mercifully gone. In large measure the curriculum we studied was a reflection of how our teachers perceived and presented the subject, and what they thought suitable for undergraduate study. At the time slavery was only one of many topics which effectively did not exist in British undergraduate studies but which, today, are in great demand. The absence of slavery, in common with other areas of history, was partly a reflection of prevailing knowledge (or lack of it) and the consequent paucity of appropriate literature. There were no obvious books or studies of British slavery that would have provided students with the necessary materials. Equally, the teaching staff were interested in other historical problems for their own research careers. Social history, for example had only begun to make its first transformative impact in Britain. It was hardly surprising, then, that slavery did not even register as a noise off-stage.

Today, fifty years later, if any history department were not offering courses on slavery this would be viewed as seriously remiss, and undergraduates and graduate students turn to the history of slavery because of its inherent interest and because of the intellectually exciting prospects available. Slavery is now accepted as a defining historical element in the shaping of the Western world in the post-Columbus period, its importance amply confirmed by a massive (and growing) accumulation of research evidence from all corners of historical enquiry. Even science (in the form of DNA) now lends itself to the study of slavery.

The story of the study and teaching of slavery in the USA in the same period has taken a very different trajectory. Moreover, what happened there was to have major consequences for the study of slavery in Britain (and the Caribbean). In the USA, slavery has an immediate presence and a powerful historical resonance, and naturally enough there has been a long, imaginative, and often fiercely contested historiography of slavery. For decades, arguments about slavery spawned distinct and sharply divided schools of historians. The slave South had its scholarly defenders, and their influence spread far beyond academe. They gave intellectual sustenance to the world of segregated US life and politics, and even helped to shape a romanticized view of the South that permeated popular culture. But all that began to sag, and eventually collapse, in the late 20th century, under the sheer weight of scholarship into the social history of slavery. By the turn of the century, it had become indisputable that slavery in the USA was not simply an interesting, regional issue – not solely a matter for the South, with consequences for the North. On the contrary, slavery was exposed as a central institution in the development of the modern USA.² Indeed, the modern American state came into being in 1787 arguing about slavery. Inevitably, debates continue among historians, but the days have gone when slavery could be regarded as a peripheral, largely Southern issue. What has happened, in the space of an academic lifetime, is that the study of slavery has shifted from the margins to occupy a pivotal position in US historical concerns (with all the political and cultural consequences that follow).

While Americans have for decades wrestled with the question of slavery throughout their history, the British, on the other hand, suffered a prolonged bout of forgetfulness about their own entanglement with slavery, and only recently seem to have emerged from this historical amnesia. At first sight, this forgetfulness about slavery (which lasted effectively until the 1960s) seems very odd indeed, though what underpinned it now seems clear enough. Most significant perhaps, and unlike the North American version, British slavery was not a domestic matter. Whereas in 1860 the USA was home to four million people of African descent – all of them slaves or freed slaves – Britain's slave population had evolved thousands of miles away from Britain itself. There had been, it is true, a small black presence in Britain for centuries, and slavery itself had existed, however small-scale and marginal, despite various legal challenges, right up to full emancipation in 1833.

Yet the British, despite having no substantial slave population at home, had been responsible for scattering millions of enslaved Africans across their American colonies, from Demerara in South America, throughout the Caribbean, and into North America. As the leading slave trader in the North Atlantic, the British had also shipped and sold armies of Africans to other European colonies, notably those controlled by Spain. It is hard to exaggerate Britain's involvement in the Atlantic slave system. Nor should we underestimate the enormous benefits which accrued to Britain as a result – a point first effectively asserted in the 1930s and 1940s by C.L.R. James and Eric Williams. Still, the centers of gravity of British slaving activity, the regions where they engaged directly – face-to-face – with African slaves, were located thousands of miles away from Britain itself. When the British thought and talked about slavery, the images that came to mind were of slave trading on the African coast, slave ships in mid-ocean packed with Africans, or gangs of field slaves working on plantations in the Americas. Slavery took place and thrived a long way away.

The sense that this involvement with slavery was physically very distant from Britain is itself a curious issue. After all, thousands of ships sailed from dozens of British ports on slave trading ventures, and a myriad British industries and businesses thrived on their dealings with slave ships (and with the slave-grown produce brought back by those vessels from the colonies). Major cities (most notably London, Bristol, Liverpool, and Glasgow) thrived on their commerce with slavery. Furthermore, over a period of more than three centuries, many thousands of Britons had direct experience of the Atlantic slave system: they manned the ships, they organized the purchase of slaves on Africa's Atlantic coast, and they marshalled gangs of field slaves throughout the American colonies. Less visible, but no less important, Britons master-minded the entire system from their business premises: the dock-side counting houses, the metropolitan (and increasingly provincial) centers of finance, commerce, and manufacture. By, say, 1750, it was clear enough that slavery had become part of the warp and weft of British commercial and social life. And yet….

By and large, slavery remained out of sight, thriving in distant locations which were, quite literally, over the horizon and invisible to the British eye. This physical distance between the homeland and its slave colonies had profound effects on the way the British experienced slavery. It greatly influenced what they knew – or did not know – about slavery. This geographic remove created a cultural detachment from slavery which could never have been the case in the USA itself. Put crudely, geography had a distorting effect on Britain's understanding of slavery, and therefore on the way the British subsequently constructed their historical memories about slavery. To borrow a phrase from one of Australia's most eminent historians writing about his homeland, there was a “tyranny of distance” involved in the complex relationship between Britain and slavery.³ A vast watery expanse separated the British Isles from their slave colonies, and created a sense of detachment that was more pervasive than simple geography. There was, until very recently, a gulf of understanding and appreciation which has served to divorce the British from the world of Atlantic slavery.

This geographic divide was compounded by the unfolding of historical events, especially by the story of British abolition. In large measure, the way the British ended their involvement with slavery also helped to distance them from their slaving past. Having been the undisputed masters of North Atlantic slave trading in the late 18th century, the British became the self-appointed global abolitionists in the 19th century. The campaigns to end the slave trade (1807) and then to emancipate colonial slaves (1833) were carried along by remarkable domestic popular backing. Thereafter, not only did the British lead the attack on slavery worldwide (via international treaties, often imposed on weaker partners, and by the power of the Royal Navy), but they continued to congratulate themselves on their collective virtue in being the world's pioneering and dominant abolitionist nation. It was as if the world's leading poacher had, within a mere fifty years, become the world's self-appointed game-keeper. Henceforth, the British came to think of themselves as the nation which had brought slavery to its knees. In the continuing campaigns against slavery, throughout the 19th and into the 20th century,⁴ the British were proud to proclaim themselves as an abolitionist people, their representatives, statesmen, and military keen to bring the benefits of freedom to people still oppressed by slavery.

The power and persistence of Britain's abolitionist activities in the 19th century generated a smokescreen behind which the British could hide their slaving past. Indeed, it was often difficult even to see the history of British slavery behind the decoy of abolition. This ideology of abolition – the sense that the British were a people characterized by a deep-seated abolition sentiment – had a remarkable impact on the writing of British history. Historians looked not to a slaving past, but to the British achievement in bringing slavery to an end. In the process, readers were presented with a historical saga that could make the British feel proud of themselves. There were strident critics, of course, most notably Eric Williams in his book Capitalism and Slavery (first published in 1944), but for decades such criticism failed to deflect the triumphalist tone of British historiography.⁵ What, then, are we to remember about British history? The nation's pre-eminence as an abolitionist power, or its earlier involvement with slavery itself?

Since roughly 1960 there has been a fundamental revision in the way slavery is seen. It is a complex story at both scholarly and popular levels, involving major changes in academic history, but more fundamentally, it also stems from some extraordinary transformations in the demographics of British life. What had previously been a relatively racially homogenous society was changed by large-scale immigration and the emergence of a British black population which was keen to know about its own history. Britain was also greatly influenced by events in the USA, especially by the American campaigns for full racial equality. All this paralleled independence for former colonies in Africa and the Caribbean. There, the development of new systems of higher education also created demands for a new kind of history: one which addressed local needs and interests rather than the concerns of the old imperial powers. African history, Caribbean history, African-American history, British black history: all of them critically intersected in places to create a cultural ferment which focused on the history of slavery. It was clear enough, for instance, that US slavery had important ties to Britain itself. Equally, British scholarly interest in slavery began to flourish under the influence of some innovative scholarship about slavery in the USA, and about the Atlantic slave trade. This ought not to have been surprising. After all, North American slavery had its roots both in the Atlantic (mainly British) slave ships, and in a British colonial past. Most Africans shipped to North America had been transported in British ships, while the main commodities cultivated by North American slave labor (tobacco initially and cotton later) were vital features of Britain's booming economy in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, in what was a confusion of cultural change and historical debate, it became increasingly clear that slavery was of great importance not only for the Americas but for a fuller understanding of Europe itself. It had, for example, been European colonial powers which had conceived and nurtured African slavery throughout the Americas (all with dire consequences for Africa itself). In addition, the more we learned about the detailed mechanics of slavery, the more integrated and far-reaching the world of Atlantic slavery proved to be. Thus the basis was laid for the idea that slavery was perhaps the major building block of an ‘Atlantic’ history, though even this broad concept had its limitations. Despite the enormous geographic and temporal range of the concept of Atlantic history, research revealed that the full story of slavery could not easily be accommodated within it. For all its enormity, slavery in the Atlantic formed only one region of a slaving system that spilled over, well beyond the boundaries (and definitions) of the Atlantic. Students of slavery came to appreciate that slavery had significant worldwide dimensions.

Slavery's global significance emerged most clearly via research into the enforced movement of Africans from their homelands, and not merely westward into the Americas. The overland migrations of enslaved Africans northward across the Sahara, the slave trades from East Africa to Arabia or India, each formed discrete and major histories of slavery. (And this is not to include other forms of slavery in other parts of the world.) Above all, however, it was the shipping of millions of Africans to the plantations of the Americas that exposed both the enormity and the historical importance of slavery. It was both a massive enforced migration of peoples, and a system of extreme human and social complexity. European, American, and Brazilian ships carried a multitude of goods, from all corners of the globe, to exchange for African slaves on the Atlantic coast. Their African victims then endured a pestilential experience like no other, before finding themselves landed in the Americas. They were then forced onward to even more distant destinations. Finally, and often far from their first landfall, Africans were set to a lifetime's labor, overwhelmingly producing export crops for the markets of the Western world.

Not long ago, all this had been thought of, and written about, as a simple story: ‘the triangular trade’ of popular imagination. Today it is recognized as an astonishingly complex global process. Its most obvious end result was the Africanization of swathes of the Americas. David Eltis has noted that so huge were the numbers of Africans landed in the Americas that, until 1840, the Americas were an outpost, not of Europe, but of Africa. Equally, the labor of enslaved Africans served to transform the habits of the wider world. Tobacco quickly became an addiction in Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Sugar made tea and coffee palatable to millions. By the time of the American Civil War, slave-grown cotton clothed the world in cheap textiles. All this, and much more besides, is now so familiar, so commonplace, that it hardly needs repeating. Yet to have made such claims in, say, 1960, would have been to invite historical derision. No longer.

Today, historians and writers face a very different challenge. We now have so much information about slavery that it is difficult to know how to take stock of so vast and sprawling a topic. It sometimes seems easier to provide a detailed case study, a microcosm of the story (the history of a single person, a place, a ship even) than to try to make sense of a topic that involves so many people, during such a prolonged period, and which spans such geographic expanse. To put the matter crudely, slavery in the Atlantic world bound together the continents, economies, and the peoples of Europe, Africa, and the Americas – with onward links to the trade routes and cultures of Asia. How can we hope to write a broad outline of that entire story?

My aim here is to tell that story by taking a very different approach, certainly different from any other book I have written about slavery. Slavery in the Americas was designed to produce commodities for the consumption and pleasure of the Western world, and many of the habits conceived and nurtured by slavery survive, in modern form, down to the present day. Similarly, a number of major artifacts (some of them so commonplace that they are unexceptional – banal even) have their origins and dissemination in the world of slavery. This book seeks to tell the story of slavery by discussing a number of those things. In recent years material culture has become of great interest to historians, in the process spawning some best-selling books (mainly when linked to exhibitions of those material artifacts).⁶ I am trying to follow a similar path: exploring a broader story via a range of small items, in this case, objects and customs which emerged from the world of slavery. I have chosen a number of small pegs on which to hang the very big story of slavery itself. What follows is an attempt to tell the story of slavery by looking at the history of slavery in small things.