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By Root 1234 0

and financial services. When the Act of Union allowed Scotland to join in colonial trade, Glasgow boomed through the import of tobacco from Virginia and sugar from the West Indies, each the product of slave labour. Liverpool, though, was the slave city. At the height of the trade it was reckoned that over half the slaves carried by English ships had been stolen from Africa in Liverpool vessels. The city’s Royal Institution ‘for the promotion of Literature, Science and the Arts’ was built as the home of a slaver. The Liverpool Exchange, later the Town Hall, was decorated with the carved heads of African elephants and slaves. Destitute children at the city’s Bluecoat School owed their education to the forced labour of Africans. An actor who appeared drunk on a Liverpool stage – not for the first time – was hissed by the crowd. He steadied himself long enough to round on the audience with the words: ‘I have not come here to be insulted by a set of wretches, every brick in whose infernal town is cemented with an African’s blood.’

You would have had to be wilfully deaf and blind to remain ignorant of the profound change the slave trade was working in England during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was, in the words of one apostle, ‘the mainspring of the machine which sets every wheel in motion’, making possible the network of enterprises which brought tea and coffee to the sideboard, oils and wines to the lunch table, Chinese pottery and Persian silks to the drawing room. It created a wealthy commercial class with the means to shoulder aside the traditional landed aristocracy. Wealthy West Indian traders became a familiar sight about town and the subject of popular drama, their riches contaminating almost every area of national life, buying seats in parliament, building churches, funding schools and hospitals, educating orphans. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel was the proud proprietor of its own plantation in Barbados, where for a time a red-hot iron was used to brand the word ‘Society’ on the chests of slaves. The Society tended not to preach sermons in the colonies based on the Exodus text about the promised land.* Slave traders effectively owned much of the British political class, who secured their interests in parliament. By the middle of the eighteenth century, families which would soon claim to be the very flower of the aristocracy were showing off the enormous wealth from their plantations by throwing up or elaborating vast country houses, like the Pennant family’s mock-Norman castle at Penrhyn in North Wales, the Fitzherberts’ Tissington Hall in Derbyshire or the Lascelles’ great pile, Harewood House – ‘St Petersburg Palace on a Yorkshire hill’ – with magnificent gardens designed by Capability Brown and furniture specially made by Chippendale. The beautiful Codrington Library at that most unworldly of Oxford colleges, All Souls, was built with slaving money. The core of the British Museum’s original collection of artefacts was amassed by Sir Hans Sloane, much of it with money from his marriage to the widow of a Jamaican planter. The National Gallery was established with the collection of Old Masters built up by John Julius Angerstein, much of whose money had been made by underwriting slave-ship insurance and ownership of plantations. All these exquisite sensibilities were nourished by barbarism. The British have never really had to confront the consequences of this trade because for them slavery happened thousands of miles away. The contrast is with the United States – where slaves lived, sweated and died within the national borders, where a civil war was fought over their freedom, and where discrimination against the descendants of slaves was a mainstream issue within living memory. Roughly 40 per cent of African Americans alive today have their ancestral roots in West Africa and remind contemporary Americans of the country’s slaving past every day. But Britons with an Afro-Caribbean family background, who are also descendants of slaves, pass as a mere ‘ethnic minority’, while their white